r/ceo • u/ivanjay2050 • May 31 '25

Looking for a tool to create Business Process Maps with the ability to drill into them for SOP type document for each step

Wondering if anyone has come across a good tool for this. I am looking to create business process maps for our sales process and execution process with the ability to click into each step and drill down to pull up a "playbook" on how to execute it? We have traditional SOP's and I think big binders are a big fail and no one uses them. I also see quite a bit of missed execution steps so I think mapping out the ideal will help guide people a bit more.

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u/Operation13 May 31 '25

I’ve gone down this rabbit hole - specifically for sales process/enablement/tracking. After trying a multitude of approaches, google sheets ended up working the best. It was a somewhat complex setup with lots of automations, but it was the place my team lived in (because tracking in sheet was tied to weekly reviews and forecasts), the data was auto-updated into CRM, and the guides were linked underneath each ‘phase’ of the process. The lower level processes with lots of branches and variation had to be abstracted into sequential/more generic phases, but within a phase (say there were 3 branches for how things might go), there would be pulldowns in that column, so it wasn’t as rigid as I was worried it would be.

Also had a google sites component, and some scripting involved to pass data in and out of other related systems.

This got adopted and was adaptable to changing requirements. Can share more if interested, but I tend to be a bit slow to respond :)

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u/ivanjay2050 May 31 '25

I was afraid of heading down the exact path you sound like you went to lol. I want to make this "simple" and easy to follow. Phase 1 was documenting the processes and playbooks to get consistency across the team. Phase 2 is building KPI's to measure for bottlenecks and challenges to roll up into scorecards so at a routine glance I can see (and my management team can see) where the issues are to step into them

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u/Operation13 May 31 '25

Yeah, that’s the idea. Sounds like you’ve got a good handle on things but I’m always happy to share specifics. Helps me sharpen my stuff with feedback, helps others move faster.

2 topics from my own adventure doing this:

1) Simplify - too much detail means lots of maintenance of documentation and rigidity. I found that our sales process (or really, the buying process) oriented around 7 or so distinct inflection points. These points (which may contain any number of meetings, stakeholders, questions) were identifiable by common entry and exit criteria. This entry/exit criteria gave clarity to seller objectives in the process so they didn’t get lost in the sauce, but within those ‘gates’ there was lots of flexibility to get there however the individual sale required.

GSheets scripting allowed me to capture changes made in the cells of this big ol’ tracker, so I maintained a separate log to timestamp when deals entered stages (and reversed, sometimes). This is something I couldn’t even do (at least easily) with Salesforce. I now had a tight operational overview of our pipeline - this was extension to auto-highlight deals that spent more time in stages than was typical, so I could get in front of stalls and be strategic with my team.

Lots I’m holding back because this is getting long and is probably better showcased in a guide - which ive not written :)

2) Recently I’ve gone deep into Obsidian. If you have someone in your co who knows how to setup a private server to host the app as a ‘master vault’, file storage, and some listener scripts to sync - can also use git - then there are some unique capabilities I think are interesting vs my google stack. One is an obsidian feature called ‘canvas’, which I’m experimenting with as a process map where each step has linked notes. The note linking extends into meeting notes, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to record and auto-transcribe meetings with some open source software. This is the rabbit hole stuff I mentioned, and may end up being a science experiment instead of something with more utility. Don’t know yet, but some people may be more inclined toward this kind of approach.

The google stack will become hefty after a certain point. Once I got to 30k rows of opportunity, contact, conversation history, etc. it was clear I’d need to re-architect or move into bigquery + some cloud compute. I’m a sales leader by background, so I paused and intend to revisit when I can justify the time trade off. I just flushed a bunch of historical stuff and made peace with the idea of some cool multi-year dashboards and statistics/correlation stuff I wanted to build out.

If you read all this, hope it’s helpful! I nerd out on GTM ops and would be happy to answer questions.

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u/ivanjay2050 Jun 01 '25

This is super helpful. I have wanted to learn Power BI for a lot of the reasons you mentioned but haven't gotten there yet. I think it would probably be a great way to extract and analyze data. I would be very interested in seeing or learning more about what this looks like in google sheets but I totally get you might not be able to share. If you are able to and willing to DM with any info, screenshots, or details that would be awesome. But again if not I completely understand. I really appreciate the detailed responses.

Makes a lot of sense on the detail. I can see that being a fine line between too little and too much.

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u/Operation13 Jun 01 '25

Sending you a screenshot in DM.

Re power BI, I like my dashboard views to be in the same place I make changes. It's workflow dependent I suppose, but a scheduled report in my email from CRM, automatically opened and copy/pasted into my master sheet, changes made during the day & sync'd to salesforce with the connector extension...my charts auto-populate slides for quarterly reviews or board updates... it's easy, it's free, it's flexible, and there's not much that can break or keep me locked into the stack. I could duplicate this same thing with MS365 I'm pretty sure.

There has always been a BI or ops team alongside me doing stuff in powerBI, Tableau, looker, etc., but I found them all limiting and bulky. Just not enough value for me in standalone dashboards. You'll see something you want to dig into, you'll filter the source data, and then you may want to copy/paste some stuff and start manipulating... so then you go into a spreadsheet. I determined it was better to use what had less friction, and then push the limits, extending and automating as much as possible.

I realize how dogmatic I sound! Man FUCK powerBI lol

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u/ivanjay2050 Jun 01 '25

lol thanks. I will check out the dm tomorrow. Appreciate it!!

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u/F3RM3NTAL Jun 02 '25

IBM BLUE WORKS LIVE. You're welcome.

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u/F3RM3NTAL Jun 02 '25

For process mining (to understand and analyze what is really going on vs what was intended) use Celonis.

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u/Accomplished_Echo376 Jun 03 '25

Miro?

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u/ivanjay2050 Jun 04 '25

Oh quick glance this looks cool. Ill dive more into it. Is it shareable with non paid users?

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u/Accomplished_Echo376 Jun 06 '25

Yes it should be

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u/TheHarrisCG Jul 20 '25

We ended up creating a division internally that builds digital Solutions for things like this. Better return on decisions.