“I won’t get distracted”, you tell yourself, “I’ve got a deadline – I’ll be fine”.
Next thing you know you’re looking at the goals-per-game statistics for second division Scottish soccer team Raith Rovers from their 1976/77 season.
I know because it happened to me. It was 1.15 goals-per-game. In the league only – not including cups.
This is why I’ve had to drill myself to be able to work effectively, and why I’m telling you how to avoid distractions today.
We’re always looking for innovative ways to drive sales.
One simple step which people often overlook is the potential purchasing power of your existing audience. It can be expensive to market to people who know nothing about your product, but less expensive to increase the lifetime value of your existing customers.
When Facebook first released their custom audiences advertising feature, results poured in rapidly. One e-commerce company, as reported at the time by TechCrunch, targeted their email list and recorded a 43 percent increase in sign-up conversion and a 30 percent decrease of their cost-per-lead.
The Washington Post’s advertising arm, SocialCode, also reported a 15 percent lower cost per new fan after using custom audiences.
Using custom audiences and Facebook retargeting to activate people who have previously shown interest in your product is a strategy which works.
Recent elections have hogged the headlines due to their rhetoric and their politics.
However, one consistent theme across both the Trump victory and the Brexit success was their use of advanced marketing techniques.
These campaigns utilized the power of emotion to drive their narratives and leveraged the complexities of Big Data to direct those messages at segmented groups with devastating effect.
The recent victories were not merely political successes, but demonstrations of the immense potential of advanced marketing and advertising methods.
We’ll look at three key areas in this article:
The world of marketing is changing. Don’t get left behind.
According to Atlassian, unnecessary meetings cost the US economy $37b a year in wasted salary costs.
In fact, per the same study, half of all meetings are considered “wasted time”.
What differentiates a successful meeting from a failed one? How do we make sure our meetings are consistently successful?
In this article, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of how to run a successful meeting; the 7 key steps advocated by MIT professor Neal Hartman.
And we’ll share with you our internal method for running meetings in a structured manner with Process Street.
It’s not always easy to know whether your team is doing everything you ask them to. How do you know everything is on track? Are you sure your team is taking care of every responsibility?
Here’s the worrying thing:
According to the American Management Association, 21% of companies believe that 30-50% of their employees shirk from their responsibilities. This is stupidly high. So, we need to see how it can be resolved and take action right now.
Accountability in the workplace, in short, refers to your team members taking responsibility for their actions and for the tasks they’ve been assigned.
In this post, I’m going to cover 4 key areas which pertain to managing the accountability of employees:
Workflows are the building blocks of your business.
Whatever business you’re in, workflows are your business.
They act as representations of your whole operation. They can be used to smash inefficiencies and increase profits.
…But what are workflows, and why do they really matter?
Why should they be documented, and how can Process Street help you optimize them?
Let’s find out.
From September 1st 2015 to June 23rd 2016 the polls were clear that Britain would vote to remain in the EU.
According to the Financial Times, there were only two weeks over that period where the Leave campaign were ahead.
Yet, when the results came through, British voters had opted to leave the EU with 51.9% voting out.
How did the leave campaign strategy overcome the clear gap held for the year leading up to the vote?
A clear narrative and a range of big promises?
Well, yes. But also by selling those narratives and promises through a slick targeted marketing campaign powered by social media and big data.
According to the Laboratory for Social Machines from MIT Media Lab, Donald Trump was the most influential force on the 2016 election.
More than any television news stations, newspapers, or other public bodies. Donald J Trump, as an individual, was the most powerful influencer on the nation.
This influence was driven by his huge social media following. In March 2016 he had 6.8m Twitter followers, 6.3m Facebook likes, and 4.1m views on his YouTube channel. Now, he has over 22m Twitter followers.
But his eventual success lay deeper than just finely crafted tweet storms.
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.
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!
