Insights on automation for SMEs
Our experience, written up as 5-minute articles.
Which repeating work is worth automating, and which is not
The numbers to agree before anything is built
Why enquiry and quote follow-up is automated first
Weekly campaign reports without the manual work
All insights
Strategy
StrategyWhich repeating work is worth automating, and which is notMost of what a marketing team repeats every week can now be automated, so the useful question has stopped being what the tools can do. We take a short list of conditions into every strategy session, and a good share of the work teams nominate fails at least one of them.5 min readStrategyAn automation built beside the CRM sees less than one built inside itThe same follow-up sequence can be built as a workflow inside the CRM or as a chain of steps in a separate connector, and the choice is made by whichever tool the person setting it up knew better. We treat it as a decision, because it settles what the automation can see and how soon a broken field gets noticed.8 min readStrategyThe order a client wants automation built in is rarely the right orderThe process a client asks us to automate first is the one they can see, and in most sessions that is the report. A report only reads records that other processes write, so we set the build order from what each process depends on, and the report the client asked for tends to go live last.7 min readMeasurement
MeasurementThe numbers to agree before anything is builtBefore a build starts we write down five numbers and the client confirms every one of them. A baseline the client has not agreed is not a baseline, it is our version of events, and at day thirty it gets argued with.5 min readMeasurementThe first week of numbers after an automation goes live usually looks worse, not betterIn the week after an automation goes live, the numbers a team watches usually move the wrong way. We say so before the build starts, because a process that was never counted is being counted for the first time, and the first honest reading of it is rarely the one anybody hoped for.7 min readMeasurementAttribution needs a volume of leads most small teams do not have yetMulti-touch attribution splits the credit for a customer over every step that led to them, and the split only means something when there are enough customers to divide. Most of the teams we work with are not there yet, so we take two plainer numbers and set up the record that a model will need later.7 min readMeasurementComparing this month to last month hides more than it shows in a seasonal businessThis month against last month is the comparison most dashboards offer first, and in a business with a busy season it reads a predictable dip as a decline. We compare against the same month a year earlier, or against a rolling twelve months, and the report says which one it used and why.8 min readAutomation
AutomationWhy enquiry and quote follow-up is automated firstMarketing teams are measured on the enquiries they bring in and lose a share of them after they arrive. Follow-up is usually the first process we automate, because it is where intention and practice sit furthest apart and because the result can be read in the same month.5 min readAutomationWhy we document every automation we hand overAn automation the client's own team cannot change without calling us is still ours, whatever the invoice says. The handover note is written as part of the build for that reason, and it names the trigger and then every step in the tools the automation runs in, before we count the work as finished.7 min readAutomationA renewal date already sits in most systems, unusedThe first condition for automating anything is a trigger somebody can name, and for retention work most teams believe they have none. A renewal date already sits in the CRM for nearly every customer, entered once at the point of sale and never read again, and a sequence built on it runs to stricter rules than enquiry follow-up does.8 min readAutomationThe handoff to sales breaks more often than the automation that feeds itWhen a qualified lead goes quiet, the follow-up sequence that produced it usually takes the blame, and in most of the traces we have run it did its job. The lead went quiet in the gap between marketing marking it qualified and a salesperson knowing it existed, and that gap is the first place we look now.7 min readAutomationA review request only works if it arrives the same day the job finishesA review gets written from what the customer still remembers of the job, and that memory is at its clearest on the afternoon the work finished. We send the request from the completion event itself, the same day, and most of the discipline in the build is about what that event has to mean before it can be trusted.9 min readAutomationMost automations fail at the exception, not the ruleThe path an automation was built around almost always works on the day it goes live. What breaks it later is the order cancelled an hour after the confirmation went out, or the contact who replies to the second message and then the first, and we list those cases before launch because finding them live costs more than the build did.7 min readAutomationWhy the posting is the part of a content calendar we automateMost content calendars are a plan kept in a spreadsheet, and whether a post goes out at the time in the cell depends on somebody being free at that minute. We treat the posting itself as the part to automate, and we keep the writing and the judgment on tone with a person.7 min readMarketing operations
Marketing operationsWeekly campaign reports without the manual workThe weekly campaign report in most marketing teams we sit with is assembled by hand, and it costs a person most of a Monday morning. We build one scheduled report that takes three figures straight from the ad platforms and the CRM, because a plain report nobody assembles is worth more than a prettier one somebody has to build.7 min readMarketing operationsA campaign brief that already carries last month's numbers gets written fasterMost campaign briefs start from a blank document, and the figures that should shape them sit in tools nobody opens until the plan is already written. We set the brief template up to fill its first page with last month's numbers before the writing starts, and the plan that follows reads differently.6 min readData and CRM
Data and CRMThe next meetings are in contacts untouched for twelve monthsWhen a team asks for more meetings, the conversation turns to a new channel, and the CRM already holds a list of people who enquired or took a quote a year ago and have heard nothing since. We write to that list first, because it costs almost nothing to reach and the first bookings arrive inside the month.6 min readData and CRMA duplicate contact costs more than a missed oneAn enquiry nobody answers is lost once, and the loss stops there. A duplicate record keeps costing after that point, because every sequence built on the CRM treats one person as two, so we agree the merge rules with the client and run them before anything goes live.6 min readData and CRMA segment is only as good as the field it is built onWhen a sequence sends to the wrong people, or to almost nobody, the workflow is the first thing anyone opens, and the fault is usually one step earlier, in a CRM field the segment depends on that is blank for a large share of the database. We look at the fields before we look at the logic.8 min readData and CRMAn unsubscribe that still receives a message is a bigger problem than a slow replyA slow reply costs the enquiry it was slow to, and the contact goes elsewhere without giving the company much further thought. A message that arrives after somebody has unsubscribed tells them the company did not listen, and it is the one failure in an automation build that we treat as a stop on everything else until it is fixed.9 min readData and CRMPublic records show a need before anyone advertises itA permit, a licence or a new business registration is a public note that something is about to change inside a company, and it can be on file well before that company asks anyone for a price. We build automations that read these records for our clients, and most of the work lies in being exact about what a record says and what it leaves out.7 min readData and CRMA lead found in public is lost if it never reaches the CRMWatching public requests and public records produces leads, and the work that decides whether any of them becomes a conversation starts after the alert arrives. We log each lead in the CRM with the post or record that surfaced it, send a first email from a named person where there is an address to send it to, and stop the follow-up as soon as the lead replies.7 min readJudgment
JudgmentThe line between a rule and a judgment call moves as a process repeatsIn the strategy session every step gets sorted into work a rule can describe and work that needs a person, and the sort is made on the cases the team can remember that afternoon. After a month of the automation running the exceptions look different, so we go back and sort again on a date agreed before the build.7 min readJudgmentTwo people handling the same reply will not automate it the same wayWhen the person who does a task says it depends, the dependency is either a rule nobody has written down or a judgment that should stay with a person, and from across a table the two look identical. We settle which it is by giving ten real cases to two people separately and reading their replies side by side.8 min readTalk through one of these processes
If a marketing team still does any of these by hand, we go through it on a first call and say how much of it could run on its own.
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