70 ideas for automating your B2B business

How to make a fortune in a crisis?

The answer is - acting with reason 🤔.

It's a tough game! Many managers, observing a decline in demand and revenue, reflexively decide to cut costs. Unfortunately, it turns out that this strategy does not guarantee success.

This approach tightens cost and personnel control, which reduces decision-making at the middle and low levels of the organization. Operational efficiency decreases. People feel their hands are tied on many issues.

Layoffs introduce fear and a sense of uncertainty. This in turn dampens employees' enthusiasm and belief in the company's success. Long-term, the desire to do more with fewer employees and resources simply can backfire.

So is it better to take off your guard and go on the attack?

Well, neither.

Aggressive spending on development, frequent changes, acquisition of talent, resources and business, in times of high volatility is very risky and can just as effectively wreck your business.

A model service business, prepared for an economic downturn, can tick off all six items on the following list.

It is the combination of defensive and offensive moves, that is, a selective approach to cost-cutting and investment (focusing on increasing operational efficiency), that offers the best chance for business growth after and during a recession.

The companies that emerge victorious from the recession are those that, with increased business efficiency (defensive), expand into new markets, invest in marketing and R&D (offensive). Provided, of course, that they can afford to do so.

Let me tell you something.

If you still feel enthusiasm today, have plans, have the support of your employees, and know how to get the right customers, you can kill two birds with one stone in the years to come.

• Save business from recession by retaining key employees
• Mow down the competition and become an industry leader

Interestingly, most of the challenges of business in times of crisis, can be addressed precisely through automation.

I'm already explaining.

Four advantages of a strong business

According to the Harvard Business Review, four elements are key to success in times of crisis.

Access to capital

As the classic says - cash is blood for business. If it runs out, business is in serious trouble.

Imagine that after a few weeks of working with Automation House, your automation-supported salesperson is doing the work of not one, but several or a dozen salespeople, constantly bringing you new customers.

Automation of tasks and processes will speed up your internal processes. It will issue and send the invoice by itself, check if the customer has paid on time, and if not - send him a relevant reminder.

An automated business is more likely to be supported by partners and investors, so you don't have to worry about capital inflows.

Decentralized decision-making

With high volatility in the market, it's harder to make good decisions. Especially when you do it alone, because sales, marketing, HR and strategy managers don't have the time or access to up-to-date data.

This can be changed. Automatically collect, combine and visualize data in clear dashboards that make it easier to analyze, draw good conclusions and make better decisions. To this end, we are happy to create a single "source of truth" for you and your company, which can be used by any authorized employee of the company.

In these challenging times, you are needed on every front, and organizational agility is more important than ever. There is no time for report writing and protracted discussions. You need to act. That's why it makes sense to hand over decision-making to your best employees and support them with data refreshed in real time, so that the rest of you can focus on implementing your ideas.

Focus on increasing operational efficiency

Focus on increasing the operational capabilities of your best employees. Those who bring the most value and are the most important to your business. By automating boring and repetitive tasks, create a modern work environment for them where they can give even more from themselves.

By implementing automation, you can increase the efficiency of your team by up to dozens of times. What's more, after a crisis with the same team and resources, you can accomplish even more tasks. Without hiring additional people.

Investment in technology

Since I understand the real advantage of Automation House solutions, discussions about digitalization, digital transformation, etc. bring a gentle smile to my face 😊

Everyone talks about the HUGE costs of implementing new technologies.

On the other hand, they know that digitization is a prerequisite for survival.

This dilemma is a thing of the past.

Forget outdated, expensive and difficult to use systems.

Thanks to Automation House's clever approach, stereotypical thinking about technology is completely wrong. We implement lightweight, easy-to-use and low-cost solutions.

Automated companies are nimble and flexible enough to reign in efficiency in the four areas mentioned above. They have the best chance not only of surviving the crisis in good shape, but also of becoming a leader in their industry.

I would venture the thesis that companies that automate heavily today, in addition to the obvious quick wins, will be market champions in 2024 especially in the current demographic and economic realities.

Franciszek Bazyli Georgiew

Leverage and evolutionary theory

You probably know the rule...

• If it's going to be cheap and fast, it's not going to be good.
• If it's going to be cheap and good, it won't be fast.
• If it is to be fast and good, it will not be cheap.

I don't like this theory, and it's not about the fact that I'm a practitioner.

In my opinion, Polish business and the people who create it deserve something SIGNIFICANTLY better.

They need conditions and tools that will bring their potential and productivity to the top, allowing them to command better results and focus on real challenges.

They need leverage for big change.

Following this lead, Hanna Gadowska (my support at Marketing Automation House) proposed the concept of the Automation Triangle, which we then refined together. It's a simplified model of the benefits of automation.

In short, with automation you can do things better, faster and cheaper.

Going forward...

Darwin was right.

Only the smartest will survive the recession.

Therefore, the best path to long-term security for your business is to continue its steady growth. This new reality is forcing business to evolve towards automation.

It seems counter-intuitive and you may think the idea is folly.

If you're thinking to yourself "What do you mean, sales are holding back and I'm supposed to think about growth!", calmdown and keep reading.

To reiterate. With automation, business becomes better, faster, more flexible.

Even if your revenue drops, with automated processes the company is more agile. You gain time. You can take better care of existing customers and optimize sales to scale the business (without additional people on board) after a temporary slowdown.

What's happening at your competitors during this time? - Layoffs of key employees, ill-considered moves, declining quality, decisions based on "whimsy," chaos and perpetual firefighting (maybe even bankruptcy?).

When others are on fire, your company is an oasis of calm.

(Provided you have automation in place. It's not too late.)

All in all, right, but what to automate?

Here are some examples to better illustrate this to you.

1. Prepare contracts and offers for clients. Your salespeople probably waste many hours pasting data from one file to another, preparing quotes, presentations, contracts and other documents. This is time they could, after all, use for ... selling.
2. Documentation management. Entering or uploading a scan of an invoice into a form so that it can be automatically uploaded into the accounting system, and then saving a copy in a folder, while giving it a fixed name would minimize the risk of human error. Automate all processes related to cost and sales invoices.
3. Recruitment process at virtually every stage. From agreeing on and transmitting to the recruiter the need for an employee in one company's system, to verifying resumes for the position, making automated appointments for interviews, sending an aptitude test to candidates or informing them of the company's decision, to the onboarding process. As a result, the recruitment process would take considerably less time, and the new employee could start work virtually immediately.
4. Financial Dashboards. Download and standardize data from multiple sources, then present it in aggregated form in a data visualization and reporting tool. With information about your company's financial health (updated in real time), wouldn't strategic decision-making be dramatically easier?
5. Measuring the level of customer satisfaction. Automatically send a satisfaction survey to the customer, and remind them to complete it if they don't return it. By improving the response rate, you will be able to better understand customers, react if something goes wrong and adjust services to their preferences.

However, the playing field is much larger.

It gets serious when you combine multiple automations into one cohesive, fast system.

This is also what we do at Automation House.

If you still have no idea what tasks and processes to automate, we have prepared a checklist of company processes as inspiration. In the file you will find 70 automation ideasthat you can implement in your business. It's worth saving the link, because we will expand the sheet with more examples.

The second tool you can use is the automation return calculator.

ROI Calculator is an extremely easy-to-use tool. It allows you to see how much time and money you can save by implementing automation.

Think about what automations (or maybe a series of automations) will free your head from the treadmill and give you the best results.

Consider how much time it takes you and your employees to perform repetitive tasks at the present time, and then see after how long automation will save you money.

I want it to resound again at the end.

By automating your business, you increase your company's capabilities by improving the quality of service, saving time and money.

What's more, you can address all of the four best business practices for times of crisis effortlessly through automation.

Just look at these examples. You can:

• Increase margins (profits) of the company, more easily obtain financing, partners and investors (access to capital)
• Gain operational and financial transparency of the business by giving real-time access to indicators, data and information to all employees who need it to choose the right paths (decentralization of decision-making)
• Increase operational efficiency, minimize mistakes, improve communication and project management in the company (pursuit of operational excellence)
• Increase service quality, experience and customer satisfaction through automation, focus on relationship building, creative and strategic activities (investment in technology)

This works whether you are a small business or a representative of a global corporation. Automation is available to everyone.

"Luke, this is great!"
Where to transfer the money?"

‍

To get started, sign up for a free consultation.

You don't have to make special preparations for the interviews. Automation Heroes will take care of everything, offering you the best solutions.

During the conversation, you will talk about possible improvements in your company, and if needed, we will arrange an extended technology consultation on automation and process optimization, led by our experts.

Next, the magic of automation happens.

Therefore, do not wait and sign up now for a free consultation with experts.

Just write to us at hello@automation.house or fill out the form on the Automation House website.