These days, every small business owner is looking for ways to run faster, cheaper and leaner. In a recession, business owners know all too well that when margins get squeezed, it’s the business owner’s time and take-home pay that take the real hit. Spend more hours to earn less money? That’s not fun.
So in tough economic times, automating your small business is not a luxury; it becomes a necessity. Here are five important things in your business you should automate to put more money in your pocket—and increase your most valuable asset: your time.
1. Connect your website to your customer database using web forms
If your website has a form that visitors can fill out to get more information, subscribe to your newsletter, get a quote or contact you in some other way, make sure that web form: i) automatically dumps the visitor’s information into your database; and ii) automatically communicates to the visitor for you.
Most email marketing programs today will enable you to implement this type of web form. This kind of automation will save you 5–10 minutes of time that otherwise would have been spent keying in and communicating with that visitor. More important, it will ensure you don’t have leads slipping through the cracks between your website and your customer database.
2. Follow up with the leads you generate on your website
Once you’ve got the web form automatically putting leads into your customer database, make sure you follow up with ALL of the leads, not just the hot ones. Most of the leads you generate are not ready to buy from you right now. That’s a fact. By staying in touch with all prospects, you’ll be there when the time is right for them to buy.
The best way to accomplish this is with a good, useful newsletter. Again, a good email marketing tool can automatically deliver your newsletter to the folks who request information from your website. Make sure they’ve given you permission to send the newsletter and, if your email marketing tool allows it, automate the delivery of the newsletter right from the form they filled out on your site.
The automatic delivery of your newsletter – which is triggered by the web form filled out on your website – can be handled by an email autoresponder. Autoresponders are a really powerful form of automation, which have become standard functionality among most email marketing tools. This will save you 5 minutes for every newsletter subscriber (each time you send the newsletter) and it will cultivate a relationship with your prospect so they buy from you when the time is right for them.
3. Follow up with customers
Most business owners work hard to win new customers and then spend too little time cultivating those customer relationships. The reason? It takes time—the most scarce resource available to small business owners. Don’t neglect the all-important customer communication function of your business.
Automate it, in a personal way. You can do this through email, post cards, direct mail packages, even personalized voice messages to your customers. Simply create a customer communication process (aka campaign) that includes a variety of communication “touch points” and then use a good customer database to automate the execution of your communication process.
If you find yourself struggling to come up with a process, I would suggest you start by building a communication process for the first 30 days of your customer’s experience with you. Think of this as your “Wow Campaign” to welcome new customers. Include things like:
* a welcome letter;
* a message from YOU the business owner;
* a thank you gift; and
* 30-day survey
A good customer database can deliver all of this to your customer automatically and in a personalized way. And the time you invest in setting this up once will pay customer satisfaction dividends years into the future.
4. Automate your workflow
If you’re like most business owners, you are doing a bunch of repetitive tasks every day. If you do the same thing three times in one day (or even one week!), stop and ask yourself how you can automate it. Do you have a series of tasks that need to be completed when a lead comes in, an order is created or a service request occurs?
Workflow automation and sales automation software can help you bundle all those tasks into two or three clicks of the mouse, saving you loads of time and ensuring the work is performed in an orderly, systematized manner. It’s hard to explain how powerful this is, but most business owners who implement this type of workflow automation can quickly recover several hours per week.
5. Put your collections on auto-pilot
Too many business owners work hard to close the sale and fulfill the order, but fall short when it comes to collecting on invoices. The problem is the uncollected cash is usually the very cash that goes into the business owner’s personal bank account. Don’t allow your operating profit (and take-home pay) to go down the drain due to uncollected invoices.
Automate the collection of invoices, overdue invoices and declined credit card transactions by employing the automation features found in many of the billing and e-commerce tools on the market today. When it comes to efficiency drivers, your collection effectiveness is a biggie because it correlates dollar for dollar with your take-home pay as a business owner. And don’t forget: every invoice you collect on without making a phone call is money in the bank and time you can spend on other worthy activities.
For the average business owner, these five techniques will usually result in a savings of 8–12 hours per week. The increased revenue opportunity is usually even more valuable than that.
So take a look at your operation and apply these techniques to your business so that you can spend less time, make more money and maintain a personal touch with your customers.
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