Tag: personal development

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Sales Automation Tools and Tips

When it comes to automating sales, you’re in a great time to be involved in selling anything. Selling online is fun and exciting because you have access to so much data from your efforts. You can perfect your sales process to the point that it produces tremendous results for you if you’re paying attention to the metrics.

 

  • Capturing Leads – You can automate your entire lead capturing process by using the right software. For example, you’ll need autoresponder software and a landing page to deliver a freebie. Just set up the autoresponder to deliver the link to the download page after they sign up. You can make this work even better if you use software for your landing pages, such as leadpages.net or Instapage.com, to set up a dynamic lead capturing system.

 

  • List Building – Building your list is an important thing to do if you want to be successful in marketing online. When you build a list of hungry buyers, you can give yourself a raise anytime you want by making them an offer. Using systems like Aweber.com, Drip.com, or any autoresponder system that enables you to set up automated messaging, tagging, and segmenting is essential.

 

  • Communicating – To automate your communication process, use templates to get the work done faster. Once you set up a template, you can use it for all your communication needs, only changing what needs to be changed each time.

 

  • Qualifying Leads – You can use automated systems to help qualify your leads. Once you capture a lead and they sign up for your list, you can send more information automatically to them via your autoresponder system. Then, based on their behavior, you can tag them all automatically, depending on their behavior.

 

  • Nurturing Leads – For most people, the easiest thing to understand about automation is the autoresponder, which sends out messages that you loaded in the system in the order you determined was best based on the exact customer’s needs.

 

  • Following Up – Most transactional and follow up emails can be designed in advance and then delivered right away as soon as the customer needs them. For example, if your customer buys widget A, you’ll send information about widget A and how to use it right away. Only later will you follow up with a recommendation that they buy widget B.

 

  • Scheduling Meetings and Calls – The other important thing you can automate when it comes to sales is calls and meetings. Let your potential customer fill out a questionnaire and sign up for the exact time they prefer to go to the meeting or participate in the call. When the customer feels in control, they’re more likely to show up, and you can close the sale.

 

  • Webinars – Webinars are often used in the sales process. You can do one of them live, then automate the remaining ones and run them “as live” to build your list and get more followers. You can run these automatically and pop on at the very end if you want to make that part live and more interactive. An excellent tool to check out if you’re interested in running live and recorded “as live” webinars are Demio.com.

 

When it comes to automating sales, you can’t go wrong with investing in a good autoresponder service, a webinar service, and/or a funnel-based system like Clickfunnels.com to build your business by capturing leads, building your list, and nurturing your list members with appropriate content every single day.

 

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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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9 Tips for Choosing Awesome Contractors for Your Business Needs

When you decide to outsource to others using contractors, you must understand how to find good ones and keep them before you get started. Nothing is worse than finally deciding to pay someone else to do something and making a bad choice.

communication

  1. Know What You Want – If you don’t know exactly what you need, it’ll be hard to hire the right person or team to help you. If you cannot write a detailed job or project description highlighting the expected deliverables and timetable, and budget, you are not ready to find a contractor.

 

  1. One Thing Per Contractor – When it comes to your small home business, you don’t want to hire one person to be in charge of an entire project because it can cause problems. For example, if you hire one writer to write, edit, format, and do every part of a project for you and they get sick, you may end up without a project. But if you hire someone just to do the writing, someone else to do the editing, and yet someone else to make it pretty, you’re more likely to get a better product in the end. Plus, it’s a lot easier to replace someone only responsible for editing since each skillset is specific.

 

  1. Know Your Budget – You need to know the range you’re willing to pay for the projects you’re trying to outsource. To generate the number, you need to find out what the going rate is for that particular expertise. Don’t try to get a rocket scientist on a minimum wage budget.

 

  1. Check References – Even if your friend recommends a person or company for your project, always check up on them to be sure they are who they say they are. You’d do this if you were hiring someone to come to your storefront, do it when you are going to work with someone in your company every single time.

 

  1. Start Small – When you first work with someone, don’t hire them for a long-term project. Instead, hire them for a short-term project with a faster turn around time so that you can find out if they are right for you for future or more critical projects.

 

  1. Respect the Laws – When you hire a contractor, they are not your employee. How they produce your deliverables is not any of your concern. The important part is to answer the question: Did they deliver the results you paid for? You don’t control their time because they are not your employee. For this reason, pay by project or task and not hourly.

 

  1. Use a Project Management System – Some independent contractors have their own system and want you to sign up for their project management system. This is important because it helps establish that they are not employees. But if they don’t use their own, set up a system for them to use with you as it’ll keep everything more organized and on task.

 

  1. Communicate Regularly and Quickly – When your contractors have a question, get back to them as quickly as possible with the answers. They have their own timeline, and if you’re not fast with responses, you can end up being really hard to work with.

 

  1. Pay on Time – Don’t mess with someone’s pay. If you promise to pay them a certain amount of money for the work, then pay them when you said you would. Don’t hire people if you don’t have the funds to pay at that moment.

 

Remember that the old saying that if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Always check up on anyone you plan to work with, whether you are going to pay them, share private information with them, or have them associated with your business name in any way. There are lots of great people who want to work virtually as a contractor, so if you know what you want and do your due diligence, you will find them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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.

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What’s Your Customer’s Buying Journey

 

One of the first things you need to learn about your business is your customer’s buying journey based on the sales funnel. Big businesses like to call this their customer relationship management pipeline. They tend to use a few basic pipeline structures that follow their customer’s buying journey from awareness to delight.

 

The truth is that no matter what type of business you have, the basic sales funnel is the same and defines the buyer’s journey.

 

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Consideration
  • Decision
  • Delight

 

Map your customer’s potential journey so that you can visualize where you need to place touchpoints. For example:

 

  • Awareness – Sync your favorite apps such as Google Sheets, Aweber.com, and other apps using software like Automate.io or Zapier.com to deliver the right content at the right time based on the customer’s behavior.

 

  • Interest – Automatically deliver email subscribers content that teaches them about the products and services you offer via your email software as well as your website using auto sequences and conversational chatbots.

 

  • Consideration – This is when the buyer really wants what you have to offer, and it’s your sale to lose or gain. You can automate content delivery that asks for the sale, such as delivering a free webinar to them. Using the right software, such as offered by HubSpot Automation and others, you can even let the software generate new one time offers based on their behavior.

 

  • Decision – Depending upon the type of business structure you have, whether it’s a course or a physical product or not, you’ll want to help them make the choice to buy by setting up automated discovery call appointments. You can synchronize your website with scheduling software like Acuityscheduling.com to let your customers schedule their own call.

 

  • Delight – Finally, you can create a whole new funnel to use during the post-purchase stage in order to elicit customer delight. When you delight your customers, they’re going to make more purchases and recommend others to you. One way to do this is to automate the onboarding of new customers so that they receive enough information to want to stick with you.

 

People add different steps along the way to each of their funnels based on the path the buyer likes to travel on their buying journey. Each step is a chance to streamline and automate part of the process. To make your customer’s buying journey successful, you’ll hopefully lead them through the entire process past the point they decide to buy your product to include customer delight, loyalty, and advocacy when it’s appropriate.

 

 

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What’s Your Business Type?

 

Do you have a store where people purchase products, or do you offer a service like coaching?

Maybe you offer courses and classes, or you provide customer support or something else entirely? Whatever you offer, how you have structured your business is vital to determine before you start your automation plans.

3 step plan

If you have an online store that people come to in order to purchase products from you, the way you automate and run your business will be very different from the way someone who offers courses or one-on-one personal services does.

 

So, consider what your business type is.

 

Online Store

 

If you sell any type of product, whether it’s physical or digital, with a shopping cart, you have an online store. You may be selling books, content, and even courses if you’re selling them as a product without your extra coaching and input. Essentially if you sell anything online in a shopping cart, you have an online store and can use a lot of automation tips for online stores.

 

Virtual Services

 

If you sell any type of service, administrative, one-on-one coaching, and so forth that you perform at a distance, using your website as your storefront, you are a service-based business. As a service-based business, you’ll organize your business and market yourself differently from an online store where you don’t speak to the customers directly yourself and sell products directly.

 

Virtual Support and Consulting

 

You may also offer only virtual support and consulting without offering direct service. For example, you may coach your clients to create a sales page, set up a freebie, set up a discovery call, but you don’t do it yourself, you simply advise them on what to do, and the client with their team does it. This is an entirely different business structure than a business that does the services directly or delivers the product directly.

 

Virtual Training

 

If you offer classes and “how-to” information to your customers via courses, classes, and content, you have a business that provides classes either self-paced or teacher-led this is a training business. A training business sometimes needs more personal input and engagement than a storefront that just sells the complete self-paced course.

 

There are numerous opportunities for automation in each of these business structures. But first, you need to write it down. What does the composition of your business look like? What do you do for customers and clients, and how do you do it? Is it hands-off or hands-on, or a combination of both? The more you can document how your business works, the easier it will be to find ways to automate and outsource.

 

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The Fundamental Parts of Your Small Business

 

The first thing to think about when you seek to make your days more manageable and more effective is the parts of your small business. What parts of your business are essential to your success? For each business, you’ll need to look at your own situation to determine it, but this can get you started.

 

  • Human Resources – If you hire or contract out to others, you’ll need to concern yourself with setting up, organizing, and managing all your HR. Having some knowledge of this even if you think you’re going to do everything yourself is essential because you should not do it all yourself, and there are laws to consider.

 

  • Accounting and Finance – Every business must figure out how they plan to keep track of income and expenses and set up benchmarks for planning purposes. There is a lot you can automate in this area too.

 

  • Marketing and Advertising – No business can exist if they don’t get the word out about their solutions.

 

  • Production – If you have a product, whether physical or digital, the product has to be produced somehow. Much of production can be automated depending on the type of products you have.

 

  • Information Technology – Most small businesses today do have to deal with technology in some way, which means you need to have a general understanding of the technology available in your industry to help you manage and do your business.

 

  • Operations – The inner workings of your business are ripe for automation. It doesn’t matter if you sell products, manufacture products, or perform services, someone has to be in control of this work, and that’s typically the small business owner because they don’t typically hire managers, but you can.

 

  • Customer Service – Even if you only serve five customers a year, you need to focus on customer care in order to keep your customers happy. A lot of this process can be automated too.

 

  • Purchasing – This is a department that will often fall to the owner of a small business but exists as a separate department in a large business. In this department, you’ll want to figure out what the business needs, how much, when, and negotiate better prices, and so forth.

 

  • Legal Department – This is one of the first areas to go for a small self-owned business, but it is still important to acknowledge this area. You always want to make sure what you do is legal and follows the laws.

 

  • Business Development and Growth – This includes sales, marketing, project management, product management, and more. If you focus on business development, you’ll focus on how you can use what you have to expand your audience and make more money.

 

While in general, all businesses share the same fundamental parts, some businesses, especially home solopreneurs, may place importance on different parts depending on their goals. But these potential fundamental parts of your small business bare considering so that you can create a solid automation plan.