So I run an automation audit on every business I work with. And there’s usually only about six or seven real problems that I see every time that I talk to someone.
So tool sprawl is getting out of control. A lot of companies I talk to, they’re working with 30, 40, 50 different softwares, and they all don’t talk to each other. They don’t really know what to do.
Write down every tool you use
Get a piece of paper, write down as much as you can, all the tools that you’re using.
For a lot of companies I talk to, they have a CRM. They have some sort of scheduler to schedule meetings. They have their calendar. They have where they store their files. They have their lead intakes, maybe their ad machines. Maybe they have a cold email campaign. Maybe they have databases for lead magnets and scripts. It really adds up quick.
Map how your systems connect
So write down every process and every different system that you can and see how they connect.
Off the top of your head there’s already a few connections that you’re like, yeah, obviously these do not talk to each other. I have to sit there and re-input this data every day. So those will be the obvious ones, but try to make a little web graph of where all your systems are and how they connect.
And the count’s already higher than most people think.
A tool mismatch: two calendars
This is something we see across many of our clients.
So in this example, they had two calendars. They had a calendar on HubSpot and they had their Google calendar. People at the company use different calendars as their main calendar. When a new showing or a new client meeting came in on HubSpot, it would go to the HubSpot calendar, but not the Google calendar.
And obviously, at this point in time, most of us know what software is capable of, so we know without a doubt that they should be able to sync up. But the problem is that they weren’t. And that’s because there was no interlinking between the systems.
So what that left that particular client with was a system where there was a high opportunity for meetings to be missed, double booked, or just, I guess, forgotten entirely by either side.
If they’re not synced in real time, first of all, you have to rely on someone to manually go in and double insert the calendar times. Or you have to rely on everyone in your company checking both calendars to make sure there’s no double bookings and to make sure they don’t miss any events.
What falls through the cracks
And what they found and what’s all too common in this kind of scenario is that they would just miss client meetings or they would double book, have to reschedule.
And this might not seem like a big deal, but if you’re that customer, you’d be pretty frustrated if you only had one time slot that week and they double booked or they canceled on you last minute. So it was hurting their sales.
And at the end of the day, they shouldn’t have their top people putting double events in two calendars.
With all of these problems, you have teams that have lost focus time, they’re missing handoffs, they’re ending the day really drained, and that’s all contributing to the low output for the company.