How Can I Save Time?
Who couldn’t use an extra two or three hours each day? We’re all chasing those extra minutes, trying every productivity hack, hiring virtual assistants, or even sleeping less. While these tricks may add up to a small amount of time saved, you have to make sacrifices to get there.
The easiest way to save time without cutting back on those ZZZs is to free yourself from repetitive tasks. Think about all the manual work you do each day, from data entry to sending follow-up emails to managing invoices and payments. With automation, you can set everything up once and never have to worry about it again.
In this post, we’ll talk how you can automate your business and the tools you need.
Is There an Easy Way to Automate Repetitive Tasks?
It’s easy to understand the value of automation, but much harder to figure out exactly how to streamline your tasks. There are many tools available, however most of them have a steep learning curve and force you to master complex workflows.
On the other hand, customer relationship management (CRM) software offers the most important automation features in a simple, intuitive interface. A customer management tool like Keap is designed to get work done intelligently, saving you time and alleviating stress. It lets you manage your customers and your business in one place, making it easier to see the latest status on tasks, sales opportunities, and email results.
How to Automate My Business
Once you centralize and organize all this important information, it’s time to figure out how to automate it.
Here are four ways you can automate your business:
- Payments and invoicing: Get out of the cycle of bill collecting and create invoices directly from your CRM to help you get paid faster. Look for a solution that lets you upload your logo, choose which contact to bill, set the due date, and add line items. Even better, connect your bank to your CRM for the ability to accept credit cards directly through the app.
- Appointments: Schedule and manage appointments by sending an online link that allows customers to choose from your available meeting times. This reduces back-and-forth coordination, syncs with your existing online calendar, and sends out auto-reminders so clients are prepared and on-time. No more last-minute rescheduling!
- Email follow-ups: Do you find yourself copying and pasting the same email to customers or prospects? Perhaps you want to follow up after someone completes their free trial or you want to ask for their feedback. Instead of remembering when to send each email, marketing automation can do all the work for you. You can create robust email nurture campaigns that are automatically delivered to based on your customers’ actions.
- Sales automation: Do you use file folders, calendars, or sticky notes to record and store customer information? With a CRM, you can organize your customer information in one place and every action is recorded and updated. An activity stream shows all customer activities and interactions as they happen, so you don’t have to waste time tracking down updates. Then, when you’re ready to reach out to leads, you can automate the mundane tasks like building campaigns or running promotions so you can spend more time meeting your customers’ needs.
Final Thoughts
We all have those mundane chores that are a natural part of our jobs. But, when you’re running a small business, those chores can quickly add up. Next thing you know, your day is full of tasks like building manual reports in Excel or invoicing clients.
Automation can help save time and alleviate stress by eliminating these manual to-dos. It can benefit any part of your business, from customer service to marketing to sales. And when you fully embrace automation, you can focus your precious time on where it matters most: growing your business.