The following is a guest post from Forster Perelsztejn. As content marketer, Forster gathers sales data at Prospect.io in order to deliver powerful and insightful advice to salespeople. Check out his Top 10 Cold Email Templates Based on 3,327,652 Emails Sent! and connect with him on LinkedIn.

An essential part of my job at Prospect.io is to help customers craft cold emails that actually get replies. Why is that? Because cold email brings business in!

Yet, you’d be surprised at how many of those emails are poorly written. Most of the ones I get are a cringefest even though they were sent by professional salespeople. For that reason, I feel it’s essential to spread the word about cold email best practices.

Use this 10-point checklist below to optimize your sales emails to make it more likely you’ll get results. After all, only around 1.7% of cold emails get a reply…

Continue Reading

Humans are responsible for 70% of airplane crashes, 90% of car wrecks, and 90% of workplace accidents.

But people are also a core part of business. The same factors that make humans irreplaceable — nuanced judgement, emotion, and creativity — also make humans a pain to manage.

You don’t get these problems with computers, but computers are also dumb. Mostly too dumb to carry out processes without human intervention.

Humans are the chaotic variables in your processes. Humans make spelling errors in your marketing emails, create security risks in your software, and forget pretty much anything that isn’t written down.

And it’s because of human error that businesses need processes.

Continue Reading

In 2014 an employee at Xchanging named Amanda Barnes created a software robot she called “Poppy”.

Poppy’s job was to help automate the tedious task of validating insurance premiums — something which could be easily done by a computer if it was fed structured data.

Before Xchanging built Poppy the robot, they were processing 500 premiums every few days. With Poppy, the same 500 items take just 30 minutes to process.

Rather than kicking Poppy out of the office in case she starts taking jobs, the Xchanging team welcomed her warmly because she saved them from laborious, mechanical work.

Continue Reading

To understand the value of a style guide, you should first try working without one.

You’d get the wrong blue on your logo, jarring copy, and code that can only be maintained by a lone developer.

Writers, editors, programmers, engineers, social media managers, and support agents all need an indication of how their company wants to work, so they can ensure consistency.

The number one goal of a style guide is consistency.

Inconsistency weakens your brand image, makes your company look unprofessional, and hurts conversion rate and revenue. Once you’ve settled on your brand voice and style, the style guide is the document that enforces those values.

Continue Reading

No organization wants to keep an incompetent, untrained employee on its payroll.

That’s an obvious fact. However, the benefits of training are much greater than simply avoiding incompetence; trained employees are more productive, loyal, engaged, and profitable.

Those are nice sounding words, but what about the facts and figures?

Take a look:

Continue Reading

Merry Christmas and a happy new year from all of us at Process Street!

2017 might have been a mixed bag for most of the planet, but we had a lot of fun writing content for you, our blog readers.

We published 151 blog posts between us this year, with a little help from fantastic guest writers like Pascal van Opzeeland from Userlike, and Sam Suthar from Tagove.

Here are our top picks as well as the posts you, the readers, liked the most.

Continue Reading

The following is a guest post from Pascal van Opzeeland. Pascal is CMO of Userlike, software for website and messaging support. He and his team share tips about customer service and communication on the Userlike Blog.

In school, everyone looks forward to the day they can stop learning and start doing. But once inside hamster wheel of working life, many long back to the times in which they had the time to invest in their personal development.

At Userlike, we see this lack of time for personal learning as a serious challenge. The world is developing faster than ever, and the pace is only accelerating. To stay competitive, we need employees to keep up; to keep learning and stay up-to-date with their craft. Other benefits from  having a culture that stimulates continuous learning include:

• Increased productivity
• Attract and retain talent
• The ability to grow leaders in-house and reward loyalty

The best employees have an innate desire to grow, but it’s hard to free up time when your daily tasks and duties mess up your schedule. Learning is one of those high importance – low urgency tasks that easily gets pushed aside.

Continue Reading

The following is a guest post from Sam Suthar, the CMO of Acquire.

Scaling your business is almost impossible until you know your customer’s value. Whether you’re going to scale a brick-and-mortar business or an online business, it doesn’t matter; it’s vitally important to understand what each customer is worth to your business.

Statistics by Unicom Group show that 50% of customers naturally churn every 5 years. Sadly, this number can increase if you fail to understand what the customer who signed up last night is worth.

Can you reduce your churn and increase customer retention rate?

Yes, it’s doable. Although very tricky. In the rest of this article, I will show you how to scale your business by first knowing the value of each customer.

Continue Reading

In 2016, Process Street went from using a basic Bootstrap theme to a custom-branded website, complete with a logo change and full aesthetic overhaul. We did it to avoid looking dated, and to make the site consistent with our app.

Like many startups, we focused on building a great product first, and rightfully overlooked the importance of a brand until the time was right.

A brand is the often low on the list of startup priorities. Startups develop in a fast-paced, cutthroat environment and are concerned primarily with attracting early users as beta testers, building disruptive products, and iterating based on feedback. Tech is a mercurial industry; many companies start out with a solution to a problem that could be adopted by everyone from individuals to large corporations.

Over time, by stabbing in the dark and following growth over all, a tech startup could find itself with a brand that doesn’t match its product. That’s something we grappled with in 2016, and it’s something even big tech companies come up against every couple of years.

Continue Reading

Think about what’s at stake if Salesforce suffered a breach…

• American Express, Philips, Vodafone, Virgin, Western Union, GE, the U.S. government, and 150,000 organizations risk their communications leaking to the public
• This includes trade secrets, financial documents, passwords, and bank details
• Hackers could believably impersonate bank employees or government officials

It’s a terrifying concept for Salesforce customers, and just as frightening for Salesforce themselves; if a breach like that happened, their $61b company would suffer tremendously.

A company as well-known as Salesforce has a huge target on its back, so it needs to have the highest security standards even while scaling up and innovating rapidly.

Continue Reading