Every SaaS company pours mountains of resources into building a sales team, creating efficient sales processes, and optimizing sales emails.

That’s because the most direct way to impact your revenues is by making sure your sales processes are as tight as possible.

But, how can you be sure you use the most effective methods to follow up with leads and close more deals?

Maybe we can help.

In partnership with PersistIQ, we analyzed the complete sales cadences of 281 SaaS companies, from intro to break-up. That included signing up for a whole heap of free trials, and then collecting over 1,000 emails and voicemail transcriptions.

If you want to get proven insights from some of the world’s best SaaS sales teams, build your ideal sales sequence and learn to write emails that close deals, then check out Inside SaaS Sales.

Inside SaaS Sales is a microsite we launched that collects and organizes every single piece of sales communication we received. It’s all there for you to browse through, swipe, and analyze.

With such a lot of data, it’d be silly not to study it to find out the key trends and share that knowledge with you. So, keep reading for our full analysis of the data!

Here are our key findings:

Continue Reading

ITGlue is a collaborative, cloud-based IT documentation platform created to help MSPs standardize documentation, create knowledge bases, manage passwords and track devices.

As well as documentation, it lets you stay on top of what’s going on in your network by notifying you when key events happen, like an SSL certificate nearing expiry, or a firewall breach.

Continue Reading

I didn’t used to see the point of surveys…

I’m much more comfortable with scraping data, using software and relying on trends based on in-depth studies. I didn’t understand how it could be beneficial to read unstructured feedback from a few hundred people until I conducted a survey myself.

It’s not easy to know if what you’re doing is important for your ideal user or reader. You might believe that a certain marketing campaign or product feature is going to be the next big hit that brings customers, but without hearing the opinions of your audiences, you’re making another shot in the dark.

In July, I sent out the first reader survey we’ve done at Process Street. I built the processes and learned the benefits as I went along, and in this post I want to share them with you.

As a result of the survey, we received hundreds of common problems to solve in our articles, allowing us to create relevant and high-converting content. And, speaking of conversions, the follow-up conversations with respondents landed us a few new users and customers!

For a quick email template and a few hours of data entry, I’d say it’s well worth trying. In this article, I’m going to show you exactly how we surveyed our readers, and how it’s helped us improve our marketing and product. But first, an explanation of what I mean by feedback.

Continue Reading

The following is a guest post from Gloria Kopp, a digital marketer and a business consultant from Manville city. She works as a content manager at Paper Fellows and is a regular contributor to such websites as Engadget, Academized, and Huffington Post.

A well-planned workflow is crucial to keeping your content marketing efforts on track and ensuring that you meet your goals.  You may often find that you are receiving content late from your team, that it’s not up to scratch, has been rushed, or just never materializes. The tips in this article should help you to get back onto the straight and narrow.

Before you or your team get stuck into creating more content, make sure that you’ve read through the following points to keep your projects flowing productively.

Continue Reading

Evernote is the Swiss army knife of productivity tools. It does a hell of a lot, but doesn’t do anything amazingly well. Maybe it was designed to replace your need for multiple apps by rolling them all into one, but its feature bloat makes it a pain to use, and there are many Evernote alternatives you can use instead.

We’ve already written a lot about Evernote; everything from Evernote templates to a comparison against Microsoft OneNote. In this article, I’m going to suggest worthy alternatives to Evernote in the areas of notes, screenshots, documents and bookmarking. While technically Evernote does do all of these things, there are more options out there.

Continue Reading

I’m writing this blog post to solve a very specific problem.

During one of our regular marketing meetings, Vinay assigned me this post and said he wants it to be written so he can link it to everyone who messages him just “hey Vinay” on Slack and waits for a response before saying anything else.

Like many managers in remote teams, Vinay’s sick of our tendencies to under-communicate. Just saying “hey Vinay” and hoping to get a synchronous chat going is a waste of time, especially if there are time zone differences, or if general busy-ness prevents a polite, fully-fledged chat.

And so, in the spirit of that real example, this article will solve the problem of communication in remote teams.

Continue Reading

Processes aren’t just a set of documents and rules that help your business run efficiently and reduce human error…

They’re also something that needs to be part of your company culture. Process adherence is the culture side of systemization, and that makes it one of those hard to grasp concepts without many solid rules.

The culture of processes — instead of the act of writing and optimizing them — is something we’ve been meaning to cover for a while because we know it’s a big problem for our users.

Incidentally, we got an insightful comment on our article about creating an operations manual from MamaRed Knight. She outlined an age-old problem with process adherence:

“[Process adherence] is something I’ve been dealing with since I started formally creating documentation in ’83. It really must start at the top level where they don’t answer questions, they ask if it is “in the manual” and it ripples down.

It does take time because, frankly, a very teensy tiny percentage of people want to look something up… 98% want to ask someone and be done with it.”

In this quote, she highlights two main issues:

• Employees don’t want to look up processes
• Procedures are passed on informally by hearsay

In this post, I’m going to explain why processes fail because of human nature, and then unpack each reason with an explanation of how you can improve process adherence in each area.

Continue Reading

Don’t you just hate reading internal business documents? 

They’re stuffy, dull, and aren’t optimized for human beings to read. No one opts to pop a mid-morning sleeping pill at their desk, but diving into your library of internal documents is probably about as soporific.

Here’s the strange thing:

There’s no shortage of data on the importance of visuals and how to write content that gets read, but when it comes to internal documents, it’s naively accepted that they can be incomprehensible, unappealing walls of text.

However, with emoji, processes can be clear, memorable, and visually appealing. Here’s a basic example in Process Street using Kurt Braget’s PILLARS system, combined with Emojipoint (another system of his):

What’s the point, you may ask?

Continue Reading

Is your team confused about responsibility, hierarchy, or who reports to who?

Do you have a clear idea of where there’s room to give a promotion, or which department could do with more hires?

You need to make an organizational chart for your business, no matter what size your company is because it ensures your company can scale consistently with a clear view of its structure. It’s just as important as solid processes because it’s the single source of truth for the architecture of your business.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to create organizational charts using simple free tools, or powerful paid alternatives.

You’ll learn:

• The definition and components of an organizational chart
• The hidden benefits of organizational charts, and why they’re not just a formality
• Creating a cloud-based organizational chart in Google Sheets that you can automate
• How to use templates to create a simple org chart in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and dedicated diagram tools
• How to use different types of charts for alternative organizational structures, like matrix and flat

Continue Reading

Do you know how long a prospective candidate will spend reading your job ad?

Six seconds.

With more than three billion job listings online at any given moment, standing out from the crowd might mean the difference between finding the greatest team member possible or having to settle for the best of a bad bunch.

Data from 2015 suggests that 100 million startups are launched annually. And, as the number of competitors rockets up, the pool of available talent is diluted, leaving you with less choice.

The solution?

A clear and compelling job description. It’s more complex than it first seems, but in this article I’ll be sure to make it easy.

Continue Reading