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6 Ways to Enhance Sales & Marketing with Process Mining in '24

6 Ways to Enhance Sales & Marketing with Process Mining in '246 Ways to Enhance Sales & Marketing with Process Mining in '24

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 can tackle this issue by visualizing the sales 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. 

For instance, 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 can monitor processes, assess process performance through KPI analysis and identify the variations, bottlenecks, duplications and wasted steps in the processes. It measures the resource costs for each variation or bottleneck. Thus, it can detect the root causes such as resource deficiencies, under-performance, manual tasks, or bureaucracy by employing root cause analysis. Process mining allows sales teams and business analysts to discover opportunities for standardization, automation, or modification to improve lead time and resource management. Also, some process mining tools allow sales teams to set up warnings in cases throughput times exceed the ideal response time. 

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. 

For example, 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 overcomes this challenge by extracting the data from every system storing lead interaction data. Sales and marketing leaders can use process mining as an analytics tool to visualize the entire process where marketing leads convert into customers. They can categorize the leads based on the channels the customers find the product or service, personas the customers fit into and marketing tactics the customers respond to the most. They can compare these categories to invest in channels and tactics accordingly. 

In the same case study, Anyway Korea also deployed process mining to analyze mobile and website usage behavior in online shopping. Process mining enabled the company to design statistical models to detect business builders and customer segmentation, measure KPIs, and analyze customer behavior based on these customer segments. The firm identified the key patterns in these customer segments to make 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:

Find the Right Vendors
Access Cem's 2 decades of B2B tech experience as a tech consultant, enterprise leader, startup entrepreneur & industry analyst. Leverage insights informing top Fortune 500 every month.
Cem Dilmegani
Principal Analyst
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Hazal Şimşek
Hazal is an industry analyst in AIMultiple. She is experienced in market research, quantitative research and data analytics. She received her master’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Carlos III of Madrid and her bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Bilkent University.

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