The 5 Business Processes Every SME Should Automate First

How we pick the first five

We score candidate processes on volume, rules clarity, data availability, revenue proximity, and blast radius. Anything that directly touches revenue or customer experience and can be expressed as a clear decision tree goes first. We avoid low-volume one-offs and messy edge cases until observability is in place.

The short list (and why)

1. Lead follow-up. Speed-to-lead is the biggest revenue lever. Aim for under 5 minutes for high-intent forms, under 30 minutes for everything else. Stack: forms → enrichment → scoring → routing → sequence.
2. Invoicing & payment reminders. Cash is king. Auto-generate invoices from your system of record, validate line items, and trigger reminders with clear dispute paths.
3. Reporting & exec summaries. Weekly reports should not steal Mondays. Automate data pulls, calculations, and delivery to Slack/email with commentary.
4. Onboarding. New customer onboarding is where churn is born. Automate checklists, account provisioning, training emails, and kickoff scheduling.
5. Customer support deflection. Route FAQs to chatbots and workflows; escalate only what needs humans. Protect CSAT with clear “talk to a person” outs.

Process 1: Lead follow-up (the 60-day win)

Target outcome: lift meeting rate 15–30% and cut first-response SLA to minutes. Use enrichment (Clearbit/Apollo), scoring, and territory logic. Keep PII out of prompts; store scores as JSON for portability. Add reply detection to pause sequences.

Process 2: Invoicing & payment reminders

Target outcome: pull cash forward 3–7 days. Ingest signed proposals, generate invoices automatically, validate taxes and discounts, and push reminders at T+3/T+7 with a dispute CTA. Use webhooks to mark paid and close loops in your CRM.

Process 3: Reporting & exec summaries

Target outcome: reclaim 6–12 hours per week. Build n8n/Make flows that pull from CRM, billing, and marketing platforms, then publish PDFs or Slack posts. Keep the SQL/metrics versioned; alert when a source table changes.

Process 4: Onboarding

Target outcome: reduce time-to-value by 20–40%. Auto-provision accounts, send welcome sequences, schedule kickoff calls, and push a Monday/Wed “what changed” digest. Add a progress dashboard for both sides.

Process 5: Customer support deflection

Target outcome: deflect 25–45% of repetitive tickets. Deploy a private chatbot trained on policies and KBs, backed by workflows for refunds, password resets, and status checks. Always offer a human handoff.

Typical ROI ranges we see

• Lead follow-up: 15–30% more meetings; pipeline lift shows in 30–60 days.
• Invoicing: 3–7 day DSO improvement; fewer disputes.
• Reporting: 6–12 hours/week back to managers.
• Onboarding: 10–20% churn reduction in first 90 days.
• Support deflection: 25–45% ticket reduction, higher CSAT if handoff is clean.

Guardrails before you scale

• Add monitoring for every node; alert on failure spikes and SLA breaches.
• Version prompts, playbooks, and SQL. Store them in Git.
• Keep a rollback flow for each process; ship in waves.
• Document owners: Sales owns lead SLAs, Finance owns invoicing, Ops owns reporting, CS owns onboarding/support.

Tooling that works for SMEs

Start with n8n or Make for orchestration, your existing CRM (HubSpot/Close/Pipedrive), Google Workspace, QuickBooks/Xero, and Slack/Teams. Add a private RAG chatbot for support once your KB is clean.

Implementation timeline

• Week 1: Pick the first two processes, define SLAs, and map data sources.
• Week 2: Build lead follow-up + reporting. Ship to 20% traffic.
• Week 3: Add invoicing automation and onboarding triggers.
• Week 4: Deploy support deflection, harden monitoring, and hand off runbooks.

Copy this stack with us

We’ll score your processes, pick the fastest payback, and build with observability from day one. You keep the stack; we keep you from buying shelfware.