Let’s take a much deeper look at the concept of "business process".
We tend to think of the idea of "process" as something negative or mundane. For example, the "legal process", where we deal with life issues like traffic citations, divorce, or even civil lawsuits. It's generally not viewed in a positive light. Or, we associate the term with some bureaucracy like government offices - the "building permit process", or the "tax audit process". At any rate, the word itself doesn't really represent concepts that we regard as positive or redeeming
However, I previously discussed the idea of business process being essential to the success and growth of any business. Michael Gerber has written extensively about the entrepreneur myth, where the technician that starts a business isn't necessarily good at the operation of a business. That person might be a fantastic subject matter expert in their respective field... electrician, builder, retail store manager, pizza maker, whatever. But Gerber points out how many business owners aren't very good at building business processes to support the growth of their company.
My focus is on how does an entrepreneur go about building process within their organization? Specifically, how does one build a sustainable marketing and sales process?
If we’re going to start approaching our marketing and sales from more of a defined, consistent process, then we should understand the definition of the term as it pertains to business.
A business process is a series of activities designed to produce certain results. A recipe, so to speak.
Within the process, we can break down each and every part and measure all the activities and the results. We can analyze each part of the process for cause and effect.
A process is a set of activities which add value to one or more inputs to produce an output.
Every process requires inputs, the raw materials or ingredients. These can be all kinds of things like people, suppliers, environment, information, methods, machines, materials, and so on.
Then, we take these inputs and perform a specific sequence of pre-determined actions to add some kind of value. For example, we might take raw sheet metal and load it into a hydraulic press, which stamps a shape. Or, we might take some tomato sauce, pepperoni, and grated cheese, and spread it on a circle of dough. Another example might be less tangible. We might extract financial data from a database and make calculations. Whatever the case, this part of the process is known as the "value add", or "value-adding".
Whatever actions we perform with all of the raw materials is the actual value-adding work.
The result of this sequence of actions produces output - the finished product or service. This might be a stamped part, a pizza, or a receivables aging financial report. The output is the result of the process, and in theory should be the same every time we take identical raw inputs and perform the same set of activities.
This output is ultimately used by a "customer". Now this customer could be the end consumer - the actual commercial client. Or, it could actually be someone else inside of the company.
This gets into the idea of linking individual processes together to develop a complete system. In a system, or a series of linked processes, the output an individual process is used as an input in another process. Each subsequent stage builds upon the value that was added in the previous stage.
This is easily understood when we think of it in terms of a manufacturing production line. However, we can abstract the idea and apply it to every single activity that takes place within a company in administration, accounting, human resources, and yes - marketing and sales.
Everything that we do in our business requires inputs, and when we're done, the fruits of our activity are outputs. The outputs are inputs in the next stage of activity.