Your Salesforce.com system is only as good as your business processes. If your processes are not well-defined or controlled, then you will only have a giant database, not a system. There will not be the thrust you were hoping for to power your various parts of your organization.
Process mapping is both strategy and planning. It is a way to organize how your people and your customers should behave. Then it is making Salesforce.com do the hard work of powering those described and prescribed processes.
In our Salesforce.com consulting, we work hard on process first and foremost. Here are some of the things necessary for Salesforce success:
- Capture Action Steps. The specific action steps need to be identified within a process. These become the respective tasks within Salesforce.com that get tracked for completion and setting next steps.
- Identify Roles. People will come and go. Roles will remain. Some people play multiple roles. Process is focused on the specific roles – who does what and when. Salesforce.com process mapping helps your team to know what the delineations of responsibility look like when your offense is running in full force.
- Segment By Stages. Whether you are managing a pipeline of sales leads or a queue of support cases, there is a process these move through. The stages which constitute progress need to be articulated.
- Key Metrics and Reporting. Effective management means having a dashboard of reports of the progress of your processes being executed by your team. This gives control which is important for driving execution. A process without measurement is just good intentions. Active management and engagement comes from knowing what is happening in real-time.
- Training And Documentation. Your team is aligned when they do the steps in cadence with your process. Your leadership via training and documentation needs to be captured and distributed. As new feedback is attained, you must update in real-time and have ongoing resources to help your team know what to do.
The art of process mapping helps to introduce efficiencies into your business that create levels of automation and predictability. It is what helps to brand your business and build trust with customers.
Salesforce.com can run various parts of your operations beyond sales. The integration of your overall processes needs to be first mapped and then translated into customizations of your system to bend to your process ideals.
What does your process look like?
