How to quickly understand customer business processes?

Editor's lead: it is very important to understand the customer's business process for the operation of ToB private domain. The author of this paper shares the specific methods and ideas of quickly understanding the customer business process, and expounds the reasons and steps of understanding the customer business process. Let's study together, hoping to help you. First, why do you want to know the customer's business process? The last article shared how to quickly understand the industry characteristics of customers, which is only the first step and the foundation to understand customers. As a customer's success, the core is to provide business consulting and solutions in combination with the actual situation of customers. To propose a solution, the first step is to be able to analyze the current customer business problems and needs. Imagine that if you don't know the customer's business process very well, it is difficult to analyze the problem, let alone the solution. Therefore, understanding the customer's business process is a very important step in the process of successfully understanding the customer. At this stage, the success of customers should comprehensively study and understand the current situation and planning of customers' business, and dig and summarize business problems. How to quickly understand customer business processes? Next, I will provide you with a complete process framework. Second, the steps to understand the customer's business process Before you really start to sort out the business process, you need to figure out what is the business process? Here I quote Baidu Encyclopedia's explanation: business process is a series of work completed by different people in order to achieve specific value goals. There should not only be a strict order between jobs, but also the contents, methods and responsibilities of jobs should be clearly arranged and defined, so that it is possible to mobilize different jobs between different posts and roles. The transfer of work and work in time and space can have a greater span. In a narrow sense, business process is just a series of work related to customer value satisfaction. Business process is a workflow composed of process nodes and execution methods in turn. From the official definition of business process above, we can initially know that business process mainly includes these elements: business objectives, business roles, business work and business results. Secondly, there are many ways to analyze business processes, and different people have different purposes. Here, it is also suggested not to analyze blindly, but to analyze purposefully. This paper is also a business process analysis step specially written for successful account managers. As for the success of customers, the purpose of analyzing business processes is to help customers find solutions that combine the company's products. The overall process framework is shown in the following figure: Next, explain the contents in the outline in detail: 1. Information you know 1) business objectives The first step in understanding business processes is to define business objectives first. Because the design and formulation of subsequent business roles and business work are actually to achieve business goals. For customers themselves, the ultimate business goal is also the most concerned. Business objectives are generally divided into three levels: strategic level, tactical level and implementation level. The strategic level generally includes the strategic positioning and strategic objectives of the business, which determines the development direction of the company from the perspective of the whole company. For example, the boss of a company wants to expand online channels to promote and sell products, and the strategic goal is to make a profit of 1 100 million a year. Tactical layer generally further concretizes the objectives of strategic layer, for example, for the objectives of strategic layer, it adopts the management and control mode of centralized operation by headquarters and implementation by branches, which runs through this mode in one quarter. The executive level is more specific than the tactical level. In view of the objectives of the tactical level, clearly define the business roles and work, and formulate specific performance goals. For example, the delivery department needs to drain 50w traffic online in the first quarter. So to what extent do we need to analyze? It depends on two things. First, what stage is the business development of the client company you are facing? The second is the identity of the customer you are facing. It is not that the more analysis, the better, but that the more accurate the analysis, the better. In view of the first point, if the company's business is still at an early stage and the specific strategies and objectives of the executive layer have not been formulated, then you need to investigate the objectives of the strategic and tactical layer, help customers sort out the strategic objectives of the executive layer step by step, and give specific solutions in combination with the company's products. This requires the customer's ability to succeed, because it is necessary not only to provide product solutions, but also to analyze and understand the market and competing products of the customer's industry and help customers sort out their business operation plans. If the company's business is in a relatively mature stage and has a sound strategy and model, then you need to investigate the objectives of the executive layer, that is, sort out the status quo and problems of the existing processes and propose optimization points. For the second point, if the customer you communicate with is a boss-level person, then you should start from the strategic level; If you are an executive, you should start from the tactical level; If you are an executive, you need to start from the tactical level. 2) After defining the business objectives, the next step is to sort out the business roles, that is, the different structures and specific job roles that need to be equipped to achieve the business objectives. The analysis of business roles is divided into two levels: organizational structure and job roles. The organizational structure of (1) is aimed at the strategic and tactical level of the company. Different strategic objectives correspond to different organizational structures. Generally speaking, there are linear structure, functional structure, business division structure, simulated decentralization structure and so on. The following figure shows an example of a linear architecture. (2) The job role is aimed at the senior management of the company. When the specific company structure is determined, different departments will be assigned different job roles. Understanding these job roles will help us to analyze the future role division. The following figure illustrates the job roles under the marketing department. So to what extent do we need to analyze? This depends on two points: first, the specific business scope of your company's products; The second is the role of the customer you are facing and the business scope you expect to contact. For the first point, you need to sort out the business scope that your company's products can meet, such as our CRM products. At present, the business scope that can be met includes: customer acquisition and drainage (corresponding to drainage business department), customer marketing and management (for sales business department), customer operation (for headquarters operation business department) and customer service tools (for service business department). Then the scope of my research should also focus on these directions, investigate whether the customer's company currently has departments corresponding to these businesses, and sort them out. I don't know and pay attention to the customer's R&D or financial department. For the second point, even if your customer's company has these departments, your customers who come to you may not have access to all these services. So you need to know the business department that customers want to access, what job roles there are in using the product, and how many job roles there are. 3) After analyzing the organizational structure and work roles of the company in the previous step, it is natural to analyze what these different roles do. The analysis of business work is divided into two levels: the work of a single business role and the work of multiple business roles. The job analysis of a single business role is relatively simple, which is directly a workflow of a link. The job analysis of multiple business roles is complicated, so it is necessary to understand how the business is handed over and transferred between different roles. In the solution proposed to customers, we also need to consider the rights involved in the process of business transfer. So to what extent do we need to analyze? This is relatively simple. We have analyzed the departments and roles that customers want to visit, so we can analyze the business work of as many roles as we need to visit. 4) Business Results After analyzing the business objectives, business roles and the whole process of business work, the last step is to analyze the current business results. After analyzing the gap between the result and the target intuitively, we can better understand the business operation and expectation, locate which links need to be improved more, and give customers more reasonable solutions. The analysis of the results needs to be accurate to specific data indicators. The analysis of business results is divided into two levels: final results and process results. The final result refers to the final effect of the customer's expected purchase of the product, such as an annual income increase of 30%. Process result is the index of business process to achieve results in the whole business process, such as drainage times, telephone connection rate, friend addition rate, conversion rate and so on. So to what extent do we need to analyze? It is suggested to analyze both here. First, analyze the final result, and tell customers that there is still room for optimization of the final result at present, and how much customers in the same industry can do. Secondly, the customer will be interested in how you can help him improve the final result, which requires you to propose specific solutions. At this time, you can take out the process result data. For example, the current rate of adding friends is 20%, but a customer in the same industry achieves an average of 50%. We can do key optimization, such as matching our friends' verification language settings, designing several groups of verification languages for comparison, and finally adopting the verification language with the highest pass rate. 5) Overall business flow chart When the above four surveys are completed, it is basically enough for a successful account manager. However, in order to present our research results more intuitively and help us to analyze and point out the problems in business processes more easily, here is a classic visual chart: swimming lane flow chart. Take an education company as an example. The horizontal axis represents the relevant business departments, and the square in the middle represents the specific workflow. As can be seen from the process, in the current sales business process, making phone calls, sending text messages and adding friends are all done manually. A sales person can only handle 10- 15 leads per day on average, so there is an opportunity here. You can automatically complete the repetitive work of calling, hanging SMS and adding friends through the system, and the sales mainly focus on adding friends' customer information and transformation follow-up, so that an average of one will be fine. 2. How to understand 1) Customer interview is the fastest way to understand the customer's business, directly help customers analyze problems, and get answers quickly through one-on-one communication. Of course, there are two points to pay attention to here: First, you should be able to quickly gain the trust and goodwill of the interviewee and make customers willing to talk. Second, you should think clearly in advance what you want to get through the interview and be prepared. If you don't prepare in advance, the conversation will be divergent and chaotic, and you can't collect effective information quickly, which will lead to inefficiency. The following is a typical case of the dialogue outline template: 2) Personal experience is the best way to deeply understand the business. For maintaining customers, the customer success manager can go to the customer's business site regularly to experience the specific work of the business personnel directly and understand the real process and pain points. Although this method seems inefficient, it is better to find potential opportunities from the perspective of real business through personal experience and observation. 3) Access to information is a way to help you understand the business, or it is suggested to conduct business research directly through customer interviews and personal experience. However, before the real interview or experience, it is recommended to consult the information to see what the current business process in the industry is like, and to have a framework in mind first, so that when conducting a real interview or experience, it will be more targeted and easier to understand. Third, the summary of the above shared how to quickly understand the customer's business process as a successful account manager. I would like to add here that in the process of actual understanding, it may not be as smooth as we thought. Maybe when you do a customer interview, you directly ask what your business process is like, and customers simply don't want to spend too much time talking with you, which leads to your incomplete understanding. It is suggested to understand the industry where the customer is located in combination with the previous chapter, and then have a general understanding of the customer's expectations according to the overall situation of the industry, and then introduce the specific business process of the customer by talking to the customer about the industry or competing products. In this case, customers will feel that you have a general understanding of his industry and overall expectations, and will be more willing to talk to you about their current business processes and pain points.