Does looking over your employees’ shoulders make you feel like Big Brother? Have you had a decent night’s sleep in the last year? Is micromanagement dominating your existence?

While no one wants to worry about committing thought crimes, automating extensive data collection can be invaluable to business owners seeking improvement in accountability, transparency and sales.

Automating data collection will provide you with useful insights into how your business is faring. Are sales up or down? How successful was your recent campaign? It improves performance by eliminating the manual tracking and guesswork that go hand in hand with many business processes. And it identifies how efficiently the different aspects of your business are working together.

Here’s what automation can help you do more efficiently:

• Manage your sales pipeline. Automation tools simplify tracking leads, monitoring quotes, managing policy renewals and following up with customers. According to Forrester Research, companies that nurture leads effectively generate 50% more revenue at 33% of the cost—satisfied customers make for consistent growth.
• Manage your progress. Automation makes consistent, accurate information accessible, including an agency scorecard on the overall health of the company, open and click-through rates, lead-to-opportunity conversion rates and costs per lead. This enables your team to focus its time and energy where needed.
• Manage your time. Automation tools allow staff to identify not only priority tasks, but also where they need to step up their game. Marketing and sales software helps teams manage busy workloads by incorporating an intuitive interface that recognizes goals.
• Manage your customers. By storing data on all interactions, you can see where a client could be better served and use such instances as teaching opportunities. Periodic correspondence can also keep you on a customer’s radar by providing value when you’re not explicitly selling.

Thanks to the accompanying efficiency gains, introducing automation software can also streamline employee development. By individualizing goal tracking, automation can show you which staff members need extra coaching—and even allows you to set objective improvement targets. Here’s how automation can improve training and progress at your agency:

• Create new routines. Choose a set time every day to review sales reports. Keeping abreast of crucial reports, dashboards and snapshots alleviates anxiety about the staff’s and company’s performance and makes room for immediate action.
• Empower your team. If your staff senses you trust them, they’re more likely to succeed. Automation provides current information on what they need to accomplish without your constant supervision. This instills a sense of autonomy and indicates you’re confident they’ll meet their goals.
• Increase accountability. Setting goals that are reviewed in person but tabulated and reported through automation preserves interpersonal relationships while taking advantage of efficient technology.
• Impart wisdom. You run an agency because you’re great at what you do. Take the sales process that made you successful and recreate it within your automation software. This increases your scale by establishing a repetitive, accessible workflow your team can follow.
• End micromanagement. It may feel like you’re loosening the reins when you automate, but you’ll actually gain control, thanks to personalized reports on your sales reps’ activities and clear, objective data. You’ll spend less time addressing the same issues and more time correcting specific issues to maximize efficiency.

John Boudreau is the CEO and co-founder of Astonish, an insurance marketing and sales platform for local insurance agencies. Astonish collaborates with insurance agencies to provide an optimized online marketing presence, automate tasks with technology and create an effective sales culture through hands-on coaching.