Why is automation a key driver of business success?

You don’t need us to tell you about the benefits of technology for your business.  There are many and technology investments for your business that stopped being an option many years ago.

What should be clear to CTO’s and business owners the world over is this:  The challenges of realizing the promised benefits of that technology investment.

Remember the euphoria of Big Data?  The promise of Quantum computing? The world changing technology of 3D printing?

The truth is, new technology goes through a well understood ‘Hype Cycle’…

There’s the technology trigger – where early adopters start to investigate what is going on

Then there’s the peak of inflated expectations..

The Trough of Disillusionment..

The Slope of Enlightenment..

and finally, the plateau of productivity..

This doesn’t mean that Bid Data, 3D Printing and others won’t be successful technologies at some point – it’s just that they aren’t well understood enough to give clear business benefits to most businesses – NOW.

You have a business to run – making major investments in technology in it’s early stages is risky.  Unless that specific technology is what your business ‘does’ and ‘is’ it’s best to stay away and let others create mistakes and the associated learning that you can take advantage of later.

Why are we spending our time with this long introduction?  Because we are here to tell you that business process automation is at the plateau of productivity.

It works.  It can and will make appreciable improvements to your business.  The technology is understood and can be implemented by experts who have done this work many times.  (That would be us 😉 ) The projects to implement automation are low risk, repeatable and have a high Return of Invested Capital (RoIC).

If you have business processes (who doesn’t?) that are manual, require extensive training, are difficult to follow, have your employees time doing what we call ‘bust work’ in a regular basis – then guess what?  You are a prime candidate to have these processes automated.  If you are lucky enough to have a Salesforce CRM already then you are in luck – you don’t even need to invest another dollar in technology – you already have it!  All you need is someone who is an expert in Salesforce and Business processes (hi!) your story and you are off to automation nirvana.

Think about it.  In your past technology investments that didn’t measure up to the initial promise..  Did you have an after action report that had reasons why the promised benefits never materialized?

Did you hear the terms

• low employee engagement?
• Poor adoption?
• unclear benefits?
• undefined scope?
• poor quality data?

I am willing to bet you heard a few of those, more than once.  But here’s the thing with business process automation – it’s a project that is built to eliminate those very reasons for failure!

Poor user adoption?  Low employee engagement?  it’s automation, it bypasses this issue by design.  What’s more, you already have your business on an existing automation platform – Salesforce!  Salesforce has really powerful automation tools that are purposefully built to help us enable you to get improved business outcomes.

The venerable Salesforce Process Builder

And the increasingly powerful Salesforce Flow

Who knows your processes better than you? What improves data quality better than automating repeatable tasks?

What use cases do you have for automation?  Do you have renewal opportunities? Perhaps you sell warranties as part of your business?  Would automating the creation of these renewal opportunities complete with reminders to the customer and Sales prior to warranty expiration, be helpful?

Would sending a signed contract to accounting when an opportunity is closed won, keep Revenue Ops & Accounting in lock step?

Would letting your account rep know via email that their number one customer has an escalated customer service case be helpful?

If any of this resonates with you – we need to have a talk.

Schedule a free consultation with us and we will see if we can help.