Am I fixing a broken process or automating a working one? This is a great one because it’s so true.
Story time
When I first started Workflow Autopilot, I was doing cold calling. I would call businesses up and say, hey, I noticed you’re using this, this, and this technology. I can help you with that.
I did not have a cold call script, so when I got on the phone I was like, hey company, I noticed you. It was a mess. It was terrible.
And you’ll know this too if your company does cold calling or anything like that, even warm calling. Having a script is really important. If you try to free ball it, you’re just going to fail.
And especially if you try to hand it off to a junior. They’re going to have a really hard time if they don’t have a script.
It’s the same thing with automations. If the process doesn’t even exist, then how are we going to even automate it?
What most companies call follow-up
So let’s look at follow up, right? Let’s say a company does follow up and I’ll talk to them and they’ll say, oh yeah, we do follow up. And I’ll ask them, okay, what’s your system, what’s your strategy?
And they say, well, we do, whenever a customer calls, we’ll write it down on a sticky note or something. And then, throughout the week or the month, we’ll call that customer back and see if they, if they want to do business with us.
And it works. It works to an extent, but the flows that are going to be the best are the ones that are repetitive and boring.
For instance, lead comes in, tracked on the CRM, you have a follow-up cadence, so you know exactly what time and what day you’re going to call back that client, and you’re going to do that 10, 20 times until they say, no, leave me alone, or until you get their business.
If you don’t have a system, then what are you going to automate?
Write it down first
So if we remember that Bill Gates quote, automation applied to an inefficient operation will just magnify the inefficiency.
So what we really would want to do is take the system, write it down step by step.
So write down exactly what you would want the cadence of the follow ups to be step by step. And then once you actually have a system, then it’s a criteria to automate.
If there’s no system, what are you going to automate? Nothing. You’re going to automate yourself into the ground.