Successful entrepreneurs are known to do more with less. Doing more includes more resources, leads, exponential growth, virality, etc. – everything happens at rocket speed. And doing with less involves reducing overheads and saving time. There are several tasks that startups invest their time and effort in. But the returns hardly match up to the investment. And if it’s a startup striving for scale, it’s doomed even before signing the first twenty clients.
So what is the secret sauce that does the magic? It’s simply a dash of automation. Automation helps entrepreneurs and startup teams streamline their processes and put them on a fast track. Once a process is set, it does not need additional resources but a well-planned start and minimal attention after that.
There are quite a few software and services that can come in handy to help startups automate some of the mundane tasks or error-prone activities. Have a look at the following list and the benefits they offer, and find your magic sauce to step up to the next level of your startup.
1. Hubspot
It’s practically impossible to write personalised emails to every prospect. Also, the sales cycle for many startups happens to be quite long. To identify and communicate with every new lead, the process needs to be automated at each marketing campaign stage.
Hubspot helps automate some of the key marketing processes. It is a lead capturing tool that allows creating landing pages, managing email campaigns and blogs, and communicating with them at every sales cycle stage.
2. Slack
Though emails are a good way of keeping digital communication, they usually go missing when needed the most. Quick sense-making and faster responses don’t seem to happen with emails.
Slack is an automation tool that helps timely and organised communication within and across teams. Sharing flies and also communicating face-to-face is possible through this tool. Moreover, it is connected with more than a thousand apps to add value to its users. To a large extent, it makes the good old email system redundant.
3. Zapier
Having different apps work together would resemble tech-heavy and futuristic expectations. For example, getting a reminder on your calendar app every time you miss to follow-up with a prospect’s email after three days could be very valuable automation for a startup salesman. But, building a workflow around it was the job of a software engineer. However, you don’t have to be a techie to build real problem-solving automation for your startup anymore.
Zapier helps create zero-code workflows with different apps. One can get various apps to talk to each other to execute a task based on if-then conditions. Zapier also offers ready-made recipes, that is, ready automation that can be chosen and implemented in a few clicks.
4. Buffer
All businesses and especially startups, are heavily dependent on social media to engage and educate their target audience. Sales, too, happens on social media. For this, the entrepreneurs need to leverage the full potential of their social media accounts by persistently posting and engaging the audience.
Buffer is an automation tool that allows its users to schedule social media campaigns. It needs a one-time connection with the user’s social media accounts, and then it can keep posting as and when scheduled. It provides extensions, too, for analysing the performance of the campaigns, creating content and images to be posted. It mainly helps handle Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
5. Grammarly
Grammarly acts as a writing assistant and checks for errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary in real-time. It proofreads every sentence you type and suggests better ways of writing it. With Grammarly, you do not have to worry about brevity or oversights while replying to emails.
Above all, automation has proven that the size of the business does not matter anymore. It allows startups even to challenge the biggies of their market and beat them with innovative products or services. Automation also helps startups quickly pivot their offering according to the evolving demands of their prospective customers. Therefore, we highly recommend startups to use automation tools to their advantage.
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