Are You Using Automation?

Automation. This single word can completely change your workday. You’ve got a lot going on during the day. Sending out emails, making phone calls, researching your next leads, creating content, writing proposals, the list goes on and on. When it comes down to having free time to nurture your leads and your business, automation is the number one factor that will help you pivot your workflow. Our COO and Co-Founder, Larissa LaMaster, has some great advice when it comes to figuring out what you want to automate first. “It’s

always best to focus on the things that you’re currently doing and things you spend a lot of time doing.” Look at your day. What do you spend the most time doing, and how can you automate it so you can focus on more significant tasks?

Here at Boundless Media, we are always trying to automate as much as we can to focus on creative and meaningful tasks. We use tools like Airtable, Asana, Slack, Conversion.ai, and Placid to automate a lot of our processes. Using these tools for automation doesn’t only save you time personally, but you can also use these tools for your employees so they can spend their time on valuable work, not tedious work.

As you start automating your processes, look at others around you. What tasks do they do on a daily or weekly basis that can be automated? If you automate tasks for employees, start with the ones that have the highest value, meaning their time is most expensive. By automating their duties, you will see they can get more done in less time. So although they will still be

working the same amount of hours, they will be more productive, and you’ll get more bang for your buck. This is also a great way to increase the volume of work you can handle. If you can only manage 20 clients without using automation and you can automate 60% of the work, you have more time to take on new clients. And do you know what that means? Increased revenue!

Knowing what tools to use is great, but what do all of the tools help you automate? Let’s start with content generation. Larissa has a great video that shows how you can use Airtable and Placid to make content generation easy and automated! Content is a massive part of marketing and brand identity. Also, if you have a marketing team, they are probably some of your highest-paid teams. When you automate your content creation, you not only save time but think of all the extra content they can create for you. It’s a win-win! Your marketing team will also thank you.

One of the most time-consuming parts of any business is the hiring process. You have to review resumes, send emails, interview, do second interviews, and you have to track all of that. Airtable is a great tool to help you systemize your hiring process. You can create different categories and views that will help you keep track of where your candidates are in the hiring process, and you can even set up automatic emails to go out to candidates. So if you are asking someone for references, if you change the status to “Ask for references,” you can set it up to automatically send an email to that person asking for references.  

Sales, proposals, and contracts can take up a lot of valuable time during the day. Creating a systemized sales development process can be a lifesaver. It makes your cold leads easy to track, and with the push of a button, you can do anything from sending an email, subscribing to your newsletter, sending a calendar invite for a meeting, or anything else you want. Cold leads can be a gold mine if your automation is set up correctly.

Once you have a hot lead, sending proposals and contracts is as easy as entering a few pieces of information and pushing a button. No more sitting at your desk finding a proposal template and hoping you get all the information entered correctly. You can send a proposal out in less than 10 minutes with automation. We have our onboarding process and payment collection system automated as well.

From cold lead to a signed deal, we have a systemized automated approach that saves our team’s time, decreases our costs, and increases our revenue. In its simplest form, the key to automation is documentation.

Document how to do everything and keep track of all your Standard Operating Procedures. It will help as you hire new employees or cross-train current employees.

If you want to know how you can have a quick, easy, and automated system, you can contact us today. If you don’t want to worry about setting everything up but still want to have a process that works, we can take care of your lead gen or cold email for you! We have our system and our client’s systems automated!