What Should You Actually Automate? A Practical Guide to Automation Priorities

‍TL;DR:

• Start with a proper roadmap and training, but focus initial automation on sales, service, and operations
• Set a low bar for first wins: turn 20-minute processes into 2-minute ones
• Keep humans in critical decision loops while automating repetitive elements

🚀 The Automation Temptation

"Let's automate everything!" It's the battle cry of the efficiency-obsessed executive who just attended their first AI conference. But automation, like any business initiative, requires strategy and prioritisation. Not all processes deserve your immediate attention, and not all automation delivers equal value.

The question isn't whether you should automate - it's what you should automate first.

🗺️ Start with the Roadmap (Yes, Really)

I know you're eager to jump straight into building automations, but resist that urge. A proper automation roadmap is non-negotiable. It prevents scattered, disconnected automations that don't work together, helps identify dependencies between systems, and ensures your automations align with business objectives rather than just technical possibilities. Perhaps most importantly, it creates organisational buy-in for the automation journey.

This doesn't need to be a six-month strategy exercise. Even a focused two-week assessment will dramatically improve your results.

A well-structured roadmap also empowers your team to contribute their own automation ideas within a coherent framework. Without this structure, you'll quickly end up with 76 half-baked automations created by different departments that don't integrate with each other, duplicate effort, or worse, actively conflict. When everyone builds in isolation, chaos is the inevitable result.

🎯 The Smart First Targets: Sales, Service, and Operations

While every business is different, three areas consistently deliver the highest return on automation investment:

💼 Sales Automation Priorities

The sales process contains numerous repetitive tasks that consume valuable selling time. Think about your lead qualification process, where team members spend precious hours sorting through inquiries that often don't go anywhere. Automating this initial screening doesn't replace the salesperson's judgement – it just ensures they're spending time on prospects with genuine potential.

Similarly, follow-up sequences often fall through the cracks in busy sales environments. An automated system ensures consistent communication without requiring manual effort for each message. The salesperson still handles the important conversations, but the process keeps moving without constant attention.

Sales automation delivers triple benefits: it frees your team to focus on relationship-building, ensures consistent follow-up, and creates better data for future decision-making.

🤝 Customer Service Enhancement

Customer service teams face predictable, repetitive interactions that are perfect for automation, especially in professional services firms. Consider a law firm where client emails containing certain urgent keywords ("deadline," "urgent," "immediately") are automatically flagged and escalated to senior partners. The system doesn't replace the human response, but it ensures critical requests never sit unnoticed in a junior associate's inbox.

Accounting firms can implement similar systems that automatically categorise and route client tax questions to the appropriate specialist based on content analysis. The specialist still provides the personalised response, but the routing happens seamlessly without administrative overhead.

For consultancies, automation can track project milestone completions and automatically generate client update reports that a consultant reviews and personalises before sending. The consultant maintains the relationship, but much of the documentation burden is removed.

Good service automation doesn't replace human interaction - it ensures humans are only involved where they add unique value.

⚙️ Operations Efficiency Gains

Operational processes often contain the most transformative automation opportunities yet remain overlooked. Document processing, approval workflows, and data entry are prime targets that span nearly every department.

Consider contract management where automation can extract key information, populate your CRM or project management system, trigger onboarding workflows, and notify relevant team members – all without manual intervention. Or employee expense processing, where receipt images can be automatically categorised, validated against policy, and routed for appropriate approval.

Supply chain notifications, equipment maintenance schedules, and compliance documentation are all areas where manual processes create massive inefficiencies. By automating these operational backbones, you free up significant time while improving reliability.

Quality assurance documentation is another area ripe for automation in manufacturing and service organisations, potentially reducing processing time from hours to minutes while simultaneously improving accuracy and compliance. The human quality specialists can then focus on actual improvement rather than paperwork.

👥 Which Roles to Target First?

Not all roles benefit equally from initial automation efforts. The highest-value targets typically share these characteristics:

High-Skilled Professionals Doing Low-Skilled Tasks: Look for situations where your most valuable team members spend significant time on administrative work. A senior sales executive spending hours updating CRM records represents a far greater opportunity cost than an administrative assistant doing the same.

Customer-Facing Roles: Prioritise automations that directly impact customer experience. Reducing response times, eliminating errors, and ensuring consistent follow-up all translate to improved customer satisfaction.

Data-Heavy Positions: Roles that involve substantial data entry, extraction, or transfer between systems often contain numerous automation opportunities. These also tend to be the roles where errors have cascading effects throughout the organisation.

Scalability Bottlenecks: Focus on roles where manual processes are directly limiting growth. If onboarding new clients takes so much administrative work that your team hesitates to take on more business, that's a prime automation target.

⏱️ Setting the Right Bar: The 20→2 Minute Rule

One common automation mistake is aiming too high initially. You don't need to completely eliminate human involvement to get massive returns.

The 20→2 Minute Rule is simple: if you can turn a 20-minute process into a 2-minute process, that's a worthy first target. This approach delivers quick wins that build momentum, requires less complex automations, maintains appropriate human oversight, and creates immediate time savings that can be reinvested.

Consider a sales team member who processes 10 new leads daily, spending 20 minutes qualifying each one. Reducing that to 2 minutes per lead saves 3 hours daily - almost half their workday recovered for high-value activities.

🔄 Keep Humans in the Loop

The most successful automations don't remove humans entirely – they just change where human attention is directed. Take content marketing as a perfect example. Trying to fully automate your blog production is a recipe for disaster. AI-generated content published without oversight will eventually produce something inappropriate, inaccurate, or off-brand.

Instead, consider automating the workflow components: have AI draft initial content, automatically route it through editorial tools for grammar checking, then place it directly into your CMS as a draft – all while flagging it for human review before publishing. The human maintains critical creative control and final approval, but all the administrative friction is removed.

This approach works across nearly every business function. Automate the repetitive, time-consuming parts while preserving human judgement at critical decision points.

💰 Understanding Automation Tool Costs: Beyond the Price Tag

When choosing between automation platforms like Zapier, Make.com, and n8n, the pricing model matters more than the specific numbers. Each platform charges differently, which affects which one makes sense for your use case.

Zapier's Task-Based Model

Zapier charges primarily based on the number of "tasks" (individual automation actions) you use monthly, with different tiers offering different task allowances. This model works well if you need lots of different automations that don't run very frequently. However, it can become expensive for high-volume, frequently triggered automations.

A marketing agency with many clients each needing a few specific automations might find this model cost-effective, while a high-volume e-commerce business might quickly exceed reasonable task limits.

Make.com's Operation-Based Approach

Make.com (formerly Integromat) focuses on operations rather than tasks, often making it more cost-effective for complex, multi-step workflows. Their pricing also considers data transfer volume and the number of active scenarios (workflows).

This typically works better for organisations with fewer, more complex automation needs that run frequently. If your automations involve multiple steps and conditions, Make.com often provides better economics as the operation count doesn't increase as rapidly as Zapier's task count would for the same workflow.

n8n's Self-Hosted and User-Based Options

n8n stands apart by offering both self-hosted (free, open-source) options and cloud deployments with user-based pricing. This gives more flexibility but requires more technical expertise.

For organisations with in-house technical talent or concerns about data sovereignty, n8n's model can be compelling. You're paying for user seats rather than usage volume, making it potentially more economical for high-volume automation needs – provided you have the technical capability to manage it.

Choosing between these models depends not just on price but on your organisation's technical capabilities, usage patterns, and growth trajectory.

📈 Measuring Automation ROI

Calculating the return on automation investments doesn't need to be complicated. Start with these straightforward measurements:

Time Savings: Document the time required for the manual process vs. the automated process, multiply by frequency, and convert to cost using average hourly rates. A process that saves 3 hours weekly for someone earning $50/hour represents $7,800 in annual savings – just for that single automation.

Error Reduction: Track error rates before and after automation. Quantify the cost of each error type (rework time, customer compensation, lost business). Even a modest reduction in errors can translate to significant savings.

Capacity Increase: Measure how automation affects your team's capacity to handle additional volume. If automating client onboarding increases your capacity from 10 to 15 new clients monthly without adding staff, that's a 50% productivity gain.

Anecdotal Evidence: Don't underestimate the value of qualitative feedback. If your team reports feeling less stressed, having more time for strategic work, or improved job satisfaction, these are valuable outcomes even if they're harder to quantify.

Organizations that simply track the difference between "time spent on administrative tasks" and "time spent with clients" before and after automation implementation often see the most compelling evidence of ROI – even without complex calculations.

🏢 Where Does AI and Automation Fit?

Most organisations struggle with where to house their automation efforts. Should it live within IT? Operations? Each department independently? There's no perfect answer, but what matters is having clear ownership and governance to prevent fragmentation where departments create automation silos.

This is where Braive can help. We establish the right structure for sustainable automation that can transform your entire business, not just implement isolated solutions.

🔑 The Bottom Line

Automation isn't about replacing humans - it's about making humans more effective. By focusing first on sales, service, and operations processes that match the 20→2 Minute Rule, you'll quickly demonstrate value while building momentum for your broader automation strategy.

Remember: the goal isn't to automate everything possible - it's to automate what delivers real business value while keeping humans engaged where their judgement matters most. Start there, measure rigorously, and expand methodically.

Ready to identify your highest-value automation opportunities? Let's talk about how we can help you build a practical automation roadmap that delivers immediate results while setting the foundation for long-term success.

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