This is a guest post from Kyle Anderson; a freelance tech journalist whose typical day is spent scouring the web for the latest developments in the world of business tools and software. He loves any type of software that automates his life! For his pastimes, he is an avid lover of travelling, poetry, and photography.

When it comes to prospecting and the wider sales process, there’s never a shortage of tools you can use to make your work easier and more efficient. One of the most versatile of them is Outlook, a Microsoft tool that is popularly known for email and business calendar management.

However, Outlook is not limited to just these two functions.

You can easily unlock its hidden power by integrating it with compatible add-ins and other extensions. In the end, you’ll be able to complete a broad range of business functions including market/customer research, communication with your clients, document sharing, accounting, and more.

In this Process Street post, we take a look at how you can run a successful outreach campaign for your sales cycle using Outlook and its supported add-ins.

We’ll cover:

• Lead qualification Outlook Add-ins
• Email template Outlook Add-ins
• Meeting scheduling Outlook Add-ins
• Contract signing Outlook Add-ins
• Accounting and invoicing Outlook Add-ins

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This article is a guest post from Wendy Dessler; a super-connector who helps businesses find their audience online through outreach, partnerships, and networking. She frequently writes about the latest advancements in digital marketing and focuses her efforts on developing customized blogger outreach plans.

It’s easy to check a few boxes when it comes to backgrounds and ethnicities, but does that really equal inclusivity?

Let’s face it, these are conflicted times. Everything seems to be coming to a head, and as workforce leaders, we need to make it a priority to make sure people feel valued.

Diversity is more than just a buzzword.

Diverse companies have a better reputation, and they also reap the endless benefits of having people from a variety of cultures, experiences, and backgrounds. Even if you don’t think inclusivity and diversity is a real issue today, it is.

An unfortunate 44 percent of managers are “too busy” to bother with diversity initiative. Including more people and encouraging a variety of perspectives does take time. It’s not always easy. It’s a team effort in many ways, yet it’s so essential to success today.

It’s not all about diversity. It’s also about building a culture of respect and appreciation.

We’ve all experienced working somewhere where we didn’t feel welcome. Maybe the leaders were too harsh and demanding. Maybe the hours were ridiculous. These jobs aren’t worth keeping, and they cause employees to feel undervalued.

You work hard to bring the best talent into your company. Don’t you want those individuals to feel excited about where they work? Believe it or not, it’s hard to find top talent today. According to the ManpowerGroup Talent Shortage research, 45 percent of employers across the globe struggle to find the skills they need. This is the highest in over a decade.

It’s time for your company to thrive thanks to different perspectives, skills, and personalities. Give your top performing employees a reason to love working at your organization.

If you’re ready to create an inclusive environment built for thriving, keep reading this Process Street article to explore the top 3 steps for cultivating diversity, inclusivity, and more.

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Being able to sell is a skill.

You know this if you’ve ever tried working in sales.

My first efforts working in a sales capacity were slow.

There were no management structures in place in that small startup to support me, train me, or guide me.

I was going it solo.

There was a lot to learn and, in a role which thrives on confidence, a lot to be anxious about.

Learning the basics of how to sell is important even if you feel you have the natural skills to do well in the area.

For me, learning the basics of the trade came from a little book. A little red book. Jeffery Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling, to be precise.

After recommending our audience Gitomer’s text in my best sales books roundup post, I managed to sit down with our best selling author and sales champion to explore the craft.

In this Process Street post, we’ll cover:

• To learn how to sell, you have to learn to communicate well
• The Little Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
• How to make sure you get things done
• Build your personal brand and support it with social media
• How to use humor as an effective tool
• How to understand what’s required for sales leadership

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This guest post is by Whitney Blankenship, Content Marketing Manager for Omnisend. When not writing awesome content, Whitney is reading up on the latest in digital marketing, ecommerce, and social media trends. Obsessed with pop culture, art, and metal. Powered by coffee. Fastest Googler in the West. Follow on Twitter.

In the ecommerce industry, omnichannel marketing has been a prevalent theme across articles, social media, conferences, and general thought leadership over the past few years.

Everyone is talking about it, but how many retailers are actually using it? How much of this is just theory, and how can we put omnichannel marketing into practice?

In this Process Street article, we’re going to walk you through the ins and outs of using omnichannel marketing for ecommerce. We’ll cover:

• What omnichannel marketing actually is (and more importantly, what it isn’t)
• How it’s different from multichannel marketing
• Reasons to implement an omnichannel marketing strategy for your ecommerce store
• Best practices to help you nail omnichannel marketing
• Plus, 17 free ecommerce process templates for your business

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Are you scrambling to keep up with your tasks and stay on top of priorities?

With tasks scattered all over the internet and no concrete place to see everything in one list, it’s not only difficult to manage your work — it’s nerve-wracking.

Enter Inbox for Process Street — making task and process management as easy as working through a single list.

Add an assignee to a task within a larger process, and the task will appear in their inbox. Due dates help you straighten your priorities, hit project deadlines, and show your team what they should be working on first.

Let’s take a look at how Inbox can make you more productive.
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This article is a guest post from Isaiah Jackson.

Team collaboration is not a new thing.

However, team collaboration is so poorly practiced within many organizations that we need to find new ways to facilitate it.

In the modern digital world, team collaboration is incredibly easy and can be achieved from in the office or in the home.

In this article, we’ll explain how effective team collaboration can allow you to operate your business either with remote staff or with staff being given the freedom to work from home flexibly.

Having home-working opportunities can unleash employee satisfaction, retention, and attainment. Modern approaches to team collaboration enable this.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why the traditional office dynamics are in decline
• The benefits of working remotely
• How team collaboration tools make remote work possible
• The key team collaboration tools used by the team at Process Street
• Why you should encourage your employees to work from home
• Team collaboration tools help in achieving a work-life balance

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Gone are the days where signing contracts involved figuring out how to connect to a printer, scanner, or photocopier.

And don’t get me started on fax machines.

Now we live in a glorious new world of rapid digital signature workflows.

There are many kinds of digital signatures. Some may think of the high-tech encrypted keys people like Julian Assange have used to prove whether messages came from them or not.

But let’s be honest, outside of our international secret agent daydreaming we’re not likely to need to use those. What we need is the simple act of being able to add our signature on to digital documents with the fewest number of clicks possible.

Those interested in soccer may remember the high profile signing of David de Gea by Spanish giant Real Madrid from Manchester United. Or, actually, you won’t remember it. Because it didn’t happen. The documents were to be sent in the last moments of the transfer window, and the whole multi-multi-million dollar deal fell through due to a broken fax machine.

Digital solutions to contract workflows are important.

That’s why in this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• The 5 best digital signature tools
• Digital signature integrations you can use today
• How to connect digital signatures with the workflows in your business

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Processes are all the rage right now, and we’re very pleased to be leading the charge in making processes agile and actionable for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

We’ve written countless pieces about creating a process, writing standard operating procedures, or building business systems.

But sometimes we’re guilty of assuming that having a process automatically makes something organized. It doesn’t.

If you’re a solopreneur or working in a startup, managing processes is fairly easy. You have a limited number and you can easily scroll through to find the one you need when you need it.

But what about large organizations? Companies where people on different teams are in different countries? Businesses where different departments speak and operate in different languages?

How can we manage processes on such a large scale, and what does that tell us about managing processes for small businesses looking to scale?

This is where a process library comes in.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• What is a process library?
• Why you should build a process library for your business
• Determine your information architecture before building your library
• How you can build a process library in Process Street
• Harnessing the power of Process Street’s templates!

Or, if you’ve just come for the templates, grab them below:

• Process Library Checklist
• The Process for Optimizing a Process

Let’s get started!

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Modern business is a fast paced game and there are always new ways you can discover to improve your operations and output.

One of the easiest and simplest ways to improve the day to day running of your business is to supply your team with better tools.

With the array of modern SaaS products available on the market there are specialized tools for a host of use cases.

We use Close.io for our sales team, Intercom for customer support, and Process Street for our business process management throughout the company.

But if you’re a department within a larger company, or a team within a department, how do you convince top management and finance to sign off on a new software product to boost your team’s performance?

In this article, we’re going to give you a step by step guide of how to make that happen. Including:

• What is a purchase requisition?
• The difficulty of bureaucracy
• 3 important factors to convince finance
• How to write a proposal for a new software purchase requisition
• Create or improve a purchase requisition process

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Writing perfect processes is a dream all Process Street users share.

But a perfect process isn’t necessarily a process where all the steps work perfectly all the way through.

In real life, processes come up against external forces and unforeseen circumstances. A perfect process doesn’t have to predict all these external influences in advance; it needs to be able to adapt to them in real time as they arise.

Fortunately, there’s a concept for this: Process Flexibility.

Process flexibility helps keep our processes working even when everything else is going wrong.

In this article, we’re going to outline what process flexibility is and the main approaches to managing it:

• What is process flexibility?
• What are the main approaches to process flexibility?
• Flexibility by design
• Flexibility by deviation
• Flexibility by underspecification
• Flexibility by change
• How Process Street is designed for agility

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