There are so many tasks that no one is ever thrilled to tackle, the ones you have to do over and over for every new customer, new sales sequence, new promotion, new spreadsheet loaded into your CRM…the list goes on. Those repetitive tasks are never-ending, and there’s never enough time to deal with them. Even worse, they all exist in their own apps, forcing employees to log in here, log in there, and switch their attention between different systems.

That’s where workflow automations come in. Rather than leave different employees to handle these tasks manually in a dozen different software ecosystems, automate them in your CRM. Workflow automations are low- or no-code (drag-and-drop) features you design to handle specific repeatable tasks. When triggered by a specific user-defined action, the workflow takes over to complete the task. Workflow automations ensure that a task is completed in the same way every time, helping with compliance, scalability, adaptability, and the minimization of errors.

Marketing Automations

It’s easy to give a handful of customers a personalized experience in the form of a special promotion or experience designed just for them. But when you’re serving dozens, hundreds, or thousands of customers, you simply don’t have the time or personnel to reach out to each one individually.

Marketing automations solve that problem of scaling up the customer experience. One of the more useful workflows involves entering different customers into different email sequences based on different actions. For example, you can set up a workflow to send a welcome email to visitors to your website the first time they enter their email address on the site, a promotional email to visitors who return but haven’t purchased anything, and information about requesting a quote to visitors who frequently visit your catalog or product pages.

Doing all of this manually would take up hours of your day, or would require a whole team of people just monitoring and analyzing traffic and behavioral data. Setting up a workflow might take about an hour, and that workflow can be used over and over for different campaigns and promotions.

Sales Automations

Just as marketing automations can get the right message to the right customer at scale, sales automations can help salespeople keep up with customer inquiries, track leads as they move through the sales pipeline, and receive notifications as soon as leads open an email. Workflows can assign leads to particular salespeople or add them to a particular email sequence according to user-defined criteria. And when a sale is made, that event can trigger a workflow that sends confirmation to the sales department and an invoice to the customer while adding the customer to a post-sales nurture sequence.

Data Automations

To glean good insights from your data and use it to make strategic decisions, you need clean data. Data cleanup involves removing outdated records, fixing typos and other errors, standardizing abbreviations, and making sure everything is in the right place. This can be time-consuming, as it's easy to miss small details in large databases. Automation can help fix these errors and irrelevancies that crop up in databases over time.

Make Time for the Important Work

I know…sometimes, when technology promises to “take the drudgery out of work” or “free up employees to do more creative tasks that require strategic thinking,” it ends up making more of a different kind of work. That’s not what workflows do. What you automate are the things that, if you have too much on your plate, you’d push to tomorrow, or the things that have to be done quickly, automatically, and the same way every time. You automate the delivery, not the deliverable.

The tasks to automate do not comprise a job on their own; they comprise the work that takes up the time of people who are best served doing other things: creating marketing materials, following up with leads that need personal attention, handling customer inquiries, and making strategic decisions. Workflow automations bring the repetitive, repeatable tasks into your CRM so that your employees can focus on what they do best: using their skills and experience to create real value for your business.

As consumer confidence shrinks alongside household budgets, just about every sector of the consumer economy is becoming more competitive. In the past, a small business could sometimes afford to carry a little extra inventory, or buy ads without a marketing strategy, or default to pricing products in line with competitors. Today, you need every advantage you can get. When it comes to financial decision-making, data can provide valuable insights that you’d miss relying on intuition and experience alone.

In the past, data analytics was only for the big businesses that could afford both the software to collect data and the experts who knew how to analyze it. Now, customer relationship software (CRM) puts that power into the hands of small businesses. When you use these tools to help you collect and analyze financial data, you’ll make more confident decisions, gain an advantage over your competitors, and, most importantly, improve the customer experience.

What Is Financial Data?

Financial data covers all of the money coming into and going out of your business: expenses related to operations, marketing, inventory, and payroll, to name a few, as well as revenue. This data comes from various sources: your bank accounts, credit card accounts, invoices from vendors, data from your point-of-sale system, and so on.

A CRM system can connect to these various sources to provide your business with a single source of truth on all financial questions. Rather than bringing together information from a dozen different websites and apps while also digitizing a trail of paper invoices and receipts, CRM integrations keep it all in one place so it can be analyzed holistically.

Make Better Decisions

Data analytics is like a microscope for your business. You know there are inefficiencies somewhere, but you just can’t see them. Data analytics brings all of those small issues into focus so you can see exactly where your business is succeeding and where it can improve.

Analyzing this data across time can help you more accurately determine peaks and troughs in revenue throughout the year so you can better focus marketing and sales efforts while adjusting inventory seasonally. You can do this through common sense—if you run a garden center, you know it’s going to get busy in springtime, and you’d better stock up on your poinsettias for Christmas—but data analytics can spot subtler trends the naked eye might miss.

More Accurate Pricing

Pricing strategy is one of the trickiest aspects of business strategy. There are so many factors to consider: manufacturing and shipping costs, competitor pricing, consumer preferences (including what your customers would be willing to pay for your products), standard markups for your industry and sector, what particular value you bring to the sector that can affect the price of your products…the list goes on.

A data-informed approach to pricing helps to bring all of these factors under control and bring clarity to the ones that are the most important to your business. With a smart CRM, you can bring all of your enterprise resource planning data, social media analytics, website analytics, sales data, and business intelligence data into one place and create sophisticated statistical models that show you what you might have otherwise missed.

More Accurate Forecasting

In the past, we had to rely only on our experience, and maybe what we read in trade publications or the news, to make decisions that affect the future of our business. When we make decisions that way, there’s a whole lot that we don’t see. Using data for financial forecasting fills in our blind spots and mitigates our biases (we all have them). It also helps us better understand new situations, ones we don’t have much experience with. All of the hidden opportunities that data brings to the surface can give your business a vital competitive advantage.

Go Beyond Intuition

That’s the real value of data analytics: filling in your blind spots and giving you something more than intuition. You gain more confidence in your decision-making when you know which perspectives the data supports or does not support. Your years of experience in business and all of your hard-earned expertise then become valuable in interpreting the data and building a strategy around it.

In this article, we covered some of the big cybersecurity risks that businesses should be aware of, focusing mostly on new AI threats. There is, however, one major threat that didn’t fit into that article but still needs to be covered. Ask a cybersecurity expert in private and they’ll tell you the biggest cybersecurity risk to any business is an employee who doesn’t know what they’re doing: they’re clicking on suspicious links in emails, responding to texts from unknown senders, downloading attachments they weren’t expecting to receive, reusing old passwords, failing to setup 2FA, sharing sensitive information with a chatbot, or deploying AI agents without strict limitations on access, all without understanding the consequences.

While naïve or careless users will exasperate your IT department, the problem here isn’t necessarily the people. These are all process problems. Hacking is easier today than it’s ever been, but keeping up with cybersecurity threats is a full-time job. When an IT department is already working at full capacity, staying on top of every new threat becomes nearly impossible. But it’s not all on IT to do it alone. It’s the responsibility of small business owners to educate employees and develop processes that keep their businesses safe.

Develop Cybersecurity Processes

Don’t leave employees to their own devices when it comes to their devices. Set up guidelines specifying on which devices they can access business accounts and how they can access those accounts. That means asking employees to not reuse old passwords and to set up multi-factor authentication on all of their accounts. Logging in safely is much easier if you give them access to a tool like Bitwarden or LastPass.

Next, develop processes for dealing with common email occurrences. What do you do when a client asks for access to a Google Doc? What about when someone sends you an attachment? What is the process for when an employee emails HR asking to have their paycheck sent to a different bank account? These processes should be documented so that every employee can confirm that they are familiar with them.

These processes need to be documented because threats aren’t always obvious. That client asking for access to a document might have been hacked, and if you grant them access, you’ve given hackers access to your file system. That PDF that looks like an invoice or service you never purchased may contain a Trojan that steals password data from your computer or ransomware that takes control of a device, promising to give access back if a ransom is paid. That employee asking to change their bank account could be a scammer trying to steal an employee’s paycheck.

We’ve actually seen that attempt recently, but we have a process in place for dealing with these requests that involves contacting the employee through a different channel. If it had been the employee who requested the change, they would be given instructions on how to do it themselves. But the employee had not requested the change, and the process kept us from getting scammed.

Ask your employees to document these occurrences. Make the rest of the team aware of these kinds of emails and develop a process for reporting them and determining their legitimacy. It feels like a lot of extra work, but giving cybersecurity this kind of time and attention helps employees recognize and avoid threats.

Educate Your Team

New and increasingly sophisticated threats emerge every day, so it’s important to keep employees educated. Designate someone in your organization to be responsible for staying on top of the latest threats and educating employees on how to avoid being the victim of an attack. Hackers will never stop trying to find a way into your systems and accounts. Your best defense is education and constant vigilance. What’s important in documenting these threats and educating your team is not so much knowledge of the specifics of the threats themselves but the reinforcement of a certain posture of vigilance and wariness in digital communication.

Cybersecurity Is a Growing Cost, But Hacks Could Cost You Everything

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest growing business costs. Both the number and sophistication of scams and hacks are increasing, and insurance costs are soaring with them. Ignoring cybersecurity could end up costing much more. Develop processes for handling digital communication that keep your employees vigilant even if they’re not so digitally savvy. While you will have employees fall for a phishing scam every now and then, it is often the case that security breaches are not caused by carelessness but by a lack of a documented process for securing accounts and communicating online safely.

People often do the wrong thing not because they’re stupid or have bad intentions but because the right thing is unintuitive, more work than they have time for, or outside of their current understanding. Well-designed processes remove the friction from doing things the right way. It’s another instance of something we say often at the WeRX brands: solve the processes, and you solve the people.

Cybersecurity used to be something you could invest minimal resources into and still feel relatively secure. Just in the past year, however, it has become a huge monetary risk to many businesses. The World Economic Forum’s Global Cybercrime Outlook found that 77% of organizations reported an increase in cyber fraud and phishing attacks. One of the simplest and most effective ways to protect your data from hackers is to store it in a secure customer relationship management system (CRM).

Businesses gather a lot of personal information from customers and employees alike. Everything from address and phone number to banking and credit card information is stored in your databases. Your business is a lucrative target for hackers. As a business owner, you have a responsibility to keep them out. Beyond monetary losses, data breaches break trust, and once trust is broken, it is hard to regain, especially when there are dozens of other businesses ready to accept those customers. The consequences, however, can be far worse in sectors like healthcare or finance, where patient and customer confidentiality is protected by law.

Main Sources of Data Breaches

Data breaches happen when too many people have access to sensitive data and the systems they are stored in, when the wrong tool is used for the job (i.e. using a shared Google spreadsheet that anyone can request access to), and when systems aren’t kept up-to-date. Even the most well-trained, digitally literate employees can let their guard down. Keeping your most precious data in a CRM can mitigate the damage that both a malicious hacker and a well-meaning yet careless employee can do.

The Role of Your Customer Relationship Management System

The right customer relationship management system (CRM) will greatly reduce these various threats. Most CRM systems will give you end-to-end encryption, access controls, regular updates of cloud-based software, secure backups. These features are especially important in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and law. A CRM like HubSpot, for instance, gives you the auditing and access controls necessary to comply with laws like HIPAA.

Access Controls

With a CRM, you decide who gets access to which data and documents. Most CRMs allow you to assign roles to users and grant different levels of permission to view, edit, and delete data and files. Sensitive data will be accessible only to the employees who need it.

Single Point of Access

Instead of users accessing different spreadsheets, databases, documents, and dashboards with multiple passwords and sharing them as they see fit via email or chat, a CRM keeps everything in one place so you don’t have to worry about keeping half a dozen systems and platforms secure.

Back Up Your Data

Some CRM systems, such as Odoo, host and manage backups of your databases. It also allows you to schedule daily backups and back up data manually. Regularly scheduling and maintaining backups protects your business from losing data due to user error, system failures, or cyberattacks. These backups are especially important if you’re about to do major system upgrades, move sensitive data, or test third-party integrations. If something goes wrong with an upgrade or integration, your backups allow you to roll back to a stable, working state.

Find the CRM That Is Right for You

As a technology-agnostic agency, our main concern is building a tech stack that will help you achieve your goals. No matter your industry, growth goals, sales and marketing strategy, or budget, we can help you choose and implement the right CRM for your business. Our technology experts are ready to get your business using technology more effectively and automate the tasks that are keeping you from focusing on your business.