Sales process and marketing campaigns impact sales results. Yet, business leaders find it challenging to identify bottlenecks and optimize sales management processes and marketing strategies since these processes are dynamic, complex and impacted by external factors. Process mining sales can tackle this issue by visualizing the sales and marketing processes and comparing them with the defined targets.
Here are 6 process mining use cases for marketing and sales:
1. Monitor sales processes
Challenge: Commercial leadership provides ideal sales guidelines to follow during customer-sales teams interactions. However, businesses often do not know to which extent sales reps follow these rules and procedures.
Solution: Process mining helps analysts visualize the entire sales process from lead generation to the closed deal. This provides insights about interaction with customers, steps the sales reps follow and throughput time between each activity. Analysts can monitor the actual sales processes and compare them with the ideal models by using process discovery and conformance checks.
In one of the process mining case studies, a Portuguese retailer used process mining to continuously monitor their sales processes, specifically customer return sales. They also analyzed their customer support quality and its impact on customer satisfaction with the help of process mining.
2. Design ideal sales processes
Challenge: Sales teams often complain about designing a sales process that is flexible depending on the differences in customer size, sector, product type and contract value.
Solution: Process mining can be helpful to define key sales activities for different attributes and generate segmentation criteria. Based on these criteria, sales teams can design processes targeting each category of customers, products and sectors.
For example, process mining allows the companies to determine the activities that move deals forward and design their sales processes based on these insights in order to speed up the sales process.
3. Improve B2B sales process performance
Challenge: Sales processes are dynamic and complicated, because they include multiple parties, sequential activities and process changes depending on deals, market variations and time. Therefore, it is difficult to track variations or issues at any step of the entire sales process.
Solution: Process mining analyzes processes using KPIs, identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and root causes like resource shortages or manual tasks. It helps sales teams and analysts find opportunities for standardization, automation, and improvement in lead time and resource management. Some tools also allow setting alerts for excessive throughput times.
For example, a manufacturer in Finland applied process mining to sales processes to increase visibility of operations. This process mining case study enabled the manufacturer to discover steps and activities in the sales processes. Based on the insights, the firm minimized rework and improved execution time, which ensured the on-time delivery.
4. Increase B2C conversion rates
Challenge: As in B2B, B2C sales processes need to be constantly improved. Conversion rates are a critical metric to improve since most companies are able to convert only a small percentage of prospects. Sales deals can be lost due to external factors such as competitors or internal factors such as
- activities leading to delays and dissatisfaction
- marketing strategies that do not convert into sales
Solution: Analysts can leverage process mining to assess the impact levels of the factors over the outcomes. Then, they can make actionable advice to the teams to eliminate these factors or modify marketing strategies so that they can increase conversion rates.
Also, process mining performance analysis serves to measure sales teams’ performance within market segments and regions. Business analysts can detect the best practices increasing conversion rates to share their experience with the rest of the team through workshops, coaching and short training.
In one of the process mining case studies, Amway Korea, a global network sales company, employed process mining to understand why they were losing customers. The analysts found out that website processes were one of the major factors leading to high customer churn. Therefore, the advice was to improve website processes by streamlining home-page user interface.
5. Develop and optimize marketing strategies
Challenge: Though businesses implement sales and marketing insights while planning their marketing campaigns and strategies, they find it difficult to turn the qualitative tactics into measurable and objective marketing ROI.
Solution: Process mining extracts data from systems storing lead interactions, allowing sales and marketing leaders to visualize the lead-to-customer process. They can categorize leads by channels, customer personas, and effective marketing tactics, helping them invest in the most successful strategies.
In the same process mining case study, Anyway Korea deployed process mining to analyze mobile and website usage in online shopping. It helped design statistical models for detecting business builders, customer segmentation, and measuring KPIs. The company used these insights to identify key customer patterns and create data-driven marketing campaigns.
6. Enhance customer satisfaction
Challenge: Often, sales teams and customers find themselves in a conflict about product specifications, price and delivery details which eventually lowers customer satisfaction.
Solution: Process mining can tackle this problem by predicting the downstream activities. Predictive process mining leverages historical process data to identify similar cases and generate predictions based on these findings. These predictions can support sales reps when they interact with the customers.
For example, order cancellations or changes can imply lower customer satisfaction. Sales teams can leverage process mining to discover and optimize their lead-to-order and order-to-cash processes. With process mining, teams analyze the historical data to diagnose the root cause of these issues and predict for the future, which stabilizes the processes, reduces sales cycle times and minimizes the cost.
Further Reading
You can learn how process mining is used among other business functions and departments such as:
Also, you can check our data-driven list to identify process mining vendors.
Check out our comprehensive and constantly updated process mining case studies list to discover more real-life examples of process mining in sales and marketing.
And, if you need help to apply process-mining in sales and marketing, let us help you to find the right vendor:
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