Value Drivers: Impactful Business Process Development With Moustafa Moursy

A business operates with a process; how well you develop and implement those processes determine your growth and success. In today’s world, automation has become the buzzword that businesses tend to automate just for automation’s sake. But is it really moving your business? This is the dilemma that our guest in this episode tackles by taking us on an enlightening discussion about impactful process development. Andy McDowell is with Moustafa Moursy, a deeply experienced entrepreneur who empowers business owners to grow their businesses rapidly by rationalizing and mastering business processes specific to their circumstances. Moustafa gives us a great view about what makes a business process work. From the differences between Business Process Improvement and Business Process Automation to driving value and making processes efficient, Moustafa covers it all. Tune in now and find how you can build a lean mean fighting machine through your process.

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Value Drivers: Impactful Business Process Development With Moustafa Moursy

I can’t wait to bring the guest to talk to you what some people in the operational side of business call a four letter word and that is processes. Those things that you have to do on a repetitive basis to get the outcome that you’re looking for, whether it be internal to the company or in the actual delivery to your customer or your Marketplace. It’s a core ingredient for scaling your business by nature if you’re trying to grow your business.

The idea is to have repetitive things. It can be done quickly over and again to get that scale. My guest is Mr. Moustafa Moursy, from the great state of New Jersey where I spent quite a bit of time in my youth as I graduated high school from there. New Jersey gets a bad rap. It does. It’s a very diverse state when you talk about the South Side versus the North Side and so forth. It’s almost like California. A many version of California in some ways. The North Side is very different than the South Side.

If all you do is spend time on the New Jersey Turnpike driving through it on your way between Philly and New York City. You don’t understand these things. I like to think New Jersey is misunderstood. Anyway, let me read Moustafa’s bio and we’ll bring him in and have a great conversation. Moustafa Moursy is a deeply experienced entrepreneur who empowers business owners to grow their businesses rapidly by rationalizing and mastering business processes specific to their circumstances.

Moustafa leads Push Analytics, a business consultancy firm that is in the top 10% of hubspotting agencies among the best in class and helping businesses grow and specifically optimizing their business processes. Moustafa, Welcome to the show. I can’t thank you enough for taking that valuable resource that we all have that’s limited called time to share your wisdom with our audience.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

 

 

Who Is Moustafa Moursy

I always like to start our conversation, it’s just a conversation to help our audience to know who you are, connect with you and understand what makes Moustafa tick. If you wouldn’t mind, take 5 or 10 minutes to pick somewhere on your timeline of your life and give our audience an idea of what life has been like for you so far.

I could explain a little bit how I got here. I’ve always been interested in two things or maybe three things at the same time. Maybe I couldn’t put my finger around them, but eventually, I figured it out and that’s led to where I got here. I studied engineering. I like the fact that you had to think about harder problems but I didn’t also want to sit there on a desk and be on a computer all day. I didn’t want to do that either.

It seems to be the right thing to study because everything else seems maybe a little too easy. I did that and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I went to somebody that looked up to. Eventually, I realized he did something in sales engineering and I was like, “What is that?” He’s like, “You get to sell but also, you still engineer because you have to figure out the system.” I was like, “That’s pretty cool.” I end up doing that.

I got it to sales then I realized ever since that I need to be the intersection of something social and something that requires problem solving. That’s helped throughout the way because when you get into a lot of this type of stuff, the secret to having a good process or a lot of good things is that you need to combine two worlds.

 

You need to combine solving for the technical, whether it’s on the technology side or what’s possible or how to implement something, but also do it in a way that is accounting for the real world at the business side like what needs to happen. That’s carrying me throughout and when we started Push Analytics. We’re working with different businesses. We’re able to offer that value and we grew pretty fast because we’re able to look at both sides of that which is very cool.

I came out of College. I wanted to be a sales engineer too. I was an electrical engineering major. A lot of my electives were in computer chip design. I wanted to be a sales engineer focused on computer chips in the day. Unfortunately, the timing of the market when I came out was the computer chip companies were only hiring PhDs. They begun heavily involved in the actual design of the computer chip and from a sales engineer perspective, there wasn’t anything. That’s why I decided, “I’m going to get my Masters.” The rest is history as you say. We have that in common.

BPI Vs. BPA

One of the fallacies or one of the dilemmas particularly small businesses get into when they start looking at processes, it’s this notion between business process improvement and business process automation. To automate a process does not necessarily mean that you’re making it efficient or delivering a value to your employees or your customers or something from that standpoint. We’d love to hear your viewpoint as to the difference between the BPI and BPA.

Let’s back out a little bit and start from the top. When it comes to the process, a lot of times we’ll give webinars and give talks. We’re talking about processes and we put up a question on the board for the audience. We’re like, “Tell us where your process is today.” This is a different choice like, “We do pretty good. We’re okay, or we don’t have processes,” is one of them.

It’s a little bit of a trick question because there’s no such thing as not having processes. It’s a little bit of a trick question because there’s no such thing as not having processes. A lot of people will pick that but there’s no such thing. What is a process? It’s just a way to get from point A to point B. If your business and your functioning, any amount of customers, even one you have a process. It’s just that you may not be paying attention to your process.

It’s almost like when you go and somebody says, “I’m not on a diet. You folks are on a diet.” You are on a diet. It’s just that you eat whatever. That’s your diet. It’s the same thing. You can’t not have a diet because the word diet means what you eat. The word process just means what you essentially do or how you do it.

I want you to start thinking about that then you realize, as you said,a four letter word is going to exist whether I like it or not. It’s there. We’re either acknowledging it exists and deciding to focus on it or we’re brushing it away and not. It’s still going to impact our business one way or the other like diet does. Your diet exists whether you like it or not. If you want to pay attention or not, it’s going to affect you though. Whether it’s not now, it’s going to be later. It could be now or subtle or over. There’s a lot of different ways that affects you.

The same exact thing happens with process. The process is almost like the diet for your business and you got to pay attention to that. That’s the starting point because a lot of people think of it in different ways and some think of it like, “We’re good. We don’t have to focus on this. We have great processes.” Again, it’s like a iterative thing. Others think of it like, “I’d rather focus on something else.” You can’t. You can’t ignore the process at any skill. It’s very important. We’ll talk more about that coming down here, but I wanted to to start with that.

We live in a living age of technology. To automate a process may help you from the standpoint of speed or accessibility to data and we start getting into analytics. You maybe able to bring data in a digital way to those that are involved in the process but there’s got to be some mixture of Automation and what the person is doing with the data. That has to be looked at when you’re analyzing the particular process for automation for automation’s sake. It brings you a certain level of capability or efficiency in the process, but there’s an assumption that your process itself is okay.

That’s very good segue and this goes back to what I was saying in the intro, which is that the secret to doing this very well is that you need to combine a couple of different things at the least which is like the real world of like what’s happening in the business and the actual technical abilities of your platforms or capabilities and implementation and tight implementation of it. Honestly, I would add to the way humans also operate. You need to account for that, which is something a lot of people will leave out.

I’ve seen both ends of it. You mentioned automation for automation sake. That sometimes we see where somebody maybe understood the technical capabilities very well or whatever. It’s just a bunch of things that are automated but it doesn’t move the business that much forward or it’s confusing or it’s overwhelming or people are getting a million notifications in their inbox for the same two things. It’s like, “We get it.” That’s like one aspect of it.

Sometimes maybe people know the process by the book but they don’t know exactly how people operate. I’ve seen this even at the Fortune 500 level, where people will go and they’ll make processes then the people who have to use it and use the tools because people don’t know anything about the tools or technical capabilities or how to make things work. They just know this technically in theory should work.

 

Everybody has to use it. It’s like, “This sucks,” and they’re not using it. They’re just checking off a box to appease their manager but in reality, it’s not advancing the company at all. They’re doing more work to give you less visibility because they’re basically for all intensive purposes almost like making up stuff to get to the next prom.

Not because they’re malicious but because the process is bad or the way it’s executed, rather, is bad. Maybe it’s good in theory and nobody’s going to be able to follow it and also still do their job. They don’t do that because they don’t have that practical sense. They might have the technical sense in this case or they might have the sense of what needs to be done but not the sense of what can be done and is doable. That’s an important balance to strike with the process.

I often saw it as what comes first, the chicken or the egg? Quite a question. When people get a technical salesperson in front of them and they’re selling or wearing their platform or their technology, “This is great.” They don’t sit back and try to understand whether they have a good process first, too. If you’re going to maximize the value that an application or platform can bring, you have to work on the process itself before you even install the software.

What are we trying to accomplish here with the process? What value is it going to bring internally and externally to our organization? If we build a lean mean fighting machine in terms of a process before we start throwing technology added to bring the benefits of speed or access to data or something of that nature that automation brings?

That’s a key thing and we run into this. You mentioned, you weren’t a top tier HubSpot partner. One of the ways we got there is we don’t just jump in and be like, “Awesome. HubSpot, let’s start clicking and setting up features.” We jump into a lot of people that already have it set up and it seems like that’s what was set up and it’s holding them back. What we do is we’re in touch of HubSpot for a while. What we do is let’s look out. We call it our business first approach. Let’s see what the business is doing first.

We need to understand what that’s looking like. We need to consult with you. We need to talk in-depth like, “Where are you at? Where are we trying to go?” I always tell people like, “Tell me what you’re doing.” There’s no wrong answer. Maybe it’s like, “I’m taking stuff.” The sales reps are writing on a napkin and they’re handing it to the customer. That’s fine. We need to know. Some people do that but it’s fine. We need to know, where are we now, where do we need to go and how are we going to start getting there?

This is a very important part of it. That’s a lot of times, what we’re doing with a lot of the stuff on the CRM side because a lot of times, you jump in and people had it set up a couple of years like, “How’s these automation is doing? I don’t know. Who set them up? I think John did. Where’s John? John left months ago. Do you guys have documentation? No. Do you guys know if you need them? No. Do you guys know if they’re even active? We don’t know. Do you know what they’re supposed to do? No.”

Nobody knows anything. It’s a bunch of things that sound very common. A bunch of things that’s there. Nobody knows why it’s there or if it should be there. Nobody knows if we turn it off, does everything break or not? We have no idea. We run into this quite a bit. People will come in and this is very common, whether it’s whoever comes in, “This tool is awesome. Let’s set up features, automations, and reminders,” which is again, you do need to do but you don’t start there. You need to start with, “What do I need to do to set up everything? You’re set up should be very intentional like, what do I need to set up? For what purpose are we setting it up?

That’s what we take that approach, where we’re like, “Let’s zoom out. You have HubSpot. That’s amazing. Let’s park that for a little bit. Let’s zoom out. What do we need to do to improve our processes? What is our process even look like? We’re going to improve it. We can add some reminders here. We can do this here. We can add a little automation here. We can automate this and push this into this.”

We start mapping out what we’re going to do and we iterate over that then eventually it’s like we’re on a good page then we start implementing. What’s good too is they’re able to come back and refer to it and be like, “That’s what we did.” A year or two later, they’re looking at it. They’re like, “These folks set it up for us. That’s what we were trying to do. I remember.” People will refer back often to that diagram to be able to see what was happening. It’s done in a way that’s meant to drive a certain result for the business.

Processes Are The Drivers Of Value

I’m a big fan of the word value. When I get on other shows and get interviewed and so forth. I always make the statement that value can come in different shapes, sizes, and colors. Often, a lot of value gets left on the table because we’re not looking at all those different shapes, sizes, and colors that it comes in. When we talk about a process, there’s different sizes, shapes, and colors of value that we need to pay attention to. How often do you see that as a problem? When you’re in front of a company, they’re not taking into consideration all the value and a process the deliver or touch whether it be internally or externally to a company.

A process is one of the biggest drivers. Good processes are one of the biggest drivers of value and that’s one of the things I love about products. I’m a value guy too, but people don’t necessarily associate process with value, but I’ll tell you in a second it’s the best value. As far as what you were saying, that’s the diet thing. That’s how that came up because some people are like, “I pay attention to that. We don’t have processes.” You have processes. You not paying attention to them is like it’s not going to suddenly make it that you don’t have them. They are there.

 

Good processes are the biggest drivers of value.

 

You are somehow servicing your customers. You are somehow selling to your customers. If you say, “I don’t have a process.” You’re basically saying, “I’m not going to look at how I’m selling to my customers. If I got a sale, I get it. If I service the customer, I service them. I’m not going to look at how that happens and have any control to ensure that happens in any way. I’m just going to let it happen however it happens.”

When I say it like that, it sounds outrageous. You’re probably looking at me or people are looking at me like, “Who’s going to say that?” That’s what you’re saying by saying things like, “I don’t need to focus on my properties. I don’t have them.” It’s essentially what you’re saying. You may not be aware but when you think about it, it’s basically what it is.

Processes are like the absolute biggest driver of value. When you look at a business, regardless of whatever industry you’re in. If you’re in a B2B business or even a B2C but more particularly even B2B. you’ll know how much work it takes to get a customer into the door and to get a lead into the door. Anything you do, there’s always things a little bit outside of your control.

For example, if you’re running ads, there’s some things in control but then, the customer’s have to come to you. The message has to resonate with them. They have to come in whatever. Anything on the marketing for anything you do. There’s a lot of things outside that controls it. Process is one thing where essentially the whole thing is inside your control.

This is people that have already come to you. You’re doing more with what’s already coming to you. You have leads coming into you and you’re like, “We need to have a good process to make sure nothing falls between the cracks,” for example. That is guaranteed value, as guaranteed as it gets and the business world. They’re already there, coming and expressing interest. You’re making sure that interaction is very tight so that people don’t fall between the cracks.

Even if you’re doing a good job and Ad hoc without having any system. A hundred people come in and we service 95 of them. We were able to talk to 95 of them. The five that you missed, one of them could have closed or two of them. That could have been a pretty big sized deal. You lost a whole ton of money, especially again in that B2B context, where each customer is very valuable.

It’s very critical to be able to look at that and it is guaranteed value. It’s across the different sides of it. On the sale side, guaranteed value and to be able to extract higher conversion of the leads that you have or higher engagement off of the leads that you have. On the marketing side, it’s to be able to juice up the attention of some of the people that you already have and your funnel. Maybe try to get them into the sales side. On the service side, it’s one thing we like to say, “Service when done right is a sales tactic or sales opportunity.” If you do server as well, you can use that to drive upsell or cross sell. On all fronts of your business, this is a guaranteed value driver.

 

Service, when done right, is actually sales.

 

It’s not always understood the importance of a process. With my small business clients, the whole sales process is not understood well. You’ve got a sales funnel and within the funnel itself, you’ve got different steps from when you get a lead to when that league changes into a paying customer and how are you doing that on a repetitive basis? That’s going to drive your revenues.

It’s another story whether those revenues cover all your expenses, but you want repeatability to increase your sales success. You also want to make sure that you’re getting the quality leads. If you want to have an understanding of whether you have quality leads, it’s going to help bump up your sales success rate. What in your process tells you that? How do you capture those statistics or that data to understand how you need to change your decisions about what advertising or marketing to use?

What social media to use to get those qualified leads that’s going to help pump your success rate? All of that is a process. Have you found the same thing that people don’t understand? Sales is just sales. I’m just here to try and convince somebody to buy our product or service. To a certain extent, but there’s a lot more to that process than what you’re stating.

A lot of times, people will come to us with their CRM or HubSpot and they’re like, “We want to fix our reporting. We want better reporting.” I’m like, “Reporting is one of the first things that you see is inadequate or broken but the last thing that can be fixed.” It’s like you go to a doctor and you’re like, “I have a fever and I’ve had it for days,” but he’s going to ask you a million other things to try to understand why you have a fevers and do testing. Did you have this? Do you have this? Do you have that? It’s something else. Do I need to refer you? Do you have some other underlying thing? You’re going to have to fix that then the fever.

Get to the root cause.

The fever isn’t the thing that we’re trying to fix. It’s just you’re sick. It’s the same thing with the reports. People are like, “My reports are broken.” It’s not. You’re not going to have these reports unless a lot of other things are happening and that’s one other reason why processes are very important, especially going to B2B setting or a high ticket sales setting, which I consider similar to B2B.

Salespeople are having these high level interactions and if you don’t know have any way of capturing that or storing them or looking at that, then you’re never going to have reports no matter how you slice it. The reason why I say especially B2B is because in B2C, let’s just say you had like a Shopify store. Even if you didn’t have as much, you can still get some data because you still know how many people bought and each ticket is smaller. Even by knowing how many people bought, you still know something.

In B2B, that’s not enough at all. Neither is it enough B2C but especially B2B. On that note though, you need to be able to have very clearly defined steps in order to have that level of tracking. A lot of times when people have their deal pipelines, we come in and we’re looking at them. It’s like one of the steps says something like demo.

It’s like, “What does that mean demo? Given or the customer requested a demo or we scheduled a demo or we are attempting to schedule a demo or we completed the demo?” You come with like four different interpretations for the same word. Now what happens is, if you had a sales team and it had four different people. Each one of them has their own interpretation and they’re all putting in stuff based on their own interpretation.

You’re trying to manage that and you’re looking at it. It’s like you’re reading four different languages that collapse into one and it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not going to be very useful but it’s also not their fault because there’s no guidance as to what is it supposed to mean? That’s something we run into often. There’s no documentation. There’s nothing. It’s just a word. It’s a very ambiguous word and we need to clarify what that means because it has to mean something across the board.

You got to start cleaning stuff up in that way and having very defendant of things, having things that people agree what they are, having clear mind stones and clear junction points where the salespeople know like, “Even if you forget to put something at this point, it’s fine but when it gets to this stage, you got to put it in.”

You should put it in from the beginning but let’s just say we forgot. No problem. After this stage, whatever it is for that business. It might be the stage at which we give a demo because we know people are going to start being interested or that’s going to be a key metric like how many demos we give, versus how many schedule a follow-up or sales call. You got to start putting it in at this stage and enforcing that and explaining why that’s very important.

Until you get to the point, you now have this information that you can look at. You should drive and make decisions. That’s a very key part of it. Again, it’s combining a few things with each other. One is the actual like having very clear business-oriented steps that make sense in the context of what’s being sold. Two is combining that human element of training people and making sure they understand what the steps are and like, “When do I have to make sure something is put in?”

Three is building that easy to use way on technology which is a CRM or whatever platform. You’re using for them to be able to do that and for you to be able to get that data so that you can look at a report and be like, “Our demo to follow up call could use some work. Maybe we got to change our demo,” for example.

At times, I don’t know if people understand the impact of what you’re doing may have on others within the organization. When I was at Boeing, I would lead and grow a service business that was labor intensive, and project-based. The key indicator milestone that I was tracking about when to hire more people was what’s going on with the sales process? How many of these projects are going to land? Can I sustain the revenue?

When I go to my higher-ups asking for the authority to go hire more people, that’s their first question. Do you have enough revenue projected to come in to substantiate hiring more people and still keep a profitable business? I had to do a lot of work in the sales process for that reporting in standardization so that I could collect that data and have data I could throw in front of my vice presidents to get the authority to go hire people. Once they’re sitting at the desk, I got to keep them busy.

I’d even bet if the organization had invested in certain ways of facilitating the process of money. Even made your job a little bit easier as far as you don’t have to put as much. They slice things together and get that reporting up but it’s very key. It drives a cycle. That’s another thing, too. Process is not this one and done thing. It’s like with diet. You don’t just say, “I eat a salad. I’m done.” That’s it. That’s not how it goes.

The right thing to eat isn’t the same every day either. Things change. You might need a meal counting or something else. You might be sick or whatever. You got to iterate on it. It’s the same thing with processes. You have to iterate on it but it leads you there because you will change your process and you’ll start tracking certain things. Those things are going to tell you something.

In the example we gave where it’s like you’re tracking that demo ratio then you’re like, “Our demos are way less effective than I thought.” It’s like, “We built a hundred demos and we got five follow-up sales calls,” and two of them to deals. It’s like, what’s happening? Right? You got to start investigating a little further then you maybe you’re like, “Maybe you are. Maybe you’re not. We got to start recording the demos because we got to see them. We don’t know what’s happening.” You’re looking at the demos and you see a point where customer engagement falls off then you’re like, “Why?”

You dive in and you got another hypothesis. Maybe the demo is too long. Now we got to change the process a little bit. Change the way we do the demo and see what happens. You iterate and you’re like, “The data reflects better. What else can we do?” It’s going to lead you to other things to do then you’re going to need to do those things and it’s a journey. That’s how you drive sustainable success. At the end of the day, you have to do something and see what happens.

You have to have the means of seeing what happens. That’s why initial getting things lined up is massively key because if you don’t have any way of seeing what happens, it doesn’t even matter what you could be doing. All the best things or all the worst things. You’re never going to know it. What good is that for you? You’re going to be able to iterate through that and see what we can do better.

 

Getting things lined up is massively key because if you don’t have any way of seeing what happens, it doesn’t even matter what you could be doing. All the best things are all the worst things.

 

Making A Process More Efficient

Do you have a philosophy or set of criteria as to when a department within an organization should get other departments or even their customer involved in their processing development or work to make a process more efficient or deliver more value to the organization or the customer? When should a company or organization seriously look at getting others involved?

I think you know what I’m going to say, but getting others involved one thing. When should a company or organization seriously look at the prices, one time. I don’t think that they should, but in particular, if they’ve never looked at it carefully before, then they should do it like yesterday. The core thing that the process helps with is it helps you at any scale, by the way. People sometimes associate scale with whatever is in their head but it’s at any scale.

If you want to take a team from 4 people to 5 people, that’s still scaling. It’s very hard to do if you don’t have anything. If you have any problems, it’s like, “I got to start.” What are you going to do? Everybody does whatever they do and it works. We don’t have any system to plug them into then they sit there or they wait for learning people or they figure it out on their own or they make their own process.

Scaling and being able to service your customers. You’ll be able to service customers better and faster with the resources you have. That’s a process thing. Being able to sell it to customers and again, you want to be able to get a higher rate on the people that you talk to what you’re able to sell to. Again, that’s a process thing.

There’s no time where you shouldn’t be doing this. The better question is, have we done this? Did we look at our processes? We look at our processes. Did we improve our processes? Do we want to get more value out of our processes? These are questions you should be asking yourself. Again, the one thing to remember is it’s as guaranteed of an investment or value as you’re going to get because any amount of improvement you do to a process is something that is fully in your court, which is very rare.

 

There’s a combination. If you’re doing ads some stuff is in your court and some stuff is not in your court. If you’re doing anything. If you’re doing an event or going to a conference, you might have the best table, the best booth or the best everything but people don’t show up to the conference. Not as many show up. Everybody’s been there. They’ve showed up to trade shows and they invested all this money. It happens a lot, the corporate level. They invested all this money and the customers didn’t come. It’s not a whole lot of people came. It’s only a few or almost none. You’re sitting there and talking to vendors.

Everybody’s been there. You can do everything right there, but the ball is not fully in your core. With processes, it is. Everything’s in your court. You’re talking about customers who are already coming in your door. They’re already interested in you and you’re like, “How do we extract more value out of that?” Do you want to get more value? You should be asking yourself that question. If you do, then you should take a look at it.

I equated to what I tell my clients about business plans. A lot of people that are starting up a company is saying, “I got to write this 50 to 100 page document. I got to have all the details. I’m going to go execute it.” It’s an all or nothing thing. I either got it right or I didn’t. As opposed to we’re going to make it a ten page document. We’re going to build a lot of flexibility into this. We’re going to collect data and ask questions to collect data to validate or invalidate the assumptions that we made when we built this plan.

Areas In Business To Pay Attention To

To me, it’s the same thing with processes. Here’s a process. We build it. We know it’s not perfect, but we’re going to be flexible with it. We’re going to collect data on it and we’re going to improve it like we would improve the business plan, where the business strategy as we get more information. I don’t know if it’s well understood that companies that do well have this part of a culture, this continuous improvement philosophy that we’re constantly going to be looking at this. What areas of a company do you do the most work in? Where do you see the biggest bang for the buck from an ROI perspective with the work that you do? Where are the most common problems or the areas where this is an issue for companies?

I’ll answer a little bit of it. There’s value in all the sides of the business, but I’ll lay out where that is, but on social, it’s a little bit different. One of the first things that if you’re going to check one thing, this is one of the first things that you need to check because we do run into this a lot. Any ingress point into your business like digitally or even physically, but most likely digitally. Any form or phone number and email, make sure that goes somewhere that people check.

This is important and this is always where we start because a lot of times, people have a bunch of forms. One form is like, “There’s a contact us form in this page you guys.” Who checks it? Go select some inbox that we set up when we set up the website. What if people are trying to reach you there? They’re coming in. It’s almost like a customer is walking in the door to like a store or department store. He’s doors open, looking around and nobody at the cashier. There’s nobody anywhere and he’s like, “What do I do?” He just leaves. Who’s going to buy something?

That’s massive. Again, people who are going to hear this are going to laugh. Who doesn’t? A lot of people do that. It might not be where you notice it is, too. It might be that you expect everybody’s going to come in through the main form on the landing page, but there is another form somewhere if they click through to the website. They say things like, “Contact us or become a vendor.” Whatever little form that you might have called a partner. People like these little form and we don’t monitor those.

That’s key. As far as getting value, all the stages but one way to look at it that I tell people is you look at it from the perspective of where does the customer navigate through our business. That gives you a good way to look at where you optimize because that’s the most important thing in your business. It’s your customers. You’re trying to have a process that manages both. Between the business side of things but from the customer’s perspective as well. People don’t look at this like she ends up being bad because again, they think of like, “We want to see all these metrics.”

We’re going to ask to have all these steps and things for the reps to fill out but that has nothing to do with the way that the business is conducted and the way that the customers buy that. It ends up being impossible to do for the reps and it ends up not being their fault. That’s something that we’ve seen. You want to be able to combine between both sides of it. That’s a very big part of it, but one massive friction point that we see a lot of people not paying attention to is the intersection between sales and service.

 

A lot of people do not pay attention to the intersection between sales and service.

 

People will be like, “We close the deal. We’re done.” You’re not. That’s the worst part to think that you’re done. You’re not at all because that onboarding part is very key. I call it onboarding. It transition to servicing the customer, onboarding or project management meeting. Depends on your business whatever it’s called. Whatever the equivalent of whatever happens right after the deal, that portion is a very big friction point. Often, it’s going from whoever is selling in your business to whoever is executing. That point, things get lost in translation. Things then don’t get carried forward.

Didn’t collect any information needed.

Again, this is an issue at all levels of organization, even at the Fortune 500 level, this comes a lot. They’ll have to even have processes enforced on certain things like you have to sit down and meet with the person to be able to have a discussion before you can fully close an order, for example, which is good. That’s very key. We do a combination of things on the organizational side but also on the technology side. Where you’re combining between almost the deal Pipeline then the ticket side of things are whatever onboarding team is using.

Have some combination of flow of information between one department to other without overwhelming the other department because service doesn’t need to know every single thing like the sales talked about. They do need to know certain key things. One example that comes up and a lot of people probably have heard of this. Let’s say you’re like a software company. They finish then it’s like onboarding.

They’re talking about onboarding rap and the onboarding was like, Bob from sales said, “I’m going to get like two free months.” and the onboarding rap is like, “I don’t know. I don’t see any note of that.” There’s no system and it’s not written anywhere. He has to go hunt down. Bob’s in the middle of something else. It’s like a startup or a little bit beyond the startup. Bob’s like, “I don’t know man,” and there’s papers, flipping and throwing them. Half a day later, he’s like, “I told them 10% off and it’s already on the deal. Come on.”

The onboarding rep goes back to the customer the next day and is making another call. He’s like, “I get 10%. You’re already got it.” The customer waited a day to get an answer that wasn’t the best thing that they wanted to hear. The rap wasted his entire day to hunt down the other guy and the salesperson had to jump back into an order that he’s already forgotten about. He’s moved on doing a million things.

You can imagine how many man hours you face and if you ever worked at a startup, you know this happens a lot. This happens very frequently and even not just to start up. This happens very frequently. You multiply this, call it five man hours. It’s more than that, but call it that. Multiply it by however many times it happens. You’ve got guaranteed value.

If you had a system where they had to put in certain information before they close things out. That information got transferred over to the service guy then he could be on the phone and customer is having the conversation and they’re asking the questions. He’s like, “Don’t worry. You’re good. You got 10% discount. It’s already applied.” That’s it. Everybody feels better and John doesn’t even know. The staff doesn’t even know. Multiply five man hours or 10 by however many times this happens in a week, 2 times or 3 times or 4 times. That’s a lot of guaranteed value when we’re talking about that because it’s time that does not need to be spent.

Where To Reach Moustafa

Moustafa, our time is coming to a close. I can’t thank you enough for coming and sharing your wisdom with our audience. If somebody want to reach out and understand your services better or has a question about process development or so forth. What’s the best way they can reach out to you?

If you want to reach out and you’re reading this, reach out to us at Hello@pushanalytics.com and put in the title Generate Your Value so that way the team knows to route it. If you want to take a look at something or jump on a quick console call with us and you’re reading this episode. We’ll happily do that so just put that in the email. Our team will route it and we can get a console booked with you and help you talk through whatever you’re trying to figure out.

Generate Your Value

One last final question that we ask all of our guests because we like to understand where the common thread is around the world with this question. The question is, what are the words that generate your value mean to you?

I think generating your value, depending on the context but it means being the best you can be or strive. It’s not a destination. It’s more of a journey but it’s a constantly working to get to the point where you’re better. You can be the best version of yourself at any given point in time. That applies to you as an individual or you as a business. How do we improve more so we can become better than yesterday? How can I always be better tomorrow than it was yesterday? I would say that’s how I would take it.

 

We’ve been talking about process development for businesses but how do we translate that over to our lives to have a culture or a mindset of our life about continuous improvement? How is it that I can look at what I’m doing when my processes of my day? Whether it’s health and diet like we were talking about or other things to help be the best that I can be in this world no matter how you slice it.

You can look at it that way as an individual, too. It’s a pretty cool way to look at it.

For the audience, I can’t thank you enough for reading this episode and have us be able to deliver the content and the value of Moustafa, his experience, expertise and processes. Hopefully, Moustafa, we call them golden nuggets on this show. We had some golden nuggets in our conversation that people can use to integrate their life or their business such that they feel like they’re taking a step forward. That is why we’re here. With that being said, we’re here every Tuesday with a guest just as greatest Moustafa is. We hope that you have a great day and a great week. We’ll see you next time here on the show.

 

Important Links

• Moustafa Moursy – LinkedIn
• Push Analytics
• Hello@pushanalytics.com

 

About Moustafa Moursy

Moustafa Moursy is a deeply experienced entrepreneur who empowers business owners to grow their businesses rapidly by rationalizing and mastering business processes specific to their
circumstances.

Moustafa leads Push Analytics, a business consultancy firm that’s in the top 10% of HubSpot agencies and is among the best in class in helping businesses grow and specifically optimizing their business processes. Moustafa has the unique distinction of having an extensive background in B2B Sales and Sales leadership in addition to a very strong technical
foundation. This allows him to build out & weave together complex business processes &
technology stacks to deliver custom, hyper focused, elegant business systems that maximize efficiency, profits, and market share.

Moustafa excels at guiding and supporting clients as they rationalize and optimize their
businesses to streamline communication, operations, processes, and growth. With every individual client, he sees that by observing a business’s functions, having efficient and in-depth conversations with principals, and together creating elegant structures and processes, rapid growth results – because businesses are more powerfully serving their core markets and expanding those markets.