3 Types of Agency Automation, With Real Examples

What are the three types of automation?

Automating parts of your agency improves the experience for you, your clients and your employees. The three types build on each other: simple automations, complex automations and custom systems. Knowing which one you are building sets a standard for how complicated the work needs to be. Keep simple ones as simple as possible. Expect real work for custom systems, especially for something like fulfilment where many pieces must work together.

What is a simple automation?

A simple automation connects one app to another, usually in two or three steps, and at most about three apps. Tools such as Zapier and Make.com make these easy, and you may have built some already without realising it.

The aim is to remove small, annoying manual tasks so you and your team can focus on the work that matters. One or two will not change much. Once you have ten or more running, you feel the difference in workload, because you are no longer distracted by small tasks that might be forgotten and cause delays.

What are some examples of simple automations?

These examples show how little is involved in each.

• Sales: when a sales call is booked, add the lead to your CRM and create a task for your sales team to prepare.
• Meetings: when a new Zoom recording is saved, add it to a shared Google Drive folder and message the closer or sales team leader so they can review it.
• Tasks: when a task is marked complete in your project management tool, notify a team member so they can review the work.
• Reminders: send the team a reminder when someone's birthday comes around.
• Alerts: when a new payment arrives in Stripe, post in a Slack channel or update your accounts.
• Reporting: every 30 days, check the spreadsheet that holds your KPIs and share the key figures with the relevant team members.

What is a complex automation?

Complex automations typically have ten or more steps and at least four pieces of software. They contain several paths, so if a condition is met the automation goes one way, and if not it goes another. They use tools such as filters, formatters, schedulers, webhooks and parsers, and sometimes custom code. You can generate basic automation code with ChatGPT.

This is where parts of a workflow, such as creating contracts or payment links, are automated. We usually do not automate a whole process such as onboarding in one go. Instead we automate specific workflows inside it, and these can be combined later. Building one or two of these can lead to large time savings.

What are some examples of complex automations?

• Sales research: when a call is booked, use Perplexity AI to research the lead's website, update the CRM with a one or two sentence summary and send it to the assigned closer on Slack.
• Customer support: when a client submits a ticket in Google Forms, create a task, message the assigned team member and email the client to say someone is working on it.
• Lead magnets: when someone completes a form, create an AI generated lead magnet, send it by email or text, give access to a course, remove them from email sequences to avoid spam and notify the closer if they qualify.
• End of day reporting: each day, read the sheet that employees fill with end of day reports, summarise it with ChatGPT and send it to the relevant Slack channel and team leaders.
• Slack onboarding: when a client is closed, create a Slack channel with their name, set the topic, invite customer success or developers, send a welcome message and create a task to invite the client.

What is a custom system?

A custom system is a set of complex automations working together to achieve one output. This is where you see whole processes such as onboarding, fulfilment, content creation or feedback collection automated. They are the most complicated type, although they range from simple to very complex.

They have many triggers and usually run over a long period. For example, one automation may start fulfilment, and a second trigger then starts the next automation. You need somewhere to host and track it as it moves through stages. That could be a CRM, a project management tool, an internal platform or even a Google Sheet.

What are some examples of custom systems?

• Meeting system: when a meeting is scheduled it follows a path based on its type. For a sales call, it adds the lead to a newsletter, updates a spreadsheet, researches the lead, messages the closer, creates a meeting database item and a CRM lead, emails the client and sends a second warm up email 12 hours before the call. A separate path unqualifies leads who do not meet the criteria.
• Onboarding system: split into phases. In phase one, a closed client triggers notifications, Slack setup, Google Drive folders and a client portal. In phase two, the trigger is the client completing a Google Form. Without a project management tool to track where each client is, this becomes messy at scale.
• Sales system: each branch is its own complex automation, covering the phases before and after the call and before and after the close.

How do the three types fit together?

Complex automations combine simple ones, and custom systems combine complex ones. Start with simple automations, build a few complex ones for the key workflows, and move to custom systems when you want a complete process automated. The video above walks through each type with more examples. To find ideas for simple automations, browse the examples that Zapier shows for each app.