Why automation is the secret weapon for your small business

The businesses that embrace automation will always dominate those that don't. Learn about the processes you need in your business to make it grow, and learn about what a framework for automating your complete business looks like. To learn more visit www.theautomationexperts.co.uk

Why is automation your secret weapon of 2015?
Okay, so what I want to do is talk about why automation gives you a huge advantage in your business. When you set up your business, the whole dream was to get more free time, freed into work, when you want, and more money. Your plan was to get some customers coming into your business, have a happy staff, happy customers, and then your profits, you're a happy owner, so that's your plan.
The reality is that it doesn't always happen that way. You don't necessarily get enough customers, staff find they're overworked, and they can't do everything you need to happen. Customers then fall through the gaps and the business doesn't work as you want to. Over time, this leaves you feeling a bit trapped.
The question is, you had your dream, but is your business set up and ready to grow? Things you want to look at is when you're thinking about setting up your business ready to grow is you want to think about what you're selling and how it happens. You want to think about what your ideal highest-value customer would buy from you, so product A, service A, service B, and you want to think about what subscription plan you wanted to join. You want to make sure you've got high-value items, which you can sell, and a subscription plan, because this helps make your cash flow much better.
You want to think about how much they spend with you in the first 30 days and how much they spend in the first month with you. You can see all of these elements help you understand about getting the most profitable customers in. Then you want to think about your sales process and think about currently who takes the inquiries and communicates with them and invites them in for a consultation, who then follows up with them to make sure they're followed up. What happens to all the inquiries that never came for a consultation, what happens when a plan is presented to somebody but they don't go ahead straight away. All of these areas are places where gaps can occur and customers fall through, and that means you don't get sales.
What you want to look at is how many customers' tasks are forgotten and missed, and if they are, who picks up the pieces, who's the unseen person working like crazy. Is it you? Are you the one in all these boxes? Are you investing money, you doing marketing, you investing time, energy, you answering potential customers, you trying to serve the customers? If you do all this, you're going to get tired and the reality of it is that a lot of these things don't happen because then waste occurs.
What you want to make sure is you've got this framework in place. I wish someone had showed me this when I first started my business because it makes things really, really simple. You invest money and you invest time energy into your marketing, which will generate a new potential customer. Once that customer buys from you, you want to make sure that they have a really good experience that they purchased but then these are two hidden things you need to make sure are happening.
You need to have a process to make sure that once they bought from you, they rebuy from you, and they keep rebuying from you, and [inaudible 00:02:44] third process to make sure that once they bought from you, they're also referring new people to you. If you got this happening with new customers appearing and you got your customers being looked after all the time and new customers being referred in, you're going to have everything you want to grow your business.
Really, you basically need to think in terms of processes. You need six processes. A process to generate targeted new potential customers is going to be online advertising, offline advertising, different things like this. You want a process to capture their contact details and build relationship over time. This is where marketing automation comes in by making sure you can collect the contact details on the website in exchange for a free guide or something like this. You want to then have a process to convert the interest into sales, so you want to make sure that when you're in contact with these people via email or phone or whatever you want to do, you do that sequentially and then you then got a process to follow up with them to make sure that they finally buy from you.