Automate it!

Many of our new clients experience a similar problem at work: they feel as though they’re spending too much time doing admin and menial tasks. These tasks take time and prevent them from doing the work that they want to do.

“I’m wasting time doing admin and chores a I can’t find the time to focus on things I enjoy.”

This sucks. Everyone who runs a business or team knows that it’s easy to get bogged down in paperwork and boring documents that seem to take so much time that they actually feel counterproductive.

Managing contacts, leads and accounts
Keeping track of your customers and leads can quickly become overwhelming. And the more overwhelming it becomes, the easier it becomes to lose faith in the process.

Try using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool. There are free versions of these tools online that will enable you to easily and quickly manage contacts and clients.

It’s actually not as difficult as it sounds to create a database with Contacts, Leads and Accounts. A place where you can save each individual, their details, and what stage of your conversion cycle they’re at.

And if you want to go the extra mile – hook it up to your website so that when someone contacts you, they’re immediately added to you CRM system.

Useful Tools:
Zoho – a free CRM system with paid upgrades.
Hubspot – great if you deal with a smaller number of contacts and customers
Salesforce – this one costs, but it’s super useful for managing lots of contacts.

“I feel like I’m constantly writing documents, proposals, invoices and so on…”

I understand this one – it’s easy to spend a tonne of time writing up business documents. I used to spend loads of time writing proposals and briefs for clients.

Instead of starting up a new document for every single item – take a bit of time and create templates. I guarantee it will save you time and reduce your stress in the long term.

It also means that you can continuously improve your template over time, making it more effective and engaging.

This is true for any type of document, whether it’s a single invoice, or a long proposal. By creating a template and saving your text styles and colours and branding, you’ll be firing out consistent documents like a boss.

Useful tools
Google Docs – great for organising and creating all kinds of templated documents.
Apple Pages – Pages is a great tool for anyone that uses a Mac. You can save your styles, fonts, colours etc in a template and all you have to do is drop in some text.

“I feel like I’m losing customers but I don’t have the time to email them all”

When you’re having to keep in touch and help lots of customers – it’s way easier to automate the parts of the process that don’t require any personalisation.

This is a good idea for anyone who’s worried about forgetting to welcome new customers, follow up on leads, or even missing out on abandoned shopping baskets.

Implementing automated emails can be a little bit tricky, but don’t let that put you off. It’s imperative for any business who wants to scale quickly and grow their customer base.

The first thing to do, as in many cases, is to map out each step your customer journey. Then identify which information needs to be conveyed at each step. This is effectively the basis for your email automation.

An example:
1. Customer creates an account -> Send an automated welcome email
2. Customer logs in several times -> send them an automated promotional message
3. Customer purchased -> send an automated thank you message

Useful Tools:
Mailchimp – a super friendly, easy-to-integrate email automation that offers single, transactional email support.
Campaignmonitor – a useful tool for sending out bulk emails.
Drip – brilliant tool for guiding individual customers through their journey, an email at a time.