This is a guest post by Reese McKnight. Reese is a sales veteran and editor over at JookSMS, a messaging platform for teams and customers. Hailing from Royersford, Pennsylvania, she started out as a sales assistant in local advertising. Her favorite pastime is trying out new cuisines and board games.

Widespread business changes, caused by COVID-19, have affected global trade and supply chains significantly.

Hundreds and thousands of businesses around the world are having to navigate newly implemented no-contact policies for the safety of both themselves and their clients.

What does this mean for logistics & inventory management?

This question, and more, will be answered in this Process Street as we go through the following topics:

• Logistics & inventory management: What’s the current state of play?
• No-contact policies in logistics & inventory management
• 4 steps to help you manage your inventory with a no-contact policy
• 7 top tips help you manage logistics with a no-contact policy
• Logistics & inventory management in a nutshell

Ready?
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I was once abandoned when I was six years old.

We were shopping in a busy department store when I decided to ride the escalator one more time, while my parents kept on walking.

Although I now know that my parents were completely oblivious to my own decision to take a solo trip down the escalator, I’ve never forgotten the fear, anxiety, shock, and anger I felt when I reached the bottom of the next floor down.

I didn’t know where to go, what to do, or how to find them again. I felt lost, uncared for, and cruelly abandoned.

Ok, so I wasn’t really abandoned and I was, in fact, entirely to blame for this incident – but I’ve never felt the same about escalators or busy department stores since. I still avoid both.

I’m sure we’ve all had similar “abandonment” experiences when we were kids, but maybe we’ve had some more recently too…

Feeling lost, abandoned, and unappreciated is the #1 reason customers move away from products and services and is why 52% of customers will never touch a brand again.

“Humans are driven by feelings. So if you want the consumer to remember your product or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your company.” – Inc, Harvard Professor Says 95% of Purchasing Decisions Are Subconscious

Not with Process Street though. Thanks to our customer success team, no customer of ours ever feels lost, uncared for, or abandoned.

How? Let’s find out together as we go through:

• The 4 best practices our customer success team follow
• How our customer success team succeeds at customer success

Ready to succeed? Continue Reading

Q: What do you get if you cross Santa with a duck? 🦆
A: A Christmas quacker! 🤣

The only thing better than a good old Christmas cracker joke is a good old Christmas ad.

Festive, heartwarming, and thought-provoking, TV Christmas ads signify the start of Christmas.

And they’re a marketers dream. According to research, for every $1.30 that’s spent making a Christmas ad, retailers can expect to get $31 back.

How do Christmas ads generate so much revenue? When did Christmas ads become such a huge deal? What are the best Christmas ads EVER made? And what makes a Christmas ad the best EVER?

Time to find out as we get ‘Santa-mental’ and ‘sleigh’ our way through the following topics in this Process Street post:

• ”It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas ads”: When did it all start (and who started it)?
• ”On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…”: How do Christmas ads affect the bottom line?
• ”Last Christmas ad I gave you my heart”: Why are they so effective?
• ”All I want for Christmas ads is you”: What are the best EVER Christmas ads & why?

Ready? Hold on for ‘deer’ life and let’s ‘snow’…

(The ‘presents’ of these terrible Christmas puns do ‘snow’ down – I promise.) 🎁 Continue Reading

As there are so many different types of recurring work happening in every part of your company, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

You can often spend too long looking for answers to questions like these:

“Which processes in the Sales team run smoothly and which take longer than they should?”

“Who in the Underwriting team completes their tasks on time and who misses their due dates?”

“Have we reduced the time it takes HR to complete the onboarding process, for new Account Executive hires in particular?”

“How many different processes is the IT Helpdesk team involved in, and how many tasks have they completed in the last 30 days?”

“How long does it take the Customer Success team to onboard a customer, and which onboarding tasks take the longest to complete?”

Wouldn’t it be useful to have a custom-made dashboard so you can get answers to these types of questions with one, quick glance?

Well, with the launch of Process Street’s new Reporting API, now you can.

To find out how you can export, store, visualize, and utilize all your Process Street data in the way that you want to, take five minutes to read through the following topics and find out:

• What is the Process Street Reporting API and who is it for?
• How Process Street’s Reporting API works
• What benefits the Process Street Reporting API brings
• How to get the Process Street Reporting API

Let’s get started.
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Have you ever typed out a full message on your phone, only to realize that you’ve misspelled something at the very beginning?

It can often take you longer to navigate the teeny-tiny cursor back to fix your mistake than it did to write the message in the first place, right?

I’ve got a little trick that will make correcting your texts 10x easier.

If you slide your finger over the spacebar, you can move the cursor around quickly, easily, and accurately, letter by letter.

Try it!

With this small but effective tip, I’ve not only taught you how to get more value out of your phone, but I’ve also given you an example of how customer success works.

“When you teach your clients how to maximize the value of your product, you help them succeed and you show them why it pays to stick with you.” – Tenfold, 10 Companies Mastering Customer Success

Now, if I was an organization, I’d want to provide this type of value to my customers on a far larger scale – all of the time. And, judging by the fact that the use of customer success software platforms has risen from 25% to 43% over the past few years, so would a lot of other people.

Allow me to elaborate as we go through the following in this Process Street post:

• What is customer success software & what does it do?
• Why you need customer success software
• How do you choose the right customer success software?
• 4 customer success software platforms to consider

So, put your phone aside, and let’s get cracking!
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For organizations, updating prices is like getting plastic surgery (I imagine).

You’re painfully aware that people can see what you’ve done, but under no circumstances will you ever talk about it. It’s a forbidden topic.

“The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing” – Medium, The First Rule of Pricing is: You Do Not Talk About Pricing

Until now. I’m sticking two fingers up to the stigma surrounding pricing and I’m lifting the lid to reveal what goes on, behind the scenes, when organizations like Process Street change their SaaS price model.

😱

I know. I’m brave, right?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve coerced and cajoled the Process Street pricing team into sharing some of the biggest pricing lessons we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way), since we launched in 2013.

And, here they are…

• SaaS price model lesson #1: Pricing is a never-ending process
• SaaS price model lesson #2: Pricing is about perception
• SaaS price model lesson #3: Yearly is better than monthly
• SaaS price model lesson #4: Listen to customers, not competitors
• SaaS price model lesson #5: Involve the whole team

Curious?

Let’s hope I still have a job at the end of this… 🤞

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Quality management. Oh, how I love thee.

You’ve given us rubber flavored cookies, phones that go up in smoke, and exploding car airbags (we’ll get to all of that later).

Last year, 337 food products passed through stringent quality management procedures and went to market with major issues. So major, in fact, that each and every one of those products had to be recalled. This cost the US economy over $7 million.

But, the cost of poor quality management surrounding the production of food is only a tiny part of the picture:

“Defective product incidents have caused in excess of $2 billion of losses over five years” – Allianz, Product Recall, Managing the Impact of the New Risk Landscape

When you consider that the global quality management software market is valued at $7.96 billion, why are we, as consumers, still being exposed to low quality, defective products?

Because, contrary to what most organizations think, there is more to quality management than simply making a good product. You need to know how you’re going to make it good and how you’re going to make sure it remains good.

In other words, you need a plan. A quality management plan to be exact.

The reasons for this will become even clearer as we make our way through this Process Street post and discuss:

• What is a quality management plan?
• What is the most useful thing about a quality management plan?
• What’s included in a quality management plan?
• How to enforce a quality management plan

Let’s get planning.
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This is a guest post by Adam Hempenstall, who is the CEO and Founder of Better Proposals – simple proposal software for creating beautiful, high-impact proposals in minutes. Having helped his customers win $500,000,000 in the last 12 months alone, he’s launched the first Proposal University where he shares best practices on writing and designing proposals.

A great business proposal means the difference between an unsigned contract and a successful deal. A poorly written business proposal will get turned down, even if the offer is good.

Business proposals are considered to be an art form that only the extremely skilled can write.

However, after analyzing over 189,000 successful business proposals, I can tell you that there’s no secret to writing a great proposal.

Allow me to elaborate as I take you through our analysis findings, and run through the following topics, in this Process Street post:

• What is a business proposal & how do you create one?
• Business proposal finding #1: Visuals matter
• Business proposal finding #2: Video makes no difference
• Business proposal finding #3: Live chat increases conversions
• Business proposal finding #4: A single offer is better than a package
• Business proposal finding #5: Kiss PDFs goodbye
• Business proposal finding #6: People open proposals on their phones first
• Business proposal finding #7: It doesn’t matter when you send your proposal
• Business proposal finding #8: Clients love paying directly from the proposal
• Business proposal finding #9: Length matters
• Business proposal finding #10: The title of the pricing section makes a difference
• Business proposal finding #11: Act quickly
• Business proposal finding #12: Use a template
• Key takeaways: The magic business proposal solution

Let’s get started.

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Would you eat a McDonalds Big Mac that was out-of-date, had been dropped on the floor, and made with a stranger’s bare hands?

No! Me neither.

Unfortunately, that’s what thousands of people in China, unknowingly, did.

Back in 2015, the Chinese meat suppliers for McDonald’s were secretly filmed and caught:

“Handling meat and chicken with their bare hands, taking meat that had fallen on the floor and adding it back on to the production line…and forging production dates on beef patties.” – ET2C, Lessons on the Importance of Quality Control Checks

Around 4,300 McDonalds beef patties were tested and found to be out-of-date and contaminated with bacteria.

As a result, over 2,000 McDonald’s outlets across Asia were dramatically affected. The reputation of McDonald’s and their meat supplier was irreversibly damaged, and McDonald’s saw a 7.3% drop in sales.

McDonald’s was definitely not ‘lovin it’.

If only they’d used Enterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS) to regulate their supplier’s meat handling processes and control the quality of the produce they were delivering.

Companies who use EQMS to manage quality, experience fewer product quality issues (less than 1%), and improve their productivity by 20%.

Keen to find out more? Join me in this Process Street post as we run through the following:

• EQMS: What is it & how does it work?
• EQMS: Who uses it?
• EQMS: Is it just for regulated organizations?
• EQMS: What are its downfalls?
• EQMS: Is there another option that’s quick to implement & easy to use?

Let’s make our way through the golden arches and get started! 🍟🍟🍟🍟
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I don’t want to alarm you, but without process control, you’d be dead.

What? How? Why? …What?!

Your body is continuously performing a series of processes to keep you alive and it’s constantly checking for irregularities in these processes. If it picks up an abnormality, it immediately takes measures to regulate it, and return it to its desired state. Like when you’re too hot, for example. Your body recognizes that your temperature is above normal and produces water, in the form of sweat, to cool you down.

So you see, process control is the reason you’re alive and able to enjoy this Process Street post!

But this isn’t a lesson in biology (thankfully); the same concept can be applied to organizations too.

With adequate process control, businesses can perform efficiently, effectively, and safely. They can function at a consistent level and can even reduce operating costs by up to 6%. Without it, they would miss opportunities, make costly mistakes, and struggle to survive.

“Process control is the ability to monitor and adjust a process to give a desired output.” – Beck Electric Actuators, What is Process Control?

To discover how process control can cut costs and eliminate errors within your organization, we need to find answers to the following questions:

• What is process control?
• Who uses process control & what do they use it for?
• Why should organizations use process control?
• How can you implement process control with Process Street?

To satisfy your curiosity (and return your body back to its normal state!), you’d better keep reading…
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