Why Automate Your Business? A Short Primer on Automation

January 16, 2015 Dean Soto

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It’s funny that in this day and age there are still people that ask the question, “why automate your business?” The answer that I usually give – almost out of habit – is “Why the heck not?”

In this article I will show you all of the reasons why you want to be automating everything in your business. Not only that, I’ll also be showing you the 3 pillars that you need to know in order to truly automate anything in your business. Ready?… Let’s go.

The problem with most businesses

The problem with most businesses is this… the owner is the biggest constraint in the business. They may either micro-manage everything or macro-manage everything, but the essence of what the business does could not function without them.

Some obvious examples of this are when the owner is answering customer emails, when they are heavily involved in the sales process, they are entering in contact information from new leads into their CRM etc…

Look, there is no reason that the owner should be doing any of this stuff (unless you are a one man show – even then you can use technology to get rid of some of those tasks). If you are the biggest constraint in your business, then something is very, very wrong.

Automation is not about technology

A lot of people are averse to letting go of things in their business because they think that automation primarily relies on technology. In fact, the core of automation doesn’t rely on technology but in people. The technical aspect of automation is a only a small branch of the big tree. It’s used to connect people and processes together. In fact, in automation you have three basic types of automating:

Technical automation
Administrative automation
and Customer-based automation

All three of these concepts intertwine with each other, and you cannot have a fully functioning automated business without them scratch that each one of them.

So you want your technical automation connecting to your administrative, in your customer-based automation connecting with the other two types.

For example, once you have buying customers one simple way to build an amazing referral program is to have a sequence sent via email to your customer a few days after they have purchased. This sequence, depending on whether or not they enjoyed your product or service, invites them to become a referral partner.

Yes it’s that simple… And over time becomes a referral machine.

Technical ways to automate your business

There are several ways to start letting go of mundane tasks by using technology. Some of these include:

Using an email autoresponder such as Aweber or Infusionsoft.
Automatically sending out postcards and thank you cards with something like sendoutcards.com.
Using text messaging to keep customers up-to-date with the latest and greatest happenings with your business
and so on…

There are literally thousands of tools that you can use, both free and paid, that let you automatically do things in your business. Another quick example would be ifttt.com, a free service that essentially lets you connect one web application to another. So if you wanted to send a LinkedIn invitation to someone that was recently added to your Google contacts, you can have ifttt.com do it for you, no problem.

Administrative automation

Administrative automation is where you are delegating to your staff, the vendor, or sometimes even a client. Now, this doesn’t mean that you are verbally or directly delegating something to them. They could very well mean that one of your technical automations is sending a task, or doing something that lets your administrative staff know that something needs to be done.

There’s a lot that goes into this but just know that your administrative automation is the core of everything that you are going to be doing when you automate your business. This includes having some sort of handbook that can easily show what task need to be done when certain things occur throughout the day.

For example, if you have a notification that goes out to an office administrator whenever somebody emails you from a specific domain, that would be a type of administrative automation. Perhaps that office administrator knows to reply within 24 hours, or they send a thank you card, or they send a notice to a fulfillment center. Whatever it is, your people know what to do.

Customer-based automation

Lastly, customer-based automation is something that a lot of business owners completely ignore. The long and the short is that your customers can play an important role in how your business grows. They don’t have to just continually buy things from you, rather they can be one over to your side as teammates.

As mentioned before one very easy way to do this is to have some kind of sequence that invites them to be a referral partner. By doing this you are not only rewarding them for referring new customers to you you are making them happier and eventually they will buy from you again and again.

There are other ways to use customer-based automation such as having your customers fill out automated surveys that give you market research and data that’s vital to your business.

There are infinite possibilities when it comes to helping your customers to help you grow your business. However, the only way to truly do this is to make the process hands off for you so that you are able to focus on building new revenue streams based off of your new preferred customers and the feedback you’ve been getting from your current customers.