By automating workflows with easy-to-setup triggers, conditions, and actions, businesses are saving time and money while helping them scale.
Sales, marketing, and most service businesses can benefit from workflow automation simply by leveraging it within their project management or PSA software.
These kinds of automations no longer require any coding knowledge whatsoever and can be incredibly customized to fit the nuances of your processes.
Menial, in-between tasks like approvals, assignments, task creation, and many more, may no longer require manual intervention within your processes. In these scenarios, automations can potentially save your business serious time, money, and mistakes.
Here’s everything you need to know about workflow automation and why the most well-oiled sales, marketing, service, and project teams in the world use it:
Workflow automation uses rule-based logic and technology to execute a sequence of tasks with minimal or no human intervention.
This includes sending emails, updating databases, routing service tickets, processing approvals, and more by replacing manual triggers with digital ones.
Automation follows an "if this, then that" model. For example:
In platforms like Monday.com or HubSpot, automations are built using triggers, conditions, and actions:
Routine tasks eat up thousands of hours each year. When automated, small and large businesses alike can reduce labor costs, reallocate resources to higher-value tasks, and scale operations without proportional increases in headcount.
Manual data entry is prone to mistakes. Automation performs tasks the same way every time, reducing human error and improving accuracy in critical processes like billing, compliance, and customer communication.
Employees are freed from repetitive tasks and able to focus on strategy, innovation, or customer engagement, aka productive activities that drive business growth.
You can leverage automation in project management in a big way to improve communication, making sure stakeholders are always informed. Whether it’s notifying a team member of a deadline or updating a CRM with lead status, it removes the “nobody told me” excuse.
Automated workflows track timelines, reassign tasks, escalate issues, and generate reports. As your business grows, automation continues to keep your processes streamlined, scaling with you and making sure nothing falls through the cracks.
Workflow automation is not confined to a single team, but rather helps improve operations across every business unit. Here’s a few examples of how different departments are using it today.
Don’t worry; with today’s all-in-one project management software, automations are already in the wheelhouse.
You don’t need to learn how to code or take an extensive course to learn how to do this. Here’s how you can implement workflow automation in your processes step by step:
Audit your team’s daily tasks and highlight:
Target these first, as the most useful automations for your business will usually come from mundane, everyday work.
Before automating, document each step, and talk with the different team members involved to uncover pain points and exceptions. A simple diagram or checklist to map everything out will help clarify what needs to be automated and what doesn’t.
What does success look like? Should the process be faster? More accurate? Less reliant on senior team members? Set clear goals, then design your automation accordingly.
Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to automate everything at once. Launch just one or two automations, measure their success before expanding, and focus on use cases that are:
To automate your workflows easily (aka without coding knowledge or any special experience), choose the right tools that are at once user friendly and powerful from a functionality standpoint.
The best workflow automation tools include:
These tools can help manage the whole of your projects and processes, making them the best place to save time and limit errors with automation.
The highest rated workflow automation software will also make setting up automations easy as pie, and they’ll also include AI tools that can guide you through doing so step by step and even retrieve metrics on your automations down the road with just a simple request.
On top of being easy to leverage automations easily, choose a tool with robust integrations that can help keep your tech stack efficient and your data all in one place.
Automation will inevitably alter workflows, and sometimes even roles, which can make things get potentially sensitive for your team. That’s why it’s best to set expectations early, communicate precisely how tasks will change, and provide hands-on training.
Most employees will embrace automation if they can truly understand how it helps them and will make the business run more smoothly.
Just because something can be automated doesn’t mean it should be. Automation excels in consistency, but it usually falls drastically short on creativity, nuance, and of course, empathy.
Don’t forget to resist the temptation to overautomate, especially for sensitive interactions like resolving a customer complaint where human oversight is still undisputedly essential.
Many companies now are using what’s called a “human-in-the-loop” (HITL) model, where automations handle the grunt work but humans handle judgment calls. This hybrid model improves both efficiency and quality and can be leveraged by professional service businesses who want to offload admin and billability drain.
Review and refine your workflows quarterly. As your business needs evolve as you grow and scale, so should your automations. No automation is perfect forever, so it’s diligent to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as:
Here are 6 tools we’ve tried out personally that are excellent for organizations that want to automate their workflows with ease and superb functionality:
Workflow automation is a helpful technological tool that helps businesses scale without losing control, innovate without burning out teams, and serve customers with more speed and precision than ever before.
Sales, marketing, and service businesses in particular are the big winners with workflow automation that can help relieve admin drain and help maintain a higher level of process standardization, particularly with cross-functional teams.
Remember, don’t be intimidated!
Workflow automation can be accomplished relatively easily, with no coding experience necessary. You can also reach out to your PSA or project management software customer service if you need a little extra guidance.
To close, remember that successful automation requires thoughtful planning, the right tools, and ongoing oversight.
Speaking of the right tools, PSOhub’s PSA software was built for easy to setup automations and now comes with an AI Copilot, your bonafide 24/7 project management assistant.