Automate the follow-up of business opportunities with workflows

Discover how to develop automation for tracking business opportunities. Generate a personalized follow-up through automated business rules.

Every company has several processes, strategic management, management of various business areas, such as commercial departments, marketing, sales, customer service, complex internal management processes, and contact with customers and prospects. In this composition, we will teach you how to automate one of these business processes, which are of utmost importance and require immediate automation at the end of the day.

This composition will address how to automate lead follow-up as part of sales automation. A company should consider the essential steps when adapting its pipeline opportunity or business follow-up processes to define checkpoints, information inputs, specified requirements, and business rules and automate them through a follow-up in its CRM or sales and marketing automation platforms with workflows.

We will address the following topics concerning the automation of opportunity tracking:

• Considerations for adapting your company's business rules and processes before automation.
• Creation of information inputs, requirements, and business rules.
• Recommendations to automate the follow-up of opportunities in your CRM with workflows.
• Expected benefits of automation.

If your company is in the discovery or adoption stage of business process automation, I invite you to read our blogs:

• Introduction to Business Process Automation.
• Process Improvement using As-Is & To Be.
• Ten reasons to automate your business processes.

Considerations to adapt the rules and business processes of your company before automation.

Before automating processes in any platform such as a CRM with omnichannel qualities or business and strategic processes automation platforms such as Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle, SAP, and others, regardless of your company's platform acquired or managed the different business areas of your company. We must start by mapping and lifting processes. In this case, focusing on sales management processes, respectively business opportunities.

Key steps to consider when mapping and mapping business opportunity processes:

• Steps or stages of the negotiation cycle: each company or organization has distinct processes and differentiated negotiation stages. 
• Definition of Macro-Processes within the negotiation channel pipeline: The principal or triggering processes and stages in each of the cycle or channel flow of your company's negotiation stages.
• Describe the journey to be performed in each of the steps or stages of the negotiation cycle: Detailed descriptions at the time of raising and mapping business opportunity processes are fundamental because, with them, you will be able to establish the subsequent workflows.
• Assignment of business owners: It is evident that there are types of opportunities that will be assigned to different owners, either by industry, or territories, among others. The important thing is to document it later in the automation. 
• Information provider: It may vary according to the execution type of each negotiation stage. 
• Information inputs or requirements: It is essential to be able to document this information to be verified and adapted to the CRM.
• Information systems: The tool or platform where the business opportunity management processes will be carried out.
• Information or requirements outputs: Crucial to document because each production confirms that the information imported at each stage has been completed to move on to the next stage of the negotiation process.
• KPI's or indicators: Performance indicators of the established inputs and business rules.
• Pipeline stages: All stages of the negotiation process.
• Inputs established in the CRM: Information that strategically enters to continue with the stage or steps within the pipeline, either within a sales or service module. 
• Rules established in the CRM with workflows: Mandatory requirements that its purpose is to record, control, and measure the actions of users or teams within the CRM.
• Norms of communication or notification: Means of contact to follow up on user activities.

Creation of information inputs, requirements, and business rules.

Once mapped and identified in a process survey, it is crucial to adapt them to the automation process management platform.

The inputs and business rules must be steps that can self-regulate the management of business opportunities. Whether for business development management (BDM) pipelines, project development, sales, or other pipeline management. These will be the strategic compass so that your teams can record, control, and measure the results and KPIs or performance indicators for the stages of the negotiation process.

Recommendations to automate the follow-up of opportunities in your CRM.

1. Know your automation platform well. First, analyze its documentation about its scope, properties, types of configurable business areas, a link between workflows of the same or different types, integrations, and limitations.
2. Define the problem or process that needs to be solved and automated.
3. Define the base property of the Workflow directed to that problem or process (contacts, companies, businesses, service tickets, quotes, events, among others).
4. Create a previous step definition diagram.
5. Define the initial trigger.
6. Define the WF goals to test the criteria.
7. Select execution properties.
8. Create execution steps, assignments to contact or lead owners, and tasks associated with responsible user or team.
9. Define follow-up steps: property types, generate records, property configuration, "IF/THEN rules" or association branching, etc.
10. Define follow-up steps to properties: Email marketing, sequences, notifications, and Enrollment to other workflows.
11. Test Workflows functionality; if successful, enable it.

Expected Benefits in Automation

Expected benefits for marketing, sales, commercial, customer experience, management, and board of directors:

Real-world scenarios for CMO, CSO, CCO, CXO, and CEOs: A good manager in any of these verticals today is looking to accomplish three types of crucial objectives in their company through automation, which are:

1. Getting nurturing, constant and effective conversion of your leads to qualified leads: Marketing is not about posting "nice things on social networks or spending opening multiple digital islands just to have a massive presence." Marketing today goes beyond that; sales-qualified leads are prospects ready to buy your products and services, "in the end, your company cares about selling, not about likes and reactions."
2. Develop robust workflows that will enhance the performance of your sales teams: Imagine that your company has many stages in the negotiation process with prospects or customers. In addition, you have a very large or even a small team. How do you ensure that the follow-up, onboarding, and lead generation will arrive or be managed correctly, if not through workflows? Which your marketing, sales, and service teams should create to simplify, streamline and give traceability to the business rules of management and take these seriously.
3. Define the overall ROI of your CX strategies: Forrester was evident in its report The ROI of CX Transformation. It clarifies where post-pandemic consumers are headed. The customer doesn't care about hearing what your company offers, but how your company solves their problems and how quickly you will give them the answer. Communicating is key. Analyze the following tips in detail:

• Perform a diagnosis of your company's current situation.
• CX will enhance your ability and insight into what you need to automate processes in your CRM with workflows.
• Your organization should calculate the possible range of the profit chain; CX-focused strategies will provide.
• It would be best if you forecasted future potential investments over the execution periods of these projects.
• Develop an intriguing ROI model that delights each stakeholder for these projects.

I invite you to read: One buyer persona to rule them all (CX)

If you are interested in learning how to automate the follow-up of business opportunities in your CRM by adapting inputs and business rules, schedule a consulting session with a consultant.