Running a lucrative business is exciting and scary and thrilling all at the same time. You may feel like your head is exploding with information and that you are on fire with energy.
You feel on top of the world like you can do anything once you start generating money, but as you move up in the business world, you’ll start to realize you’re only one person and you really need to work smarter, not harder, so that you can be genuinely productive.
Not only that, you deserve a quality of life that includes not just earning a great living but living a great life. When you first start trying automation in your business, it’s vital first to understand why you want to automate that task, and secondly to know if the impact of the automation matches your goals.
For this reason, you need to test for impact. That means that you set up automation with a goal in mind, then check the numbers to ensure you met your intended goal. A few goals that you might be going for with your automation choice:
- Improved Efficiency
- Boosted Productivity
- Better Accuracy
- Easier Collaboration
- Better Tracking of Progress
- Easier to Notice Change
- More Flexibility
You may also be automated in order to accomplish other things without hiring a huge staff such as:
- Building your list
- Engaging more with your customers
- Delivering a freebie
- Nurturing your subscribers
- Creating social media buzz
- Creating and organizing files
- Paying your bills
- Providing topnotch customer care
- Booking your purchases
If you don’t know the point of the automation that you are setting up, it’s going to be hard to measure. Before you even research automation tools, know what and why you want to automate it and the result you’re hoping to experience. If you don’t know, it can cause problems because you won’t know what to test.
Let’s say that you want to automate your customer service with a conversational chatbot to streamline getting people to provide information to get them on your list instead of using the form you have used the last few years.
After you set up the chatbot and let it work for a while, you’re going to want to test whether your list building is happening faster once you set up the automation and if it is, are the people joining your list hungry buyers or not?
How has the change impacted your list? Are you getting more list members? Are you getting a higher quality list member? What’s different? What’s the same? You should be able to compare the numbers easy to find out. Checking the metrics is the only way you know for sure that what you intended to happen did happen. Remember, if the impact you expected did not happen, you might need to tweak what you automate or use other tools to get it to work for your needs.