Small business owners are the most guilty of trying to be in more than one place at one time and often have what feels like a never ending to-do list. This is especially true if you are working with a very small team of employees or completely alone. In which case, automating parts of your business should be right at the top of that to-do list. When it comes to operational and management tasks, time is precious and there never seems to be enough of it, but with these tips on how to automate your small business, you’ll find yourself gaining back more time to get on with the heavy work.

Manage Your Accounts

Online accounting tools have been around for a while, but as technology changes, these accounting softwares have adopted automation processes that help business owners keep their books tidy and ready for tax. In fact, some of these softwares will even automate your tax return and file it for you. The good people at Piesync have compared two of the market front-runners, FreshBooks and Quickbooks, in their guide you’ll find the best accounting tool for your business.

Nurture Leads

Chasing leads is one of those tasks which requires a personal touch. Even something as small as receiving an email that’s clearly sent enmasse is really off-putting for a potential lead. Automation can support your in nurturing your important leads without forgoing personalisation. Automation leverages your customer and lead data to carry out lead qualifying tasks such as, targeted messaging that is triggered by specific actions on your website and direct email campaigns.

Automate Sales Processes

Automation can also help when your leads turn to clients and you need to complete purchase orders and invoices. Companies spend a lot of time on operational tasks like sales processes when they could easily use tools like PurchaseControl to automate this part of their business. Not only does it save you time, but precludes mistakes such as process repetition. These tools allow you to set up vendor accounts and easily raise POs by keeping all of their information and data in one place.

Provide Better Customer Service

Most small businesses cannot afford to have a reputation of bad customer service and if you don’t have a dedicated customer service or sales rep to manage customer queries and complaints, this can result in slow response times and that is bad for that business reputation you’ve worked so hard to build. A great solution to this is a tool like Zendesk or FreshDesk, that can manage your complaints and queries and more impressively, can respond to customers via predetermined responses to common questions, these are often known as artificial intelligence ChatBots. ChatBots are useful for being present when you cannot be but also maintain that human connectivity, which customers prefer when speaking with a company.

Better Organisation

Whether you work with a team of people or not, organisation is key to more efficiency in business. Apps like Trello, Slack and Zapier work to create better and more efficient workflow processes, this is particularly useful if you manage a team of employees or work on multiple projects. These apps allow you create separate boards for individual projects and timetables so you can see who is what on what.

Manage Your Calendar

When you run a small business it’s easy for meetings and appointments to slip through the cracks. A PA is the most obvious solution to most, however, you might not have the budget for a PA which is where automating your calendar comes in. An online calendar or schedule software is an invaluable tool which ensures that you never miss another appointment and allows clients and team members to see your schedule and make appointments with you. Calendly is an example of an online schedule software that can manage your appointments, what’s more it easily integrates with other apps like Zapier, Zoom and Salesforce.

You might also be wondering how to know what to automate in your business. Usually, if there’s a task that takes up a lot of your time or focus, there is a way to automate it or at least find an app or online tool that can alleviate some of the work. Most of these tools will help you streamline and work more efficiently, others can perform repetitive tasks so that you don’t have to. Either way, automation is here and it’s helping thousands of small business owners get on with the most important task of all: growing their business.

This article was written by Chris Howard.

He is a Tech and Business journalist whose typical day is spent scouring the web for the latest developments in the world of Marketing and tech automation. He loves any type of new marketing software!