Small businesses face more challenges than ever in today’s economic conditions. Despite increasing optimism, inflation is still the biggest worry for 21% of small businesses. That’s fueled further difficulties: input costs continue to increase as supply chain disruptions cause costly delays, leading many companies to raise prices across the board. That’s exacerbated by ongoing labor shortages, which are forcing other businesses to raise wages. All these factors combine to significantly impact revenue generation, and as a result many smaller organizations face financial uncertainty in the near future.
Though the traditional strategy for dealing with inflation would be to cut overhead costs, small businesses now have more options in today’s post-digital transformation era. Automation was a cornerstone of this transformation for good reason. It boasts the ability to streamline repetitive tasks, maximizing resource allocation and helping companies get more done with less. Major players like Accenture and Genpact—which lead a dedicated business process automation software market worth roughly $14 billion—offer functionalities in everything from marketing and sales to finance.
This versatility is what drives the demand for automated software as a cost-effective way to improve various processes and ultimately improve profitability. As a result, it can help small businesses stay afloat amid continuing inflation.
Key areas where automation can help
Marketing
Marketing is crucial for establishing brand recognition, customer loyalty, and a steady source of income—all crucial for keeping small businesses afloat. That’s why it can contribute as much as 15% of their annual revenue, or an average of $1.5 million. Using automated software here can improve the ROI marketing campaigns have to offer while reducing how much it costs small businesses to conduct them in the first place. Whether small businesses opt to do email marketing, social media marketing, or beyond, these tools can automate minor yet time-consuming tasks like multi-channel content publishing to expand a brand’s reach or target a more niche demographic. The likes of Outbound’s marketing platform even leverage automation to provide more precise performance analytics, giving small business marketing teams more room to be creative, customize campaigns, and tweak them as they go so they make an even bigger impact on potential and returning customers.
Sales
As the small business’ main source of revenue, sales are essential for keeping operations sustainable in the long term. That’s especially true for newer companies, which are at a higher risk of going under in their first few years. In these cases, it’s important to build a solid foundation by generating leads that are more likely to convert into sales. Automated software can make things easier: the same ability that allows it to provide actionable marketing insights helps it more accurately pinpoint ideal customers to tap. It can then aid in nurturing those leads by automatically sending personal follow-ups based on a customer’s behavior and what stage of the sales funnel they’re in. To keep track of everything, all-in-one sales tools like Salesforce use dashboards to offer a full overview of every customer’s activity and their past communications with a user’s business. Such features can help shorten the sales cycle, reduce human error in the process, and ultimately boost lead conversion for improved revenue.
Revenue management
To stay afloat despite rising costs, small businesses also need to take account of the income they’ve earned, predict how much they’ll make in the next few months, and allocate their funds accordingly. Automated software can help by keeping track of all income regardless of complexity, such as those posed by subscription, usage-based, and milestone billing. SOFTRAX’s revenue management software has features that help small businesses automate revenue recognition in compliance with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 accounting standards and then leverage real-time revenue metrics to gauge their financial health. The insights provided by these features will allow for more accurate forecasting and decision-making, so small businesses can spend less time recording numbers. Instead, they can allocate more resources toward strategizing how to get through periods of financial uncertainty, such as by deciding how to adapt to changing market conditions or finding ways to further enhance business profitability.
Challenges to consider when leveraging automated software
Though exceptionally useful for ensuring long-term financial health, automated software isn’t a “magic” solution that small businesses can take advantage of to instantly get rid of inflation woes. Instead, they’re best used as part of a more holistic strategy that also accounts for the true heart of any business: its employees. As such, the challenges of leveraging automated software revolve around the people who’ll actually be integrating them into their daily workflows.
One thing to consider is the ease of use a tool provides. As businesses continue to digitalize their operations, they take on increasingly more kinds of software to accomplish various processes. That overwhelms employees, creating the belief that automated software is more of a hindrance than a help. That’s especially apparent in sales, where sellers are 43% less likely to reach quota when overwhelmed. Experts thus find that organizations that successfully leverage automation to stay afloat only deploy tech that sellers can leave to operate independently on the side—not the kind that they need to learn how to use and constantly refer to while doing their tasks. In other words, automated software is most effective when treated more like a teammate than a tool.
That points to what’s arguably a more crucial point: regardless of how useful automated software is for a particular business, it won’t be effective if employees don’t have the skillsets needed to maximize the time it frees up for them. The biggest advantage of automation is that it helps employees shift their focus from manual, repetitive tasks to higher-value ones. Comprehensive onboarding and continuous upskilling are vital for ensuring employees can accomplish those responsibilities by producing high-quality output, which can work to the advantage of a small business’ bottom line.
As costs continue to rise, small businesses worried about inflation can strategically leverage automated software to successfully navigate current market conditions. For more insightful pieces like this, keep reading here on Digital Weekday.
