humananalytics
Contributor
I work as a tech & management consultant, and my previous company spent a lot of time trying to sell automation.
A few thoughts from what I've seen:
Best of luck!
A few thoughts from what I've seen:
- There's a lot of red tape surrounding tech use at most big companies. One F500 bank I worked with needed management sign-off if you even want to incorporate Excel macros/vba into a process.
- Small companies often struggle with basic technical concepts. I've found most small clients aren't technically adept at maintaining even a complex Excel spreadsheet, yet alone code. I've had many instances where I create my own automated process just to speed things up, but the client never wants to adopt it
- When we would sell automation, it would often come through RPA (robotic process automation). If you're not familiar, RPA tools like BluePrism are almost like frontend interfaces that use python to automate tasks in the backend. Usually RPA is not as powerful as custom coding, but RPA can be combined with coding. RPA is nice because it can be more intuitive and easy for the client to maintain, plus for easy to automate tasks you don't even need to code. Think of RPA tools almost like Wordpress/Shopify for automation.
- I've found automation projects generally sell when it's one big problem versus 10 small problems. What I mean is big clients don't really have much appetite to automate 10 small tasks...there's just too much red tape to implement. In general, fixing minor inconveniences do not seem sell, even if those small inconveniences add to major inefficiency.
- Sometimes we don't even sell automation, we sell completing a task. Then, we use automation to increase the margins. For instance, if a fairly manual tasks takes 1000 hours, we bill the client a flat rate equivalent to 500-1000 hours for the task, then complete it with automation in 200 hours. Win win for both parties.
Best of luck!