Subprocesses

Many software projects get caught between two divergent ideas: The high level, elevator pitch, process; and the nitty, gritty, piece of functionality. Rationalizing these two things is the trick to successfully deploying an application.

At our company, Bluewolf, we have defined the area in between these as the "subprocess." Our firm focuses on building and automating Demand Generation to Customer Care processes. We typically engage with organizations whose processes need updating, tweaking, or optimizing. We work with Marketing, Sales, Sales Ops, Channel Management, and Finance to define and automate the flow of information from customer inquiry to customer service.

Many people call this process CRM. And while CRM captures the high level idea, it misses the mark in recognizing the hundreds and thousands of processes that go into an effective Lead to Order process. In today's web driven world, where relationships are often predicated on a suppliers ability to serve up on-line content on a personalized, one-to-one basis, it is the subprocess that will ultimately determine a businesses effectiveness.

Here is an example: a customer of ours was having an issue because it had TOO MANY leads. Imagine that. And it could not separate the good leads from the bad leads. So many times sales people were wasting cycles on the bad leads. To solve this problem, we created an Intelligent Lead Subprocess. This subprocess created a lead scoring matrix, and automated the scoring of each lead. Then, the subprocess grouped the leads according to their score, and served them up to the sales people in a prioritized fashion. The customer's close ratio increased by 16%.

Subprocesses are the "plays" that an effective CRM system allows. They are the drivers of user adoption, and they have the greatest positive effect on the ROI of a Demand Generation >> Customer Care project. Most importantly, they are measurable.

For an example of the subprocess above, see http://www.screencast.com/users/ChrisP_at_Bluewolf/folders/Jing/media/7c6231e5-ed0b-4bba-9db4-089e164d93c6