What Automation Services are Businesses Buying from Freelancers?

The recorded roundtable featuring Bryan Golkhajeh of Workload (plus notes!)

Workload is a marketplace that matches companies who need automation processes with the experts who can do it. Think of it as “Upwork for automation.”

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Why Automation Services?

• Streamline (repetitive) tasks and workflows
• Automation helps both top and bottom line: Increases efficiency/helps grow revenue faster.
• Automation preferred by CEOs over new hires:
• New hires are costly and resource-heavy (training, salary, etc.)
• When employees leave, they take the knowledge with them.
• Automation is overall more predictable and reliable than employees doing the same work.

Your clients are most likely already familiar with the concept of automating a task/marketing automators—for instance, Zapier. Opportunities exist where marketing automators don’t necessarily provide seamless end-to-end functionality, IOW, where your agency can step in and provide additional/more niche automation.

Where demand is growing:

• Big software: Shopify, Slack
• Big CRMs: Hubspot, Pipedrive
• Airtable

Basically, any software where clients are doing repetitive tasks, you could be helping them automate.

Tips:

• Hubspot is probably 80% of the market share.
• Not a lot of Salesforce inquiries (probably because enterprise software is handled in-house)
• Zendesk/ticketing system: if a company you’re working with has started using zendesk, it indicates they are in a stage of growth.

Facts/Figures about Automation Services:

• The average deal size is $3500
• Turnaround time is < 10 biz days.
• Margin can be as high as 60%

Automation-Related Partner Programs (with Leads) to Check-Out:

• Zapier Experts Directory - (experts.zapier.com) Tip: Contact Greg (contact info is on the site) for help getting added into the Zapier Experts Directory - there are a few hoops to jump through to get listed.
• Integromat Partner Program: https://partners.integromat.com/

Cool Examples of Automation Processes:

• Twilio
• Programmable voice - automates the customer inquiry process. Kicks off the project workflow. It allows you to build out and implement the workflow via templated modules.
• Programmable video (used for conference service) same pricing structure (for conference service)
• Airtable Builds: most common use case is for companies using google sheets that have reached their limit. So importing spreadsheet data to align.
• Automation and eCommerce:
• Woocommerce, Shopify, Amazon - eCommerce across the board has seen increased demand. Ipass doesn’t natively support a lot of these API structures. eCommerce is infinitely scalable so lends itself beautifully to automation processes.
• Shopify Airpower: https://www.basegenius.com/integrate-shopify-and-airtable/

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