How do you know whether you’re going to be successful or not with a new business or product?

Well, you’ll probably look to pour your heart and soul into it. You’ll work hard to make it the best product or service you can. You’ll endeavor to make each and every customer happy.

And well done to you for that.

But you’re not the only one who impacts on whether your efforts are successful.

It’s no secret that one of the hardest parts of business is the competitive nature of the market.

What your competition looks like, how it’s constructed, and what opportunities their weaknesses provide you, are crucial factors which can determine your success.

This is where you’ll need to do some kind of competitive position analysis.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at a framework which is designed to help you understand your competition called Porter’s Five Forces. We’ll cover:

• What is Porter’s Five Forces Model?
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 1: Threat of new entrants
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 2: Threat of substitutes
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 3: Bargaining power of customers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 4: Bargaining power of suppliers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 5: Competitive rivalry
• Resolving the 5 Forces: An Economic Moat

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As organizations get larger they get more and more complex.

So many different people pushing and pulling in different directions.

This slows an organization down and makes it hard to operate. It makes it hard to achieve the best results.

Human resources departments should be the ones who sort out this mess. The ones who make sure everyone is working toward the same goals. The department which facilitates the other departments to do their best work.

But for many companies, HR isn’t working.

According to McKinsey:

1. 42% of HR professionals are not taking action against priority areas
2. 65% of HR professionals are not pursuing innovative approaches
3. and 68% don’t have confidence in their strategy

That’s why, in this Process Street article, we’re going to take this problem seriously and look at:

• What is HR management?
• What are the current HR best practices?
• How to manage digital transformation in HR
• Netflix and the modern HR revolution
• How to use Process Street for human resources

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Services, services, services.

We seem to be in a world of managed services.

Everyone’s outsourcing nowadays. And when they’re not outsourcing, they’re insourcing in an outsourced way.

It’s all very confusing.

That’s why we’ve decided to break down the core document which tends to regulate and organize this kind of service provision: the humble service-level agreement (SLA).

Service-level agreements, amongst other things, bolster trust in and between organizations – making it clear what needs to be done, to what standard, and when.

Trust is a hugely important thing in business. Accenture’s Competitive Agility Index found:

following a drop in trust, a company’s index score drops 2 points on average, negatively impacting revenue growth by 6% and EBITDA by 10% on average.

One of the main ways to keep trust alive in your business is to know what is expected of people and to hold them to it. Enforce reliability.

SLAs are one mechanism to help you in that battle.

In this Process Street article we’ll answer the following questions:

• What is a service-level agreement (SLA)?
• Why do you need a service-level agreement?
• What are the different types of SLA?
• What is in a service-level agreement?
• What kinds of companies use an SLA?
• What are some SLA examples?
• What are the alternatives to SLAs?
• How you can use SLAs with Process Street

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Natasha Ponomaroff is the Senior Marketing Director of Instasize – a content creating tool-kit for anyone editing photos and online content on mobile. A weekly contributor on the site’s blog, Natasha tracks social media trends and updates the millions of “creatives” who are currently using Instasize to curate awesome online content.

Seeking to establish a well-rounded online presence?

There are many different digital marketing channels to choose from, and all of them contribute to a holistic online strategy.

However, to succeed you need to know how to pair the right kind of content with the most suitable platform.

For marketers, there’s a constant pressure to create new content while maintaining a high level of quality.

To alleviate that burden, look to social media content.

Social media content, especially the kind of content you’ll find on a visual-focusedchannel like Instagram, is perfect for repurposing. Consider the fact that not all audiences favor social media as their communication medium of choice.

While effective in its own way, studies have shown that email marketing is 40 times more effective at reaching target customers than some social media channels.

With that in mind, and to cover multiple audience bases at once, here’s how you can bring Instagram content into your email marketing campaigns and save time in the process.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Embedding user-generated content into your email marketing
• Making the most of original content in emails
• How to save and share Instagram Stories through email newsletters
• Getting started with repurposing your Instagram for email marketing content
• Use Process Street for your email marketing processes and more!

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Automation has been one of the key emerging trends of the late 2010s, and will likely be a defining characteristic of the 2020s.

It’s something we’ve covered extensively at Process Street, and something we’ve taken huge advantage of internally as well.

The move from companies only providing enterprise-level API access to their software over to commercially available Internet of Things style mass integration has been a dramatic shift in the marketplace. This has opened up huge potential for individuals and small businesses; you can integrate with thousands of services in just a few clicks.

Now, so many services, SaaS products in particular, provide a means to integrate with other platforms that there are very little restrictions on what you can and cannot automate.

Tools like Zapier, Flow, and IFTTT have made these integrations so easy that anyone can set them up.

But they’re not the only ones – new connectors and middlemen are cropping up all the time, helping people without tech skills connect with APIs or Webhooks of their choosing. The No-Code Movement has gone mainstream and it now has a full suite of tools at its disposal.

Even in 2015, according to Chui, Manyika, and Miremadi writing in the Harvard Business Review, not only could a marketing executive be automating activities which account for between 10-15% of their current time using existing technology, but for 60% of existing US jobs, 30% of their time could be reduced by automation.

For those interested in that kind of thing, you should check out Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation by McKinsey. An illuminating text which is already somewhat out of date!

Here at Process Street, we integrate with thousands of other apps and platforms via Zapier, we have large customers making use of our API, and we’ve now added webhooks to our array of automation options to try to cover the rest of the use cases our customers tell us about.

In this article, we’ll look at:

• What are webhooks?
• What do people use webhooks for?
• What is the difference between webhooks and APIs?
• How do I use webhooks?
• How do Process Street webhooks work?

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This is a guest post from Olivia Harp, whose easy-reading, approachable pieces help bring important business and negotiation skill-building content to new audiences in an accessible way. With a degree in linguistics, Olivia excels in creating her own engaging content.

Sustaining customer satisfaction can be challenging in business. However, there are several ways to improve your sales and customer satisfaction at the same time. Improving your sales negotiation skills is an overlooked low hanging fruit route to making a positive impact on your customer relations.

Through sales negotiation training, you can learn how to identify your customers’ needs better. Understanding your customers puts you in a position to offer better services. By improving your customer relations, you may be able to attract and retain more customers.

This article outlines practical negotiation tips to increase your customers’ satisfaction.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Redefine your business strategy
• Analyze your sales negotiation tactics
• Review your negotiation style
• Additional negotiation skills for customer satisfaction
• Get it right every time with Process Street

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This is a guest post from Oren Greenberg, a growth marketer and founder of the Kurve consultancy in London. He helps startups and corporate innovation projects scale using digital channels. He has written for leading marketing blogs and has been featured in the international press.

A business is an abstract entity, which is brought to life by its people. Every team member has a part to play in representing their organization – not in the sense of blindly flying the flag or sacrificing their own identity, but in the sense of owning their area of expertise and sharing their deepest knowledge.

These days, it’s normal for a business leader to build their own personal brand. These are the “thought-leaders” we hear about so often. But I believe that too many organizations stop here, and miss the chance to create a team of people who all have strong personal brands.

In turn, I believe this limits the opportunity to build credibility, reliability, and authority – three of the key considerations for B2B buyers.

So, the tactics I discuss in this Process Street article are designed to apply to team members at every level of the hierarchy. They are suitable for business leaders, but also for executives and junior staff.

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If you’re manufacturing food, drinks, or medicine, you know you have a sea of regulations and standards which you need to hit and adhere to.

You knew that starting out.

But it does leave you with two questions:

1. What are the regulations and standards that I should adhere to?
2. How do I get my organization to run in an effective manner so that we consistently adhere?

Lots of companies are very good at asking the first question, but the second sometimes gets overlooked.

This is how we end up with malpractice and lawsuits and all kinds of bad things.

You don’t just have to know what the standards are, or intend to reach those standards, but you have to consistently hit those standards in order to be the successful safe business you want to be.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’ll be looking at:

• What is CGMP? Current Good Manufacturing Practices explained
• What are the current Good Manufacturing Practices?
• What is a Quality Management System and how does it help CGMP?
• How Process Street can help you build your Quality Management System

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Andy Mura is an inbound Marketer, entrepreneur, speaker, and SaaS enthusiast currently working in Germany as the Head of Marketing at Userlane, the user onboarding and support automation platform that drives customer success.

The modern B2B SaaS market is reaching full maturity.

After attracting early adaptors and transforming the startup world, SaaS has conquered the enterprise world as well. Large corporations, such as Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP, have shifted their focus from stationary, on-premise software to subscription-based cloud solutions.

And in turn, even the most conservative enterprises are rethinking their infrastructure to leverage the flexibility and reliability of modern SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS solutions.

Companies will soon run solely on SaaS applications. In fact, there are many reasons that lead firms to embrace this new model.

In this Process Street article we’ll cover:

• Why are B2B SaaS applications on the rise?
• The 9 essential elements of B2B SaaS applications
• The growing world of B2B SaaS applications

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I moved house not too long ago.

Now, I’ve always been a pretty terrible record keeper in my own life.

To remedy this I tried the hoarder technique. If I thought something was even remotely important, I’d throw it in a box file and vow to come back to it one day in the future.

It was only when I came to moving, and thought I’d try to Marie Kondo my crap away, that I dug out all my box files and the piles of messy paper inside them.

I’ll be really honest with you – it’s not an approach to records management that I would recommend.

Your business probably creates exponentially more records than I do, so you certainly can’t use an unthought-out approach to records management either.

That’s why we’ve decided to take some of the basics of records management, explain them, and give you a series of actionable ways to get started taking control over the lifecycles of records in your company.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is records management?
• Why is records management important?
• The 5 key steps to records management
• How to build a records management process

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