Process Mapping Tips

Last week, I discussed the importance of focusing on behaviours rather than outcomes, especially when it comes to rewarding people. Outcomes often include elements we can't control, so it's far better to hone in on the underlying behaviours we want to encourage. This week, I’m diving into how processes ladder up to those behaviours.

Why It Is Difficult

Process mapping is one of the most challenging tasks in business, primarily because it’s inherently tedious and difficult to get right. The first thing to consider is that when you approach your employees and tell them you’re going to observe and document how they do their jobs, it can make them anxious. People often worry that process mapping might lead to them losing their jobs, even if that’s not the case. It’s uncomfortable for anyone to have someone watching over their shoulder, and it can disrupt their workflow. So, it’s crucial to handle this process with care and ensure everyone understands that the goal is to improve the process, not to replace them. It's very important that you communicate clearly why this is happening.

Where To Start

The first step in any process mapping is to uncover the variables that you control. The example I used last week was about optimising sales behaviours - so let's stick with that.

Scenario: You want to optimise the cold outreach process on linkedin. The variables you control are:

1. Who are you targeting?

2. What is the frequency of your messaging?

3. What do the messages themselves say?

4. What is the sequence or order of messaging?

Once you've identified these variables, the next step is to map them out:

- Targeting: Start by defining your lead criteria. This could involve creating segments based on industry, job title, or other relevant factors. Your process should include steps for continuously refining these criteria based on feedback and results.

- Frequency: Next, establish guidelines for how often you’ll reach out to leads. This might include setting rules for initial contact, follow-ups, and final attempts before moving a lead to a different status. (e.g., "cold lead").

- Messaging: Develop templates for your outreach that can be customised for each segment. The process should also include a review or feedback loop to regularly update and improve these messages based on their effectiveness.

- Sequence: Finally, plan the order of your messages. This might involve a series of emails or LinkedIn messages.

These are the key areas where you can make adjustments to improve outcomes.

Next, Factor Out Edge Cases

When you start mapping out processes, it's crucial to remember that the real world is inherently complex and unpredictable. There are countless variables and possibilities, and it’s impossible to account for every single outcome right from the start. This is why it's essential to focus on the most common scenarios—the situations that occur 90% of the time—when you're beginning to map out and optimise your process.

While these edge cases are important and should not be ignored, they shouldn’t be the primary focus initially. Instead, start with the most common situations, the ones that represent the majority of cases you’ll encounter. By focusing on these, you can create a streamlined and efficient process that works well most of the time.

In our example, if you're optimising a sales process, begin by focusing on the typical customer journey that most of your clients follow. This might include the most common objections they raise, the usual questions they ask, and the standard sequence of interactions that lead to a sale.

Edge cases, are still important to record. Initially, it's sufficient to acknowledge these edge cases and have a basic plan for dealing with them as they arise. Often, these scenarios can be addressed on a case-by-case basis using your judgment or by consulting with others. This approach prevents you from overcomplicating your process with too many contingencies that might never be needed.

However, if you start to notice that a particular edge case is happening more frequently, it’s a signal that you need to pay closer attention to it. When a previously rare situation starts becoming more common, it may require its own policy or a more detailed part of your process. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many organisations suddenly had to address new questions and challenges, such as whether employees should come into the office. What started as a rare concern quickly became a common one, necessitating a formal process or policy.

One of the most important things to remember when developing or refining a process is to keep it simple. A process that tries to account for every possible outcome will quickly become overly complex and difficult to follow. If a process is too complicated, people are less likely to use it correctly, or they might abandon it altogether.

Be Wary When Conflating Signals To Behaviour

When you're considering the effectiveness of your processes, it's crucial to think deeply about behaviours, signals, and the underlying philosophy that guides your actions. These elements are interconnected, and understanding their relationship can significantly impact how you approach decision-making, especially in areas like sales, marketing, or customer engagement.

Let’s say your guiding principle is that you don’t want to waste time or resources on people who aren’t genuinely interested in what you’re offering. Issues arise when you start to conflate signals—like whether someone has read a message—with actual behaviours, such as their level of interest or intent to engage. It’s very tempting to make assumptions based on these signals, but doing so can be misleading and, in some cases, counterproductive.

For instance, if you’re sending messages to potential leads on LinkedIn, you might decide that after sending four messages with no response, the person isn’t interested. That seems reasonable on the surface. However, this approach assumes that the lack of response is a clear signal of disinterest, which may not always be the case. What if the person has read your message, but their LinkedIn settings prevent it from showing up as "read"? Or what if they are indeed your ideal target but simply prefer a different communication channel, like email or a phone call, over LinkedIn?nThese scenarios illustrate the danger of making assumptions based on limited data. While assumptions can help streamline your decision-making process, they can also lead you to prematurely discard valuable prospects or misinterpret their behavior.

Human behavior is highly variable and context-dependent. People may respond differently based on timing, the communication channel used, or even their current workload. By incorporating multiple touchpoints in your process, you allow for these variations and reduce the risk of misinterpreting a single signal as a definitive behavior.

Let The Mapping Begin!

When you're mapping out a process, especially something complex like sales or customer engagement, I find that using a flowchart is one of the most effective methods. A flowchart visually represents the sequence of steps, decisions, and actions that make up the process. But the key to a successful flowchart isn’t just its structure—it's about keeping it as simple and clear as possible.

A complicated flowchart can overwhelm the people who need to follow it and may even lead to them abandoning the process altogether. The goal is to strip the process down to its essential elements, removing anything that isn’t absolutely necessary. This means focusing on the main steps and decisions that occur most frequently and avoiding the temptation to account for every possible variation or exception.

One thing I advocate for, which some might find unconventional, is including your reasoning behind decisions directly in the flowchart. While some might argue that a flowchart should be strictly procedural, I believe that making your thought process transparent can be incredibly valuable. By doing this, you’re not just laying out steps to follow, but also providing context and rationale for why certain steps exist. Including assumptions and reasoning helps prevent one of the most common complaints people have about processes: that the rules don’t make sense or aren’t clear. When people don’t understand the reasoning behind a rule or a step in the process, they’re more likely to deviate from it, either intentionally or unintentionally. This deviation can go unnoticed until it causes a problem, at which point it becomes difficult to address because the underlying issue is a lack of understanding, not just a failure to follow directions.

For example, if your process includes a step where a sales rep is advised not to follow up with a prospect after multiple ignored messages, it’s helpful to include a note explaining that this is based on the assumption that repeated contact without response indicates disinterest.

Once you’ve simplified the flowchart as much as possible, test it out in real-world scenarios. Observe how well it works in practice and be open to feedback. It’s rare to get a process perfect on the first try, so be prepared to iterate and refine the flowchart based on what you learn during testing. This might involve further simplification or adjusting certain steps based on how they’re working in practice.

Look For Bottlenecks

Once you've mapped out your process, the next step is to start identifying areas where you can optimise. One key aspect to focus on is identifying bottlenecks—those points in the process where progress slows down or stops altogether.

For instance, consider a scenario where you’re in the middle of a sales cycle, and you receive a technical question from a prospect that you can’t answer on your own. If there’s only one person in your organisation who can address that question, and they’re frequently busy, this creates a bottleneck. This person, often a subject matter expert (SME), becomes a critical dependency, and any delay on their part can slow down the entire process.

To address this, you might consider implementing a protocol to minimise the impact of such bottlenecks. For example, if the SME hasn’t responded within a day, you could proactively communicate with the prospect, saying something like, “I don’t have the answer to your question right now, but I can arrange for a call with our expert.” This keeps the conversation moving forward and shows that you’re actively managing their request, even if you don’t have the immediate solution.

Look For Redundancies

The next crucial aspect to focus on is identifying and eliminating redundant steps—those activities within your process that don’t add value or make sense. These steps often exist simply because “that’s the way things have always been done.” By critically evaluating each part of your process, you can significantly streamline operations and improve efficiency.

This issue of redundancy is often compounded by a culture of resistance to change. In many organisations, especially those with a long history like manufacturing, there’s a mindset that if something isn’t broken, it doesn’t need fixing. The idea is that if a process has been working well enough, there’s no need to risk changing it. However, this approach can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for improvement. Just because a process functions doesn’t mean it’s optimised. It’s essential to question whether each step in the process still serves a vital purpose or if it’s merely a holdover from an earlier time.

Automate

Finally, it’s essential to explore opportunities for automation in your processes. While automation can be a powerful tool for improving efficiency, it's important to approach it thoughtfully and strategically. There are numerous opportunities to automate tasks that are repetitive, time-consuming, and prone to human error. For instance, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that can mimic the actions of a human on a computer, performing tasks such as data entry, processing transactions, or responding to simple queries. While RPA is an older technology, it remains effective for streamlining routine tasks that follow clear, if-then logic. Automation becomes even more powerful when combined with data analytics. For example, data can be used to segment your audience or customers based on behavior or demographics, and then automated processes can handle subsequent tasks like sending tailored email sequences or updating customer records.

Manual Tracking Will Cause Excessive Admin

A common pitfall is the creation of process is the need to track the progress of that new process creates excessive administrative tasks. This is particularly true if you rely on spreadsheets or manual logs to track interactions and responses.

For instance, let’s say you’re running an outreach campaign where you send messages to a large number of people. If you don’t have an automated system to track who received which message and what their response was, you’re left with the cumbersome task of manually recording this information. This often means creating and maintaining a spreadsheet where someone needs to log each interaction: which person received which message, on what date, and what their response was. Not only does it consume a significant amount of time, but it also introduces a high risk of errors.

This is why having an automated way in which to track and collect data is so important and that will be the subject for next week...