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March 14, 2021

10 Ways Small Business Benefits from Smart Automation

All businesses benefit from smart automation. Automation today is not expensive. You can implement much different productivity-improving automation free and inexpensively that will not just save time but will save money and increase your revenue exponentially.

Increased Scalability – When you automate, even if you’re just one person, if you choose what to automate wisely, you’ll be able to scale your business in ways you may not have thought possible.

Reduced Errors – There is no way around it, but machines, once set up properly, make fewer errors than humans. If you can set up an automaton that works, you’re going to reduce the errors you’re used to making and letting by. It’s not about perfection, though. It’s just about being able to do something simple without having to worry about the errors once it’s set up.

Better Customer Satisfaction – When customers get service fast like they want, and it’s accurate and timely, they are always happier with you—today’s customers like using self-service automation and don’t mind using chatbots at all.

Reduced Labor Costs – When you can automate instead of outsourcing, this is always a good thing because technology is cheaper than a human being. Your time is also worth way more than your chatbot’s time.

Better Work-Life Balance – Automating things even that take you five minutes a day can add up and save you so much time that you start experiencing that elusive work-life balance people love to talk about.

Use Resources More Efficiently – When you set up automation, it is always more efficient than human resources. Not only does it work more accurately, but it also costs less to start with than hiring a person.

Decreased Operating Costs – When you use technology to increase productivity, you can keep your operating costs lower because you’re not using extra human resources or your time, which is always more expensive than tech.

Improved Decision Making – If you have an accurate picture of the research involved, which using automation can help you with, you’re going to make better business decisions. Imagine if you set up a Zap to send reports generated in Google Analytics to a Dropbox for you to view every Friday – so much more straightforward than having to get the reports yourself.

Boost Productivity – When you have to do fewer steps to get to the deliverable, you will become super productive. Remember that there is a lot more to being productive than movement or being busy. Finishing projects and tasks makes you productive.

Increased Competitiveness – When you can get more done in less time and done accurately, you’re going to please customers more, and that’s going to make you more competitive.

When you decide to implement automation in your small business, choose from the things you do right now, already, that are repetitive in nature, and you can’t go wrong—no need to invent new things to do until you automate what you already do every single day.

March 14, 2021March 14, 2021

Project Management Tools to Try

When it comes to project management, the worst thing you can do is either use nothing to organize yourself or use a tool that you don’t understand enough to utilize fully. Try out a few different options to find out what works smoothly for you within your budget.

Smartsheet.com – If you’re accustomed to using spreadsheets to organize your work, this might be the system to work for your needs. It’s easily customizable, supports automation, but you do have to use other software if you want time tracking and built-in project management features.

Wrike.com – This is the PM system used by big businesses like Paypal.com and Hootsuite.com, but it’s not overpriced, so you can afford to use it too. This is a true all in one project management system that allows you to collaborate not only with contractors and employees but your customers too.

Monday.com – This platform is very helpful in managing tasks and creating impressive and effective workflows. It’s really billed as an online collaboration application, but you can use it to manage projects too. It’s very customizable and easy to understand.

Easy Projects – This cloud-based project management software works for small and big businesses. It allows you to work with anyone interested in the following projects. You can give permissions that keep people notified of the action being taken.

Zoho Projects – Competitively priced, cloud-based, fully-featured, and intuitive. This is really a standard in project management. It’s especially good with individuals and small teams. It’s responsive and not really hard to understand and set up. Try the free trial.

Basecamp.com – This option has been around for a long time. It is a popular choice among virtual assistants, graphic designers, and others who want to be able to let their customers sign-on and assign work to them in a project management system. It’s easy to understand and has tons of features you’re used to in a dedicated project management system.

Trello.com – If you think visually, you’re going to love using Trello. You can organize your workflows and teams, or you can just use it for your own organization. There are many public free and premium templates you can get too. What’s more, is you can use it free.

Honeybook.com – A super popular choice for virtual assistants and service providers, this easy-to-use platform helps small business owners get control of their processes and manage clients from start to complete projects, including proposals, contracts, project tracking, and payments.

LiquidPlanner.com – Manage projects, tasks, and human resources, and more with this fully featured project management system. Track tasks but also track resources, including HR, to best keep your company lean and mean. While this one is a little more expensive than some of the other choices, it’s well worth every penny because of what it can help you do for your business.

Asana.com – People who use Asana are fans of it and love to brag about using it. It’s a unique online collaboration tool that helps improve your workflow management. It’s not really a full project management since there is no time tracking, but many service providers love it and use it regularly.

Quire.io – This project management and collaboration tool can help you launch your projects fast. Users love the fact that it’s super intuitive and easy to understand how to use it. They use Kanban boards, which many people love, to help get organized.

Almost any of these choices will work for most small businesses to manage their projects and keep their work organized and on task. Being productive is about using your time wisely. Don’t use a system you don’t grasp almost immediately. Test it out, and if it’s too hard to get, move on to another one so that you are using what works with your way of thinking.

March 11, 2021

How to Use Automation for Boosting Efficiency

One of the main reasons people like to use automation in their business is because it boosts efficiency. If you can automate any task that is repeatable such as invoicing, creating files, saving files, and so forth, you can save many hours of time in your workday and work year. Those are hours you can use to create even more awesome products and solutions for your ideal audience.

Sort and Respond to Emails – Your email software has many features that you may not be implementing fully. Apps like Boomerang for Gmail or Sales Handy for Outlook will help you sort and respond to emails using automation features.

Manage Projects – This is especially important if you are working with a team. Set up a project management software that allows you to know when each part of your team is done because they check it off, make a note, or otherwise use the system to ensure smoother collaboration and avoid bottlenecks.

Improve Your Sales Funnel – Using software to automate your sales funnels is a no-brainer today. There are numerous options for you to implement, such as Leadpages.net and Instapage.com, but also many email marketing solutions come with sales funnel automation options.

Enhance Your Workflows – Software like Monday.com, Kissflow.com, and others can help you automate your workflows whether you work alone or with a team. Improving and enhancing your workflows will ensure that when you do automate something, it’s done most efficiently.

Optimize Your Online Presence – Use an all-in-one platform that enables you to use all your social media in one spot, such as Hootsuite.com or sproutsocial.com. When you use one of these social tools to automate sharing, engagement, and relationship building, you’ll really realize the power of social media marketing.

Drop the Dead Weight – You don’t need to keep doing tasks that are not working. For that reason, you want to always check your metrics to ensure that when you act, the result is what you’re looking for. If it’s not, stop doing it and move on to something else.

Automate Every Possible Task – Make a list of any tasks you do each day that are repeated. For example, perhaps each morning, you walk into your office, turn on your computer, and check email. What can you automate? You can automate turning on the light in your office as well as turning on the computer. You can even automate organizing emails using tags and other features so that it’s faster to get to the emails you need to respond to.

The best way to determine what you want to automate is to track what you do each day, week, month, and year. Anything that repeats, do a little research about how other people automate that task. You may be shocked to learn how simple automating your business really is. Automation is not nearly as expensive or complicated as you may think before actually finding the right solutions.

March 11, 2021

Tools and Tips for Automating Your Sales and Inventory Process

Whether you sell physical products or hours and services, automating as much as you can of your entire sales process and inventory, if needed, will save you tons of time. When you save time, you’re saving your most valuable and irreplaceable resource, but more than likely, automation will also save money.

Understand Your Buyer’s Journey – Every business type who has a buyer can learn what they do to make a business decision. Most buyers go through a process from awareness to delight, and it’s your job to know what the buyer’s intent is so that you can deliver just the right information at the right time to advance sales.

Stop Doing Repetitive Work Manually – If it can be automated, stop doing it yourself. There are too many ways you can automate things today that fit any budget for you to keep doing everything like file creation, backups, and inventory tracking. If you continually need to transfer customer information to another system, find a way to automate using Zapier.com or another option.

Provide the Right Information to Your Stakeholders – Ensure that anyone who is interested receives information that they need to make decisions in a self-serve manner. This can be via internal documentation that you provide access to based on their place, such as Trello.com or Basecamp.com. You can assign access based on who they are. For example, the customer of product A gets access to information, groups, and help about product A.

Empower Customer Care – If you hire customer service personnel or use a chatbot, empower your customer care to make sales when it seems like the right thing to do, depending on the conversation. You can even set up your chatbots to do it.

Empower Your Customers – Let your customers care for themselves with self-serve information and AI chatbots so that you don’t have to answer repetitive questions, and they can help themselves.

Create the Right Email Messages – Every product that you create needs certain email messages set up right away. You’ll need a series for all stages of the buying journey, from awareness to delight.

Get the Right Software – It depends on the types of products you sell, but many shopping carts have inventory management included in the system. The most crucial factor is to get the right software for your needs and not try to make bad software work for you.

Automating your sales process may only involve setting up a landing page, a freebie, and moving them to your email list so that you can teach them information, make offers, and move them through their buying journey faster. But if you sell physical products, you probably want to keep track of how many you have available to buy—the same thing with the hours you sell for your VA business. If you’re a service provider, keeping track of what you’ve sold will ensure you don’t oversell but also ensure that you meet your goals.

March 9, 2021March 9, 2021

Tools and Tips for Automating Discovery Calls

Many small business owners like virtual assistants, business and life coaches, and others who work one-on-one with customers and clients use discovery calls to help pitch their offers and close sales. Discovery calls are a powerful way to get more customers, but it can be time-consuming if you don’t develop a process that can be automated and replicated.

HBA Funnel Builder…

Build a Landing Page with Your Offer – Your first step is to build a page that tells your audience about your discovery calls and what’s included, and why they should set up a call with you. You can do this with your basic website pages, or you can use landing page software like net or Instapage.com.

Set Up a Questionnaire Via Your Scheduling Software – Using scheduling software like com offers you the ability to force your lead to fill out a questionnaire in order to set up their appointment, all without you helping in person at that moment. Most people will happily fill out a short questionnaire but remember that you are trying to qualify your leads, so don’t be afraid to ask questions that make them leave the form.

Develop Transactional Emails for Your Autoresponder – Now, set up some information in your autoresponder so that once they submit the questionnaire as well as choose their time for a call, they receive automated emails giving them more information and instructions. You can use your email autoresponder for this, and it doesn’t matter which platform as long as you check to see if the other software you’re using integrates. Aweber.com works with most.

Let Your Potential Customer Choose Their Time to Call – The scheduling software allows you to put the times you’re free. In fact, you can choose different free times for different types of calls so that you know when you get a call what it’s for due to the time and date.

Get a Dedicated Phone Line for Calls – Having a dedicated line or at least a unique ring will help alert you to the call. You’ll want to set up your calls so that your customers call you instead of the other way around as it eliminates the need for you to remember anything.

Read Their Questionnaire Before the Call – You can sign into the scheduling software to read the questionnaire, or you can set up a Zap (Zapier.com) to force the system to put the questionnaire into a special Dropbox or file on Google Docs.

Set Up Follow Up Information to Go Out Automatically – Once the call is finished, you’ll want other information to go out to your lead automatically so that you can close the deal if you did not already on the call. You can use tags and triggers within your autoresponder using IFTTT.com or Zapier.com to make it happen automatically.

Discovery calls help you get more clients and close deals. However, due to the fact they can be time-consuming, it’s best to go in with a plan. Use the customer’s answers to the questionnaire to help guide your meeting in a way that showcases what you can do for them based on their needs.

Follow up as soon as possible within 24 hours after each discovery call with an offer giving them a few days to consider your offer but setting a deadline so that you can avoid overbooking yourself. This process works wonders for booking more clients for the one-to-one service provider or coach.

March 3, 2021March 3, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

This list of social media marketing automated software and tools that you can use in your small business is not complete. There are so many options today that anyone can find the right tool for themselves at the right budget. There is no reason not to use social media marketing automation because the price is very reasonable for most platforms, and the ROI is outstanding.

Hootsuite.com – Aside from all the ways you can automate social media marketing using this software, they have an exciting training program through their Hootsuite Academy, where you can learn all things marketing and even get certification. Whether you’re publishing, engaging, or monitoring, Hootsuite can help you keep it all in one place.

Loomly.com – Manage all your social media content from posts to ads in one place. Not only that, the software will give you ideas about what to post based on trending topics and related events. They also have a great way to keep track of your content assets like photos, videos, notes, links, and templates.

Activecampaigncom – This marketing and sales automation platform is fully featured and offers almost anything you need to run your small business marketing program. Their solution offers automation with email marketing, customer relationship management, sales, support, and more all in one platform.

SproutSocial.com – This platform offers features to help you with social media engagement, publishing, listening, and analytics, all from a central hub. Publishing across platforms at one shot easier is essential today, especially for the one-person business.

Sendinblue.com – This platform offers email marketing, CRM, SMS marketing, engaging chat, and more that you can personalize for your audience. You can also automate your segmenting and make your transactional emails better than ever.

Sharpspring.com – This is being billed as a revenue growth platform that offers a suite of sales and marketing tools to bring your marketing automation to a whole new level. Build on the funnel idea to help you build your list and get more leads by increasing engagement due to focusing on the entire customer lifecycle. Get chatbots, landing pages, dynamic forms, and more.

BuzzSumo.com – Every marketer needs to find, produce, and publish as much relevant content as they can for their audience. This platform helps you discover and research your audience. Use this software to find influencers to help you market your products and services.

Mention.com – An essential component of social media marketing is engagement. It can take a lot of time to find places to engage with your customers but not if you use this platform that allows you to monitor the web to find out what their audience is saying so that you can join the conversation.

Socialert.net – There is no point in using hashtags if you can’t figure out who else is using them or what is going on with them. This platform enables you to track keywords, hashtags, and your social accounts for activity, making it easier for you to engage with your audience.

Zapier.com and IFTTT.com – These two platforms allow you to create applets that perform tasks for you automatically. For example, want to create a list of new list members who purchased your book with phone numbers and dropped into your Trello account so you can call them? If you’re asking for the right info, you can use one of the applets or zaps to tell your system what to do.

When determining the type of automation to use, first decide what you want automated, know your budget, and then find the right tool. Anything you do on a repetitive basis is game for automation. It might seem like it’s only going to save minutes, but those minutes add up and will improve conversions as well as boost your results from social media marketing.

March 3, 2021March 3, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Email Marketing

There aren’t many business owners today who aren’t aware of automated email marketing technology that uses autoresponders. If you’re not sure, autoresponder software like Aweber.com will send out messages to your list members based on either your schedule or a behavioral trigger that you set up and define.

Two ways to automate your email marketing:

Trigger Based Email Messages
Drip-Fed Scheduled Messages

A trigger-based email message is set up to be sent to the subscriber based on something they do. For example, if your customer downloads a free report, or clicks through to read a specific blog post, or even if they simply open a particular email, you can set up your autoresponder to automatically deliver specific messages to them based on what they did.

A drip-fed email message is simply set up to deliver based on the schedule you choose in a specific order. Usually, the messages are a sequence and often referred to as your “autoresponder sequence.” For example, if you offer a free report about a specific problem that you solve, the customer downloads the report, which puts them on that list, which triggers the system to start the drip schedule.

Besides these two ways you can automate, you can also use the automation features inside your software to segment based on new information you obtain from your customer such as demographics data, and product purchased, product not purchased, how they learned about your solutions, and more. Frankly, if you can think it up, you can create a segmentation trigger.

When you automate your email marketing in this way, you can create more targeted and personalized messaging, create customized landing pages, and even use split testing for your emails to create better results from your email marketing. You can also use the native software to examine delivery rates, view rates, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more to make it all work better together – mostly automatically.

The trick for getting this right is to choose the right software for your needs. Some small business owners using a combination of Aweber.com and a WordPress site will work fine, but for some others, they may need a more robust platform to work with, such as Ontraport.com or Clickfunnels.com.

Write down the functions you’d like to have now and in the future. Choose your software based on longevity, functionality, and growth – but of course, also consider your budget. Fortunately, most email marketing software choices have options that can grow with you based on your usage. You can find solutions for as little as $20 to start and on up to thousands of dollars, depending on how you’re using it. The main thing is to do your due diligence checking out the software you want to use to ensure that it works for your needs. For example, some autoresponder software expressly forbids affiliate marketing – if you want to build an affiliate marketing business, you don’t want to start with that choice.

February 28, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate HR Management

From time tracking to expense management, automating your human resource management will save time and money. Anything that happens on a recurring basis is ripe for automation. Tasks like data collecting, file creation, document sharing, form filling, and more can all be done using the software in a way that eliminates the need for an HR person to do these tasks and frees you up to do more.

Contractor and Employee Onboarding – When you bring on a team member, they need to have access to information about your company, including branding information, document templates, and more. If it’s important that your people comply with a particular thing, it needs to be in the onboarding process.

Offboarding – When someone leaves your company and moves on with another, it’s a good idea to survey them about why so that you can improve. Use your HR system to send an automated exist interview via email that they can do on their own before they leave. Plus, once they fill out the exit survey, they can also be automatically sent other information such as COBRA info.

Vacation Requests – If you have employees, they may want to leave, even contractors, if you rely on them to do regular tasks on a long-term contract, offering a way for them to let you know they’re going away is always going to make everyone’s life easier.

Expense Claims – If you reimburse your people for expenses related to the work you do, letting them automatically enter a request for expenses is a lot simpler when done via computer technology and reduces the paperwork and time needed to process such requests.

Payroll – Allowing your employees to enter their own time in a system that creates the paychecks is a great way to cut down on your need to do data entry. All you have to do is approve the time, and the check or direct deposit for their pay happens automatically.

Training – Whether employees or contractors offering company training is helpful to them and can improve their work. You can offer branding information and train them on using all your systems without having to do it individually for each person you bring on board.

Time Management – Let your contractors and employees keep track of their own time using the software.

Benefits Management – Let your contractors or employees take advantage of their benefits on their own. Self-serve, saving lots of time.

Tax Forms and Filing – Most bookkeeping software and systems automatically offer tax forms and filing options depending on your needs.

Even if you don’t have a bunch of employees and only work with contractors having everything together in a centralized place organized according to the laws and regulations where you live is going to free up your time and help avoid issues in the future.

February 28, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Your Finances

Automating your business helps free up your valuable time to do more money-making activities. It’s a wonderful time for business finance automation because the tools that exist today are so easy to use, inexpensive, and they work great. Plus, new tools are coming online every single day.

Bookkeeping Data Entry – Most bookkeeping software today can be integrated with your bank and credit cards. When you make purchases using those cards or that bank, the expense is automatically booked into your accounting software in the right category the moment it happens.

Invoicing – Most invoices in small businesses don’t change that much from month to month. Because of this, you can set up invoices in most bookkeeping software to send automatically based on entries during the previous week, month, or another time period you choose. What’s more, when your client clicks the invoice to pay, the payment is automatically recorded in the software, and then once the money is received, it’s booked in your bookkeeping software.

Accounts Receivable – You can set up your bookkeeping software to remind your customers to send you the money, and it will automatically book it properly when received too.

Accounts Payable – Likewise, if you have bills to pay, you can use the same bookkeeping software to record your payment as you make it. You can also set up your bill-paying system to pay all your bills automatically on their due date. Most banks have this feature built-in for free.

Tax Compliance and Reporting – Once your accounting software is set up with the right categories, most of it will work automatically. If you have to deal with more than one state due to your business structure, try a platform like Taxify.co to help automate and understand more of this process.

Expense Management – Managing expenses, especially when you’re away from your office, is easy today with the various software that helps you collect receipts, appropriately book the expense, and so forth. Automating this is more important if you have several people to keep track of. Software that can help include Zoho Expense, com, and even your existing bookkeeping software may have an option.

Payroll – Depending on how many contractors you have or if you have employees or not, you may need to have an automated way to ensure your people get paid on time. Letting them self-manage their pay helps save time. Look at your bookkeeping software to determine if there are add-ons to help automate this or try using SurePayRoll.com.

Investing and Saving – The truth is, if you don’t invest and save on a regular basis, you won’t do it. Using your bank to send money to your investments automatically, savings accounts are the best way to make it happen, whether personal or business finances.

Automating your finances helps you avoid making the same steps over and over again. There is no reason to repeat tasks today when you have the ability to let the software do it for you. You can save hours each day by implementing these financial automation tips and tools.

February 28, 2021

Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Engagement

Customer engagement is crucial to building the all-important “know-like-trust” quotient that is so important for a business owner’s success today. After all, the main reason you even exist is to solve your customers’ problems in a way that makes them feel satisfied and delighted. The best way to engage with customers today is to automate as much as you can while remembering to focus on the customer of one.

Set Up a Customer-Driven FAQ – Most customers today like going to a website to find information by searching for answers to questions that they have before they contact anyone in person. You can assist this process by setting up an automated FAQ for the customer and potential customer to use for themselves.

Be Easy To Reach – Don’t hide your contact information from your customers. You want them to be able to contact you in a number of ways so that they can use their favorite method. If they want to contact you via email, SMS, or more directly, making that happen will help you both.

Let Your Customers Self Schedule Appointments – If you do take sales calls or do discovery calls, it’s essential for you to let your customers schedule these for themselves. Use software like acuityscheduling.com to automate the process. If you provide the phone number to them to call, you can even let them call you at the arranged time, so you have less to remember.

Automate Your Email Marketing Campaigns – Definitely use an email marketing software that uses triggers like tags to deliver the right message at the right time to the right person on your list. Software like Drip.com, Aweber.com, and if you’re not an affiliate marketer, mailchimp.com all work great.

Automate Your SMS Marketing Campaigns – Using automation software for your SMS campaigns is also important. You’re just not going to get good traction trying to do everything manually. Using a service also helps you with legal compliance.

Consider Adding a Conversational Chatbot – With the advent of inexpensive conversational chatbots, you can engage with your customers 24/7 in a way that feels very good to them and boosts sales exponentially.

Recommend Products or Services Based on Customer Behavior – Using internal triggers in the software you choose, such as your autoresponder software or your landing page software. You can efficiently deliver product recommendations to them based on what they do.

Make More Sales by Targeting Cart Abandonments – This is a fun way to automate your sales. Set up a system that automatically starts a remarketing ad campaign to target cart abandoners or to send them a message via email if you have their email when they leave their cart.

Boost Customer Retention by Following Up Post Sale – When you do make a sale, your job is not over. You need to send follow up information to them via your autoresponder and have the info via SMS. Even if all you do is send a series of messages to them after the sale, that will help.

Find Ways to Reward Your Best Customers – Remember that customers get tired of seeing all the sales directed toward new customers. Treat your customers like VIPs so that they want to stick with you.

Practice Social Listening Strategically – A really great way to automate engagement is to set up your social listening to send you information each time your product or name is mentioned. Then you can go respond directly to any mentions of your name or a like product so you can help people. Set up Google Alerts to send you the information that you need as often as you want it.

Use Automated Invoicing Tools – Why spend time with time-consuming invoicing tasks when you can automate the process as much as possible. Look at using systems like Go Daddy Bookkeeping or Freshbooks.com with their time tracker to automate your invoicing tasks as much as possible.

For your business to grow and flourish, you need to pay close attention to how you communicate with your customers. It needs to include two-way conversation in order to really take your engagement to the next level. When you are easy to find and are responsive to your audience, you’ll end up building a more successful business. Because when people feel like they like you, they also trust you more.