Marketing automation can make managing multiple digital marketing strategies, from search engine optimization (SEO) to social media to email marketing, easier.

Here are some of the things you benefit.

• Ease your workload by automating tasks
• Track your digital marketing campaign data and organize it
• Improve your understanding of the buyer’s journey
• Increase your return from digital marketing

Partnering with a marketing automation agency can help your business take full advantage of marketing automation. The question, however, is what do marketing automation agencies do, and how can they help your business?

A marketing automation agency helps your company by overseeing and managing your marketing automation.

They’ll help you choose which tasks to automate, for example, and make the most of automation software, like MarketingCloudFX, so you get the best return on your investment.

• What is Marketing Automation?
• What Do Marketing Automation Agencies Do?
• Should you hire a marketing automation agency?
• Best Marketing Automation Software for Agencies
• How does Marketing Automation Benefit a Business?
• How do you get into Marketing Automation?

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation involves using software to automate emails, social media posts, and other digital marketing tasks. Today, many agencies offer this type of service to aid in their clients’ digital strategies and campaigns.

The idea behind automating parts of a digital strategy is to make managing different tasks easier.

Read Also: Email Marketing Automation Software

As your strategy becomes more complex, automation helps you stay on top of everything and enables you to take on more initiatives and campaigns. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you get to work on other, more challenging projects.

What Do Marketing Automation Agencies Do?

Marketing automation agencies provide marketing automation services like MarketingCloudFX to help their clients determine where automation could simplify their workload and use their time more efficiently so they can get more value from marketing.

In general, you can expect a marketing automation agency to help your business by:

• Assessing digital marketing processes and tasks
• Determining which processes or tasks could benefit from marketing automation
• Automating processes or tasks that offer the best return on investment (ROI)

A marketing automation agency, will also help your company by:

• Establishing marketing automation through your preferred platform, like HubSpot
• Setting up website tracking to monitor conversions, leads, and phone calls
• Creating helpful dashboards for organizing data and analyzing digital marketing performance
• Offering supportive solutions, like lead scoring, lead tracking, and more

Your marketing automation agency’s role in your business will depend on your needs. For example, if you want a provider that supports automations via HubSpot, you’ll want to focus on agencies that provide those types of services.

Marketing automation offers companies of all sizes value. Whether you’re an enterprise organization or small-to-midsized business (SMB), you can benefit from bringing marketing automation into your company.

If you’re unsure about whether you need marketing automation, think about these questions:

• Do you have repetitive marketing tasks, like sending emails or segmenting subscribers?
• Do you know how much ROI each marketing channel or strategy generates?
• Do you have a smart method for tracking and monitoring leads?
• Do you have a fast way to measure, organize, and assess marketing channel performance?

If you answered “No” to most of these questions, marketing automation could help your business.

For example, marketing automation could help your company (and you) by tracking each channel’s ROI. When you track and measure a channel’s ROI, you make it easier to assess its impact on your business, which can help you prove the effectiveness of a channel, like search, to company decision-makers.

Should you hire a marketing automation agency?

Your business can start using automation today if you want. Platforms like HubSpot and Mailchimp, for instance, allow you to automate tasks as soon as you create your account. Some companies wonder, however, if they should hire a marketing automation agency.

Questions like the following can help you decide whether an agency is right for you:

• Am I able to automate tasks successfully?
• Am I getting the most value from marketing automation tools, or could I use some help?
• Are there more tasks that I want to automate, but can’t with my experience or toolkit?
• Do I need help organizing and analyzing my marketing data?

Most of the time, businesses will partner with a marketing automation company because they want to get more value from their time, data, and marketing strategies.

Since a marketing automation agency focuses solely on streamlining your tasks and organizing your data, it can help you accomplish this task.

If you’re still unsure about whether you should hire a marketing automation agency, do some research.

Look into what marketing automation companies provide as a part of their services — and how those deliverables help your business. If you like what you see, schedule a call or meeting to learn more about how they could help your company specifically.

A meeting puts in perspective the potential impact of a marketing automation agency on your business.

Best Marketing Automation Software for Agencies

Seventy-nine percent of high-performing companies have been using marketing automation for at least three years. It’s not surprising. Using marketing automation software has numerous benefits for your marketing and sales departments.

It can increase productivity, grow revenue, reduce overhead, and save time so your teams can be more agile, high-performing, and deliver on their goals. 

The particular software you decide to go with ultimately depends on what you want to automate. If you’re unsure, start with listing each step of every marketing process your business or team takes.

Then, mark which actions must be done by a human and which ones might be better left to the robots. The latter will then become a list of features that you’ll need your marketing automation software to provide. 

Your list might include, for example:

• Sending pre-written emails to prospects or customers
• Lead scoring/qualifying 
• Survey, form, and landing page creation
• Publishing posts to social media channels
• SMS messaging
• Consolidating metrics and sending reports

Fortunately, there’s marketing automation software for each of these tasks. We have selected the best marketing automation software options for agencies in 2020 and beyond (based on capabilities, ease of use, and customer reviews) so you can start test-driving them for your organization today.

1. Sharpspring

Sharpspring is a platform designed for agencies, so you can be sure it’ll fit your needs out of the box. Users report that it’s easy to learn, has an expansive set of features, and is cost-effective.

• Key features: Email, Forms, Visitor ID, CRM, Landing Pages, Blogs, Analytics, Social
• Price: $$

2. Marketo

Marketo is one of the most popular programs out there. It has a toolset for each part of your digital marketing strategy — from lead management and email to mobile marketing. It has incredible customization tools, making it an excellent solution for agencies of all sizes and specializations.

• Key features: Lead management, email, mobile, account-based marketing, social, content AI
• Price: $$$

3. BenchmarkONE

We’d be remiss to leave our own solution off the list. Hatchbuck is ideal for small and medium-sized agencies that regularly utilize email marketing in their digital campaigns. Customers love our automatic lead scoring system, affordability, the continual addition of features, and customer support.

• Key features: Lead management, email, advanced segmentation, lead scoring, CRM
• Price: $ – $$

4. Pardot

If you’re already using Salesforce, its marketing automation solution, Pardot, might be a good pick. Find different plans for different essential functions: forms and landing pages, email marketing, lead scoring, and more.

• Key features: Lead management, email, sales enablement
• Price: $$$

5. Hubspot

Hubspot customers love its range of inbound marketing tools that keep you covered throughout the entirety of the buyer’s journey. Content marketing agencies may be especially satisfied with Hubspot’s focus on blogging, SEO, social media, and website automation tools.

• Key features: Lead management, email, blogging, landing pages, email, social media, SEO, ads
• Price: $$

6. Act-On

This marketing automation tool is less expensive than some of the big guns but nearly as powerful. Users like that you can maintain contact lists for different groups, a significant perk for agencies with many clients. It also allows you to pay only for the contacts you interact with, which can be a big money-saver.

• Key features: Email, lead scoring, multiple list creation, ads, landing pages, gated content
• Price: $$ – $$$

7. NetResults

NetResults users report that it’s easy to get up and running with this marketing automation solution — but also that it’s a really great value compared to some of the market leaders. As an end-to-end solution with unlimited, it’s ideal for agencies. 

• Key features: Lead management, social, email, CRM integration
• Price: $ – $$$

8. eTrigue

eTrigue boasts an extremely intuitive user interface, with functionality designed specifically for B2B marketing. Though some users share that reporting could be a little better, eTrigue seems to make up for this with its stellar customer service.

• Key features: Email, CRM integration, Google Ad Words, website tracking, forms, personalization, webinar integration
• Price: $ – $$$

9. Active Campaign

Active Campaign has advanced automation features that make this software highly valuable for agencies. Segment your audiences, and easily set up triggers for automated email campaigns and other admin tasks.

• Key features: Lead management, email, advanced segmentation, advanced reporting and analytics, social analysis
• Price: $ – $$$

10. dotdigital

dotdigital features an incredibly powerful, but easy to learn, automation interface that’s fantastic for smaller firms and those who aren’t super tech-savvy. Users are consistently impressed with its value and customer service.

• Key features: Email, Integrations, SMS and Mobile, Landing Pages, Surveys and Forms, Reporting and Analytics
• Price: $ – $$

Don’t start 2021 without a marketing automation platform. Instead of going through the motions, not seeing the results you need while also adding more to your plate than what’s necessary, find the software that’s right for you and see your marketing and sales strategies reach new levels.

How does Marketing Automation Benefit a Business?

These are, in my opinion, the five key company-wide benefits of implementing a marketing automation solution.

1. Reduce your staffing costs

Using marketing automation software, one employee can compete with a 50-person marketing and sales department. How? By setting up lead nurturing and marketing campaigns that are automatically triggered based on certain criteria.

After a few months of building these automated campaigns, your business might be sending out thousands of personalised emails each day on autopilot.

2. Increased revenue and average deal size

By automating your cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups you’ll likely notice an increase in your customer lifetime value. When you combine this with better lead management and prioritisation, it’s likely that your sales activity will produce a better ROI.

Virtually all of benefits outlined in this post contribute to increasing revenue and deal-size in some way or another.

3. Improve accountability of marketing & sales teams

Marketing automation makes it very clear where the bottlenecks in your company are, thanks to having clearly defined processes, and birds-eye view reporting of the company’s pipeline.

If marketing is capturing hundreds of leads, but none of them are being nurtured to become ‘sales-qualified leads’, the marketing department will receive instant and impartial feedback that they need to improve their nurturing campaigns.

This feedback system not only reduces tough conversations and company politics, but also improves accountability of staff and departments to ensure that their part of the system is performing effectively.

4. Be more effective

No matter how large or small your team, you have a finite amount of resources to grow your business. Marketing automation enables you to squeeze more juice out of the hours available to you.

5. Less repetition, more creativity

When you replace manual repetitive work with automated rules and campaigns, you naturally free up your staff’s time to focus on more creative tasks.

While this has clear benefits of staff productivity and effectiveness, there’s a softer and less tangible benefit on creativity and overall happiness that comes from focusing your staff on varied creative work instead of mundane repetitive tasks.

How does marketing automation benefit the marketing team?

In this section, we want to focus specifically on how marketing automation enables marketers to be more effective and generate a higher ROI on their activity.

6. Refine your marketing processes

One of the nice side effects of implementing marketing automation software is that, if you haven’t already, it requires you to visualise your customer journey and marketing strategy to create processes around them.

While this might not sound riveting, creating processes around the customer journey enables you to gradually refine how you target and nurture your leads.

Here’s an example of one of my friend’s lead nurturing sequences in Infusionsoft. While it’s a bit small to see, each box represents a separate campaign or action that is triggered when a lead reaches that stage of the customer journey.

This sequence can be visualised in a funnel, which enables you to see where leads are falling off in your nurturing process, and make refinements in those areas.

7. Target potential customers across multiple channels

One of the powerful benefits that marketing automation offers marketers is the ability to reach customers in a personalised way across different online and offline channels.

When you’re creating a marketing sequence like the one displayed above, you can choose to send customers an email, postcard, text message, tweet, or phone call when they reach certain stages of the customer journey.

Some marketing automation tools have more options around this than others with multi-channel targeting. While most will enable email, social, and phone calls, only a few tools (e.g. Ontraport) enable text message and postcard targeting.

8. Never stop A/B testing your campaigns

Unlike traditional landing page or email A/B testing, where you might split test a campaign once or twice before sending it out to your mailing list, marketing automation tools make it easy to run ongoing A/B tests.

Imagine having an A/B test running on every campaign and at every stage of your marketing process all the time. Over time, the incremental improvements across your marketing activity will generate a significant improvement in your funnel’s efficiency.

9. Boost customer lifetime value through up-sells and cross-sells

How much revenue does your business leave on the table by not remembering or implementing a series of up-sells and cross-sells?

With marketing automation, you take the human aspect out of up-selling and cross-selling by creating a series of automated rules. Let’s say you run an Ecommerce business that sells bicycle gear.

On top of generic up-sells, like reminding customers to order new tires, or inspiring them with popular Christmas gift products, you can also set up highly personalised up-sells.

For example, if a customer buys a bike model that has an optional gear upgrade, you might want to automate an email campaign or text message telling them about this upgrade 30 days before their birthday.

Over time, the impact that this type of marketing can have on your customer lifetime value can be quite dramatic.

10.Take your marketing activity to an ultra-targeted level

The ability to create targeted marketing campaigns at a huge scale is one of the biggest opportunities available to marketers today. Because, as taught in marketing 101, the more relevant an offer or product is to a potential customer, the more likely they are to hand over their money.

Never before have we had the opportunity or privilege to reach 1,000 different leads with 1,000 different messages in a fully-automated way.

I’ll leave the possibilities of this to your imagination.

11. Save time managing your social media campaigns

Most marketing automation tools allow you to manage all of your social media campaigns from within one dashboard, and post to multiple accounts in one go. While this has been easy to do with tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite for years, it’s powerful to have it connected to the same system that you use to track leads.

12. Schedule posts and campaigns ahead of time

Marketing automation tools make staying organised easy by enabling you to schedule your campaigns and social media posts ahead of time.

While this functionality has been around since the early days of email marketing and social media marketing, the added benefit of doing this from a marketing automation tool is that you’ can easily schedule different posts to different segments of your audience, based on data from the CRM system.

Instead of scheduling one message to your whole database, you could, for example, schedule five slight variations to five different segments of your audience, all a bit more personalised to their needs and interests.

13. Reduce the time it takes to create campaigns

Most marketing automation tools have a drag and drop interface, enabling you to build email campaigns, landing pages, and social campaigns with no technical or design expertise required.

By not having to schedule time in for your web design or graphic design to create campaigns, you can execute marketing campaigns more efficiently (while saving time for the design team).

14. Repurpose existing content to nurture leads

If your company has a blog, it’s quite likely that once you’ve written a blog post and shared it from your social media profiles, you do nothing.

Through marketing automation, you can give your existing content a second life by setting up automated rules to recommend content that educates your leads and customers over the customer lifecycle.

This is a great way to generate return visitors to your site and ensure that you get the most value out of your investment in content marketing.

15. Better reporting on what’s working and what’s not

By working with the data in your CRM system, your marketing automation software won’t just tell you which campaigns worked, but what type of customer they worked for.

The level of information enables you to create in-depth reports and have a greater understanding of where you should focus your effort.

16. Reward your most loyal customers with a referral program

If you use a marketing automation tool like Infusionsoft or Ontraport that enables you to create and sell products, you’ll be able to setup a referral program that rewards customers and affiliates when they promote your products for you.

How does marketing automation benefit sales?

While you’d be forgiven for thinking that marketing automation is a tool for the marketing team, some of the greatest value comes from combining CRM and marketing data to help your sales team be more efficient.

Let’s look at some of the ways your sales team can benefit from implementing marketing automation.

17. Taking the guesswork out of lead scoring

When you setup your marketing automation software, you’ll need to create a set of rules and criteria that automatically scores incoming leads based on the lead’s actions and information.

In most tools, leads are prioritised on a scale of 1-5, and then categorised as either ‘marketing qualified leads’ or ‘sales qualified leads’ or MQLs and SQLs. If a lead is classed as an MQL, it remains in a nurturing campaign until it becomes an SQL.

This means that your company’s sales team are only ever focused on converting pre-qualified SQLs, and not wasting their time on unqualified leads.

18. Prioritise your leads with lead scoring

On top of knowing whether your leads are sales qualified or not, you’ll also be able to priortise your leads based on how likely they are to convert, or the size of the deal.

If you’ve been using a CRM system over the past few years, this is hardly revolutionary, but still very valuable to ensure that you start the day focused on converting your best leads.

19. Keep your CRM data up to date

Building a CRM database is incredibly valuable, but it can quickly diminish in value if information isn’t kept up to date.

By connecting your CRM system with your marketing automation tool, you can gradually capture more and more information about your leads over time, while confirming that their key information is still the same.

20. Know exactly when to call

Along with lead scoring and prioritisation, you’ll also be able to see when a lead is thinking about your company or solutions, by tracking when they visited your website.

You can even set up alerts to see which pages they’re looking at in real time. This insight enables you to pick up the phone to qualified leads at the exact moment that they’re thinking about your company.

21. Reduce lead conversion time

By making your sales process more efficient and effective, you reduce the time it takes for a potential lead to become a customer.

When Thomson Reuters implemented marketing automation software, they found that their lead conversion time dropped by 72%, contributing to an 175% overall increase in revenue attributed to implementing the software.

22. Automatically follow-up with leads

A few years ago, a study on the Harvard Business Review suggested that you’re 60x more likely to qualify a lead if you follow up within one hour, compared to waiting 24 hours.

With automation, you can ensure that every hot lead is followed up with straight away. Whether it’s at 8pm on a Friday evening, or 6am in the morning, your automation system can be hard at work when you’re not.

When Capterra implemented marketing automation software, they found that their sales qualification rate went up by 400%, largely due to a combination of faster follow-ups and their sales team being more efficient with what they focused on.

23. Never make another cold call

If you’re not a fan of cold calling, marketing automation will make this almost obsolete – providing the marketing department deliver enough sales-qualified leads!

With the amount of data captured by automation tools, you’ll have plenty of information on your leads, from what their challenges are, to what pages on your website they clicked on and when.

The fact that marketing automation software is so comprehensive is a blessing and a curse. While it can cause quite a few headaches in researching whether or not it’s right for you, you’ll be glad of it if you do end up biting the bullet.

How do you get into Marketing Automation?

1. Know the Tools of the Trade

“That’s a tall order in this day and age,” Josh admits. In its 2017 Worldwide Cloud Report, Netskope found that the enterprises it surveyed used an average of 91 cloud-based marketing services.

Today’s marketing automation experts don’t just need to master email and automation platforms. They increasingly need a command of the tools that integrate with those platforms, including:

• Ecommerce platforms
• Lead-gen tools
• Analytics and tag-management solutions
• Data enrichment services
• Content management tools

… and more.

Of course, you can’t set out to master 91 different applications before you set out to land a job or a client. Instead, strive to become intimately acquainted with the top two or three automation platforms that are most common in your target industry.

Then, make sure you have at least category-level knowledge of the other kinds of marketing tools that integrate with them.

If you’ve heard people talk about the concept of the “T-shaped marketer,” that applies here. Marketing automation should be your central area of deep expertise, but work to expand your knowledge wide across other tools as well.

2. Know the Customer

You might hear employers refer to it as a customer journey, a marketing funnel, or a message map, but the central idea is the same: successful marketers need to match their campaigns to all the different stages of the buying cycle.

This requires both strategy and empathy. “You want somebody who can curate a journey, rather than just automate marketing tasks,” says Josh.

Getting into marketing automation at this moment in marketing history helps you here: you probably haven’t worked as a marketing automation specialist your entire career.

Draw on customer insights you’ve picked up all along the way when thinking through your automation strategy—and then perfect it by interacting with real customers.

3. Gain Meaningful Experience Across Marketing Disciplines

Great marketing automation specialists aren’t content to live inside their platform of choice. They’re endlessly curious about everything else that’s happening in their coworkers’ and clients’ businesses.

If you’ve ever mapped out an end-to-end automation sequence, at some point you’ve probably stopped to think: wow, this touches almost every part of the business. Your automation becomes many times more effective when you know things like:

• What kind of data the analytics manager is pulling in
• What kind of graphics the designer is creating for your email campaign
• What the social media manager is planning to accompany the campaign
• What tactics the copywriter has developed to increase clickthrough rates

… and so on.

But what if you’re not currently working within a marketing department? How do you know which marketing skills to brush up on?

Josh gave a simple tip in his Automated presentation: find people in the kind of roles you’d like to have on LinkedIn, and see what skills they’ve been endorsed for.

If you notice any weak spots in your own skill set, start seeking out ways to become better-rounded.

4. Apply Logic and Creativity to Your Work

With all those if/then statements and complex workflows, you probably realize that to succeed with marketing automation you need to have a logical mind.

Until AI takes over, our automation systems are only as smart as the people who build them. You need to be comfortable thinking six steps ahead in an automation sequence and swiftly deciding which of several possible pathways is most efficient.

What’s less obvious at first glance is the creativity you need to bring to the process. The best marketing automation experts have “almost an artistic flair” to their work, says Josh.

Even if you’re working on a team with people whose job it is to handle design and copy, your creativity will still give you an edge in automation. Consider…

• Building the most effective delays into email sequences
• Developing compelling calls to action
• Making sure design elements in an email look great at every screen size
• Weighing in on how messaging should change in a push notification vs. an email vs. an in-app message

Josh cites the example of Andre Chaperon’s “soap opera stories” concept. The creator of the Autoresponder Madness course doesn’t just teach the nuts and bolts of automation—he goes over the kind of email-based storytelling that keeps people clicking Open.

5. Know When to Say “No”

Once an organization grows to a certain size, automation specialists may find themselves in a tough spot.

The marketing team wants to send out a promo email. The events director needs to get an invitation out before another day goes by. The customer support team needs to spread the word about a service outage, stat. And there’s a newsletter and a product release announcement that should have gone out yesterday.

So, as the automation expert, do you just power through these emails as quickly as possible and avoid looking at your unsubscribe rate?

Or do you take a step back, look at the bigger picture, and coordinate a plan to make sure that you aren’t bombarding people with five emails in the space of a day?

Thinking strategically means knowing when to press pause on a communication plan, says Josh.

Sometimes that may mean adjusting the timing of your sequences, or creating more precise segments to ensure that your emails stay relevant. Sometimes it may mean recommending entirely different channels for a given message.

Of course, when you have to say no, you should have more than your opinion to back you up. So pay attention to the data: what usually happens when you send a certain group a certain kind of email? Which approaches get the highest and lowest clickthrough rates?

Once you understand the patterns, you can help your team use automation to get more predictable results.

6. Work on Your Juggling

“Spectacular multitaskers” thrive in marketing automation, says Josh. It’s useful to be able to hold an entire automation sequence in your mind at once, or effortlessly reconfigure timelines when a company’s priorities shift.

That’s not to say you need to be a natural-born multitasking prodigy to be a sought-after automation expert. You just need to find—or create—the right tools to help you keep all the plates spinning. Think about tools like:

• Calendars that show all the communications going out each day
• Request forms to help you take in automation requests from different sources (and get all the info you need to proceed)
• Project-management tools like Trello, Asana, or Wrike
• Reporting dashboards and data hubs
• Regular meetings or checkin calls

Creating the right structures and processes will help you shift gears faster and ensure that multitasking doesn’t devolve into chaos.

7. Be Strategic, Operational, and Tactical

“These are not all the same, and very few people can think on all three levels,” Josh warns. Here’s how to think about the differences:

• Strategy: a plan designed to achieve an overall aim
• Operation: an active process
• Tactic: an action carefully planned to achieve a specific end

For example, let’s say your company’s goal this quarter is to book 20% more consultations with new clients.

You might devise a strategy to get those new clients’ attention by promoting an ebook on a relevant high-interest topic.

Operationally, you’ll need to create a plan to produce the ebook, create and drive traffic to a download page, and build an email funnel that guides new leads to sign up for a consultation.

And at every step of the way, you’ll need to consider specific tactics to deploy to make this effective, from the content on the landing page to the tags you apply to leads who enter the funnel to the exact email subject lines you use.

Now, you might not be doing all of the creative work as the automation specialist. But you’ll need to have a firm grasp of what should happen at each level. Otherwise, new leads are sure to fall through the gaps in your automation plan.

8. Learn to Spot and Correct Errors with Grace

As an automation pro, you’re often the last line of defense before a campaign hits your audience—and you have to be prepared to speak up (politely) if anything seems off to you. Such as:

• Typos in email copy
• Off-brand or incorrectly sized imagery
• Email content that doesn’t make sense for the target audience
• Links going out without the right UTM parameters

Again, it pays to know a little bit about everything. So shadow your colleagues, read industry blogs, and even consider taking mini-courses outside your area of expertise. It will all help you correct problems and make recommendations with authority.

9. Know When to Be Lazy

Sure, you might not want to lead with “laziness” when an interviewer asks for your best qualities. But you should definitely have an instinct for the most efficient way to get something done. After all, the entire purpose of automation is to do as much as possible with as little labor as possible.

Read Also: Learn the Basics of Setting up an Effective Email Lead Generation Campaign

Josh recommends asking yourself, “Is there a way to get out of doing this (while still meeting the end goal)?” That outlook can lead to time-saving decisions like these:

• Instead of uploading CSV files to Facebook ads, use PlusThis and Drip to automatically create and refine custom audiences.
• Instead of creating a blog newsletter from scratch every week, use Drip’s RSS-to-Email feature to pull essential content into a broadcast.
• Instead of having your sales team go back and forth with prospects to book a demo, let prospects self-book with a tool like Calendly and send automatic reminders.

While you shouldn’t be afraid of hard work, you should cringe at the idea of performing the same manual task week after week. Selective laziness can actually help you get more done than colleagues who don’t bristle at busywork.