Improve Customer Acquisition through BPM

“Excellent! We are getting almost 20 enquiries in a month. I never thought in our industry if it is possible”, said by the MD of North America based Leading Manufacturer of Pressure & Flow Control Equipment to the Oil & Gas Industry. 

The journey started almost 12 months back, we were introduced by another customer who was CEO of an IT company and close friend to him. In this Initial meeting, the MD was not much convinced that a Management consulting firm with so called expertise in Managing Business through Processes would bring any change or even understand this highly technical industry products. 

Can BPM improve Customer acquisition? here are the five steps we followed that converted a doubt into a WOW.

1. Get your objective clear: We need more sales, is a desire but it is not an objective. How do you measure the performance of an end to end process. Getting 20 qualified sales enquiries for……. From….. is a much better a measurable objectives.  

2. Plan a strategy: “What customer wants and how do we deliver it faster, better and efficiently” are one of the few important questions. It helped us to identify the right sales and marketing tools and techniques, for ex: What type of content is searched more, what are the information or support a customer is looking for, what is the problem, how do we know the effectiveness of the content that we published, how can we retarget customer with more relevant information…. And many more. Strategy helped us to think through what matters most to the business and in this case business is “Sales”. Strategy helps to plan the required ecosystem and integration among all components aka “Architecture”

3. Establish Architecture: Architecture for Sales, sound irrelevant or not applicable. But the fact is, not one single activity or one single person or one single tool alone will do the wonder. It is a collaboration of people, technologies, guided by company, and industry’s business rules and compliances. Unless we see a clear integration among all of them, we can not find where is the link broken, where is the missing piece in the entire journey. Are we doing over or under, we can only have “best” guess but surely not the real truth. Sales too has an architecture, how offline and online sales integrates. Even Online sales has many components from website to SEO to Lead Generation. If the website is more aligned for message A whereas SEO is more executed for Direction B, it does not matter how much efforts, time and $ you invest, it will not be successful.

4. Identify All Critical and Enabling Processes: Architecture helped to identify the critical and support processes. It helped to identify what are the processes should be executed in house and what processes should be outsourced. For ex: Content Creation Process a critical process should be performed internally as internal people are best to define technical aspects, define problems correctly and explain the solutions with much more details. But one sub process of Content creation, proof reading, making content understandable is to be outsourced for the content writers. We got two advantages from this process ownership assignment. The technical people are sometimes not good in technical writing so that can carried away a lot with the technical jargons. But once this document is reviewed and proof read by the expert writers not from the same industry, they understand and convert the content in more layman language. We found all relevant processes in Sales, from start to end and checked who should perform, where it should perform, how to measure the effectiveness of the process and link with the Big Objectives so that we know:What is not workingWhere do we need to seeWho should be contactedHow much is the difference 

5. Regular Monitor and Update: Measure what is defined and find the gaps. We used some AI tools too to measure the visitors online behaviour for the content. There are sophisticated tools that help you to  find how people visited on your content, on which part of the content how much time was spent, even if they copied any part of the content too. There are methods to “Scan” how a visitor’s journey was on the published content that can be a blog or one of the webpage on your website. This helped us to identify what really customer wants, and we narrowed down our content, SEO, lead generation and other process approach to generate what matters most to the customers. Many hypothesis made and failed or proved successful.  

This structured approach helped us to remain focused on our objectives, we had an absolute reason if something was not working, and the reason behind it, Where should we invest and how much, helped to keep the budget in control. And finally when customer mentioned we are getting enquiries from Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia… all over the places without sending our sales fleet in these countries, we know things are working in right direction. 

That was a happy ending of the day end of Wednesday Nov 22, 2023 at 7:30 PM (IST).