What’s the best way to pitch BPM to a company that doesn’t know that it needs it?

There is a Business Process Group on Linkedin that is very active with numerous posts on BPM related subjects everyday. I try to comment when I get a chance and this specific thread asked “What’s the best way to pitch BPM to a company that doesn’t know that it needs it?”. I commented as follows and then got a private message from John Wurl.

PvS Comment: These are always the most difficult. In all honesty, we don’t sell them BPM if they don’t know what it is. We rather engage with them and identify some “pain points” in their business. We then solve the problem by addressing the process and we show them what it means to “manage” their processes. This approach takes less time with a higher conversion rate than trying to educate them at the start.

Message from John: I enjoyed reading your reply to this post.  It seems that many of our posts get into the technology agnostic debate and I was curious how you managed this?  You seem to have a very simplistic and elegant approach.  Does it remain that way for long when you integrate a tool?  Thank you and I hope I am not asking a dumb question.

PvS reply to John:

Our objective is to sell our software in the end but we’ve learnt that we have to solve the “business problems” if we want to have a long time relationship with our client. Taking a business improvement approach mostly leads to the question on how to implement the process change to make it consistent, repeatable and sustainable. That inevitably leads to employing a tool like XMPro. We never started XMPro with a view to become a BPMS. We come from a background of developing bespoke solutions for ERP solutions. That generally requires solving the business problem. The focus is not on the tool but the objectives and performance indicators of the process. We then decided to build a tool for composite process applications with complex integration requirements and it turned out that Gartner coined it BPMS. So our focus is on solving a business problem and you will have a customer for life.

Once they see that they have multiple process (pain point solutions) in one process portal, they start to see the value of “managing processes” proactively. Then we introduce them to fully fledged BPM.

I hope this answered your question and thanks for commenting.

So the best way to pitch BPM to a company that know that it needs it, is not to pitch it at all. Show how process performance improvement can solve business problems. It is not about the methodology, technology or the tool. It is about solving a business problem.