Do you know whether your products are profitable?

How do you drive sales? Product marketing, surely? Your good marketing people put together a product or service that consumers simply can’t refuse.

The legal team check it – it doesn’t break any laws.

The finance team check it – the forecasts look great – you should get some fantastic revenue growth.

Finally the board sign it off and it’s launched into the market.

What happens next? The sales figures are probably reviewed after four or five weeks, at the next month’s management meeting. Budgets and campaigns will be set and managed according to how the figures are reported.

It’s a system that generally works pretty well in the long rage, but is it the best system to ensure your products are successful for your business?

What happens if demand leaps in the first few days?

What happens if the campaign has no effect on the sales of the product?

Problems like these simply can’t be picked up on a monthly review cycle. Even weekly meetings introduce a very long lag time to responding to any issues associated with proactive sales management.

By integrating your sales campaigns into your business process management (BPM) system it’s possible to create far more profit-centric and market-response-based approach. As well as automating much of the reporting closed feedback loops can monitor success and failure of campaigns, hour by hour if needed. Sales and CRM systems are tied into BPM. You then define the marketing success and failure criteria. This is then monitored in real-time. Your planning can now respond far more appropriately to the market response to your marketing campaigns.
There are many systems working around the marketing and sales engine of your business. How they are managed is intrinsic to the success or failure of your marketing campaigns.

Traditionally the issue has been that the systems associated with different aspects of the business have been island solutions. These were never connected and could not interact, to form the closed loops necessary to monitor the metrics associated with the business actions they measured.

Whole systems have all too often been set up to just sell more. These systems don’t measure take up, or analyse the impact of take up of products and services. Departments often found themselves out of synch with business requirements, with either not enough resources, or too many. Sometimes call centres got flooded if there was unexpected demand, sometimes purchasing couldn’t give enough notice of requirements to seal the best deal.

Using a combination of closed feedback process steps within your business it is now possible to analyse how a marketing campaign is progressing much earlier and much more effectively. If it is wildly successful you can gear up your call centres far earlier and get mail requirements set more realistically etc. If the campaign is performing poorly the alarms are set off at objective pre-defined points, on time and they are aimed at the right people. The business becomes more agile. Waste is reduced and profits increased.

This isn’t utopia; this is all possible using your existing systems. By defining the business processes that existing systems support, it is possible to elaborate your existing systems into a BPM that automates many steps in your business, provides rigor for the manual steps and alerts out of range key performance indicators (KPIs) to your key staff.

The value this system business process system can add to your business, especially in a service organisation, is substantial. Call Keith Mitchell on 0207 402 0027 to discuss how to create more business value and improve your profitability.