Category: Business Process Management

The key to your first successful change initiative is picking the right process to target for improvement. Although you probably witness an abundance of everyday inefficiencies in your job, you want to start by selecting a process that will allow you to celebrate a quick win. Choosing a process that is central to driving your business is important, but it does not have to be a large, unwieldy process. Don’t overlook small business processes as they can have a big impact. Look for repeatable projects. When there’s repetition present, there’s always an opportunity to create or improve a formal process around it!

To help you choose the right project for your initiative, here are five telltale signs that a process is ripe for change.

#1 – A Project Lacks Visibility & Transparency

Do you find yourself or your team spending inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out the status of the project? Do you have a maze of steps and gatekeepers to go through to gain valuable insight such as the budget or who’s responsible for what? You are not alone. It can be difficult to attain critical information related to contracts and near impossible to run reports on those contracts. Other examples of a lack of visibility or transparency in a project might involve a team member having to email the whole group to find out where a contract is in its lifecycle, or the budget runs over because the latest budget document wasn’t updated correctly.

#2 – Simple Projects Take Too Long

Do standard contracts, such as NDAs, take days rather than hours or minutes to complete? When simple contract workflows get mired in administrative pileups, this can cause larger project delays or prevent projects from getting off the ground in the first place. In many organizations, it takes more than two days to execute a standard NDA. Wrangling the various interested parties can be a struggle, with many teams involving 5 or more people in the administration of a typical contract.

#3 – Project Inefficiencies Cause Missed Deadlines or Opportunities

Another key trait of an ineffective process is that teams miss deadlines, or can’t capitalize on quick-turnaround opportunities. It could be simply not receiving client feedback in a timely manner in order to respond and turn an adverse situation into a sales opportunity. Alternatively, perhaps your marketing team is unable to capitalize on a key promotion opportunity because it cannot wrangle outside vendors in time. It could mean that the lack of a defined set of steps necessitates that your sales team has to “go with their gut,” leaving valuable revenue on the table. Either through a lack of visible information or intelligence or delays caused by inefficiencies, teams that cannot execute deliverables to their full potential are in need of business process improvements.

#4 – Critical Project Paperwork Goes MIA

Contract administration is a crucial function, but the storage and retrieval piece is often neglected. It does not become a problem, until the unthinkable happens – an NDA cannot be located and produced to diffuse a precarious situation. This leaves your company vulnerable. For many companies, contracts are left to languish on a shared drive buried in a labyrinth folder system. At the opposite end of this spectrum, companies might have more than one contract repository (some with over 10+!) making it very challenging to find an executed contract on demand. With these situations, it is a wonder that anyone can find an executed contract when they need it!

#5 – Spreadsheets are Still Your Go-To Project Tracking Method

If your tracking system is a series of spreadsheets with various users contributing or accessing pertinent information, your project is ripe for an overhaul. No matter how sophisticated the pivot table, or how interactive your Google doc seems, spreadsheets do not give you a real-time, all-encompassing view of the project and its status. Because spreadsheets are dependent on the users adding information, your project tracking is only as organized and accurate as your team members. Teams consist of humans, and humans make mistakes. Why leave that up to chance when there is a better way to track projects and deliverables?

Inspired to improve a process that suffers from one or more of these qualities? Onit can help you be a change agent for your organization. Download our whitepaper, Your First Enterprise App: 6 Ways to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

First things first: What exactly is an “intrapreneur?” While the concept comes up frequently in Eric Reis’ recent book The Lean Startup, the term itself has been part of business vernacular for decades. Its definition is simple – an intrapreneur is “a manager within a company who promotes innovative product development and marketing.”

Even in 1992 this wasn’t a new concept, it simply gave a name to something that had been at the heart of business innovation for decades. To this day, intrapraneurs are everywhere in business. Whether a part of a sales and marketing team or a back-office legal department, intrapraneurs are constantly challenging the status quo and driving new ideas that help your business grow.

I know what you must be thinking at this point – Isn’t promotion of innovative ideas just part of the job? Shouldn’t all sales managers already be striving to grow the business? What makes an intrapreneur so special? What sets them apart?

The key to making a lasting impact as an intrapraneur is in understanding that process and workflow are at the heart of innovation.

Unfortunately, innovation and growth can be challenged by inadequate software used to manage process – like email and spreadsheets – and a lack of sufficient visibility into the process.

If you were to ask an intrapraneur if they are making their program or business process better, they most likely would say yes. But if you follow up by asking them, “How do you know?” – you might get some interestingly vague responses.

In this blog post, we hope to give you some ideas on how to innovate despite corporate IT and inadequate software tools and overcome uncertainty in process improvement.

Lean Startup Principles and Smart Process Apps Make Innovation Easy

Here are three guidelines from Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup that might help your company get started:

1.    Establish a Baseline with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The first step towards that next ground-breaking business idea is to establish a baseline of data around how your users, whether they are the company’s customers or an army of sales reps, will actually perform your process.

This is where Onit can help.

Onit will build you a MVP within a matter of hours or days that you can get in the hands of your customers to see how they perform with your product.

2.    Tune the Baseline Toward the Ideal

Now that you have an Onit App or two that your customers are using, you can begin to fine-tune the system.

Onit automatically records every action a user takes when they are using your Apps. That means you can extract the data to analyze on your own, or Onit can build you amazing reporting dashboards to help you stay on top of your processes.

The detailed reporting capabilities will allow you to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies standing in the way of innovation. By carefully analyzing these bottlenecks, you can make the executive decision to change aspects of the process. Perhaps that API call to Salesforce.com should execute before it gets to the legal team, or maybe the VP of Sales should review that contract before it makes it to the team in India.

When you have the ability to rapidly iterate on your design, you can quickly refine your process to be efficient and effective – even if it wasn’t at first.

3.    Pivot or Persevere

After a sufficiently long period of execution with your App, you’ll have lots of data and analyses on how your business could work. You’ll have insights that simply weren’t possible before.

With this information, you can make a clear decision on whether to continue scaling and building on your idea or to pivot to another one altogether.

If you decide to pivot, Onit licenses by the process, so it is very easy to switch to a totally different design without significantly affecting your cost.

Execution is All That Matters

Whether you are a Silicon Valley startup or a Fortune 100, execution is all that matters. You can have the best idea in the world for your business, but unless you make it happen and measure the results, you’ll never make an impact.

Onit is here to help you do just that.

We believe that process and workflow are the most important ingredients in business and we know a good deal about lean startup process improvement because we are a startup ourselves.

Email us today at [email protected] to start a conversation with one of our business process consultants. We will help you refine the design of your process and build your minimum viable product Apps to establish your baseline.

With the Onit Team and Smart Process Apps on your side, you can pave the way for all the intrapreneurs within your company to take your business to the next level.

Last week marked a major milestone in Microsoft’s company history when they held their first Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) with their new CEO, Satya Nadella.

Nadella has proven to be remarkably sophisticated in his thoughts on running Microsoft – from evoking quotes from German philosopher Friedrich Niezsche in describing his corporate vision to joking about sorting algorithms when expressing their “mobile-first, cloud-first” market strategy.

Beyond Nadella’s scholarly sense of humor, he also expressed some hard-earned wisdom about running one of the world’s largest, and arguably most important, channel sales organizations.

Here are some key insights all sales leaders can learn from Nadella:

1. Your Channel Partnerships are Integral to Adding Leverage to Your Business Growth

Simply stated. It’s important to foster these relationships.

Your direct sales organization can only generate so many customer touches a day, but when each of your sales reps has multiple partners collaborating with them on sales opportunities, you have effectively multiplied the power of your sales organization.

Unfortunately, most sales organizations do not align their sales personnel with their channel and other partners as well as they should.

One rep from your organization likely maps to five or ten different reps in partnering organizations, and with each organization, different CRM and content management systems are used that are often incompatible across corporate lines. This makes it extremely difficult to collaborate effectively.

Onit has been working with IT channel resellers and top vendors such as Microsoft, VMware, Dell, and Google to improve their channel relationships with business process Apps that cross the corporate communication barrier.

In addition to providing visibility across multiple corporate environments, Onit’s rapidly adaptable workflow management system allows us to quickly modify business processes to optimize your channel strategy over time.

2. Keeping a Lean Team Structure Can Help You Have Consistent Execution

The day following Nadella’s keynote address at the Microsoft WPC, he announced a company-wide layoff of 18,000 employees over the next year. Most of that was to trim some of the fat from the Nokia acquisition, but a significant amount of this layoff is to reduce some of the structural leadership layers that were bloating the decision-making process. The idea is to make leadership teams more lean and capable of quickly adapting and making decisions.

Keeping a lean team structure like this can help you attain more consistent execution across your sales leadership, and that’s a good thing when it comes to ensuring your customers experience the same high caliber of performance from your sales teams.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to manage that consistent execution across your sales teams, even if your sales team is already as lean as possible.  

Process can help create a healthy culture of consistent execution but processes run with spreadsheets and emails tend to fray out of control over time.

Onit can help you design a series of Business Process Apps that will help you maintain a consistent level of execution across your teams, all while providing the level of agility to change and stay optimized over the competition.

3. Increasingly Ubiquitous Technology Makes Human Attention the Most Valuable Commodity

The “Internet of Things” – and as Salesforce.com calls it – the “Internet of Everything” is fast approaching, with sensors on everything from our refrigerators to children’s diapers.

This data, stored and managed in the cloud, provides a wealth of wisdom to those who are interested. But there is a downside ….And this is the point Nadella made in his keynote at WPC.

With so many resources and information available at the click of a button, human interaction is becoming the most valuable commodity on earth. And as a result, productivity tools are even more important than ever.

We at Onit couldn’t agree more, especially when it comes to the attention of your sales team. It’s critical to be as efficient as possible so they can focus on high value tasks like closing deals and driving revenue.

At Onit, we work with our customers to develop custom business process workflows for everything from prospecting to opportunity management to account lifecycle management and everything in between. This is all integrated with your preferred system of record, whether it’s Salesforce.com, SugarCRM or an in-house proprietary system.

Don’t waste time with someone else’s vision of what a CRM is supposed to do. Let us build your vision for sales productivity. We can build an App for you. Contact us today for a complimentary consultation of one of your sales processes. 

Every sales organization has three different types of reps:

• ‘A’ Players who are great performers regardless of the systems and tools they use, however, because they get results, they have a ‘rock star’ mentality and thus are more difficult to manage. This is your top 10-20%.
• ‘C’ Players who never get with the program and end up firing themselves by constantly missing quota – these are the bottom 10-20% that contribute to the natural churn every sales organization experiences.
• ‘B’ Players who are the most important and constitute the vast majority of your sales organization, usually 60-80%. From this group you can achieve the most efficient boost in sales with the least possible amount of investment because they are extremely coachable and follow process exceptionally well.

The upshot of this ‘B’ player majority being able to follow process exceptionally well is that if you provide this team with the right tools to run a well-designed process, they will boost the revenue in the majority of your customer base.

The challenge comes in providing the tools required to manage a well-designed process. Most companies try to fit a workflow into their CRM system or SharePoint, and neither of these systems are built explicitly with the intention of building and managing workflows. Moreover, a well-designed process inherently must change with the evolving needs of your business – so even if you were able to create a workflow in your CRM or SharePoint, it is difficult or even impossible to change the process once it is in action.

As a result, most sales organizations end up ignoring process optimization all together. They stick with ‘back to basics’ programs in the hopes that if they make more calls, send more email blasts, buy more ads, or take more ‘decision makers’ out to lunch, they will get that incremental boost in sales they need for their shareholders.

Dedicated Processes Have Dedicated Tools

The ‘B’ players who you want to get that big boost from need a focused, dedicated system to work with to accomplish the tasks prescribed in your process. Imagine if it was as simple as your sales managers telling reps “there’s an app for that” – a simple interface that was designed to enable the sales reps do that one thing very well. And, if that same system could notify them at the right time and place to do that one thing, you can be sure they won’t miss their cue to shine.

Managers need visibility into the overall performance of the process in order to understand the bottlenecks and performance gaps – reporting that shows them exactly how to improve on the process so that your customers get the strategic output you believe will make the difference.

We’re Onit

Fortunately, there is a team that can help you raise the selling level of your ‘B’ players.

Using Onit Apps, you can get a handle on that middle 60% of ‘B’ players to drive the team with unprecedented insight and control in a way that they will understand and quickly adopt.

Onit’s team of consultants will guide you through every step of the way to designing and implementing a world-class workflow solution – all within a matter of days. Onit Apps are built from the ground up with change in mind, and the Onit team will help you analyze reporting from your process to continuously improve and get a dramatically bigger impact.

Request a free consultation with an Onit team member today to talk about your goals – we will build a process diagram for you and implement a demo of that process in an Onit App for you to see first-hand what our software platform can do you for you – free of charge. 

Sales force automation is a powerful concept. The promise of keeping sales focused on the important areas of their job (working with customers and closing deals) while minimizing the administrative areas (updating records, transcribing notes) has spawned an industry of CRM vendors. These systems often become all encompassing within a company, sending out tendrils to every department. They become the system of record.

This has laid the groundwork for building a cohesive customer experience across all stages. Each different department is able to access the data from previous and concurrent interactions. As the holistic customer experience becomes the organizational focus, more is needed out of a sales automation system than tracking the data. 

The interactions that begin to happen between groups and departments needs tools that clearly define, track, and report on who is responsible at each step and who is taking over. This is driving the shift towards systems of engagement that manage the human aspect of processes. 

The primary function of any systems or Apps that add a layer of engagement onto a system of record is to make the processes happening around the data clear. A system of record is only as good as the data included into it. Without clear (and simple) process for capturing and sharing data, the records in a database can quickly get outdated. This can cause internal confusion and have a negative impact on the customer experience.

With the rise of Enterprise Apps – SaaS software focused on specific tasks that are easy to implement and run – adding the engagement layer to a system of record does not require major infrastructure changes. Apps can provide an easy-to-use front-end for your internal users, while pushing back relevant data to the system of record already in place.

With an App platform, each department or group can build exactly what it needs to get its work done. Updating the system of record happens behind the scenes without affecting the front-end workflow. The flexibility of Apps means that they can also be changed quickly – sometimes even on the fly by end-users – without disrupting the entire system or process.

Data collection in a system of record has been, and continues to be, an important element of sales operations. As more departments get involved in the customer experience, matching process with that data will become increasingly important to companies who want to maintain their advantage. 

Come see how Onit Apps can help you transition to a system of engagement.