Tag: Home Business Academy

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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.

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Automate Your Community Management

Building community builds brand awareness, provides amazing feedback so you can get more product ideas, and builds stronger relationships. When you can find the people talking about you online and respond, it turns social media and community into a powerful tool for you to build relationships and a better business.

 

Building community for your business will increase brand awareness, teach you more about your customers, and provide amazing value to your customers now and in the future due to all the incredible insight you will derive from the community.

 

  • Invite Your Buyers to A VIP Support Group – Creating a group for your buyers to come to ask questions and get answers, and other support is a fabulous way to encourage the community to help each other.

 

  • Ask List Members to Come to Your Private Facebook Group – Make it a habit to invite anyone who joins your email list to your private free Facebook Group. You can get to know them and they you and move them from interested to delighted faster due to the fact actual customers will back you up.

 

  • Invite Interested Parties to a Product Development Group – Some of your customers may be interested in conversing with you on a deeper level helping you essentially create more products for their needs.

 

Using the tools of the trade help make community-building easier and more effective. These tools will make your job easier, and there are plenty to choose from depending on your needs and budget.

 

NapoleonCat.com

 

Manage your social media through this platform. You’ll be able to see all feeds in one view so that you can deliver the best customer care to them on any platform from one spot. Plus, you’ll get top-notch analytics. After all, you can’t know if what you’re doing is working if you’re not studying the metrics.

 

Some features include the ability to answer repetitive questions automatically with templates, hide spam messages automatically, and even delete offensive material based on your list of insulting words without having to view them yourself.

 

Heyo.com

 

This software is a platform that allows you to run contests. Community and social marketing are all about engagement, and nothing creates more engagement than the ability to have a good old friendly competition. You can use this software on any social media platform, across multiple platforms, and even in SMS via mobile devices.

 

Grow your email list, get more accurate leads, and make your customers happy with this software. Whether you want to run a sweepstake, a photo contest, or send out a quiz to your audience, this platform will do what you need.

 

Taggbox.com

 

User-generated content is the most important type of content you will deal with when building a community. It’s also some of the most powerfully compelling content for any new person to see when buying your products or using your services.

 

Whether you want to build a hashtag campaign, boost virtual events, or even help build a social wall for your in-person events, Taggbox.com can help you get it done and automate most of it.

 

Building and managing the community you create due to your brand allows you to get better user feedback, provide amazing support, increase brand awareness, and build exceptional relationships. If you really want to boost customer interactions and create raving fans that not only want what you have but want to tell others about it, invest in building community through all your social accounts with your like-minded ideal customer base.

 

 

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Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Social Media Marketing

marketing planThis 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.

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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.

 

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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.

 

 

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Home Office Automation Tips

When thinking of automation, you may forget that the work you do in your office is also a place that you can start automating. Yes, you want to automate as much as you can outside the office, too but one of the first places you can streamline your efforts is via office automation. There is more to office automation than going paperless. It’s about removing the human component or at least your need to act to get something done.

 

  • Design Your Workflow – For every project, you do in your office, there is a process that ensures successful completion. Design a workflow for each project so that you know the full process. You cannot automate anything if you don’t know each step that it takes to get to finished properly.

 

  • Notice Anything You Do Repeatedly – If you do it again and again, chances are it can be automated. For example, if you always need to transfer data from one place to another to get started with your work, can that task be automated using IFTTT.com?

 

  • Ensure Your Office is Compatible with Your Real Life – Most people who work for themselves need their office to travel with them. You’ll want to avoid using any system that is not compatible with mobile devices and systems. You should not have to go to your PC to get it done. The more mobile your tools are, the more likely you are to be able to use automation software too.

 

  • Check Compatibility with Your Existing Software and Systems – When you choose new tools to use for your business to enhance automation, it needs to work seamlessly with the software and systems you already use to be worthwhile. Of course, the one exception is if you’ve been stubborn about upgrading and using the best tools due to the cost of investment. If you are using older free tools cobbled together, you will have more issues making automation work than if you bite the bullet and invest.

 

  • Always Test the Results – Each tool that you use has native analytics and reports that you can use to determine if you’re getting the results that you wanted. If you’re not, don’t keep doing the same thing. Use the metrics to inform your next steps. Always make data-centric choices for your business.

 

  • The Small Stuff Does Matter – Even the smallest thing can change your entire workday. For example, what if you automated your office so that when you walk into your office, the light turns on, and so does your computer? Anything you can reasonably do to cut down on the steps will make you more productive and save tons of time, your most valuable resource.

 

Automating your office, whether it’s designed to turn on your computer, make you a pot of coffee, or turn on the lights, or it’s using software to let artificial intelligence do the task for you, will all help to make your days go much more smoothly. You’ll save time and be able to stay on top of the important stuff that needs your personal touch.

 

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Tools and Tips to Help You Automate Your Marketing

One of the best things to start automating as soon as you can is your marketing. Automating is a lot easier and less expensive than it was just five years ago. Today, even a one-person business can implement marketing automation that assists in exploding their business and taking it to new heights never considered in the past.

 

These tools and tips will help you get marketing automation right:

 

  • Understand Your Sales Process – You should easily be able to describe the journey your customer takes from awareness through to delight. Because when you know what your customer’s intent is, you can put the right tools and information in front of them.

 

  • Know Who the Customer Is – Of course, part of understanding your customer’s journey is also simply knowing who exactly your ideal customer is. You must be able to describe who they are in detail if you want to know how to market to them. This fact never changes whether you are doing things yourself, using automation, or letting a contractor do it.

 

  • Create, Plan, and Publish Content in Advance – All marketing starts with content. Before you even start using automation, you need to have content for each level of the buyer’s journey to get their attention.

 

  • Pick the Right Software – For example, software like Hootsuite is helpful to manage the social media platforms all in one place. In contrast, software like SocialOomph.com can automate your content distribution by prepopulating content. Know what the point of the software is before you buy it and use it.

 

  • Focus on List Building – Whether you are marketing using automation or doing it yourself, the main focus you should have is on list building. Building your list with hungry customers is your first priority for any marketing you do.

 

  • Know What You Want – If you don’t know what you want, it’s hard to find the software. One issue with automation is you may not realize how much you can automate, so you don’t even know that you want it because you don’t know it exists. For this reason, educate yourself on various ways others use automation because the truth is if you can think it up and it’s repeatable, you can probably automate it.

 

  • Focus on The Basics First – When you first begin implementing automation, focus on the easy things you do now. For example, automating your sales pages to deliver a freebie, sign your lead up to your list, and then deliver automated nurturing messages is the first place you should consider automating.

 

Take a look at what you already are doing in your business, and then look up whether or not you can automate that. Posting to social media, sending new content to your email list, and offering self-help customer service are some simple but powerful ways that you can start automating your marketing.

 

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26 Things You Can Automate in Your Business

There are numerous things you can automate in your business. Some things you may have already thought about or started, such as email marketing. But others you may not have thought of yet, such as auto file generation, event registration, and more.

 

  1. Social Media Marketing – Use software like Hootsuite.com to set up social media marketing sharing and engagement.

 

  1. Blogging – Set up your email marketing software and social media platforms using software like Zapier.com to generate applets that will automatically share any blog you publish with your email subscribers and social media platforms using the right size image and everything.

 

  1. Research – Use a combination of artificial intelligence, surveys, behavioral emails, tagging, and other tools to automatically deliver reports to you based on the criteria you set.

 

  1. Tracking and Measuring – Set up Google Analytics or platform analytics to track and measure and create automated reports. You can use Zapier.com to automatically create a document that is filed away for you to check when it’s time.

 

  1. Remarketing – Set up a pixel that autocrinally tells your customers when they left their shopping carts or that sends an advertisement just to them based on their behavior in your cart.

 

  1. Event Registration – Let your customers sign themselves up for your events using the tools included with platforms like GoToWebinar.com or connect software using IFTTT.com and another tech.

 

  1. Customer Care – Set up chatbots, customer questionnaires, and a self-service kiosk right on your site. Chatbots can be programmed to speak in your brand voice in a conversational manner and offer an amazing ROI.

 

  1. Email Responses – Set up triggers within your email autoresponder software that delivers the right information that you’ve preloaded into the system to your customers just when they need it most.

 

  1. Transactional Emails – Preload all transactional emails to your autoresponder so that they’re delivered based on what your customer does.

 

  1. General Email – Set up automation in your email so that when someone signs up for your list or buys something, they get periodic emails based on their interests.

 

  1. Invoicing and Reminders – Set up your invoicing tools to generate automatic invoices based on the criteria you set up, as well as sends auto-reminders. Most bookkeeping software will do this these days if you set it up.

 

  1. Payroll – If you have employees, invest in payroll software or work with a payroll firm. They’ll provide the tools that allow your employees to enter their time and control various aspects of their pay independently.

 

  1. Storing Records and Receipts – Purchase software that enables you to take a picture of your records and receipts so that it’s always there when you need it.

 

  1. Bookkeeping – A lot of bookkeeping software today, even Go Daddy’s version, will automatically book your purchases and income for you. This can save hours, depending on the number of transactions you have daily.

 

  1. Customer / Client Appointment Scheduling – If you’re a coach or someone who has to interact with customers and clients via appointments, let them make their own. Software like acuityscheduling.com lets your customers self-serve in more ways than one.

 

  1. Bill Paying – If you have bills to pay, you can set up automatic payments for all sorts of bills so that you don’t have to think of them every month. You can do this via your bank.

 

  1. File Backups – Everyone should be backing up all the time. Having an external drive isn’t really good enough now. Buy file storage online. It’s much safer, and set everything up so that it backs up automatically.

 

  1. Calendar Sharing – You can automate your calendar sharing by using the right type of software for your needs. For example, if you work with a team that is spread out over the country, using Google Calendar that you can all view and see will help. You can also use project management software like Basecamp.com for this.

 

  1. Email Inbox Management – Use software like boomerang.com to help you keep spam out of your inbox. You can also set up Zapier.com to organize your files for easier consumption.

 

  1. To-Do List Development – Using Zapier.com, you can turn your emails or other accounts like Slack and Trello into a to-do list with the right commands.

 

  1. Digital Product or Freebie Delivery – Set up your sales page so that when your customer signs up, they’ll receive the product automatically.

 

  1. Lead Gen and Nurturing – When your customer gets their freebie, you can automatically deliver emails that build the relationship using Aweber.com or other autoresponder services.

 

  1. Contact Management – Use a system that allows you to scan your contacts into your customer relationship management software along with tagging so that you can set up networking ops fast.

 

  1. File Creation – Set up IFTTT.com or Zapier.com to create files and add them to your Dropbox from tasks, emails, and other triggers.

 

  1. Help Desk – Use software like Freshdesk.com to set up an automated helpdesk for your customers.

 

  1. Surveying Customers – Use behavioral triggers on your website, in email, and on social media to deliver a survey to your customers.

 

Now that you’ve seen this list of ways to start automating, did it give you some good ideas? What do you want to automate? If you’re not sure about how to automate something in your business, I can probably help if you contact me.

 

 

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3 Reasons to Automate and Outsource

As a business owner, it’s important to understand what your expertise is. If you’re spending time in areas that you lack skills or information, you may be making mistakes that you don’t even realize you’re making while sacrificing what you are good at doing.

 

When you understand the core business, you will know what you sell, who you’re selling it to, where your buyers are, and how to find them. You’ll also know how you’re going to distribute the product or serve the customer. Additionally, you know how you stand out from the competition, and you use that to your advantage by differentiating yourself in the marketplace.

 

Remove Bottlenecks

 

When you start to automate and outsource tasks in your business as you develop each process, you’ll start to notice that bottlenecks are a thing of the past. Because the truth is, in most small businesses, especially those run by people starting them from home with no business experience, the bottleneck is the business owner.

 

Sometimes lack of skill causes the roadblock. Sometimes they just lack desire or energy because everything becomes so overwhelming. But whatever the reason, if you are engaged in organizing and planning as business owners should do and focused on automating and outsourcing, ensuring that others are responsible for doing, you’re going to get more done.

 

Reduce Errors and Mistakes

 

When you work with software, fewer mistakes will happen once you set it up correctly. Even outsourcing to an expert will ensure that mistakes and errors are less likely to happen. The main reason is that you’re going to use software that is tried and tested, and you’re going to hire people who are experts.

 

The truth is, hiring experts or using automation software can reduce your errors and mistakes so much that the cost will produce an amazing return on investment. You’d probably spend a lot more time worrying over the issue than your customer service expert or the automation software will. But you’ll get superior results in the end.

Setting Boundaries: It’s Not Selfish to Go After What You Want

Spend Time on Higher Value Projects

 

This is the biggest reason of all to automate and outsource. Focus on your primary business, which is the core of your businesses’ existence. As a business owner, while you may need to do things in your business as a job, once you reach specific benchmarks, you should hand those tasks off to machines or to experts so that you can spend time on projects that produce a much higher value for yourself such as business planning and idea generation which is the key to business growth.

You live in an amazing time to be a business owner. You can find plenty of technology to implement in your automation plan and plenty of people to hire in your outsourcing plan. Figure out what you want to do, set your goals for doing it, and then follow through.

 

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How to Do More with Less

Many folks in western society have been taught by word and deed that being busy makes them a good person. The truth is, being busy does not mean that you are productive. You can be busy doing the wrong things. Getting more done with less implies that the impact you make is more significant than your effort.

 

Some ways to get more done with less:

 

  • Understand your key objectives – For any task, what is the point of doing it? Does this task actually impact any of your critical business objectives or the objective of the one task?
  • Automate – If you can document the steps you do for a task, you can likely automate a lot of it. From using macros within your documentation to implementing new automation tech, there is likely a way to do it.
  • Outsource – If you cannot automate it, you can likely get someone else to do it for you. As a business owner, you should actually make it your goal to outsource or automate almost every task in your business, with few exceptions.
  • Batch tasks – Once you’ve figured out what tasks you really do need to do, batch things together that make sense. The fewer steps you can take, the better. For example, if you need to do bookkeeping, save all your booking entries to do one day a week instead of doing it daily.
  • Avoid multitasking – When you are doing a task, do that task. Don’t do anything else that will take away your focus. No human really can multitask anyway.
  • Create realistic schedules – When you write your tasks into your calendar, it should make sense. If a task takes four hours, you need to ensure you really have four hours and not one. For example, include set up time, drive time, and all the time needed to finish the task as scheduled completely.
  • Do the hard things first – If there is one thing on your list you really don’t want to do, but you cannot eliminate it, automate it, or outsource it, get that out of the way first thing.
  • Track your time – When you first start doing things, it helps to track your time so that you stay mindful of how you’re spending it and so that you know how long any given thing really takes you.
  • Focus on money-making tasks – Note which tasks you do that generate invoicing or money in your pocket. These need to be done first thing.
  • Cut distractions – Set up your workspace to eliminate distractions and interruptions. Turn off notifications, your phone, the TV, or anything that can take your mind off what you are doing.
  • Use the right tools – Don’t skimp on investing in the tools of your trade. If a tool exists to use that helps streamline your business and eliminate busywork, you need it.
  • Know your top five – Everyone has off days, but if you create a list of the top five money-making must-dos for a basic day, then even when you have issues, you can focus on those top five tasks.

 

Remember that being organized in your business is part of what a business owner does. Business owners reduce risk in their business by organizing, planning, and generating new ideas that create new opportunities.