I often tell the story of the mild anxiety I used to feel as a new consultant when I read a prospective client’s email. It wasn’t because I wasn’t happy to get the email. It was because I was knee-deep in client delivery mode. I was already working on a client deliverable, had a proposal to create and send, and a few meetings to schedule.
I wanted to respond immediately but felt obligated to maintain the momentum of the task at hand. Far too often, I would respond several days after they made the initial contact and, who knows, maybe if I'd responded sooner, I could have had more clients.
This scenario is what life was like for me as a new business owner who hadn’t yet learned the joy of automating certain business processes to save time, eliminate anxiety, and accelerate sales.
What is automation?
According to the International Society of Automation, automation is the creation and application of technology to monitor and control the delivery of products and services. IBM describes automation as the use of technology to perform tasks where human input is minimized.
In a consulting business, automation can be used for functions such as marketing, customer relationship management, scheduling, financial management, payroll, project management, transcription, and more.
How automation is used in my consulting business
At Grants Works, automation is used for lead generation, lead qualification, lead nurturing, scheduling, onboarding clients and team members, email marketing, social media management, and research. There are other processes I plan to automate as the company grows.
How automation saves time
It’s not hard to imagine how automating repetitive tasks can save time. Creating automations means you can keep business processes flowing while you’re in a meeting with a client, devising plans with your team, or completing on a client deliverable.
How automation increases revenue and ROI
Quite simply, automation increases revenue by shortening the sales cycle. Deskera defines the sales cycle as a series of steps that a company takes to turn a prospect into a customer. So, automation either drastically reduces how long each step takes or may eliminate a step or two in the cycle.
Automation can also increase your return on investment (ROI) because the application can complete many tasks over a shorter period than it would take a person or several people to complete those same tasks. So, instead of paying a person to send a marketing email each time a lead is engaged, the application does it…automatically.
Automation also allows you to upsell or cross-sell products which means--more revenue. It allows you to segment and customize marketing messages and even price points based on what you know about the prospective client.
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Patrice A Davis is the founder of Grants Works Consulting, a government grant compliance consulting firm and the founder of Ready Set Go Consult, a consulting business accelerator for freelance or independent consultants who want to build, grow, and scale their consulting businesses. We teach strategies on how to operationalize their businesses, use their intellectual property, build thought leadership, and more. To learn about the accelerator, watch our free training on the Ready Set Go Consult website.
