Not Only Sales & Marketing Automation!
How ActiveCampaign Can Help Your Entire Business To Grow
If you’re an entrepreneur or a manager using ActiveCampaign, you have probably noticed that Sales & Marketing are just two of the many processes that you can automate using this tool.
We can say that those processes are part of a wider topic named “Business Automation”.
In this article, I’ll give you an overview of what processes you can automate and how it can benefit your business. I got the idea of this content because lately, I’ve been helping a couple of music schools with 800+ students. I helped these schools to map out all their internal processes and to understand how to automate them using a tech stack.
I’d like to share this with you because I believe that it can benefit your business too.
Let’s start with a premise: why is Business Automation so important for a SME like yours?
I’ll give you three reasons:
- Automation helps you to save time, so you can focus on more valuable work. Your team, in fact, probably spends a lot of hours per day on repetitive tasks. If you manage to automate the process, your team has more time to focus on things like sales calls, customer support and – in general – to create value for your customers.
- Automation eliminates human error. If you have a certain process that is always the same, automating it helps you to avoid mistakes and to improve efficiency. For bigger companies and projects, this can be done with a software developer but for SMEs the best solution is probably hiring a business automation consultant that helps you to automate your processes without strong coding skills.
- Automation enables data-driven decision making. Once you clarify how to structure your processes and you implement them using a tech stack, you’ll be able to measure the results and make decisions based on data. As Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured, gets improved“.
Disclaimer:
Many times people hear “Automation” and think that with a click of a button all the problems are gone and that once you set it up you can forget it.
Of course, it’s not like that and if you want to learn more about the steps you need to follow in order to automate your business processes, I suggest you watch my video “Why you need a business automation consultant” which explains in depth this topic.
So, as I previously mentioned, the goal is to give you an overview of what you can do with Business Automation.
Some of the processes that you can automate are the following:
- Marketing;
- Sales;
- Onboarding of new customers;
- Onboarding of new team members;
- Customer support/management of requests;
- Every internal process that involves data entry in the CRM.
and many others depending on the industry and the specific business!
For small numbers you don’t need to automate, but if you are a SME you probably have dozens of spreadsheets, your team goes crazy trying to find the most updated info and it’s impossible to have an overview of the current situation.
This leads to a loss of efficiency and brings a lot of stress to you and your team.
1) Marketing Automation
In this area, I include everything related to making your website a lead generation machine and not just a brochure and the management of the leads that you generate through advertising.
The activities can be summarized in the following list:
-Delivery of lead magnets;
-Appointment scheduling system;
-Lead nurturing;
-Email marketing;
-Lead scoring to qualify and prioritize leads.
In another article, I will explain better this area.
2) Sales Automation
Once you generate, nurture and qualify leads, you need to assign sales opportunities to your team. From this point, your reps need to start a follow-up process that converts leads into customers.
If you want to learn more on how you can implement Sales & Marketing automation the best way, read my guide “9+1 steps to implement sales & marketing automation and coordinate better your team”
This is the situation that Sales Automation helps you to achieve:
-Reps don’t have anymore many different spreadsheets;
-Reps have now a clear process to follow and you have an overview of the current situation;
-Reps don’t waste a lot of time on deciding what leads should be called and when;
-Reps have a way to prioritize leads.
A tool that you can integrate into this process is Proposify. It allows you to manage the entire proposal process more efficiently, from design to sign-off.
When something happens in Proposify, you can send the info to ActiveCampaign and trigger automations that can do a lot of different things.
3) Onboarding of new customers
As soon as a lead becomes a customer, you probably have some procedures to follow for the onboarding.
These procedures can be internal, meaning the internal management of the new customer, or external, meaning the materials and instructions you need to share in order for your customer to start using properly your product/service,
The automation of this process helps you to:
-Improve the efficiency of your operations;
-Have an overall view of the situation with new customers;
-Avoid having hundreds of spreadsheets and going crazy trying to find the most updated info;
-Avoid loss of info.
A tool that you can integrate into this process is ClickSend. Integrated with ActiveCampaign, it manages the sending of text messages such as confirmations, reminders, notifications etc…
Above all, it’s a great tool to automate the mailing of postcards and letters!
If your onboarding process includes it, you can set up an automation in ActiveCampaign that – when certain conditions are met – will automatically trigger the mailing of a document to your customer.
It can be a really powerful strategy!
4) Onboarding of new team members
It works with the same logic as the onboarding of new customers.
If you constantly have new members joining your team, you can automate the internal management process and the communications with the team member.
This will help you to save time and to monitor the situation.
5) Customer support/management of requests
Connecting ActiveCampaign to tools such as Freshdesk, helps you to manage the support requests, assign them to your team, manage the follow up etc…
By customer support, I mean all the processes that come with the management of the current customers and not only the technical support.
For example, music schools need to manage those that want to change/pause/withdraw their enrollment in the courses and having a process that is automated allows the schools to manage efficiently all the requests.
6) Every internal process that involves data entry in the CRM
Many other processes can be automated based on the industry and the specific type of business!
The logic is almost always the same:
-There is an automation in the back-end that creates deals and to-do lists when something happens in ActiveCampaign;
-Those deals are assigned to your team;
-There is a pipeline to manage the process and to have a clear overview of the situation;
-There are external tools to manage pieces of that process;
–Custom fields, tags and segments are updated to keep the database cleaned and to send customized emails to leads and customers;
–Reporting. I’ll deepen this topic in another article, in this one I’m going to give you a brief overview. In ActiveCampaign, you can build reports using the feature “standard reports” available for all plans or the feature “custom reports” available only for the enterprise plan. Alternatively, you can use Zapier to send data to a Google Spreadsheets. The best way to build your reports depends on how you have implemented the processes. If the main parts of the process are built inside ActiveCampaign, probably the standard reports feature is what you need, in the worst case you just need to export data and process them using Excel. However, if you have integrated different tools and you need more complex reports, the best option is to use Zapier and Google Spreadsheets.
Outsourcing the implementation of these processes could be a good idea and in this article you find 3 ways it can benefit your business.
In the last years, I helped several SMEs to make the most out of Business Automation through digital project management services.
If you want to learn more download the Business Automation guide for busy managers and entrepreneurs:
Or fill out the application form to work with me:
