Many small businesses assume that business process automation is only for medium to enterprise-sized businesses. However, businesses big and small can benefit from automating their processes. For small business owners who would like to multiply their workforce, without growing their team, automation may be the answer they’ve been looking for.

If you’re a small business owner and considering adopting your own automation solution, here are just 5 potential benefits of business process automation for small businesses. And if you’re not a small business, there’s a strong chance you can benefit from some of these things too!

1. Maximize your employees’ time.

Processes play an important role in ensuring that your team can complete tasks at the optimum speed and produce quality results. Even if your team has processes in place, without tracking those processes, it can be difficult to gauge how well your employees are following those set guidelines, the length of time being spent on each task, and what needs improvement.

By using software to share and track your standard business processes, you can create an accountability system for your employees that ensures they’re completing their anticipated tasks. Moreover, by automating the tracking of these processes, you and your team can work together to identify how to better those processes and become more effective.

2. Improve your operations management.

The smaller the team, the more each person has to keep track of. Whether your business sells products or services, that means managing your offerings, your customer contact lists, orders/projects, and more. Likewise, when these management processes aren't sufficiently documented, it can more difficult to train new hires on how to adopt your operations.

Business process automation that streamlines operations can increase productivity. For instance, new hires that follow a standardized onboarding process are 50% more productive than those that don’t (Society for Human Resources). Additionally, standardized operations ensure that your team will offer higher quality service behind-the-scenes and to your customers.

3. Boost your sales & marketing efforts.

From email to social media marketing, it can be difficult to ensure that your team isn’t merely sending one-way messages. In other words, your marketing efforts will be less successful at capturing leads if those leads don’t hear back from someone on your team. In fact, half of your leads call for lead nurturing, as 50% of qualified leads aren’t ready to buy (HubSpot).

When you have a small team, ensuring that your team gets back to those leads, and within a reasonable amount of time, can be challenging. Thanks to automation, however, you can automatically respond to leads with personalized messages. Plus, your team won’t have to spend any extra time to do it.

4. Make better business decisions.

While it may seem easier to have your employees track data themselves in spreadsheets, you’re putting your business at greater risk for human error that results in bad data. Unfortunately, bad data is expensive, costing the U.S. economy an estimated $3.1 trillion per year (IBM) and your business up to 30% in revenue (Ovum Research). In this way, it's best to avoid bad data when possible. 

One of the best ways to reduce human error is by taking humans out of the equation. Instead, you can pass on some of those data entry or sales forecast reports to your business process software. By doing so, you’ll decrease the amount of time spent generating potentially inaccurate reports, while increasing your chance for acquiring more accurate data.

5. Posture your business for growth.

Did you know that small to medium-sized businesses spend as much as $7,645 per new hire (Small Business Trends)? It goes without saying that hiring also requires time to sort through resumes, conduct interviews, and more. That being said, if you have your eye on scaling your small business, business process automation software may be the better option.

Take your sales representative, for example. By automating half of the emails he sends to follow-up with customers to simplifying his ability to manage his contacts, he may save 12 hours a week. With this, you maximize your existing sales representative’s time, while reducing the need to expand sales with a new hire.

Building Business Process Automation Software?

At ClikFocus, we offer custom software development services where the sky’s the limit. Whether you’re looking to build your very own CRM to an ecommerce system that embraces business process automation, we can help. Drop us a line, so we can start discussing your project today!