The First Step To Automate Your Business
Are you looking to automate your business ?
In your business, there are so many repeated tasks that take up your day, and making you feel unproductive.
It is of vital importance that you automate these recurring tasks that add little value. So that you can focus on two important things :
- Revenue generation activities, and
- Getting results for your client
Along with being a coach you are an edupreneur, who is derived with a personal mission to help thousands of people with their knowledge.
And to accomplish your mission, automations plays a vital role.
Thinking where and how I should start automating my business ?
Then continue reading this article and take some notes …
Where to start automating your business ?
Many times you are drawn towards the latest tools and softwares to automate your business.
But often you might end up realizing that I don’t have anything to automate.
And the primary reason for this is, you don’t have any of those processes in your business to start with.
In my experience of working with coaches, i have found these four activities that all the coaches are doing and can be automated :
- Appointment scheduling and reminders
- Follow up plan (Prospect Follow up)
- Client enrolment procedure
- Collecting recurring payments
Knowing where to start, the next step is how to automate these activities. And to do so you will need to establish some processes and workflows.
Simple workflows for your business
I am sure you have your own style for performing the above activities. And below are some simple workflows ideas that you could use to enhance your productivity.
Along with the workflows I will be sharing with you some tools that you could use to automate them.
1.Appointment scheduling and reminders
When it comes to booking an appointment, lots of time is wasted in following activities :
- Looking for availability
- Waiting for client to confirm for calls
- Creating and sending meeting invites
- Sending reminders for calls
- Post call follow up
- Collecting payment
Thankfully, you can automate all of these activities using a scheduling tool called calendly.
After you have created your account and linked your google calendar. You can create unique events like and service delivery calls etc.
As a one time setup activity you will require to set up:
- Custom time availability for each event type
- Frequency of reminder
- Connect your zoom/ google meet account
- Update the payment link (if applicable)
- Setup up follow ups (if applicable)
Next time whenever new leads come in all you need to do is send a professional email / message with a link to your calendar and request your prospect to book an appointment with you.
2. Follow up plan (Prospect Follow up)
What happens when your prospect comes on a strategy call with you, and doesn’t say no to your service offering.
They might need some time to think about, and discuss it with their spouse or partner.
How do you follow up with this person ?
To follow up with such people you can create some content like
- Case study of customer results
- Customer testimonials
- Tools, techniques etc relating to your niche
- Video trainings thats help your prospects move forward
List them out on a paper. Finalise top three ideas and create an email template for them.
Next you can create an email automation sequence on any of the email marketing tools (personally i use getresponse) and add the prospects in the list.
This way your prospects will receive mails from you without having you lift a finger.
If you are a complete beginner, here’s a tip for you for creating followup sequences.
Timing is of the essence and based on my data i have found best results when i send mails in following intervals :
- Follow up Mail – after 1 day
- Follow up Mail – after 3 day
- Follow up Mail – after 7 day
- Follow up Mail – after 30 day
3. Client enrolment procedure
It is the most joyful moment of the day, when a prospective client accepts your offer. And ask these four golden words – “How Should I Pay ?”
One of my mentors says this : The way you do one thing is the way you do all things and I make sure that I keep things simple.
While on-boring a new client, creating a smooth workflow can leave an everlasting first impression on your client.
To be able to do so i follow this three step workflow :
- Service agreement : an agreement must have a tool to protect yourself from over delivering and meeting client expectations. Along with commercials, it should clearly define what, when and how you will perform your services.
- Payment collection : using a payment gateway tool like instamojo or razorpay. Collect payments from your clients by sharing a single payment link. I have a practise of sending the payment link along with the service agreement mail to the client.
- Client intake form : after receipt of the payment from the client, it’s important you ask your client to provide the required information and documents (using google form) that will help you deliver your services. By doing this we establish collective responsponsibility for both the parties to make good of the agreement.
This is the simple, yet powerful client onboarding process that you can incorporate into your business. By using various tools like
- Office applications : google doc, google drive, google form , gmail
- Payment platforms : instamojo, razorpay,
- Automation tools : zapier (to connect above applications)
4. Collecting recurring payments
For business, who have monthly subscription services or services delivered over 3 or more months.
Keeping track of payment, payment reminders , raising invoice etc are some additional tasks that get added to your to do list.
Well what if there could be a way, where the agreed client money gets credited in your account each month on a specific date automatically. And your clients get an invoice / receipt of the same without you having to lift your fingers ?
Yes , thanks to the developing banking system and company like Razorpay. You can create custom subscription plans based on your products and services.
What is a subscription plan ?
A Subscription Plan stores information about the Item being subscribed, its price, and billing interval.
Personally I have found razorpay to be the platform which provides easy to use platforma and interface to create custom subscription plans.
Once you have created a subscription plan on razorpay, you can share the same using a link on mail or a message. Alternatively you can embed them on your website.
Now that you know where and how to start automating business processes. It’s time you take action and free up your time for more important activities.
Use the comment box below to ask questions and queries. I would love to answer them for you.
Join the Business Growth Hack Facebook group for remarkable insights to manage and advance your business.
