Process Automation: Free Up 20 Hours a Week

The average employee spends 2.5 hours a day on repetitive tasks that could be automated. How much time is your company losing?

Processes that are ideal candidates for automation:

1. Email handling: classification, automatic replies, follow-ups
2. Invoicing: generation, delivery and payment reminders
3. Reporting: data collection and automatic generation
4. Inventory management: stock alerts, automatic reordering
5. Onboarding: account creation, resource assignment

Automation tools by area:

For marketing:

• Mailchimp: automated email marketing
• Hootsuite: social media publishing
• HubSpot: lead automation

For sales:

• Pipedrive: automatic opportunity tracking
• Calendly: automatic meeting scheduling
• DocuSign: electronic contract signing

For administration:

• Zapier: connects more than 5,000 applications
• Microsoft Power Automate: integration with Office 365
• IFTTT: simple but effective automations

For accounting:

• QuickBooks: automatic invoicing and reconciliation
• Expensify: automatic expense management
• Stripe: automatic payment processing

A worked example: automating a sales process

Before (manual — 3 hours per lead):

1. Lead fills in the web form
2. Sales rep receives an email and creates the contact in the CRM
3. Sends a personalised welcome email
4. Schedules a follow-up in the calendar
5. Prepares a tailored proposal
6. Sends the proposal by email
7. Schedules follow-up reminders

After (automated — 15 minutes per lead):

1. Lead fills in the web form
2. The contact is created in the CRM automatically
3. The welcome email goes out automatically
4. A follow-up is scheduled automatically
5. The proposal is generated from a template
6. It is sent automatically
7. The sales rep gets automatic reminders

The ROI of automation:

• Time saved: 85%
• Errors reduced: 95%
• Customer satisfaction: +40%
• Response time: −70%

How to get started:

1. Map your current processes
2. Identify the repetitive tasks
3. Work out how much time they take
4. Pick one simple tool to begin with
5. Automate one process at a time
6. Measure the results
7. Scale gradually