Optimize Your Sales Pipeline: The Impact of Process Mining on Revenue Operations
Transform Revenue Operations with Process Mining.
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Optimize Your Sales Pipeline: The Impact of Process Mining on Revenue Operations
The sales pipeline is the path a buyer follows from first contact to final purchase, broken down into stages including opportunity creation, qualification, requirements validation, proof of concept, proposal, negotiation, and closing. Each step is critical and requires precise management to ensure a successful sale. Post-sale service and follow-ups can ensure a risk-free renewal and open opportunities for upselling or cross-selling. Successful execution at each stage of the sales pipeline is key to revenue attainment. However, many inefficiencies and bottlenecks occur in the real world, acting as elusive roadblocks to revenue that go unnoticed in the day-to-day hustle.
Understanding the current state of the sales pipeline is key to spotting areas for improvement and optimization. Towards this pursuit, process mining emerges as a highly effective, data-driven technique that peels back the layers of your business processes, revealing hidden inefficiencies and bottlenecks, thereby providing revenue leaders with an opportunity to reshape sales pipeline management. This blog takes a closer look at process mining, its potent predictive abilities, finesse in refining processes, and its potential to steer Revenue Operations toward data-backed success.
Process Mining in Revenue Operations
Process mining is a transformative approach that can significantly enhance revenue operations. It employs data-driven techniques to analyze and visualize how business processes are being executed. When sales operations or revenue operations are enhanced with process mining insights, this knowledge can vastly improve the sales process, increasing efficiency, boosting sales, and raising revenue. Here’s how it works:
Uncovering Actual Process State
Process mining tools extract event logs from operational systems (like CRM or marketing automation systems). These logs are then analyzed to create a visual model of business processes, uncovering divergences from the defined or expected process state that may otherwise be invisible to the organization. The graph below is an example of how process mining can visualize the actual state of the sales process.
Identifying Bottlenecks and Inefficiencies
By providing a detailed view of processes, process mining can pinpoint areas where operations might be slowing down, such as lengthy approval times or repetition of tasks, or increase in the percentage of negative flows, thereby helping teams to identify areas that need improvement. It can also detect process violations such as when opportunities that skip a stage or move backwards in stage or forecast category.
For example, in the graph, opportunities are spending a lot of time on average in the Technical Win stage and the Revenue Operations organization may choose to investigate that.
Continuous Monitoring and Improvement
Process mining isn’t a one-time activity. Once process bottlenecks and inefficiencies have been identified, they can be optimized by automating routine tasks, streamlining workflows, or redesigning processes for greater efficiency. Process mining enables continuous monitoring of these process improvements over time, while identifying new opportunities for optimization as they arise. In our example of opportunities stuck in the POC stage, the process map could be re-rendered in a few weeks after the fix to see if average stage durations have improved.
Boosting the Sales Pipeline with Process Mining
Process mining has the potential to dramatically enhance the sales pipeline. Here’s how it can make a difference:
Enhancing Opportunity Creation
Process mining can provide insights into which leads are most likely to convert, helping to refine lead qualification criteria and focus resources on high-potential prospects for pipeline generation. For example, if process mining reveals that a specific marketing campaign consistently leads to a spike in SQLs, that information can be used to improve pipeline generation during the next cycle.
Improving Conversion Rates
Process mining can identify patterns and trends that lead to successful conversions by analyzing historical sales data. Types of trends include which opportunity cohorts are easier to win, which are likely to run into problems against specific competitors or what type of touchpoints are particularly useful to help advance opportunities to later stages. These insights can then be used to improve conversion rates.
Improving Forecast Accuracy
Process mining offers a powerful means of improving sales forecasting accuracy. Unlike traditional forecasting methods which can often be inaccurate, process mining enables an accurate estimation of conversion rates from each sales stage to closed won per opportunity cohort thereby providing a detailed, data-driven view of the sales forecast. Over time, the insights gained from process mining can be used to refine and improve sales forecasts’ accuracy continually. This iterative process can result in increasingly reliable forecasts, enabling better decision-making and planning.
Standardizing Sales Operations
Process mining offers a means of standardizing sales processes across reps and regions. It has the uncanny ability to find deviations from the defined policy that are otherwise hidden to the organization. Examples are missed process steps such as key fields missing, reverse flows as in opportunities moving backwards to earlier stages, or time-based anomalies such as unusually long time spent in certain stages.
BigLittle: Leading the Charge in the Revenue Operations Revolution with Smart Insights
In the high pressure world of go-to-market operations, having the right tools that can maximize pipeline generation and performance is crucial.
BigLittle is actively shaping the emerging landscape of Revenue Operations (RevOps). Functioning as a comprehensive revenue observability and intelligence system, we meticulously manage all revenue processes from inception to completion, effectively unifying the intricacies of marketing, sales, and customer success operations.
Operating seamlessly at a level above your CRM and other GTM tools and using process mining as a key enabling technology, we help RevOps teams’ conversions to revenue boost pipeline generation while maximizing conversions to revenue.
With BigLittle, you’re not just embracing the future of RevOps – you’re actively creating it.
Get in touch with us today!
