According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview and Loudhouse, poor processes are the primary cause of company inefficiencies (44%).

Even the largest companies in the world struggle with poor processes, resulting in poor performance and lost revenue.

But these problems are not always the fault of design.

Bad processes don’t just come from poor process management, but often evolve naturally within companies over time. From NASA to SpaceX, processes can become corrupted without anyone noticing.

This phenomenon can be known as the normalization of deviance.

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Silicon Valley darling and unicorn health insurance startup Zenefits lost over 50% of its value through 2016.

Why? Poor process management.

Process management might not sound thrilling, but it’s damn important.

Process management refers to how all the different systems within your business link up together to form a coherent whole.

If they don’t link up, they won’t make sense.

And if your business doesn’t make sense… well, you get the stretched metaphor. It’s not good.

Before we dive into what process management is and how it functions, let’s take a look at the high-profile example of poor process management in action.

That’s right, I’m talking about the cautionary tale of Zenefits!

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Sales will make or break your business

Outbound sales feed your team. Your cold-callers are foragers. Your senior sales staff are hunters.

They find the new clients and bring them back to the tribe of engineers and human resources staff who depend on them.

But we live in a more complex world than the hunter-gatherers of old, and with that comes the need for more complex processes.

The key to a successful sales process is understanding the overview.

There are lots of individual processes you can employ to improve different aspects of your sales and they need to fit together into a coherent sales narrative. Some call this narrative a sales funnel, and others a sales pipeline.

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So you’ve decided to hire remote? Good idea.

Working with a remote team can vastly increase your talent pool, save significant amounts on office overheads (on average $11,000 per company), and allow your staff to work in ways which suit them.

Your remote staff are 13% more productive. And, according to Chris Byers, CEO of Formstack, they’re twice as likely to work beyond 40 hours a week. You’re getting more hours, and more out of each hour.

…But don’t get too excited. Managing, training, and onboarding a remote team comes with its own challenges and difficulties. If you fail to train, you train to fail.

Here are 4 crucial points to remember when training a remote support team:

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