SOPs and automations

Almost every agency has written its processes down at least once. The document exists. Nobody opens it, because opening it is a separate act from doing the work, and the work is what is urgent.

The fix is not better documents. It is removing the gap between the process and the task list. When applying a procedure to a client produces the actual tasks — assigned, dated, appearing in the same place all other work appears — following the process becomes the path of least resistance rather than an act of discipline.

That also makes the process improvable. If step four is always late, you can see it, because step four is a task with a due date and not a line in a Google Doc.

A rule has three parts: what starts it, what has to be true, and what happens. Triggers come from events in the system or from a signed webhook, so anything that can post JSON can start a rule.

Conditions are ordinary comparisons — equals, contains, greater than, is empty, starts with — combined with and/or. They exist so that a rule can be specific enough to be safe: fire on a new lead, but only when the source is paid search and the client is this one.

Actions run in sequence and can wait between steps, which is what makes follow-up sequences possible rather than just instant reactions.

Automations that silently do the wrong thing to a client are worse than no automations, so a rule can be dry-run against a sample payload. You see the conditions evaluate and the actions that would have fired, without anything actually being sent.

After it goes live, every execution is logged with what triggered it and what happened. When someone asks why a client got a text at 6am, the answer is available rather than deduced.

You do not have to invent the first few. Rules can be created from templates and then edited, which is usually faster than designing a process from an empty screen.

The same is true of SOPs: the useful pattern is to write the one you already do badly, apply it to one client, and fix it from what the task list tells you.