The average employee spends 2.5 hours a day on repetitive tasks that could be automated. How much time is your company losing?
Processes that are ideal candidates for automation
- Email handling: classification, automatic replies, follow-ups
- Invoicing: generation, delivery and payment reminders
- Reporting: data collection and automatic generation
- Inventory management: stock alerts, automatic reordering
- Onboarding: account creation, resource assignment
Automation tools by area
For marketing
- Mailchimp: automated email marketing
- Hootsuite: social media publishing
- HubSpot: lead automation
For sales
- Pipedrive: automatic opportunity tracking
- Calendly: automatic meeting scheduling
- DocuSign: electronic contract signing
For administration
- Zapier: connects more than 5,000 applications
- Microsoft Power Automate: integration with Office 365
- IFTTT: simple but effective automations
For accounting
- QuickBooks: automatic invoicing and reconciliation
- Expensify: automatic expense management
- Stripe: automatic payment processing
A worked example: automating a sales process
Before (manual — 3 hours per lead)
- Lead fills in the web form
- Sales rep receives an email and creates the contact in the CRM
- Sends a personalised welcome email
- Schedules a follow-up in the calendar
- Prepares a tailored proposal
- Sends the proposal by email
- Schedules follow-up reminders
After (automated — 15 minutes per lead)
- Lead fills in the web form
- The contact is created in the CRM automatically
- The welcome email goes out automatically
- A follow-up is scheduled automatically
- The proposal is generated from a template
- It is sent automatically
- The sales rep gets automatic reminders
The ROI of automation
- Time saved: 85%
- Errors reduced: 95%
- Customer satisfaction: +40%
- Response time: −70%
How to get started
- Map your current processes
- Identify the repetitive tasks
- Work out how much time they take
- Pick one simple tool to begin with
- Automate one process at a time
- Measure the results
- Scale gradually