Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth…
– Mike Tyson

Which, let’s face it, happens to most start-ups and entrepreneurs. Around 75% in fact.

You have the best idea. You spend days, weeks, and months perfecting a 40-page business plan filled with five-year forecasts, 18-month roadmaps, and in-depth marketing strategies. You confidently pitch it to stakeholders and investors.

And then?

Then you get punched in the mouth.

Potential investors go quiet or “haven’t had time to read it” and you’re left with an expensive, wasted deliverable and a chunk of time that you’ll never get back. Worse still, your product isn’t any nearer launching and you haven’t secured any buy-in or investment.

What. A. Waste. Of. Time.

Traditional business plans are of little use to start-ups, and of no real interest to investors.

But what’s the alternative?

A one-page business plan inspired by Eric Ries’s Lean Start-Up methodology and specifically designed for emerging entrepreneurs: The Lean Canvas.

The Lean Canvas is a living framework that allows you to quickly capture your idea or concept, thoroughly validate it, and then continuously share, improve, and most importantly move on it.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking:

• How can a one-page Lean Canvas possibly replace a 40-page business plan?
• How can I tell the entire story of my business on one-page?
• Is a Lean Canvas really enough to help me secure investment or buy-in?

I have the answers to all these questions and more in this Process Street post.

Ready to dodge some punches?
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Netflix doesn’t do bonuses. They don’t do formal reviews and they don’t do staff training.

Instead, their HR practices involve heavily scrutinizing employees’ skills and capabilities, and ruthlessly firing them for being good, not great.

“Netflix and chill” it is not.

But, despite these seemingly harsh HR practices, 71% of Netflix employees would encourage their friends to become co-workers. They’re officially the best place in the world to work (even beating the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple). Their employee turnover is only 11% a year, which is below the 13% annual average for tech companies. They’ve maintained a voluntary attrition rate of 3-4% over the last two years, and they make around $2 million per employee.

“Netflix has not only captivated the attention of its customers around the world, but also continues to grow its reputation as an attractive, sought-after employer.” – Forbes, Incubating Culture: How Netflix Is Winning The War For Talent

So, why is Netflix the best place to work, how do they maintain such a productive workforce, and what lessons can we take from them?

Grab some popcorn and let’s find as we go through the following in this Process Street post:

• HR practices: How Netflix does things
• 4 HR practices that changed HR forever
• How Process Street embraces Netflix’s HR practices & why they work for us
• Are Netflix’s HR practices right for you?

Settle in for the story of the year (that you can’t stream)…

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This is a guest post by Laura Garber. Laura, also known as the Career Coaching Expert, works with CraftResumes and helps individuals with their resume writing.

What’s the hallmark of a successful business?

Well, from a consumer standpoint, it’s exceptional customer service. Understandably, customers have always aligned themselves with brands that value customer service.

A big part of a company’s success, therefore, can be attributed to its employees. Companies that invest in employee development and train their employees to deliver first-class customer service are likely to:

• Gain a competitive advantage;
• Attract and retain the best talent in the industry;
• Realize a 24% increase in their profit margins.

Obviously, training and developing your employees gives them the necessary tools to do their jobs, but there’s a lot more to it than that.

This Process Street post will explain it all, by answering the following questions:

• What is employee development & why do it?
• What’s the difference between employee development & employee training?
• What are the main challenges of employee development & training?
• How do I implement a successful employee development program?
• Why is employee development a long-term investment for success?

Ready to start training and developing your employees?
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We’ve never met, but I know who you are.

You spend 90% of your day either in meetings or answering emails, so you’re incredibly short on time.

You’re a big believer in “moving fast and breaking things” but over-regulation, cyber threats, obsoletion, and the availability of key skills keeps you awake at night.

You check in with Twitter and Reddit daily to stay in-the-loop, and you’re a keen consumer of content that’s quick and easy to digest, from reputable sources, and provides clear answers to your questions. You hate waffle!

Am I close?!

Whether I’m right or wrong (and before this gets any creepier), I know all this because I’ve created your customer profile, or buyer persona if you prefer.

Organizations that use customer profiles to create and deliver content enjoy 73% higher conversions than those that don’t. So, I used market research and data to build up a semi-fictional representation of you.

I identified your common behavior patterns, discovered what your key motivations were, and established your biggest pain points so I could write a tailored post that clearly answers your questions, provides value, and delivers useful insights.

I won’t lie; this took a lot of time!

But was it worth it?

Take 10 minutes to read this Process Street post and get insights from the likes of Hiten Shah, Lincoln Murphy, and Tomasz Tunguz, learn how to create a customer profile in five simple steps, and find out:

• Can a customer profile really leverage growth?
• What’s the one thing you must do before you create a customer profile?
• What’s the quickest way to create a customer profile that helps you scale?

Let’s “cut fast, cut deep”, and cut the crap.
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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

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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