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In every field, businesses are facing strong competition in markets where customers are zeroed in on perfection. In order to develop your business and grow it to become one of the greats, you’ll need to maintain a high standard of quality and operative processes. For this reason, more companies around the globe are embracing BPM’s – Business Process Management software.

BPM’s are management systems aimed at bettering company performance by optimizing business processes and management. This is a long-term strategy used by the world’s top companies to improve how they do business and drive up profits as a result.

This is why a BPM is essential for business development and why you should invest in one today:

What A BPM Does

No matter the industry, every business has a set of operational processes that are at the core of their business model. The idea is to look for parts of the processes that can be optimized.

So what is business process management? Your business process management analyzes the different steps you take to achieve your company goals. BPMs also cover the analysis of different business processes and their impact on each other. There is no singular way to do these processes, and there are many ways to track how your business is performing. As this tracking is an ongoing task, it’s much simpler to rely on a BPM tool.

The idea behind BPM’s is to get insights into those processes that make your business tick and identify how they can be improved. For the business, this brings the added benefits of achieving improved organization, efficiency, and effectiveness. These factors, in turn, bring about more business agility and increased customer satisfaction and retention.

Benefits Of BPMs

Studies conducted by RedHat found that more than half of their participants stated that their main motivation between adopting BPM is cost-reduction. This is because BPM’s improve business processes by getting rid of redundancies, improving quality control, and highlighting areas where businesses can save. For example, if part of your business process is to review and approve documents, a BPM can highlight ways to make this process less time-consuming.

Another benefit is being able to identify processes that aren’t worth the time or effort and replace or remove them. If you’re working with an internal marketing and sales team, for example, you want to ensure that their efforts are aimed at targets that have the highest likelihood of converting to a sale.

The most successful businesses are responsive and in touch with customer needs, which are ever-changing. This is another area where business process management tools can help businesses grow – by helping them choose strategies that will meet customer demands and preferences quickly. The reality is that many customers today expect businesses to be in top form and have a system like this in place. Without proper optimization, you may find your potential customers looking for different options and turning to competitors instead.

How Business Is Changing

The nature of business is constantly changing, and if you are working on an outdated business model the chances are good you are missing out on valuable opportunities to improve. The biggest factor in business today is technology; it has rapidly changed buying habits, socioeconomic conditions, and other factors that will affect how you approach customers. Having something in hand that will help you meet these demands is immeasurably valuable.

If you are not actively trying to make changes to your business to keep up with the times, you’ll find yourself being surpassed by your competitors and losing key business opportunities. Particularly in times of tough economic circumstances as experienced this year, it’s more important than ever for businesses to differentiate themselves and make their mark.

This is where the importance of BPM’s come in. These systems help you to improve your existing processes and make new ones that drive your business further. Finding the best BPM solution is key to not only identify processes that need to be improved but also to reach the set company goals.

To choose a BPM, you’ll need to consider several factors. After setting goals, you’ll need to analyze current processes and then forecast future requirements that may take place and affect these processes.

Other Important Considerations

Beyond improving cost-reduction and efficiency, BPM’s have the benefit of increasing productivity. When business processes are created that are repetitive or inefficient, they take up the time that can be spent on better things like research and development. By taking the steps to address redundancies, you free up your team to pursue other important tasks that drive development.

If your business processes are reliable and optimized, you are able to put more of your resources into growing the company. When company productivity is improved and innovation is taking place, you can count on customers taking notice. When customers have trust in what you are doing, it becomes easier to retain leads and garner new ones on a consistent basis, which will ultimately boost your ROI.

In this article, we’ve highlighted the top benefits that introducing BPM into your business can bring. While it’s true that introducing a BPM into your business is a long-term commitment, it’s one that can have a significant payoff.

In short, this system is the one that gives you measurable results when you are scaling your business and helps you achieve the collective goals you’ve set for it. With this type of implementation, streamlining and optimization are the names of the game.

Until recently, the way these processes were handled was by mapping steps taken in workflow diagrams and charts, which is time-consuming and complicated. Today, there are many BPM tools that can help businesses improve their processes in an easy way. An initial investment into BPM software could save you more in the future than you would expect.

When businesses are looking to grow their earned revenue, there are many marketing strategies they make use of to encourage leads and sales to buy more of their services. Sometimes your most valuable market is found in your own wheelhouse; by targeting your existing customers, you are more likely to make increased sales. This is where upselling and cross-selling come in – these are two strategies used by marketers that grow sales from prior customers and lead to higher retention and income rates.

You may be wondering what is upselling and cross-selling, and can these strategies be used for your business? There are many ways that implementing these approaches can be beneficial to your business. Keep reading for our full guide below.

What Is Cross-Selling?

Cross-selling refers to a method of sales where the customer is encouraged to purchase something in conjunction with their primary purchase.

For example, say a customer has purchased one of your services. Cross-selling would encourage them to purchase a second service to compliment the first, ultimately making sure their purchase is more expensive. A customer interested in purchasing a hairbrush can also be convinced to buy a hairdryer, a more expensive product, if they know the outcome will be better for them.

This strategy is targeted specifically at increasing the revenue earned from a single customer. As a result, the main target is to boost the ROI of your business and drive higher earning potential from each sale.

It’s easier to make sales to customers that are already familiar with your business. Compared to fresh leads, these customers are already familiar with your brand and services and have expressed prior interest. These characteristics mean that it will take little extra convincing to cross-sell another service to them. It’s not uncommon for businesses to sweeten the deal a little more by offering a discount, a free trial, or some sort of incentive.

What is Upselling

A similar strategy to cross-selling is upselling. Upselling techniques refer to a method of convincing customers to make a more expensive purchase rather than their original intended purchase. As for upselling examples, a customer might have an interest in your lower-tier package, but with some input and negotiation from your sales team, they can be convinced to purchase a medium or higher tier instead. This leads to a higher ROI for your business from that customer.

Upselling comes down to suggesting a product that will be an upgrade from the purchase they originally had in mind. The trick with this strategy is listening. By following that person’s user journey, and understand pain points they may have, your sales team can introduce the idea of a more comprehensive and expensive service with a higher likelihood of acceptance.

Upselling can be more effective than cross-selling. It’s easier to sell a customer a higher-cost package one-off than it is to convince them to buy more than one service, but both approaches have their own merits and disadvantages.

Upselling Vs Cross-Selling

These strategies are sometimes referred to interchangeably, but the reality is they are representative of very different scenarios. The main similarity is that both approaches can take place at the point-of-sale and be facilitated by a salesperson or customer success person using a BPM tool. These team members can both cross-sell and upsell to customers that they think would be interested, usually, once they’ve purchased an initial product.

Cross-selling can alert customers to services they may not be aware of and help them build trust in your brand. Upselling, on the other hand, is more concerned with showing customers how their needs may be fulfilled better by a higher-tiered package. Another thing that both these strategies have in common is providing additional value to customers.

Customers often express interest in multiple services or features during email and phone conversations, and this is where the opportunity to cross or upsell arises. It’s important to pay attention to the customer’s interests and questions, as these can signal the biggest opportunities to launch these strategies. Whatever you recommend has to truly fulfill their needs.

How To Upsell And Cross-Sell

So how do you enact these strategies for your business? The first step is to study your customer demographic data and understand their goals. Every industry has it’s pain points, and by knowing these ahead of time your sales team will find it easier to spot cross-selling or upselling opportunities.

The key is to try to map out the customer journey from start to finish and identify the step at which most cross-selling and upselling potential arises. Typically, the best time at which to mention cross-selling or upselling is when they’ve purchased a service from you in the past, or while they are onboarding for your service.

The easiest way to be able to cross or upsell to customers is during phone or video calls. One-on-one contact gives your sales team the chance to really bond on a personalized level with customers, and once that trust is established they will be more inclined to spend.

Cross-selling and upselling are two key ways that service businesses can increase their revenue from their existing customers. While similar in nature, these methods do differ, but their ultimate goal is the same; to understand customer needs and recommend ways to alleviate them that are mutually beneficial.

The good news is that implementing these strategies for your business is less complicated than you think. It’s easier to sell to existing customers than to leads that have not seen the value of your services yet, and that’s what you will need to capitalize on. To kick off the process make sure you are using tools that help you track customer journeys, and that your sales team is taking a more personalized approach.

These are two methods you should add to your marketing strategy for maximum ROI, customer retention, and success.

For many businesses and financial departments, there are major challenges to overcome when financial reporting periods come around. Reviewing your business finances on a regular basis is essential to successfully plan your future financials. The problem is knowing where and when to start, and how to make the whole process more efficient.

Preparing quarterly financial reviews and reporting includes many arduous tasks such as checking balance sheets, cash flow statements, and other key financial documents. Depending on the business that you are in, you may need to focus on a myriad of other factors and data points that are crucial parts of your organization. Doing quarterly financial reviews can help you keep track of your incoming and outgoing money, as well as your business goals.

The more info you need to include in your review, the more complex reporting becomes. That’s why we’re covering how to make a quarterly report in more detail. This is how to manage quarterly financial reviews and reporting the right way:

The Basics of Financial Reviews

A financial review or quarterly report is a collection of financial statements that have not been audited yet. Usually, these reports involve looking at documents like income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and others issued in the past three months. Apart from these quarterly figures, financial reviews can also include comparisons to statements from previous years. Collecting all of this information will help you see if your business is operating within your means – especially when it comes to finances going out.

When do companies typically report quarterly earnings? The answer is that it will depend on the type of business you have. The majority of companies have set accounting periods that end on specific dates in the financial year, and this is when they do their financial reviews. Usually, the quarterly dates are at the end of March, June, September, or December. Some industries, however, follow different financial calendars and their year-end figures are reported at different times. It’s best to research what the standard practice is for your industry.

The Challenges of Financial Reviews

As important as quarterly financial reviews are, they can also be challenging to conduct.

One of the biggest challenges is that financial reviews are slow and complicated to compile. Finding all the relevant data, and then putting it into a concise report is often easier said than done. Financial reviews are often viewed not only internally by the rest of your business team, but can also be put forward to stakeholders and potential investors. If there is something missing or incorrect in your report, you can bet that questions will come up from these individuals.

It’s a lot of pressure – all the included information has to be 100% correct and needs to be triple-checked, slowing down the process even further. Other challenges that add additional pressure are having to comply with requirements set by the local government. These requirements are also ever-changing, causing further delays as financial departments work to comply. Every quarter can be different from the last as a result.

What Must Be Included

While the exact documents included in financial reviews can vary between companies and industries, there are some common features that come up in many. Most quarterly reports have executive summaries, goals, objectives, comparisons, and challenges listed, interspersed with the latest financial data available for the business. Sections on challenges may include strategies that can be employed to overcome them. For example, if your financials are down in this quarter compared to last, you can add strategies that you can use to improve them such as putting more time into marketing.

Many quarterly reports include data from previous quarterly reports in order to show year-on-year comparisons. This aspect becomes particularly important when approaching stakeholders or potential investors. Financial reports are typically data-heavy – many financial reviews are filled with graphs and spreadsheets which further illustrate the performance of your business.

How To Manage Quarterly Financial Reviews

As mentioned above, once a report has been created and delivered to the relevant parties, you can put money on the fact that questions will follow, such as “How did we get this number?”

With experience, you will learn how to anticipate these questions and include them in your report from the get-go, leading to fewer follow-up questions in the future and a more comprehensive report. Some business process management tools have built-in features that can be used to do reporting and analysis on factors like recent trends and variance compared to the previous quarters.

Remember for future projections, versioning will be critical. When doing future projections for your business, you should do a version which has conservative predictions (such as the market being down), a version that is in the middle (a market performing as per usual) and an aggressive prediction (markets performing positively above and beyond the expected). This makes your report more comprehensive and gives key stakeholders a better idea of how you plan to target the next quarter.

Often, companies will also include estimates of their key metrics for future reporting periods and use them as a goal to reach and even exceed. This goes well with the projections made as previously mentioned.

While there is some variation in how companies handle quarterly financial reviews, there are also lots of features that are common, such as comparing previous financials, projecting future ones, and strategizing for current market conditions. Preparing a quarterly earnings report is a slow and effort-intensive process that requires a lot of preparation, but using the right tools, the process can become much faster and easier to complete.

At the end of the day, you don’t want preparing for this report to affect your overall productivity. Quarterly financial reviews need to be completely accurate which adds a lot of pressure. With some experience, creating a report of this nature will become less intensive to conduct and instead become a process that is simply advantageous for your business.

Business process management (BPM) is the discipline of organizing and optimizing internal workflows and initiatives across an organization. BPMS is a software solution that provides total visibility into your company’s business processes. It enables managers in creating automated activities and repeatable tasks within the whole organization. 

The technology focuses on repetitive processes that can form predictable patterns. This helps businesses to organize their processes better and have a clear picture of the entire company’s activities.

What Is a BPM Software

A BPM software can help teams to scale their productivity in order to boost process efficiency across the whole company. In addition, it can support all departments such as HR, sales, finance, support, tech, marketing and more. 

A business process management software could support small and medium-sized businesses shaping their internal processes and keep different aspects of operations running optimally.

It could solve different problems companies are facing when speaking about communication, visibility, and accountability. 

In case you are a business owner or a manager trying to optimize your internal processes towards visibility and better planning, we might have a solution for you. Check out those five reasons why implementing a business process management software can help you grow. 

1. Gain Control of Chaotic and Unclear Internal Processes 

Businesses face different challenges. One of them is unclear internal processes, chaos across projects, tasks overdue, mistakes and more. 

It’s essential for a company to have a clear and strategic plan of how things are happening. BPM technology can improve internal business processes with standardization and automation. 

There are plenty of processes that are repeatable. You don’t need to rely on sticky notes nor different reminders. If you need to send an invoice at the beginning of the month to a client, reimburse travel costs to employees, monthly bills, following-up emails and more, you can easily automate them by creating repeatable tasks. 

Automation won’t only put internal processes in order but will save your time which you can use in something else, like planning future sales or marketing strategies for your company. 

Different departments in your company can benefit from automation such as:  

• Marketing: social media posts and planning; blogging and scheduling time-sensitive blog posts; analysis monthly reports 
• Customer service and support: email responding; following-up on clients; sending surveys asking for feedback 
• Financial tasks: invoice reminders; receipts; monthly bills 
• Administrative tasks: backing up files; planning; sharing calendars; online forms; job recruitment; daily to-do lists

2. Improving the Onboarding Process for New Roles 

Onboarding new people to your company can happen much easier if you have an automated process for it. 

Each BPM software has different features that can help companies with assigning new roles of new hires. SaaS BPM for instance allows assigning repeatable tasks per job role. What does it mean? 

For example, you need to onboard a new marketing person to your team. The first step is to create a new employee profile. You will be able to do it quickly as you can follow profile templates. 

The next action is to create repeatable tasks such as – respond to guest blogging emails each Friday and plan the social media posts for a month ahead. The software provides the ability to create tasks for each job role you need daily, weekly, bi-weekly and monthly. 

One of the cool features of the SaaS BPM is that you can visualize the team activities in multiple ways such as table, grid, list, or mindmap. 

All this automated process won’t only support new hires in their first days of the new company, but will also help companies to improve this process along the time. 

3. Improve Communication and Visibility Across the Organization 

The costs of poor communication are enormous – $37 billion in 2018 according to global Holmes reports. In addition to this data, 400 surveyed corporations with more than 100,000 employees in the U.S and U.K estimated that communication barriers cost the average organization $62.4 million per year in lost productivity. 

The lack of proper communication and visibility can threaten the entire company. Everyone in an organization needs to be on the same page. Teams need to work together toward achieving a common set of goals. 

If the connection between different departments is broken this can seriously impact your business. 

Without business process management different departments can lose the connection and become entirely unaware of how processes relate to or conflict with one another. 

BPM software can significantly improve cross-department collaboration because everybody can visualize and understand the process and their role in it. The management team can have access to all the information and have an overview of the entire company. 

This will create transparent processes and will bring more effective results. 

4. Reporting Delays to Management

BPM can help organizations move in a clear direction and identify problems or delays beforehand. When a whole organization is managed well, delays once in a while can happen. But if this became a trend probably something needs to be fixed. 

BPM can help the organization move in a clear direction. It can help set priorities for the organization and plan out possible errors. 

Using the SaaS BPM management can track easily if everyone from the team completes their daily tasks and chime in or allocate tasks to other teammates if needed. 

It will also help managers to identify if more people are needed in a certain department. If people from one department constantly delay tasks this will be a sign that more people need to be hired. 

5. Help The Business Reduce Costs 

Identifying which processes take too much time and don’t worth the investment will help companies to make informed decisions if some processes need to be optimized or outsourced. 

BPM software can reduce costs in several directions: 

• Better organization: better organization of your company processes will reduce the risk of mistakes because the management will have better visibility. 
• Workflow automation: automation can save valuable time to the whole company which can boost team productivity. Also, it can reduce the costs of operations and limit the manual processes. 
• Better overview of the company’s goals: often in companies employees can lose the bigger picture. Understanding what is their role in the company and they are valuable can increase motivation and will contribute to the company’s growth. 
• Risks and mistake reduction: setting repeatable tasks will reduce mistakes or missing on important tasks such as emails, invoices, or contract renewals. 

Wrapping up 

Growing a business is a complicated process. You need to tackle several challenges in order to grow your company. Implementing business process management software enables you to have a better overview of your internal processes. 

This will help you to optimize them when needed, improve communication across departments, identify problems and keep track of your company’s effectiveness. 
SaaS BPM is a powerful alternative to enterprise-grade BPM solutions on the market. Build with productivity in mind and transparency across the entire organization, we excel at refining business processes and tracking success across the team – a necessary tool in the arsenal of executives, managers, HR directors, entrepreneurs, and consultants.