A downward-turning economy can be a major stress for business executives, managers and small business owners. Not only do you feel responsible for your own financial stability, but that of your employees as well.
Perhaps, you've already come to grips with the fact that it's likely you'll have to let go a large portion of your employees like many, name-brand tech companies have done recently. But are there other ways to cut business costs without laying off employees - or at least as many?
Business automation is a possible solution, and you don't have to be a large company to leverage the opportunities it provides.
The best way to think about automating your business is by assessing what tasks are done by you or your employees on a regular basis. Tasks that are repetitive. Is there something that needs to be done at the beginning of a new month? Or an email that gets sent to a certain group of individuals when something happens?
Many of these tasks are what they are and there can't really be any better way to do them. But, I would bet, that many others could be automated to an extent which would save you time on repetitive tasks and allow you to spend more of that time on sales calls, or building and growing your business - the things that you're actually good at!
I've been compiling a list of automation ideas that any company can leverage, big or small, sorted them by category and put them below.
I believe that by leveraging one or more of the automations below, your company will be in a stronger position to not only last but succeed in any economy.
Human resources
- Employees managing their timesheets
- Messaging back and forth with employees, or groups of employees
- Company-wide or location-specific announcements
- Generating and distributing paystubs
- Onboarding new employees
- Creating and distributing schedules
- Sharing important documents
Marketing
- Managing and optimizing paid search campaigns
- Email marketing, drip campaigns, form responses
- Social media scheduling and posting, messaging
- Upselling current customers
- Cross-selling
- Database management
- Analytics reporting
Finance
- Scheduled reporting
- Accounts payable (invoicing, subscriptions)
- Creation and distribution of customer receipts
Sales
- Lead generation
- Sales funnels
- Customer contact messaging
- Proposal development
- Scheduling of calls and meetings
- Customer relationship tracking (CRM)
Customer service
- Chatbots
- Support pages
- Filtering support requests to correct person or department
General production
- Project management
- Website publishing, image resizing
- Email inbox management
- Team meetings
Did I miss anything? How else can a business automate and save on long-term costs?
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