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How to Use Process Management to Optimise Your Sales Operations

Sales operations have taken on a more robust form in recent years. With the arrival of inbound leads to complement your outbound work, and the larger connectivity of the world, sales operations have never been more complex.

Their management is the key to success and helping you avoid falling into pits such as overspending or overcomplicating your processes.

Let’s learn how to use process management to help optimise your business’ sales operations.

Clear Workflow & Passing Over of Tasks

It’s important to remember that sales operations are described as a funnel, one that process management helps you navigate. Sales operations are the processes through which your sales funnel works.

Your lead or prospect will start at the very top of the funnel, and it is the responsibility of different sales team members to move them along the funnel to become paying customers.

Sometimes, they may cross over with members from Marketing for certain leads. For instance, a lead that has expressed interest but stopped responding or informed that they did not currently have the budget may be moved to a newsletter to nurture them into becoming a customer later on.

Other times, members within the same team will pass the activities from one to the other. An easy example of this is a Sales Development Representative being the first responder to an inbound lead, but then orienting the lead to have a demo call with an Account Executive. 

It’s a bit of a juggling act, and the minute a cog is slightly out of place, it’s very easy to lose out on a potential sale. Everyone on the team needs to know what the next step is for the various scenarios, and what information needs to be captured for the next individual stepping up to know.

Having your processes mapped and shared in some way is an absolute necessity in sales, and is typically part of the training cycle of any new salesperson. Often, they’ll refer back to such documentation in their first few months on the job. It’s one of the main reasons why we map processes in the first place – to keep this company knowledge accessible and to ensure that the processes are being followed correctly. 

Without process management working correctly, your sales operations would be chaotic and confusing to your team members, resulting in an immeasurable amount of lost opportunities. 

Having them streamlined via process mapping and process reviews is vital to help you optimise them and see success.

Sales Responsibility Matrix Reflected in the Process

We mentioned this briefly above, but different members of the team will have different responsibilities – even within the same team. Process management helps you parse through these responsibilities.

Your Sales Development Representative (SDR) is not doing the same as your Account Executive (AE). Sometimes, there are also SDR Managers who help organise SDRs and assign them their tasks, lead lists, or territories. Your AE’s also may have different tasks amongst themselves, as they’re typically divided by territory and different territories may require different actions. 

An example is that sometimes an SDR can make an initial demo or qualifying call, in other cases, it may be passed right to the AE. Additionally, AEs are not as focused on new business as SDRs, but more on upselling and maintaining relationships with your existing portfolio. They may look for new business via referrals from happy clients, or simply focus on strengthening existing relationships.

You also have your C-Suite, whose tasks are generally either focused on organising and orchestrating the entire sales team, researching new opportunities or profiles to go after, coming up with strategies to try, and finding ways to optimise the current process.

It’s vital that everyone knows what task falls under the umbrella of what title. Your process management should reflect this as well, which means it’s best if the responsibility matrix, whether it’s RACI or RATSI, is reflected in the process itself.

Make clear what tasks fall under what title, and then assign the task to that title. Whenever there is confusion about whose task it is, it becomes easy to ascertain and follow up with any questions regarding status or outcomes.

Avoid Overspending on Tools that Prevent Optimisation

A common feature of sales teams and sales operations is the need for different tools to make certain repetitive tasks easier to arrive at optimisation.

Finding leads, writing emails or scripts, making calls, sending large quantities of emails, organising your leads with their information – all of this can be segmented into different tools very easily.

But this may be detrimental to your bottom line and lead to more overspending that is not positively reflected in the revenue that comes back in.

Proper process management will help you narrow down on tools that are unnecessary or superfluous to your needs, and instead help you consolidate the number of tools you need by spotting duplication or spots where you’re spending too much.

Process management can help you find a singular sales tool that may take over several tasks. An example of this can be HubSpot, which works as a CRM, mass emailing tool, and calling tool – all in one. Another example is Amplemarket, which serves to automate sending emails, create sequences, make calls, connect to LinkedIn, and also find leads.

You can cut costs dramatically and also simplify your processes in one fell swoop via process management.

Find Improvement Spots to Optimise Sales Operations

Process management of your sales operations will help you find improvement spots to further optimise them.

We have a clear example above, with finding one tool that will help account for several aspects of the process and help you save costs. Anything that helps automate certain tasks and give time back to your sales team, such as follow-up automation or LinkedIn automations would fall in this category as well. 

The more time your sales team has, the more time they can dedicate to tasks that truly need their input. Examples of this are crafting email copy, spending more time on calls and more time on research or social selling.

Additionally, you can find spots where time is being lost due to internal situations. A hand-off from an SDR to an AE that takes too long, missing documents making negotiations take longer for an AE and causing the deal to go south, creating a new, personalised pitch deck every time for a demo – these are all time-consuming and tasks that can be fixed and optimised.

Process management will also help you figure out how best to use your team’s talents – something which is especially important to keep in mind for sales operations. 

You may have SDRs that demonstrate ease and success over the phone, whereas others can set meetings via email or social selling. 

Certain AEs may be a better fit for a particular client profile, as they build their relationships patiently over time, allowing clients to trust them and then offer referrals. Others may be able to generate relationships quickly and get all the paperwork signed fast.

Proper process management from the C-Suite makes it possible to see these differences and assign clients, tasks, and territories correctly to the correct profile. It’s also vital when pairing SDRs with AEs to keep this in mind, as some partnerships may work better than others. And, whenever a promotion or other change happens, process management will help guide what that will look like, making it an important internal map.

Conclusion – Process Management for Sales Operations is a no brainer!

Put plainly, process management is absolutely instrumental for sales operations to be successful, and thus for your company to be successful.

Without process management, your sales team will have an incredibly hard time selling your product or service, resulting in less revenue and a problem for you.

Optimising your sales operations is not complex, and indeed should be a continuous practice – one that can continue thanks to process management.

If you’d like to learn more about process management and its uses, make sure to request access to our library of resources here at Skore.

Process Management for Service Improvement

More prevalent in governmental or healthcare roles, service improvement as part of process improvement is a phrase we are coming across a lot more.

We work on it with clients, and we believe we can help them with it. Having a wealth of experience in this sector and an abundance of tips to share, in this article, we’ll go over all things service improvement, and how process management, our specialty, fits into it.

Ready?

What Is Service Improvement

At its core, service improvement is empowering staff to feel confident about taking on a wider range of tasks. 

Service improvement covers:

  • Involving various teams with decision-making and training allowing staff to cover a wider range of tasks
  • Regular meetings between staff leaders and management teams
  • Talent mapping and training needs analysis (TNA) that are relevant to each department’s development plan
  • Development opportunities provided for all staff that meets their needs and requirements
  • The development of more specialised staff through TNA and an education programme to support all staff
  • Sharing knowledge with others
  • Engaging on the ground with partners
  • Motivating staff
  • Encouraging continuous quality improvement

Service improvement is often connected to service transformation, with improvement focusing on bettering what is already there and transformation focusing on making changes.

There are three phases to service improvement:

  • Discover and understand – you want to make sure you understand how things are currently working. Not just internally, but also taking into account any external factors that affect your service and its quality. To do this, you want to make sure that you can:
    • Identify your service’s core purpose
    • Know the demand for your service
    • Know your capacity to deliver
    • Understand customer flow in your service
  • Generate and develop ideas – once you understand how your service is currently working, you can begin to think of ideas to improve and transform it. Involve everyone that contributes to the service: they will not only know what is happening on the ground, but they will probably bring you a variety of ideas to improve it based on their experiences. With this, focused quantity and creativity are encouraged, as you can build off of ideas. 
  • Implementation – having done the tests and found an idea that works, you can now implement those ideas on the ground. This in itself requires a process to make sure it is done correctly and there is no one missing out. You need to:
    • Have a measurement plan in place to evaluate the implementation’s success
    • Know what data you plan to collect to measure this success
    • Have a clear communication system in the process and with your management
    • Know who is responsible for what at all times

In all three phases of service improvement, there are three factors you always need to consider. They are:

  • Stakeholders – anyone from management to patients or citizens in the case of healthcare or government are stakeholders as they are the ones that need to understand and essentially have the change work for their improvement.
  • Measurements – as we saw above, it is necessary to know what the measurements currently are and what they are after implementation to truly know success has been achieved
  • Sustainability – finally, focus on the ability to maintain those improvements. It’s one thing to have a super involved individual, but you can’t solely rely on that happening in every location, or that the individual will stay. You want to develop processes that are self-sustaining and will last.

If done correctly, service improvement done well will lead to quality improvement, which the NHS defines as a “systematic approach to improving service quality, efficiency and morale – not just a mechanism to solve problems in failing parts of the organisation. It is a way of expanding improvement beyond organisational or functional boundaries, so that impact is possible across the wider health and social care system”.

Service Improvement vs Process Management vs Service Design

If you are at all familiar with process management, especially as it pertains to continuous improvement, this will all sound similar.

Service improvement focuses on helping a specific service be the best it can be at any point in time. It involves a lot of moving parts and tight control and awareness of how those parts make a better whole for the entire team.

Process management is the steps you take to get to that improvement. And while we typically focus on business process management, it can be applied to services as well. After all, the end goal in both cases is always continuous improvement

This means both service improvement and process management require those in charge to constantly be on the lookout for things that can be improved. Anything from a task that is taking too long to doubling up on information is something to keep note of as unnecessary and negative to the entire process.

Service design, on the other hand, is the design of new services. Specifically, it is “the activity of planning and organising a business’s resources to directly improve the employee’s experience and indirectly improve the customer’s experience”.

The goal is to create a service that responds to your organisation’s needs, both internal and external, with processes in place that serve this purpose. One of the outcomes of service design is eventual service improvement.

For a quick refresher, take a look at the chart below:

Service ImprovementProcess ManagementService Design
Arriving at an improvement of services offered by measuring data, working with stakeholders, empowering staff, and having good communication.Managing the entirety of processes on a constant basis to ensure they run smoothly and you can find improvement spots.Creation of a service in its entirety, keeping processes in mind to arrive at the end goal of continuous service improvement.

How Does Process Management Lead to Service Improvement 

There should not be any doubt at this point that process management will absolutely lead to service improvement.

The phases described above are the same as those involved with continuous process improvement, and the end goal in all cases is the same.

They use Six Sigma and the 7 Lean Wastes. The NHS’ own Handbook on Service Improvement dedicates an entire section to process mapping – something we consider ourselves experts in here at Skore. While the industry may be different from a regular organisation, healthcare and government institutions both also require process management to be successful in achieving their service goals. 

Good process management is the key to it.

Without a clear plan in place for process management, services fall apart and issues mount. 

At Skore, we’ve recently begun working with clients in these areas, and we have discovered how much we can help them.

Our platform provides mapping services easy for everyone involved to follow, incorporates responsibilities from the get-go so there is no confusion, gives you the data points you need, points out improvement points based on that data, and provides you with the possibility to run examples before implementing anything and seeing how they may affect the overall service experience.

The best part?

It provides you with a case study for you to show stakeholders which drastically lowerswait times for decision-making as it is a data-first approach.

Conclusion

Service improvement is, at the end of the day, a natural outcome of process management.

So many organisations focus on service above all, and the quality of that service, as they serve their patients or customers.

But the skills required are essentially the same. Which means the tools can be used in both cases.

If you’d like to learn more about how Skore can provide you with everything you need to elevate your services, get in touch or join our resource community for more exclusive content like this.