With the constant demand of time in a fast-paced world, automation took the stage of varied industries. From marketing, management, support, and more, human intervention was less needed, and technology became essential. Hence, businesses delve more into implementing automation, especially when industries shift to virtual set-ups.

Samantha Porter Fox of Samantha Porter Enterprises helps businesses automate their marketing and sales systems. Her whirlwind journey began as a professional organizer in 1997. After ten years, she started to help clients organize their digital files and go paperless. From there, she went to marketing and started a web business design after college. Years later, she joined Chris Davis’ automation program. Now, she joins the podcast to talk about automation. Specifically, mistakes people make when they start getting into the automation process and how they should overcome them.

Beginner’s Mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes is that people immediately jump into the technology tool itself without any strategy. In the end, they feel disgruntled. It would have been a great tool if you had started with a strategy on how you need to use it and knowing your end goal. It is like how easier it is to see problems beforehand when you’re doing it on paper first or mapping it out first. However, since many business owners aren’t tech-savvy, they get easily overwhelmed with the options. It’s like spending money without using it for your advantage and end up becoming a collector of all this software.

Document the Process

Keeping everything in your head on how to do things will keep it trapped in there. It’s easy to blow things up if it becomes complicated. But if you write it down, you can streamline a lot of things. Remember, you can’t scale your business if you’re the only one who knows what’s going on in your business. Document your process! It doesn’t have to be fancy. You can write or record and let someone else transcribe it into a document. It will help you pivot things up when need be.

Getting Started

Start at the place closest to the money. For example, if it is a process that you generate money and you are doing it manually, like a coach manually booking people. It can be a start to document the steps like what do you send out to the people? What information do you need? And find a tool that will automate that. Another place that’s easy to automate is social media. There are a plethora of social media dashboards you can use to start to automate that process. Like Facebook, you can start automating your posting with native Facebook and schedule stuff ahead of time. If you want to automate your content to drive awareness to you quickly, that would be a quick thing you could do to get started.

Things People Automate

People want to save time, but some apps don't allow the usage of third-party tools, for you can be penalized for that. However, you can take advantage of a lot of stuff right from your phone and schedule or create content in advance. Also, most booking software has integrations with email management software like MailChimp or Active Campaign. You can have it set where it sends information once something is booked and send out these sets of emails. These are the types of things people can automate.

Identify your Needs

One major thing is to sit down and think about your goal for your business. What area is the most important for you to automate right now to put you on the path to reaching that goal? Once you do that and have the vision and the goal, that's where the strategy starts. Don't look at every other business out there. Because what works for one business may not necessarily work for yours, or you may not even need that. And don't get overwhelmed with all the technology out there. Because, again, something has been invented every second. So, you're never going to be on top of that. Just think about what your business needs and what you need to get accomplished right now. Ask yourself, how can I save myself time? How can I save my employees? How can we be more efficient in this area? And what are the tools we need to get that done?

No More Spinning Wheels

It uses conditional logic, and you can do that through some of the email platforms. And a lot that could be helpful for that has an FAQ on your website or canned responses. Suppose you're getting the same type of question all the time, having those canned responses set up and using a text expander. So, you don’t have to do things over and over again. That's why it's so important to document your processes and the questions you get, and your answer to them. Then, link it to any assets you might have out there, like videos or podcasts that go into depth and answers you can send to people. That's where automation can help and save you time.

Links/Resources/Tools section:    

• Hootsuite 
• Buffer
• MailChimp
• Active Campaign 
• Calendly

Tips or Quotes:   

• “One of the biggest mistakes is people immediately jump into the technology tool itself without any type of strategy”
• “When you actually write down stuff, you can probably streamline a lot of things.”
• “You can't really scale your business to grow past you if you're the only one who knows what's going on in your business.”
• “I think a lot of business owners learned during this pandemic how important it is to get stuff down.”
• “Start at the place closest to the money.”
• “Take advantage of that a lot of stuff you can do right from your phone”  
• “Sit down and think about your goal for your business.”
• “Start to look at your current business and see what area is the most important for me to automate right now to put me on the path to reaching that goal.”
• “Have the vision and the goal, that's where the strategy starts”
• “What works for one business may not necessarily work for yours, or you may not even need that.”
• “Just think about what your business needs and what you need to get accomplished right now.”
• “It's so important to document document not only your processes, but the questions that you get and your answer to it”