Automate sales content in United Kingdom

How to create outlook signature

welcome to the northern Affinity video podcast during this session we will be having an unedited discussion with an expert and while they're planning to do is during our discussion get them to teach me something teach me about something that's of interest but also they are an expert I'm Michael Edwards and I'm the founder of the northern activities and I will tap into our wonderful Community to bring you along on my drive for self-improvement and my desire to learn so please connect with me on on various social media platforms whether it's LinkedIn or Instagram our Twitter and I'd love to hear from you what what subjects you'd like to learn more about what subjects are you think it'd be good for me to learn about so please you know gain content and let me know all the details will be in the show notes and you can send me an email or comments by the various platforms I really hope you enjoy the ship so I'm delighted to say that uh on this episode of the video podcast I'm joined by Jamie and for those who are watching us on the video we're going to talk all about automation today so um welcome to the video podcast unit oh yeah thanks for having me I'm excited to be here oh let's go I'm looking forward to this conversation um something I want to do more with anyway that's for certain so um before we kind of talk about Automation in a bit more detail a little bit more about you your business and kind of what you do yeah so I'm obviously Jamie my comment is called everon uh we're based in Leeds and ultimately we are a managed service I.T provider so that means we can do things like your I.T support cyber security uh business automation which also we're going to talk a bit about today um we have been going since 2008 um and we work kind of predominantly within regulated Industries so legal sector financial sector that kind of thing um but yeah always happy to chat to people and things like automation are now kind of the more interesting part of my day-to-day so rather than talk about boring security or I.T support we can now talk about some furniture a bit more glamorous I guess which is good is this the like the sexy side of ideas is it then automation I'd say so because it's um it's traditional I.T I guess is more like a bit of mature you need it it's you know like it's a it's not a one it's a need whereas automation gives you time back gives you some Freedom it's kind of a desirable product or service well yeah yeah I think it I think it is so I think a good place to start is what is automation so yeah ultimately I guess um it simply is form automation is the service web I we take a human process or workflow and we reduce the human input required to do it so it might not be that you achieve uh removing that human element completely they might be able to remove it and now as much as we can or anywhere where there's a repetitive tedious task um so yeah we'd automate with technology essentially Yeah so basically automation is there to help us in doing what we do a bit quicker do it better do it faster whatever it might be so we can focus on the things that we need to focus on whatever that may be yeah so I mean it's not uh although it might feel like it sometimes like we're heading towards a kind of Terminator style apocalypse where you know people are made redundant we're not there at the minute it's more a case of like I said giving you time back so especially as a smaller business people wear many hats and it can be a massive struggle to kind of get through everything they want to be doing with their time as well as doing all these tedious tasks that should need to be done so the more we can give away to technology the more use the more value you can get out your actual time and your nine to five or whatever whatever kind of work partner you have no absolutely and I I do bits of Automation in my business I don't know how much you know it helps so um okay I guess jumping straight into it you know what what can we do then what can we automate because um then maybe people listen to this who think it's one of those things that's maybe Out Of Reach of them you know there might be a small business so I know maybe it might be yes it's okay talking about the big businesses doing it but for me I I can do it I know you'll um you'll not agree with that so it'd be interesting to know what can we do yes but I mean ultimately um the rule of all my life the kind of say is anything that's the repetitive task can be all made no matter how big up more like anything that has a repetitive workflow process can't be automated um obviously there's a few examples I've got so for example you could start really small and basic or you could automate a whole process and Department potentially depending on what you do um but some real quick and simple ones uh that you can look at are things like Social Media stuff you already might have an automation tool in fact per scheduling social media posts and stuff like that but there are art records now that understand sentiment and things like that so rather than you scouring the internet on social media for any negative plus about your business or your service you could set up an automation that would scan for your keywords or your business name whatever it might be a negative sentiment that could then drop you an email when that tweet or Facebook posts LinkedIn plus whatever else was mentioned so you no longer wasting kind of dead time looking for these things but it's proactively pushed towards you and you could then in just the social media example devote your time to better content to put out on social media rather than constantly checking stuff that was coming in and out will be an example kind of a real quick and easy one you could do um there's quite a few other ones I know we talked recently in a meeting we had a chat we had about keeping track of time and how it can be difficult nowadays with so much noise coming into your email and like that and um a person like the idea that you've gone with where you kind of have a the upset times a day I know you're all replies because you're on the check emails within these windows so you could have an automation for example that whenever you're tagged in an email so you're actually typed in the body of an email saying Ah that's why I said can you do this the workflow could automatically create a to-do list item for you so you no longer have to necessarily go and read the email or reply to the email and waste time that way but it's that you just had a definitive task item in your our to-do list week and then just go from work through so that kind of really slick like uh basic start to finish processes like you do well within one system for stuff outside of that um again the same logic applies we could automate a whole business if we had to kind of workflow in the structural place to do so but um the sort of things that are kind of the next level up are if you have an account package and you receive a lot of incoming bills and invoice and things like that you probably have quite a tedious manual job of entering all of those details into your character system there's no automation tools that will specialize in scanning those invoices and putting them straight into your accountancy system so we know what we're talking about just working within one solution but we're spanning two different pieces of software now on two different elements of a business and then going even further from there I know you've kind of got along with an Automation in this video recording Avenue so we've got the first part which is pre-recorded we have this chart and then you might have kind of an outro you could work as well as having something that would then take that video I did it I'll kind of trim the edges and then actually schedule it to go out on YouTube and then you could have again notifications on YouTube where people had talked about it or mentioned it so you could then go into the comments section and reply to those people and do those things um so kind of there is no limit to what you can do um I think going back to the earlier point you mentioned about people not realizing or people think it's Outreach traditionally um this sort of Technology was only available at Enterprise level with like the Microsoft cloud especially nowadays being kind of pretty standard amongst any business no matter how big or small the Microsoft power automate and the actual Microsoft 365 Cloud gives you access to a lot of this automation already people just don't realize it's there and then you also have tools like Zip here and things like that that again are freely available but people maybe just don't know how to interact with them or what what's possible yeah I mean I know myself and I've done bits automation the business and I'm fully put it I think I mentioned it on an event the other day and we're just about to launch and well early in 2023 something that um ultimate introductions between the people in our group um basically you know so it's like a lot of these what I I see is building automation is you kind of do the work at the front end of setting it all up essentially um and then what it will do is it'll it'll do the work for you it's something I used to do when we first started we had a smaller number than we do now with people the goodbye could do it manually and that was fine at the time but I'm going to the size it can and there is actual you know I didn't know this tool was out there I'd actually gone looking for something similar previously not found anything and but someone else has made me aware of it now so there is there is all sorts of things out there and um it's just not to me that's something like that for me is not just about saving time it's essentially improving the service that I'm offering and that is a big driver as well yeah I mean so two two things on that then so I once heard the analogy that um if you're still busy doing that tasks so let's say you start manually speaking that manual process all the time and you haven't got the time to step back and put upload some time into but not making um you're effectively just imagine you're going through a log thank you sarscon Roble and you just you're still going away at courageous and ages is sometimes quick although it doesn't feel like in the moment to step back sharpen that blade and then go okay and essentially that's what you do with the Army and you take a step back from it's stuck in that repetitive cycle you're gonna invest a little bit of time but then you're going to forever be getting that back in the future so I think it is important to do that sort of stuff um another and says well you don't always have to jump to your Rainbow so it's more a like an evolution than a revolution so start by doing the kind of really quick easy bit so you can easily kind of give away right now and then build in a kind of new version two I can dice that further and goes further um in terms of the kind of process and the way I'd encourage people to approach this initially would be to look at whether times used weekly so I don't know if people actually record time or whether you like invest in and things like that but to trying to get an accurate reflection of where the daily or weekly time goes the tasks that take up most of that time I've been focusing on kind of drilling into those um and I'd start off by actually having the Whiteboard we generally do this so and I'll be doing kind of paper initially we draw out that workflow process so you start and you're able and how many steps are there in between to get there and what happens at each step and then as I said you might find you can just automate one step or it might be you can open it the whole process or bits in between but just work on it as a kind of step-by-step process so if you just got one repetitive action instantly start with that one and kind of build it into the process have a few weeks or the months with that and then go back and revisit it right now come and do this next step this next step and I think that's probably the way people need to look at it initially is especially if you've not really used automation before because you can feel a bit daunting to give away perhaps possibility and things like that but doing it in a smaller manageable trunk well the more that you do it more and it'll also make sure you kind of don't go for the Holy Grail apartment the whole thing just having fall over and you know step back and not really do anymore yeah no I've probably got a few examples in my business where it's been such a huge difference like a woman that particularly jumps out to me is and as you know we do quite a lot of events so when we um we're kind of back out there we put it on Eventbrite and various other places what I used to have to do was load all the information onto a web right and then do the same on our website essentially Tint that's information essentially copy and paste it across and create on the website and all we've done is the event page is now um it's just like it's basically a link to event right when we put it on Eventbrite it goes on our website so yes we still we're not automating the whole process but we probably reduce the time I do on that by 50 which is it probably Juiced a bit now but at one point it was several hours a week that that saved straight away and it was it's not massive automation not a complex one at all but the the difference it made was huge I think they were the flip side of that as well so you saved all that time I think in terms of you know I've been on your website and booked through it I I haven't noticed that it's been seamless for me so I think the best automations as well are exactly that they're end user the person that's using it doesn't really understand if there's any automation going on it's really seamless um and then you've got that time you mentioned if it was seven hours and you've simply enough hours you'd be about spent using that time if you still want to get involved in that process doing those bits that human couldn't do so picking up the fun and bringing up somewhere and fighting them for coming to the event so they've had a really seen much experience with an animation but not realized it and then that time you save back you can actually then go and kind of do some of the a computer is never going to be able to pick up the phone and make a call or have a face-to-face conversation like this so you could spend your time doing those things which really add value to to kind of your products or your service no no absolutely like you say spending time doing the important stuff the things that you can ultimate um so one thing I was going to ask you about is it's like everything and you do there is it falls there is things that you need to look out for things to be wearing so when it comes to automating what kind of things should people be thinking about or things that might go wrong that they need to just be aware of yeah basically so um there's a few things really but keep it so simple is kind of your best step so if you're gonna take something from a really manual process to an automated process in one big leap you've got a lot of variables you're trying to manage especially if that automation like allows data entry to float between different systems and softwares so I'd always first of all draw out on paper what I'm trying to achieve and then work out their steps logical process so in the event uh something doesn't quite work in your way you imagine it to or when you actually run it and somebody interacts with it it puts different information this is advice back in you can kind of resolve the issues as you go each element rather than looking kind of through a big catalog or a big long automation list the other thing I'd say is be careful about the actual tools you use and where the data goes so for example the really basic automation where you just foreign ever leaves that system but if you try to join two three four different pieces of software together if there's ever a risk where the data leaving one system and isn't securely managed in between the two systems especially when it comes to gdpr and all the kind of data security going on it's still liable to manage that data even when it leaves those systems so first of all make sure that any automation or any tools you use are gdpr compliant and things like that as a bare minimum um and I would also make sure that the tools had the correct Security in them to interact with the different solutions so you don't want to have a really secure app for example put a hole in it so you can link two different apps together but then let all the hackers and everybody else see these big holes that can be kind of used but to be honest I'd start with just the Microsoft 365 cloud and a tool called Power automate so if you if you Google Power automate is part of the 365 cloud and ecosystem I think probably 99 of people that already have Microsoft cloud anyway or 365 and you can literally just start there's a there's an actual power automate template Library so these are actually pre-configured automations that Microsoft developed for you um you can just go and find the template or the automation that matches what you actually want to achieve and you can just plug in the two start point and then plug and because the system is already pre-tabulated it will do the work for you so I start with that kind of approach where you don't have to worry about all these extra variables and just pick the kind of pre-set automation to to run with and then build out from there basically because the templates all use power automate you can edit them and build in them or it gives you that start and endpoint in a clean kind of package around the style that's been tried and tested by somebody else so I'd say that I'm kind of the best place to start and yeah just um just be aware of the changes so that you if we we have like a revision at a change table here so we have a little change to a processing terminal this isn't for clients but for us we change the work for the process we have a document that shows exactly what's been changed at what date so if ever we do have issues in the future we can always revert back to previous standards or we understand maybe more change affected and create the issues that we have no no that makes sense because obviously things change in your business what you do how you do it so you're gonna have to be um evolving those automations at you all the time so um yeah it's not just a case of setting them up once and it will go forever now it might do depending on what it is but more likely to change and adapt over time yeah those simple processes tend to be a pretty clean but like you said as you build into kind of Mark this book or more kind of advanced automations yeah as your business grows the software might change that you work with like the people might Inspire stuff differently so it's important to be structured and kind of accountable with the changes you make and the stuff you put in just just like you would with a member of Staff really if you give a member of staff that particular task and they did it differently every single time they did it and they were all set and nobody knew how to do it your business would struggle at that point wouldn't it so treat their Automation in exactly the same way you would if you can't um document it and how it's done to pass to even a different animation on member of Staff you probably have a required understood it enough to be our main in the first place no makes it make sense so I know we've used kind of few examples of uh um but if you know someone's either only ever dip the toe in the water I've never done anything of automation where would you kind of stack and I know every business is different there are different requirements but there's probably some kind of common themes running through it for a lot of us uh is there any kind of things that we've not mentioned that you think would be useful for people to start to look at different whether it's systems or or just Yeah you mentioned the email earlier um funny story on that I once had a colleague who automated sets up where whenever they received into an email they they automated it so it went straight into their joint file um I wasn't I think the words were if I weren't important enough to be copied into it you know the CC then I'm not I'm not going to read it um but obviously that could be used in different ways but yeah is there anything we haven't really covered it really is different to to where you you're about your time or what you do I mean the the general kind of when you carve a competence or something it's probably quite an extreme example that would only work for certain people I imagine if I do that I'd get a lot of negative emails to follow it um yeah I guess you've you've got to work out where your time's going so I'd start by kind of even if you've got a Rough Guide of this much time because I did an exercise uh probably two years ago where I had this um soft diamond on my desk with different services on it and every time I turned it over it started a timer running so I had a side on it when I was doing emails I had aside when I was doing fire accounts for example other side when I was doing calls with clients um and I would have never imagined how much time actually when it's my email so I from that one I need to change the way I interact with our work and all these different things so for me the kind of automations that I have within my Outlook is in kind of uh there's a tool called sandbox I think it's called you can plug into your email and it will instantly learn new kind of work in others and it'll take for example like all newsletters and it'll read the sentiment in an email and if it knows it's not a critical or time sensitive he'll put into a hidden inbox so you might have 100 emails coming in a day 10 of them might be time critical I have to be replied in that day but they were nice to come and they'll pull them away and so something like that might be a great start if you're stuck in the same but I was where you stuck on these emails all day every day and they were taking on probably half my working week and I didn't realize it so I think analyzing your time first of all would give you the areas to focus on email might be a good area to start for everybody in something like sandbox might be a perfect they do a trial thing that might be a paid products but if they do a trial you can do it for 30 days close into your email and it just created two inboxes essentially like bringing into action now and what you can wait till later and then you can start working more efficient with your time that way but the um the power automating template cloud is probably your next star stand so understand where time goes um go to the just Google Power automate templates and there's a Microsoft will be the top link it breaks it down into categories of what all the automations do so like social media accounts email originally you can either type in a search box or you can just scroll through the different areas and then pick something UPS high value to you go in bed pretty much straight away and then just trial it see how it goes through it do it on the process map maybe it would save you a lot of time that you can afford to kind of test with and then build a bit of confidence that way and go from there yeah absolutely and obviously you touched on the thing I do you know I'm not you know I guess it is automation to the degree I use something called Boomerang which basically just means that my in my emails only come into my inbox a couple of times a day so it stops that distraction but I still can send emails I can stop going to my emails and send them out and say I need to do that fairly regular basis but I'm just not getting distracted by the old things and I just set aside a couple of time bits of time each day generally kind of early each of the day and towards the end of the day to deal with those and um one of the unintended consequences of that is I find that I realize how many emails I get in that I don't need to do anything with and I've unsubscribed to a lot of things and I generally do that maybe once a week where I just write right I'm just going to inscribe spend 20 minutes now on subscribing and since I've done that instead of each time I've got my emails coming and I've got 40 or 50. I'm probably down to about 20 now um so again it's kind of a consequence of the automation has really made a big difference because they invented stuff that often comes from it I don't think you could maybe buy a part it was automatically because it was so simple right at the start um Baltimore is the system's deciding kind of when you should see emails and when you're not based on a logic so that's an example of really slick arm is the way you've no really realize you're using it and again like I've been to kind of back up my example of starting off slowly and building up if you can about that level now where that works for you in the example you've just given me of unsubscribing from emails you could go one step further you've got to build into this process right if I get I don't know 10 email from gmail.com UK that never replied to her usually aren't measured so automatically unsubscribe so even though um you might apply that logic to 10 different companies that I'll email you the process will be the same if you're not using I mean you're not longer one of them find the unsubscribe button and then subscribe from it so you could teach your computer and allow making to do that as long as you could give it the logic so if I haven't replied in 10 emails or 100 or six months I clearly don't want these but it's like the computer and the automation unsubscribe it from them so you're not wasting time kind of doing it every month so that will be like an evolution of something you're already using and then again you could go a little bit further each time couldn't you [Music] I was doing about five Zoom calls a day and probably like most of us and I was spending a lot of time um so I arranged a meeting I would say okay I use Google Calendar put it into Google Calendar go to zoom create the meeting copy and paste the details across essentially not all I did then obviously I realized you can basically integrate the two with each other and now when I go to my calendar and I put meeting with a little bit on there that says make it a zoom meeting and it just automatically does it for me and it sends it across and no I I forgot I did that but that's a good I guess that's a good ultimation isn't it because it's just really simple yeah quite as much I used to do during the kind of restriction of a pandemic and it still saves me time now yeah definitely like eight days it's all around us we just don't necessarily realize in the really polished automations um and there's there's no reason why we can't do more um because people do stuff ink and like you said go back to that original better start think it's not quite available or it's it's Out Of Reach when reality anything nowadays like about a sort of a pair of task the cloud can do it for you no absolutely well um that's been great and you've like said you've made me think about some of the things I've done before I didn't realize and things I could do more in the future because I think it's um I say it gives you a time doing the things that you need and want to do and so last thing for medium is if if people want to find out a little bit more about you and and the business where the best places to go and where the best places to look especially maybe regarding the automation stuff yeah so if our website is everon.com which is e-v-e-r-o-n.com so on there um you can book time with me people want to talk about automation or any other aspects of it and we do have a page on Automation and some example automations and things like that that we can help people with as well um but I'm on there on LinkedIn Jeremy Marshall um you should find me on that I'll put it that would have been obviously partner Network yeah absolutely and we'll put all the um notes in the in the show description as well both on the YouTube page for people watching and all the podcast listings for people um listen to it um so finally for me you know really really interesting chap thank you so much you know that's really really helped and I'm sure a lot of people have got a lot for that so so thank you I hope you enjoyed this uh chat today and like me you learned something new from our wonderful expert uh so if you'd like to hear from more of our sessions please subscribe on whether platform that you get your podcast from to hear more um and also we'd love to meet you at some point at one of our upcoming events with the northern Infinity Hall defensible across the north of England and we love to meet new people and have guests along so please come along and check out our website or all the details in the show notes thank you very much for listening and see you next time