by Nigel Hilton
Tim Ferris in his New York Times Bestselling Book, The Four Hour Workweek describes the importance of automating our businesses; with a view to having much more time freedom, as whilst money is an essential resource there is no more precious resource than time. After all, you can create more money but you cannot create more time.
In this vein, Tim Ferris stresses the importance of using automated systems and leveraging tools to take some of the strain off of us, as individual entrepreneurs, in order live our lives more fully and squeeze the most from our business at the same time.
The digitally connected world we live in, can be incredibly harmful to living a balanced and successful life; particularly in terms of our emotional well being and social lives.
One of the best ways to ensure a more balanced life, is to automate your business processes by leveraging tools and strategies that free up your time as a business owner, meaning you are living less in reaction and more in response, at a strategic level, rather than reacting to notifications to the point that you feel chained to your phone or computer.
Automation isn’t only for the digital world, yet as more and more retailers are finding it necessary to migrate to an online model - the majority of this content is about selling products or services online.
Of course, there are some services which require face time, for instance, if you were to be a beauty therapist, then you cannot really automate the process of giving a massage or facial to a client - yet, the majority of product focused businesses and particularly those in the realm of education and content marketing (particularly popular in the Information Age) can benefit massively from automating their business.
Automation will not only free up physical time, but head space, as it will give you peace of mind, and a sense of certainty as you know that you have processes and systems in place to take care of things.
In this sense, you can live a much more relaxed life where you have more time to enjoy your life and more freedom to focus on what matters most. It also offers more intellectual freedom to consider your business development at a strategic level, for one of the most common issues with small business owners is that they work “in” the business rather than “on” the business.
In this article, we’re going to look at two predominant aspects - automating your sales cycle and product fulfillment. Of course, there are many technical aspects to think about when it comes to automating both your sales cycle and product fulfillment because systems integration can be challenging, which is why it’s worth getting in touch with Veon Consulting for a better understanding of how customer relationship management systems and e-commerce platforms link up.
AUTOMATE YOUR SALES CYCLE
A sales cycle is the activities and steps between a customer finding out about your existence to the point they buy something you offer, and continues, with regard to generating repeat sales. One of the most onerous tasks within a sales cycle is that of driving people toward your product or service, and this is where automation can really help.
Today, with hyper personalized marketing campaigns, such as Facebook, that offers you the chance to pinpoint who your advert reaches based on a variety of metrics from geographical location to more contextual factors such as the type of food they like or whether they’ve just gone through a break-up.
The most important feature of a good sales cycle is to ensure you are constantly generating leads. A “lead magnet” is something you can use to attract customers, for instance, it could be a special offer or a relevant question that draws prospects in to the point they are happy to provide their email address in exchange for some type of value (e.g. a free video series on how to solve a particular problem).
The great thing with this, is that the adverts themselves can be automated, and then the follow-up sequence can be automated with something like ClickFunnels to implement the next steps in the process. For instance, let’s say you are selling a course about coping with a break-up.
You can automatically target people on Facebook that have recently changed their status from being in a relationship, to single, and therefore you know your lead magnet (i.e. advert) is going to be shown to relevant people. From here, you create something of value, let’s say a free video series revealing five steps to help get over heartbreak in less than a week.
The advert automatically takes the user to a landing page, where they are encouraged to submit their email address to access the free video training - yet, in many cases today, they don’t even need to do that… as Facebook will provide their contact information with the simple tick of a box.
Within this video series, you provide a lot of value and build rapport to the extent that when you make them an offer, it feels like an offer from someone they trust and respect - that has their best interest at heart, rather than someone just trying to sell them something (which improves conversions dramatically).
Then, all they need to do is click on a link to buy the product, which can be automatically processed by PayPal or Stripe - which will trigger an email being set that provides access to the course they have just purchased.
Furthermore, an email system such as MailChimp will then take care of follow up emails to improve customer engagement, retention and optimize cross-selling opportunities.
Today, thanks to some very simple and cost effective web technologies you can create an entirely automated business for very little upfront cost… meaning an automated business is within your reach, particularly if you sell products online.
AUTOMATE YOUR FULFILLMENT
The process of posting and packaging items can be time consuming, particularly if you are selling lots of small items on sites like Amazon or eBay.
The recent distribution trend known as drop shipping is becoming an increasingly popular way to fulfill orders, where you pay for a third party to take care of physical product fulfillment - meaning you can focus on your marketing efforts without needing to deal with the more monotonous and repetitive tasks of sending out items.
Now, if you have automated your sales cycle and marketing campaigns, as suggested above… and you’ve also automated your fulfillment via drop shipping - your whole business can now run on autopilot.
Drop shipping is a method of fulfillment where a manufacturer or distributor ships a product to your customer on your behalf. Amazon, for instance, are one of the leading providers of this model.
Let’s say, for a moment that you write a physical book. In the “old world” you would have had to pay a lot of up-front costs to self-publish (unless you were to be published by a major publisher) and then store your books, either in a warehouse or a room in your house, then post each item that is sold.... meaning your life would be consumed with tedious packaging and queues at the post office.
Today, you can use Amazon’s print on-demand service, which means there are no upfront printing or storage costs - they simply print your book when a customer purchases a book and sends it out to them on your behalf. The concept of “fulfilled by Amazon” is similar, in that Amazon leverage their gigantic warehouses - offering shelf space to ordinary people that have shops on Amazon, and for a commission, store, pick, pack, and ship the items on your behalf.
Of course, Amazon are not the only drop shipping company, indeed there are many drop shipping companies all over the world.