3

Five Ways to Automate Your Small Business

FiveWaysToAutomateYourBusiness

You finally did it! You checked out of corporate America, punched the time clock for the last time and pursued your dream of running your own business. Congrats to you for following your passion and becoming a self-made entrepreneur. As your business plan becomes a reality and you are living life on your own terms, now might be the time when you take a step back and say, “Whoa, I am working a whole lot more and making a whole lot less.” As you might be reveling in self-doubt or taking a personal inventory of your life balance, you might be thinking about the payoff. Hmmm? Let’s look at this picture.  You embarked on your own business to achieve the freedom that seemed so glorious, but now you feel like a slave to your business. Answering phone calls at all hours, responding to emails when the rest of your old corporate pals are sound asleep and you are up to your eyeballs in revenue and balance sheets, especially while you’re on vacation with your family is no bueno. Before you jump ship and sink your business for the life you once disdained, there’s hope in managing the mundane tasks that weigh you down. The answer is simple. Automate your business.

Your business is probably well on its way to generating growth, so this is probably the perfect time to come up for air and invest in a life preserver (aka automation). Here are five ways to automate your business so you can dispose of your work-hound habits and start enjoying life again.

1. CRM

Customer relationship management is a model for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. A CRM system allows fast growing businesses to manage business relationships and the data and information associated with them. With CRM, you can store customer and prospect contact information, accounts, leads and sales opportunities in one central location, ideally in the cloud so the information is accessible by many, in real time. A popular CRM system to check out is ZohoCRM.

Image01

This system allows you to attract, retain, and impress more customers while growing your business. By automating you are able to manage your day-to-day business activities so that you can focus on selling and not on maintaining data. You can track your sales activities and align your sales efforts with business strategies and objectives. Over 50,000 customers trust Zoho. Solutions for every size of company and any budget, Zoho offers a15-day free trial of its pay plans, which range from $12 per month to $25 per month.

2. Customer Service Solutions

Engage your customers with live support. Zopim lets you have live conversations with visitors on your website. Impress and convert them into loyal customers before they move on to the next site. This solution allows you to create a schedule where your agents appear online automatically and are available in real time to answer any questions or discuss any topic.

Image02

Over 130,000 websites uses Zopim to chat with 290 million web visitors every month in 54 languages. With three different plans, there’s one for the one-man band, the established teams, and everything in between.

Image033. Social Media Management

Over eight million users and the world’s top brands use HootSuite. This robust social media management system takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress among others. With HootSuite, businesses and organizations can collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard.

HootSuite Enterprise: Your Social Relationship Platform

Image04

The top five reasons to use HootSuite are:

#1 Everything’s in one place. The HootSuite dashboard puts all of your social media profiles in one place. So whether you’re promoting a sale, launching a new product, or addressing a customer issue, you can do it from one single location.

#2 It’s easy. Using the HootSuite Dashboard is easy. Just add your social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Google+), apps (Instagram, YouTube), and RSS feeds, then watch it all come together with seamless ease.

#3 It’s automated. Who has the time to sit around and wait for the perfect moment to post to Facebook and Twitter? With the scheduling function, you can pre-schedule your Tweets and posts for optimal times and let HootSuite send them out for you.

#4 It’s measurable. You’ve conceptualized, created, and executed your social media marketing plan. Now’s the time to find out how well it’s working. With HootSuite’s analytics, you can measure your performance by keeping tabs on important metrics like keywords, retweets, likes, and more.

#5 It’s scalable. Your social media marketing plan is in full swing. Your followers and likes are hitting triple digits, and the general view of your brand is great. But it’s time-consuming and taking your focus away from your business. HootSuite’s ability to add team members as needed allows you to lighten your load and delegate tasks.

For $8.99 a month you will receive:

    • 50 Social Profiles
    • 2 Users Included
    • 1 Free Enhanced Analytics Report
    • Google Analytics Integration
    • Facebook Insights Integration
    • And Lots More!

4. Accounting

Successful companies look for a more robust system for handling invoices once the operation really starts taking off. Five million businesses have outgrow Excel and turned to FreshBooks to streamline rigorous accounting practices. FreshBooks offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all pay plans, which range from $19.95 to $39.95 per month. Some of the great benefits of Freshbooks are:

  • FreshBooks is built for small business owners to get organized and get paid. You’ll be tracking time, logging expenses, and invoicing your clients in no time.
  • It is simple and intuitive, so accounting isn’t intimidating. Plus you can talk to a real, live person anytime you have a question, 9 a.m.- 6 p.m. EST, Monday to Friday.
  • Your business is accessible from any computer or mobile device (iPhone, iPad and Android), and your data is always backed up and secure.

Image055. Network Management

Manage all of your IT workload from one easy place––for FREE. From network inventory and network monitoring to help desk software, and mobile device management (MDM) to cloud services detection, Spiceworks helps manage everything IT related.

 Image06

Automating your business is a necessity, not a luxury and with these five tools, most of which have practically zero to minimal fees, there’s no reason to drag your feet. The key to success is to run your business as efficiently as possible and take advantage of the tools that are available. Follow this advice and transform your day at the office to a day at the beach.

Matthew Toren
 

Matthew Toren is a serial entrepreneur, mentor, investor and co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com. He is co-author, with his brother Adam, of Kidpreneurs.org, BizWarriors.com and Small Business, BIG Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right (Wiley).

Comments are closed