As a business owners, you might find yourselves wearing a dozen different hats during any given day. You’ve got sales calls or customer service or employee management or marketing or brand management or product development or inventory control or any number of other things that need to be taken care of.
So, among those things, what is your most important asset? You could certainly make a case for your Brand or your products or your employees or your customers. Depending on your perspective at any given moment, each of those things could be categorized as your “MOST IMPORTANT” asset.
But I want to challenge you to think a bit more abstractly about this. While all of the things listed above are critical to your business, it’s important to consider another thing that business owners value immensely…
TIME
Your time is likely your most valuable asset. You have a finite amount of it. You can’t get more than 24 hours out of any day. But you CAN use your time more efficiently and effectively. And that’s one of the many ways that DBMGrow helps businesses and business owners.
Over the past decade, DBM Grow has worked with companies to automate the process of doing business. This has manifested itself in a number of ways. And, as a business owner who values time, I’d encourage you to reflect on these.
- Automating interactions via social media
- Creating templates and standards for employees, staff or colleagues to follow
- Standardizing processes and procedures for HOW you conduct business
- Automating lead follow-up processes
- Connecting multiple pieces of information and data to better understand your business and it’s bottom line
These are just a few examples. But hopefully they get you to look at what and how you are doing things on a daily basis. More importantly, where can you save time, effort and energy in automating or standardizing a process? What are some things that you MUST do in your business, but hate doing? What are things that need to be done, but they feel like a waste of YOUR time? What are the things that you avoid doing until the last minute? What are the things that frustrate you because of their monotonous, repetitive nature?
Those are great questions to ask yourself as you look at protecting your most valuable asset…your TIME.
We build a lot of process and marketing flowcharts for our clients, and the first thing that almost every client asks is how can we automate every aspect of the flow.
I have to admit… I ❤ automation!
I love connecting multiple systems together to create a beautiful system that comes alive and helps our client to focus on what they do best. Even though automation is amazing and beautiful – it can also crush a project even before it gets off the ground.
Most projects, whether they are process or marketing, require some period of testing. I would recommend that you do NOT try to automate the flow prior to having the theory behind the flow proven. Sure you may have to do some manually data entry, but if you can get to the testing or proof phase quickly… You can save a project from being abandoned due to “paralysis by analysis.”
Follow these steps:
- Create process flow
- Test process flow for viability
- Adjust process flow
- Automate! ⚙
As a consulting company with a focus on marketing, we have used many different customer relationship management or CRM systems.
When starting with a new client we always try and make use of the systems they already have in place. We never (well… almost never) “blow up” 💥💥💥 a client’s entire system.
Why? Aren’t there some CRM systems that are simply better than others? Don’t we need our clients to use “our” system?
For the most part the answer is… NO.
There is only one question we ask our clients when it comes to their CRM…
Are you actually using your CRM?
If the answer is YES 👍, then we will bend their existing CRM to fit what needs to be done.
If the answer is NO 👎, then we will work with our client to figure out… Why not!
A CRM is just a tool, like a hammer or a saw. If you aren’t using it, then you could have the best tool in the work – and it wouldn’t matter.