Posted by When running a small business, you may find yourself spending boatloads of entrepreneurship’s two most vital commodities: money and time. Granted, most startups require their CEOs to take a more hands-on approach. They also require you to invest heavily in basic tasks such as lead generation, accounting, and customer management. However, with the help of business automation, you can cut down on costs, save time, and boost your revenue in weeks.
This post will reveal the parts of your business that you may be wasting your resources on and how automating them could cover the leak. We’ll discuss the definition, basic implementation, types, and benefits of this groundbreaking concept.
What Is Business Automation?
Business automation is the act of executing all or part of repetitive manual tasks with digital technology. By this definition, a task does not have to be 100% automated to fit into this scope.
Another name for this concept is digital transformation or business process automation. In most cases, you’ll need a business automation software or tool.
What Is Business Automation Software?
This software is any digital technology solution that is programmed to carry out or repeat specific processes, instructions, or policies and save time or manual labor.
These automated tasks could be as simple as scanning a sales letter for grammatical errors or as complex as turning cold leads to successful sales without human intervention.
How Does Business Automation Work?
For a task to be successfully automated, its digital transformation must check the following boxes:
- Improve efficiency
- Save time
- Minimize cost
- Ensure scalability
Automation takes a manual activity, speeds it up, and allows you to perform the same task an infinite number of times and in a relatively short period.
As an example, let’s consider this basic scenario:
Imagine a company receives purchase orders over the phone. The business will need one or several staff members to handle the incoming requests. Each staff will have to input the customer info and order request in a file.
When it’s time to deliver the orders, one or several employees have to sort through the many orders to know what products are heading where and by what time. This could take hours.
Now, imagine if the same company instead had customers fill a simple online form for their orders by using a sales software. The software can handle hundreds of clients at once (ensures scalability). It sends customer data directly to a secure database without the risk of errors (improves efficiency).
Sorting the files for delivery takes seconds if the software has typical processing abilities (saves time). Also, the company doesn’t have to hire more than one employee to monitor the entire order and delivery process (minimizes cost).
The above scenario shows that such a company could potentially save millions of dollars in wages, wasted work hours, data entry errors, and lost customers due to poor experience. Of course, building this software would cost money, but the potential savings would be worth a lot more.
For a small fee, SaaS (Software as a Service) products also allow businesses to reap the benefits of automation without bearing software development and maintenance costs.
Benefits of Business Automation
When you adopt business process automation in your SME, you stand to gain countless benefits and advantages over your competitors. Let’s take a look at some of them:
Saves Time
The time-saving perk of automation is always a prominent benefit in any scenario. However, for entrepreneurs, it becomes a lot more precious. According to a report by McKinsey & Company, CEOs waste 20% of their work time on activities that they could easily automate. So, if you consider that an average CEO works 62 hours a week, that’s 12 solid hours you could spend relaxing or doing more productive tasks.
Business automation also helps your staff save time and boost their productivity. When you digitalize more processes, they can organize and find documents more efficiently. If you’ve ever spent 18+ minutes looking for a physical document, you can appreciate how much more productive your employees will become when each document is only a search button away.
Saves Money and Boosts Revenue
Research shows that a whopping 45% of the activities businesses pay people to do could be automated. Automating such tasks could save companies worldwide about $2 trillion worth of annual wages. When you consider that business automation tools can execute these tasks more efficiently and produce better results than humans, you may find that you’ve been leaving money on the table.
Employee cost isn’t the only downside to an over-reliance on physical business processes. There’s also the cost of materials, equipment, and tool maintenance. Take paper, which is supposed to be one of the cheapest office supplies.
On average, filing one paper document costs $20 after you include labor, storage, printing, and supply costs. So when you keep loads of paper documents such as reports, invoices, and bank statements, you’re only using more of your capital than you need to.
Reduces Business Process Mistakes
If you find that you or your employees tend to make mistakes during certain stages of your business process, this may the time to automate. As humans, there’s only so much workload we can take. Hence, we’re prone to the occasional mistakes. Computer programs, however, can work all day long on hundreds of tasks without malfunctioning.
One of the most important benefits of workflow automation is that it limits the impact of human error on your entire operation. You can expect the same quality in every output, provided you have the appropriate set-up.
Helps to Identify Waste and Potential Opportunities
Particularly in marketing, business automation solutions are famous for providing analytics that would take years for humans to gather. Startups only succeed if they can identify wastes quickly and grab new opportunities before their competitors.
This requirement is why the predictive analytics solutions market continues to generate billions of dollars each year. With real-time data in your hands, you can shuffle your resources away from lost causes to more promising ventures before it’s too late.
Also, without the burden of handling repetitive tasks, your employees are more likely to come up with new strategies. No entrepreneur should ever underestimate the impact of job satisfaction on a small business.
Widens Your Market
Does any of the following factors restrict your business?
- Location
- Time zone
- Language
- Customer management expenses
A company like Amazon would not be the juggernaut that they are today if they let the above factors limit them. For your business to attain maximum potential, you need to connect with customers in any location, at any time of the day, and in any language.
Time zone restriction, for example, is one limiting factor for businesses that have specific operating hours. This would mean thousands of prospects cannot contact your company in real-time.
Incorporating a simple chatbot system can do wonders for your business when it comes to CRM. According to Forbes, chatbots can boost business sales by 67%!
Facilitates Easy Management and Collaboration
Project management and team collaboration is an important but challenging part of any small business organization. As an executive, you want to be on top of every project without micromanaging or overextending your employees. Employees also want to receive instructions from project managers without eating up their time.
Business automation affords you the time to assess work progress without having to make calls or wait for response emails. Your subordinates also don’t have to waste time filing progress reports. Essentially, your entire team can automate repetitive tasks and collaborate on the activities that have the most impact on company revenue.
5 Major Types of Business Automation That Are Ideal for Small Businesses
Automation is a vast concept, and with recent leaps in AI and machine learning, businesses have found a way to automate nearly every part of their operations. However, some of the most advanced automation solutions are expensive to procure and implement. They are useful for large companies such as Netflix, Google, and Amazon, and you may not need them for your startup.
This doesn’t mean small businesses can’t get a piece of the action. There are several high-end yet affordable types of automation that you can implement today. Let’s have a look at them.
1. Marketing Automation
With the right tools, you can manage your marketing campaigns automatically. Already, 91% of people who use marketing automation tools see it as a vital part of their online marketing strategies.
Some of the marketing tasks you can automate include:
- Lead generation
- Email marketing
- Social media advertising
- Bulk SMS management
- Website traffic tracking
- Sales conversion funnel
2. CRM Automation
Customer relationship management is a key part of any business — big or small. Netflix saves up to $1 billion annually on customer retention, thanks to their big data algorithm. It allows them to predict the type of content that would interest each user. Imagine how hard this would be to achieve if they had to rely on surveys or customer support staff.
You may not have the resources for CRM on such a large scale, but with affordable automation tools such as chatbots, you can surpass your immediate competitors.
CRM tasks that you can automate include:
- Lead management
- Customer Verification and KYC
- Sales funnels management
- Social media management
- Data collection
- Basic customer support
3. Workflow and Project Management Automation
To improve productivity, efficiency, and job satisfaction, you can automate your workflow and manage projects virtually. In a world where remote work is becoming more relevant, managing projects with tech solutions is never a bad idea.
Whichever project management software you choose to use, you should be able to customize it to suit your business’s rules and traditions.
The project management tasks you can automate include:
- Expense approvals
- Real-time reporting
- Document sharing
- Communication of targeted instructions
- Project supervision
4. Accounting Automation
No doubt, your everyday accounting involves a significant amount of manual tasks that take more time than they should. If you have an accountant, you’ll get a lot more value from them by automating some of these tasks. Needless to say, if you do your own accounting, then you stand to gain even more from automation.
You can eliminate the bulky ledger files and financial documents with the right accounting software. It will improve productivity, reduce errors, and integrate seamlessly with some of the cloud programs you already have.
These tools will automate your:
- Accounting calculations
- Report creations
- Error or discrepancy identification
- Data entry and transfer
5. Copywriting Automation
Copywriting plays an important role in your marketing and CRM efforts. Videos and podcasts are nice, but a bulk of your sales will come from written media. This fact is why you can’t afford to have spelling and grammatical errors in your copy.
Sure, you or one of your employees could comb through every sales letter, email, video script, or website content and proofread it until it’s ready. However, this takes a lot of time. This is why most businesses that work with written content use premium grammar and spell checkers. Good software will allow you to proofread and edit thousands of words in less than a minute.
It’s also possible to create copy with zero grammatical errors from the first draft. This is extremely hard to achieve if you hire a copywriter. Automated copywriting is a groundbreaking achievement that many firms are adopting. With a copywriting automation software, you only have to pay a token in subscription fees compared to an average copywriter’s rate (80 to 120 euros an hour).
Getting consistent, high-quality copy is priceless for any business, especially if your marketing campaign requires you to produce a lot of emails, landing pages, banners, and social media ads every month.
How to Implement Business Automation in 3 Simple Steps
Automating an aspect of your small business should only take between a few minutes to a couple of hours. Follow these three easy steps to avoid wasting your time and resources:
Step 1: Make a List of Tasks You Want to Automate
Not all tasks can be automated — at least not without spending a fortune on advanced robotics, distributed control systems, and AI tech. However, for a small business such as yours, several activities require automation.
Make a written list of all the repetitive manual tasks that take a significant amount of time to accomplish. Would your business benefit from accomplishing these tasks faster? How important is it that these processes are performed accurately? Your answers to these questions should tell you what tasks need automation.
Also, you may refer to the lists above and write down the marketing, CRM, workflow, project management, accounting, and copywriting tasks that match your business operations.
Step 2: Choose the Appropriate Software
Finding the right software to automate your business activities becomes a lot easier if you have in-depth information on the best options in the market. Before choosing a service, you need to know its pros, cons, features, and pricing to get the best value for your money.
Thankfully, My Biztech Hub is dedicated to helping readers get this kind of information in one click. We have several posts on the best business automation software, we regularly update our information, and we post new content weekly.
Step 3: Learn to Use the Software
Ideally, it should take a quick 10 to 30 minutes tutorial to learn to use a new SaaS product. Most of these services are tailored for easy use, so you don’t have to be tech-savvy to use them. Your staff also don’t need to know much about tech to enjoy these most business automation tools.
Challenges of Business Automation and Their Solutions
In a bid to reap the benefits of automation, you may stumble on a few challenges. The next section will touch on the most common ones and proffer the best ways to avoid them.
Challenge 1: Compatibility With Existing Systems
Your business may already have a system in place to streamline your workflow process. If this system is incompatible with your chosen automation software, you may have a problem on your hands.
Solution:
Automation software developers are aware of the chances of compatibility issues developing with their products. Hence, a reliable software would have various plugins for seamless integration with the most popular systems. Always go for software with high compatibility ratings.
Challenge 2: Process Complexity
While some business processes such as data entry may be simple, others are more complex. It would take a lot more programming quality for a software to replicate these tasks as well as any human.
Solution:
Avoid overly simplified automation software. You should only work with business solutions that have the complexity to match and surpass the process you need to automate.
Challenge 3: Cost
One of the key reasons for business process automation is to save money. However, like any investment, it costs a few bucks. Most business automation software are subscription-based and could cost you anywhere between tens to a couple of hundreds of dollars annually. Some are a lot more expensive.
Solution:
Avoid overextending yourself. If any software costs a lot more than what it would save you in work hours and lost sales over a year, you should consider trying another option. Thankfully, most business automation solutions come with a free trial opportunity. They also have several plans and packages. Leverage these plans by only selecting those with the features you may need now and in the near future.
Bottom Line
The world has reached a stage where every business conceivable to man can automate at least one of its vital processes. The cost saving, improved productivity, and sales boost that small business automation offers have become too glaring for entrepreneurs to overlook. Already 80% of marketers who used automation enjoyed more leads, and 77% got more conversions.
It’s little wonder that 63% of them will be increasing their automation budget soon. The global business space is fast becoming a race for who can make the most efficient use of time and resources.
Don’t get left behind. Subscribe to our email list to get the latest small business automation tips and earn money from channels you never knew existed.