This is a guest post by Michael Zipursky, CEO of Consulting Success® and Coach to Consultants. He has advised organizations like Financial Times, Dow Jones, RBC, and helped Panasonic launch new products into global markets. Michael is also the author of the Amazon Best Sellers ACT NOW: How successful consultants thrive during chaos and uncertainty, The Elite Consulting Mind and Consulting Success® the book.

You know the feeling; you’d love to take a vacation and a break from your business…

…but there’s no one to handle the day-to-day operations for you.

You’ve built up years of experience, and you feel like you’re the only one who can run the show. I know, because I’ve been there. Early on in my career, I was convinced I could do everything.

I told myself I was better than anyone at the work I did. It would take me too long to train anyone up to my level. I persuaded myself that this was true…but I was wrong. I could have certainly taught someone else – and it would have saved me a lot of time and energy to focus on higher-value work.

Studies indicate that business system documentation can boost productivity and save up to 6,000 hours per year, equating to 2.4 full-time staff positions.

On top of this, documenting systems and processes builds a foundation to train new team members so that your business can run without you involved in the day-to-day operations.

By the end of this Process Street article, you’ll understand why it’s so important to document systems and processes, see some real-life examples and learn how to do it in your business.

• Business system documentation: What it is and why it is important
• Business system development starts with organizing your business systems
• Documenting systems for clients: Network Reactivation Campaign example
• Frequently asked questions about business systems development
• Using Process Street and process documentation for business system development

Continue Reading

90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from could do better when it comes to how they experience onboarding.

Customer success is about helping your customers understand and leverage the value of your product; you’re basically helping them achieve their goals. In a sense it’s one step beyond traditional customer support, taking a proactive approach to understanding and addressing customer needs.

A key component of customer success is making sure your customers are effectively onboarded.

Onboarding provides a unique opportunity for the CS team to nurture and address the key needs of a new customer, and an effective onboarding program can mean the difference between a long-term customer and a rapid churn.

For customer success teams to succeed with onboarding, CS managers should drive clear best practices and use well-structured processes to make onboarding as effortless as possible for everyone involved.

In this Process Street article, we’ll dive into:

• Customer success onboarding best practices
• Designing your customer success onboarding framework
• The customer onboarding process
• Measuring success with key customer success onboarding metrics

Continue Reading

“Processes underpin business capabilities, and capabilities underpin strategy execution.” – Pearl Zhu, Digital Capability: Building Legal Like Capability Into Business Competency

A 2018 survey by BPTrends found that 93% of the organizations studied engaged in multiple process improvement projects.

This is because business processes are the life-blood of your organization. Process improvements, therefore, prime your organization to run like a well-oiled machine, bettering your chances of business success.

On that note, in this Process Street article, we take a look at our top 45 process improvement tools. Using these tools will improve customer satisfaction, save you money, strengthen customer retention, and boost project success rate (+ more).

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Why you should care about improving your processes
• 45 top process improvement tools
• How to improve your business processes using business process documentation

For clarity, I’ve split each tool as per the following subheaders – click to jump to the unique tool category.

• Process improvement visualizations 👀
• Process improvement exercises 🏃
• Process improvement frameworks 🎞
• Process improvement methodologies 👩‍🔬

Continue Reading

It was known as the email incident. An incident that caused an astronomical uproar throughout the office.

Names shall not be mentioned, but before Process Street I worked as a technical service advisor for an environmental testing laboratory. It was our job to deal with customer queries and complaints, to answer questions, and to make sure the service we provided met the customer’s needs.

The email incident: My colleague forwarded a customer complaint email to our manager, adding an inappropriate comment to display his frustrations with that said customer.

Unfortunately, this email ended up in the customer’s inbox too…

Oops!

Mistakes like will happen if you don’t have pre-established customer success operations to act as a form of process control.

Think about it, you’ll have optimized processes for production, sales, marketing, etc. But to effectively scale and grow, you’ll need to build repeatable processes for your customer success department too.

For many companies (72% to be exact, according to data obtained by Forrester), customer success is a top priority. This is because it’s well known that investing in a new customer is 5-25x more expensive than retaining existing ones – as expressed by the Harvard Business Review.

Make customer success operations your top priority by building and optimizing repeatable processes. And in this article, you’ll learn precisely how to do that.

Click on the relevant subheader below to get started. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say regarding customer success.

• Why you need to start thinking about your customer success operations
• How to build effective customer success operations for your business in 4 steps
• Using Process Street to build repeatable customer success operations
• Using performance metrics to guide customer success operations effectiveness

Let’s begin!
Continue Reading

This is a guest post by Romi Catauta at Toptal. Catauta works in the marketing field and is passionate about writing on web design, business, interior design, and psychology.

Did you know that 53% of developers said working remotely was a priority when looking for a new job?

Finding the right developers to add to your team can be one of the most challenging hiring tasks for your HR department. It’s a cut-throat market, with smart companies steering top talent away from competitors.

And when you consider most developers are looking for remote-based work, this makes developer onboarding a whole different ballgame.

To help, we at Process Street give you our top tips, tricks, and best practices that’ll help you identify, hire, and retain talented remote developers.

Whether you’re wondering how to hire a CSS developer, a full stack developer, or anything in between, this guide will help you find the perfect candidate for the job.

We at Process Street know a thing or two about remote work. The below advice has is therefore tried, tested, and approved as best practice.

What are you waiting for?

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to the section of choice, or scroll down for all.

• What is developer onboarding?
• Hiring remote developers: The advantages, drawbacks, and solutions
• The remote developer onboarding process with 11 onboarding best practices

Let’s get started!
Continue Reading

77% of internet users read blogs – like this one produced by us at Process Street. To pique the interest of this large audience you’ll need to be following optimized, efficient processes so your blog is the best it can be.

And guess what? If you’re looking to better your blog content and stand out from the competition, then you’ve come to the right place. In this article, you’ll learn how to get your blog right with Process Street’s tried and tested checklists for bloggers.

Once more, we’re giving you these checklists for free (our gift to you for being a woautomanderful readership). 🤑

These checklists have been specifically selected and ordered for you to implement best practices from the start to the end of the blog creation process.

Right then, no more dill-dallying, let’s get straight to it.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say so you’re fully prepared to implement our checklists for bloggers.

• Blogging is a key aspect of your content marketing strategy
• Best practices for optimizing your business blog and content marketing strategy
• 12 top checklists for bloggers
• Additional checklists to help you create competitive content

Let the blogging commence! 🖋
Continue Reading

According to a report given by Queens University, 75% of employers rate teamwork and collaboration to be very important.

Despite this, reports by Globe and Mail and the Harvard Business Review indicate that 20-44% of employees experience workplace communication and collaboration challenges. And if you’re operating remotely, well, these challenges just became harder to overcome. There is a gap between want and reality.

In this Process Street article, we consider how using office hours can close this gap by supporting the effective implementation of an open door policy for your remote team.

Office hours are times in the week managers set aside to answer questions, address issues, and discuss topics with employees. This effectively implements an open door policy, to establish aspirational communication and collaboration goals. An open door policy is a culture that supports complete workplace transparency, communication, and productivity by establishing strong communication channels between employees and their managers.

Today you’ll find out exactly how office hours and an open door policy complement each other – plus top tips on managing your remote open door policy.

Click on the relevant subheader below, or scroll down to find out all.

• What do we mean by office hours?
• The top challenges with a remote open door policy
• Remote open door policy challenges (and how to solve them)
• The benefits of office hours and supporting an open door policy

Let’s get straight to it!
Continue Reading

This is a guest post by Jack Paxton, the co-founder of VYPER, a marketing tool that helps brands build email lists, social followings, and revenue using viral giveaways, referral, and reward programs. Jack spent millions of dollars testing different marketing strategies at his marketing agency. He then also co-founded Hyax a fast, conversion & design-focused course and funnel builder for creators.

Famous SaaS brands like Dropbox and PayPal witnessed explosive growth in their platforms. Since 2007, Dropbox has grown into a $4 billion-dollar company, and PayPal went from 1 million users to 5 million in the same year (2000).

Dropbox and PayPal are two entirely different businesses operating in different markets. However, they share a similar viral growth strategy, one that is still used today.

Any ideas on what this strategy might be?

You got it, they both harness the power of referral marketing.

SaaS brands worldwide, including us at Process Street, are realizing the benefits of referral marketing: to constantly acquire new customers, build platforms, and promote customer loyalty and trust.

In this article, we present world-famous referral programs to determine what made them successful and how you can do the same.

Click on the relevant links to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say, to optimize your growth strategy via referral programs.

• What is referral marketing?
• The power of referral marketing
• How to create a successful referral program

Let’s jump to it!
Continue Reading

Agent *reader*, I call upon you today as we’re at a time of crisis. Humans have annihilated 83% of all wild animals and are disrupting a natural climate balance, throwing us into a projected future that is 4.1 – 4.8°C (39.38 – 40.64 °F) warmer.

It’s our duty, as citizens, business owners, and employees to change the narrative for our children’s lives; to kickstart a transition into a more sustainable future, one that enriches biodiversity and a balanced climate. And for this, we turn our attention to sustainable cities.

According to the World Health Organization, the global world population living in urban areas is expected to increase to 66% by 2050, making cities a perfect place to transform society and support biodiversity and a balanced climate.

In this Process Street article, we’ll become time-travelers, zipping into the future to assess two separate predicted scenarios.

• Scenario 1: The continuation of human activity as normal.
• Scenario 2: Transforming into a more sustainable future, starting with our cities.

Today, we meet at a crossroad, where our future could go two ways. We’ll explore these two separate scenarios, before addressing the role of sustainable cities in creating a more desirable world. We’ll look at how businesses must adapt to survive in a future that is carbon-neutral with rich biodiversity.

After all, who wouldn’t want such a future? 🌻

• What are sustainable cities?
• Our future cities are sustainable
• Sustainable cities: Key takeaways for corporate sustainability

Seat belts on, time-machine ignited, to the future here we come! 🕔🚀🕤
Continue Reading

A recent study from Ponemon and Globalscope reported the average cost of meeting compliance mandates is $5.47 million, versus non-compliance fines of $14.82 million.

No organization wants to cough up massive non-compliance charges. And one effective means of avoiding such scenarios is by using a robust, effective, and integrated governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) approach.

Due to today’s complexity of governance, risk, and compliance demands, it would be considered reckless to go about using an integrated GRC approach without utilizing viable GRC tools.

GRC tools help organizations strategize the management of governance, risk, and compliance regulations in an integrated fashion.

In this Process Street article, you’re taken through a quick tour of our top GRC tools to meet the specificity of governance, risk, and compliance demands.

I’ll then show you how to use Process Street, for free, to integrate these three separate entities for an integrated GRC approach.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down for your quick introduction to all things GRC, how the discipline has developed, and top tools and techniques you can use to implement GRC in your business.

• What is GRC?
• GRC as a revolutionary approach and why it’s important
• Our top 14 GRC tools
• Using Process Street to integrate your governance, risk, and compliance solutions

Let’s jump straight to it!
Continue Reading