Simple automation for peace of mind by Chris Dietrich

and working on the intersection of sales and technology chris enjoys dabbling with no code python and open source today he is going to talk about simple automations for the peace of mind take it away chris i'm with myself okay great can you hear me perfect yeah thanks so much uh hushel um it's like i work in sales for uh like startup and payments so right now we also have like quite an exciting time which means a lot of growth panes uh which are good ones to have um and uh we like try to use like n8n or automations and certain things that just make the overall uh life a little bit easier um these are mainly things that uh like remove like manual things that are easy to do like everybody can do this but just like uh take away attention from uh the actual work you were doing take like five minutes so it's not a big deal but in the end it just sums up and uh it's like things that um can yeah still require a lot of different small steps that have to be done in a super precise order and i believe that uh when you have actually identified something like this you must immediately automate it so i have like one um example here and maybe i can share my screen um so here

and uh please let me know if you see the presentation as well all right thank you um so talked about simple automations um the um background what we have done like in the past is uh there's a book that's quite popular it's called build to sell it's about um like when you build like a company and you want to increase the value it is better when everything is documented everything is like actually running on clockwork because uh um when you have like a new owner they actually have like a handbook and one they can follow it so we started documenting a lot of the sales procedures we're having like in a pretty granular detail whole onboarding flows of new customers like everything in actually normal documents so first as a step when for example somebody goes on vacation or somebody gets sick that somebody can take over because they know in general what to do and um or also if you have like two people fully filling the same role that there's not two flavors in the company but like actually like a unified one this is moved down to naming conventions of documents and also always all these other things because you uh will identify um like if things are missing if things are not touched yet easier when you um when you have like consistency in uh folders files etc we're like in fintech so we have like also a lot of uh compliance documents like things that need a like very like detailed view so we have to pay like a lot of attention to process this book describes it a little bit within they call it sops and sods so the sop is a standard operating procedure could be for example how do you issue an invoice yeah what kind of steps actually need to be done um

the way when you write down the process uh the it allows you to actually free up your brain not needing to remember these things anymore so um what i usually do is uh also when i have like things that i know how to do because i actually created the whole thing i still take the workflow and try to also improve it and reiterate over this uh sometimes these are things that i cannot automate it's just like a step-by-step thing that where i can which i can go through and uh because i do a lot of context switching and different things i just come out of the sales call you have a team meeting i talk with like something else when i then have like an hour of time or something to focus on some work it's just nice to have like this guidance so um so it helps me like to stay on track and uh to actually uh get this like get better in the mode on working on this task

so the holy grail is of course when i can actually automate the whole process by technology so when something is granular enough or let's say this on a level where i can actually use tooling uh then i would like to apply like a bit like a workflow with a tool like n8n to so that i do not need to do the steps like manually i can still survey them so what we talked about right now logging or the wait function like i'm the wait node i'm very excited about this because i do have a lot of workflows where i do something and then i have to wait for external input before i can like move on and um some of these steps when i have the signal could also be something i can um let's say that i can that can then trigger like a next automation instead of me picking it up and doing actually manual work so

so some of the workflows i'm building they're like more complex um it doesn't always need to be like this so you can also just have like very simple things that actually also like have like already like a big input so for example one thing that we use is uh when we register when we receive like a new lead it's just simple things like creating a google drive folder for the client uh creating like an ad table entry and we have to also add the ad table the google drive link into the ad table entry so this is really simple um

um it's just like simple as that but if i would count up the steps i didn't do it yeah if i count up actually the steps that i have to do it's like opening google clicking going to the right folder in google drive clicking creating the thing putting the right name in there going to add table loading the right thing there's something wrong with the browser just like takes a long i'm actually uh occupied for still like five minutes to get this all of this done in the right way and i have to create like two like we have like create like several folders like etc just to follow like our process so it's really simple work but it's it just doesn't make sense because you have to be very focused on doing it and the value add of doing this actually as a human is not really there um i still need it so the whole process can go on uh but the um it's just uh it sounds simple it is simple everybody can do it but i believe like no one should do it if we can actually uh do all these things like with automation so

so one of the other things is also that um when we get like a new lead this is like we don't we're not in control on this when we get the email the phone call the whatsapp message the telegram one skype yes skype when we actually have our trigger to do this workflow yeah so it is very distributed it can come by different channels so um what i uh and maybe i'm not in front of my desktop where i can actually do these tasks maybe i'm just on my phone now creating like these things on a phone like going an air table like doing all these things you know not very effective um so we're maybe like in the middle of a meeting we're just like running short on some stuff um or like it's like all relating just like i say okay i'll do it tomorrow put me like create me like a trello task to do this instead um

what we created is actually like a slash command in slack um i am a big fan of chat ops in general um they're really great because we spend all our time in there and i have my user interface with me on the phone i have it like open on the desktop like the whole time and it allows me to stay inside the inside where i actually work instead of going now to open actually a browser the um the other benefit of it is that because we use here the web hook to trigger it um do i have my mouse sorry oh you cannot see my mouse create um so we have like the web book note um and it returns me actually the um actually we know we don't use the webhook node but like we uh we also post them after the workflow has been triggered like a message with the data into slack so when we look at this workflow here i have to create like three folders they're like nested in each other so i have to like say something already like a lot of clicking we use the set note to make it a little bit easier to write the right information from the previous notes into air table and then we post the response into slack

slash commands is like super easy to set up so you can create an app and then on slash commands you can create like a new command you can define it uh um give it like a name you can little bit of a description so when i'm inside slack and actually start with slash i can have like some sort of short documentation what i need to do and um from there i can then uh yeah just trigger the workflow which just does all these uh simple steps so we see this here we have like register lead um i have created a format was i'm still like the technical so i have like the entity name which is like the legal entity name i have a semicolon and after that i have like an uh parameter that does already other stuff inside airtable given like these things this already helps me a lot because i know the entry has been created um i know that all the manual things that are like very tedious have like are like done and sorted and as a response i get like a simple message back inside slack which links to me the google drive folder as well as the ad table so instead of going into google drive and or into air table and entering all the stuff manually all i have to do is now i click to click actually the one on the entry and i can continue entering the uh information that um uh that else i have like about this lead for example yeah so um this of course for me is like great uh but it also uh has shown to be like very used by um like by my assistants like in other people who are not so technical they really embrace the slash commands as well uh we use them for treadout task creation we use it like for everything and the nice thing is also that it resurfaces this um like it makes the work also like visible yeah so everybody's sort of in slack in this way this is like our operations channel so it's always good to see that there we have like new leads etc so it's not uh so we don't necessarily need to um report like all of this like what's been happening like people see okay we have like new stuff uh and we like everybody's like sort of um involved or updated on what is happening on this part of the um of the business um especially because we work like fully remote or at least i do uh um this is like important for uh like yeah to keep like the information flow also going and um yeah that's little that part

um one thing how to get started so building this whole thing took me like two hours from start to finish i had to learn slash commands in skype uh in slack sorry uh i had to figure out how to create like a user for google drive like um what's i called like a service account uh and i spent most of the time uh figuring out why the authentication doesn't work and i just want to point this out so read the fantastic documentation line by line like a proper sop like from n8 and from the n8nt because there's like a bunch of funky stuff uh that is not so obvious if you don't read this so i just want to point out this when you work with a private key that's a like just follow what they say um and um yeah that actually concludes my presentation on this maybe i can go back so

awesome thank you so much guys that was wonderful and yep we often don't realize that we need automation until we have all these processes documented somewhere so thank you so much for giving us this small reminder yeah i also wanted to say that it's um you can start with something that is as simple as that i mean there are uh like working with the apis the notes in it and already creates it's like um it's like very how to say like it's very useful just to start with something an experiment and um especially like the web hook notes combined with a like with slack and then returning like a response back there using a slack note like these little things are made super easy i asked my um like another engineer like a real engineer how long they would take like to build this workflow and they quoted something from one to two weeks and i was like okay this will never happen yeah so it enables us a lot to do something here and it's actually for the benefit of the people that don't get that much uh depth capacity and uh just like makes work more enjoyable and we can move faster okay thank you see