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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ISO standards can be confusing and intimidating.

However, with the 2015 updates, it really shouldn’t be that scary.

In the past, conforming to ISO meant huge manuals and a lengthy process to change how tasks were approached.

Now, there is increased flexibility and the opportunity to utilize software to speed up your systems and make everything easier to handle.

This is why we’re presenting you with our concept of Agile ISO: how to combine structured compliance with the rapid process improvement of a startup.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• What is ISO?
• What is ISO 9000?
• What is Agile ISO?
• What is needed to support Agile ISO?
• How to get started with Agile ISO in 5 easy steps

I’m going to try to be brief and clear while cutting the bullshit.

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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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When creating content, it’s easy to think you should just make it and publish it. Simple.

But your content will not be highly effective if that’s your outlook – even if the substance of your content is brilliant!

Creating content – blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts – creates an opportunity for you to connect with your audience and to engage with a new audience. There is significant value which can be unearthed through an effective content strategy.

One of the simplest ways to improve your approach is to implement a documented content creation workflow.

It may increase the time you spend on a single piece of content or decrease it depending on your current process, but it could also prove to boost the effectiveness of your content by huge margins.

A blog post which is optimized for Google can bring you hundreds or thousands of hits every month. A post which is not optimized may be read by 10% of your email list and then disappear into the void.

Beyond the very real benefit of a good workflow improving the content, a solid team workflow can boost your overall output and practically run your content team itself.

Since implementing our new content creation workflow we jumped from 20k weekly visits from Google to 75k. In the space of 1 year. The new workflow has given us the consistency to keep breaking those numbers.

In this Process Street post, I’m going to explain to you:

• What our content creation workflow looked like when we had a small team
• What our scaled up content creation workflow looks like now
• How you can build a content creation workflow like ours
• The Process Street templates you can use to structure your new workflows

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We all know processes are important.

Having a clear set of processes or procedures for repetitive or recurring tasks is a crucial way to make sure your output is the best it can be every time.

Those set game plans for how to approach a task can also help you to improve the way you approach those tasks.

Part of that improvement process can be automating elements of the flow to boost reliability and efficiency.

The world of IT provides us with a clear example of the vast efficiency benefits which can be achieved through carefully mapping tasks and seeking to improve the process which ties them together.

One such example is runbook automation, and in this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• What is runbook automation?
• How do companies use runbook automation?
• What can we learn from runbook automation to improve other teams?
• How Process Street can help you automate set procedures

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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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Automation is on everyone’s lips right now.

And for good reason.

Deciding to automate tasks in your workflow can free you to focus on the things you want to be doing – the things which really create value for your business.

According to a report from McKinsey, Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation, 15% of the average marketing executive’s time could be automated using existing commercially available tools and software.

Think of the productivity gains available if you could implement that company-wide.

More startling: that report is probably out of date.

Automation technologies are moving at such an incredible rate that new opportunities are appearing all the time. In this article, I’ll run you through a number of our real-life use cases for simple things in our business which we automate to either save time or improve processes.

Here’s a quick overview:

• Automatically launch actions like Process Street checklists from moving Trello cards
• Use dictation software to write at a higher speed and with less effort
• Tweets containing our domain are automatically posted in Slack so we can see feedback in real time
• Meeting notes are automatically posted in our Slack channel to update the rest of the team about the results of any meeting
• Posting in Slack to automatically create a new entry line in our Airtable database
• To book meetings we use Calendly connected with Google Calendar to make sure one-off meetings always occur when someone is available.

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Global Ag Input Solutions uses Process Street to help direct operations and connect team members out in the field with those in the office. We sat down with Vicki Riendeau to learn how they employ Process Street’s checklists in their business.

The Global Ag Input Solutions story

Global Ag Input Solutions is a subsidiary of Global Ag Risk Solutions, an insurance company which primarily operates in Canada and is moving further into the US market.

It was identified that customers needed more than just insurance products and would benefit from lending opportunities. As such, Global Ag Input Solutions was established to provide a unique, convenient and flexible Input Financing Program that puts producers in control.

Global Ag Input Solutions is a growing company with an innovative approach in the industry, but how does the team keep on track day to day?

Global Ag Input Solutions uses Process Street for:

• Internal communication
• Sales
• Finance
• Approvals

The team has benefited from implementing Process Street by:

• Streamlining internal communications
• Managing the sales process end to end
• Centralizing information
• Providing clarity about what work needs to be done

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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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Part of the reality of trying to manage operations in organizations of any size, is understanding that sometimes things go wrong.

In an ideal world, we don’t want anything to go wrong. We want our processes to run smoothly and all tasks to be easily completed.

But that isn’t just something which happens. It is, however, something we can work towards.

The first step is to create a critical culture where people can identify when and why a process has had a problem. From there, you can track problems, investigate them, and improve processes to stop those problems occuring.

But you need that first step.

That first step needs to be done each and every time, it needs to be done with the right amount of detail, and it needs to be quick and painless to take.

This is the art of an exception report.

Done well, this can illuminate your problems and be a crucial linchpin in a broader effort to improve processes and, in turn, outcomes.

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

• What is an exception report?
• Why you should use exception reports in your business
• How you can record exception in Process Street
• How to use Zapier to generate an exception report

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