At Process Street, we’re always asked about the best ways to construct, track, and analyze processes.

There are loads of techniques in the school of business process management to help you with these three concerns but in this article, we’re going to give you an introduction to process mining; a data driven way to create, understand, and optimize your processes.

We’ll cover:

• What is process mining?
• 9 process mining tools to automate your analysis
• How to act on your mined results to optimize your processes

We cover solutions for enterprises all the way down to basic approaches for startups. Jump in!

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Sales is one of the core aspects of how a business functions.

Without sales, your brilliant product will just sit there, neglected and unused.

But no one is born as a brilliant salesperson, just as no one is born with an innate knowledge of how to run an effective outbound strategy.

We learn these things on the way. A lot of the time, we learn from the sales jobs we’ve had. But we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. Why not learn from the best salespeople, the highest performing companies, and the extreme examples?

In this Process Street article, we’re bringing expertise galore to your bookshelf or Kindle. We’ll go through our 7 key recommended reads, and follow that with 38 more sales books to satisfy your niche, industry, or needs.

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Staying safe and secure online has always been important but now more and more people are waking up to the fact that we need to take extra steps to protect our various accounts.

Banking online. Shopping online. Communicating online. Running a business online.

These have all rapidly become standard in today’s world. Given how embedded the internet is in our lives we need to take the necessary steps to stop people taking advantage of our online presence.

I recently put out a post explaining how to enable two factor authentication (2FA) across your accounts, including this handy checklist for enabling 2FA with Google and Slack.

Today, we’re going to look at password managers. 1Password vs LastPass vs all the rest!

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

• Why you should use a password manager
• The Challenge: Can third party password managers be better than your inbuilt systems?
• What do the 6 leading password managers offer and which one is right for you?

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It feels like certain areas of tech are booming at the moment.

Everyone and their nan seem to be incorporating the blockchain into their startup pitches, voice interface devices are sweeping the globe, and chatbots are popping up left right and center.

It feels like part of the rise of chatbots is predicated on the long term potential behind the idea of a smart assistant who can effectively communicate by chat. But the reality of a proper AI assistant is still some distance away.

Nonetheless, chatbots have real world uses already. For some use cases, chatbots are proving to be an effective and affordable alternative to previous practices.

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

• What are chatbots good for?
• How KLM boosted customer interaction 40% with chatbots
• What we do at Process Street with Intercom’s chatbot features
• How to set up a simple chatbot with Chatfuel
• 7 chatbot tools to check out today

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Building an initial sales approach is something loads of us have attempted to do at some point or other.

Sales ends up being one of the key ways companies grow and scale. We all know this.

But there’s a big difference between doing effective outreach for your startup on a high-touch basis where you’re still understanding customer needs and figuring out approaches, and turning this knowledge into a sales machine with a full sales team that can operate in a financially efficient way.

Understanding yourself in the market and growing to be the company you want to be require different slightly strategies.

This growth from tiny solopreneur kind of structures to managing teams with effective documented practices is what this article will be all about!

In this Process Street article, we’re going to take a look into some expert insights from Close.io‘s recent webinar with their CEO Steli Efti, Process Street’s CEO Vinay Patankar, PandaDoc‘s Director of Inside Sales Mike Paladino, and Groove‘s VP of Sales Mike Sutherland.

We’re going to pull out the key questions to help scale your sales in a way that works:

• What do you want to scale?
• Is now a good time to scale?
• How do you build a process for scaling?
• How do you get a sales teams to follow the process?
• When and how do I add people to a sales team?

And finally, we’ll give you 10 free process templates for different areas of sales for you to start using in your business today.

You can watch the whole webinar here: How to build a scalable sales process (Q&A webinar)

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Throughout a customer lifecycle, it is important to take opportunities when they present themselves.

One aspect which many SaaS companies will be familiar with is the ongoing attempt to upgrade customers to the next level of billing.

The core method of achieving this is to add features and improve your product.

This provides provides greater value for the client and gives them more reasons to consider purchasing your services – resulting in an upsell which works for both parties.

I imagine most of you reading have bought something from Amazon at some point in time. Yet when Amazon offer a more premium delivery service with access to films and television shows many of you will have gone from occasionally using Amazon for purchases to being fully fledged Prime users!

Amazon offered greater value and you thought it was worth paying for. You were upsold.

But importantly, both you and Amazon came out of the deal as winners!

In this article, we’ll look at how different companies have utilized upselling to drive their business forward, and try to learn a little something from each.

Then we’ll take a more in depth look at how Process Street upsells its customers, and the importance of seeing this as a company wide effort rather than small aspect of sales.

At the end of the article, we’ll give you a free Process Street process template you can use in your business for upselling customers. This process is geared to be run by a member of the sales team to try to upsell a valuable client, and close the deal.

Checkout the snapshot below!

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Here at Process Street, we’re always advocating for companies to use data to help in making important decisions.

But data on its own is not massively useful.

I could run an experiment right now and gather loads of data. But if that experiment was run poorly then my data will be poor. Which means any readings of that data will be poor too, leading to poor decisions.

Alternatively, I could run a really well structured piece of research and gather some great data, but if I don’t know how to properly analyze that data then my conclusions won’t be very good.

Simply having large data sets is not enough.

We need to structure our research well and then be able to interpret the results with a degree of rigour. Fortunately, having a good working knowledge of P-Values can help us iron out some alarmingly common mistakes. It can teach us:

1. How to set up an experiment for meaningful data
2. The importance of measuring your existing hypothesis against an alternative
3. When results really are statistically significant, instead of just looking good

This knowledge will help us make better decisions and lead to greater success.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at 4 key areas:

• What are P-Values?
• How do you calculate P-Values?
• Examples of P-Values in practice – A/B testing
• Why you need to set up a research process

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Being secure online is of greater and greater importance. As businesses operate almost entirely online and sensitive information finds itself living full time in the cloud, we have to make sure we have appropriate measures in place to keep information safe.

One tried and tested way of promoting security is the use of failsafes in login systems. This is what’s referred to as Two Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi Factor Authentication (MFA).

This means that someone could get hold of your email and password, yet your data is still kept safe.

Whether you’re already familiar with the terminology or not, you’re certainly familiar with the concept.

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

• Why is two factor authentication important?
• What two factor authentication is
• The 2 classic examples of 2FA: banks and Apple
• How you can implement two factor authentication in your team
• Free Process Street template: How to enable two factor authentication with Authy, Google, and Slack

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The app market is booming and revenue is soaring.

According to TechCrunch, citing a report from AppAnnie:

Global app downloads topped 175 billion and consumer spending exceeded $86 billion in 2017, thanks to growth in emerging markets including China, India, Brazil and Russia…

One of the benefits of targeting this huge and growing market is that the Appstore and PlayStore are largely closed ecosystems. You can promote your apps directly to potential users in the one marketplace they are using to access apps.

The AppAnnie report also notes that app usage is up, with the average user spending 3 hours a day within apps on their phone. This means your app, once downloaded, is competing with the other apps on a user’s phone rather than countless other websites across the web.

So how do we get these downloads?

According to another report co-authored by AppAnnie and Adjust, titled The Complete Guide to Mobile App Marketing: App Store Optimisation, two thirds of all app downloads are organic. This means the app has been found in the store as a result of a user’s search, rather than being directed there by adverts on Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

To harness these downloads and drive consistent traffic to your app, you need to have a strategy for app store optimization: ASO.

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

• What is ASO?
• How to build a process for keyword optimization
• What are the best platforms to help you drive downloads?

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Uber currently has drivers operating in 633 cities worldwide. From nowhere they have stormed the market and disrupted taxi services globally.

Uber is one of the biggest successes of the sharing economy.

But what is it about Uber that allows for it to dominate the market?

There is of course the convenience of ordering through the app and all the benefits of the product but, as reported in The Richest, one big plus point is the drivers themselves. Consumers prefer them to taxi drivers.

Partly this is down to having an internal rating system to incentivize drivers to provide high quality services. However, to keep standards high Uber qualifies and onboards drivers to prepare them for their task of protecting the Uber brand.

In this Process Street article we’ll look at how Uber does this. We’ll investigate:

• The importance of effective onboarding
• How Uber enters a new market
• The Uber driver application process
• How Uber onboards new drivers

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