This is a guest post by Victor Eduoh, a SaaS content strategy consultant and copywriter. He helps early- and growth-stage SaaS companies drive growth, using the SaaS content topic clusters strategy and Product-Led Storytelling, two concepts he developed.

“And, after all, winning business is what writing proposals is all about.” Tom Sant, in his bestselling book, Persuasive Business Proposals, continued:

“Although a great proposal by itself seldom wins a deal, a bad proposal will definitely lose one.“

Tom is right.

Writing a consulting proposal isn’t a silver bullet to land your next client. But fail to craft an excellent, professional one and you won’t close any deal.

Since you found your way to this post, you don’t want that, right? We don’t want it either.

So, in this Process Street article, you’ll find ten practical steps to make your next consulting proposal excellent (i.e., worthy of closing deals).

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is a consulting proposal?
• How do I write a consulting proposal?
• What should you include in a consulting proposal?
• How do you format a consulting proposal?
• My proposal winning superpowers

Sound good? Read on for a free checklist to get started.
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This is a guest post from Alissa Zucker, marketing manager and writer at Mcessay. You can find her reading classical philosophy and writing short fiction in her spare time.

It’s predicted that by the end of 2020, businesses will have spent ~$110 billion on digital advertising alone in the US. To put that into context, that’s more money spent on digital advertising than what would be spent on both television and print ads combined.

This just goes to show the importance of digital advertising in the modern marketing communication mix.

It is essential that every business know how to effectively market their products and services in order to not only survive, but to grow and prosper in a competitive global market.

It’s not uncommon when questioned about marketing, that a business owner will simply produce a business card, a brochure stitched together using a Microsoft Office template, or a barely functional website with little to no traffic.

In this Process Street post, I want to provide you with an overview of everything you need to know about the marketing communication mix, including:

• The updated marketing mix: The 7 Ps of marketing
• What exactly is the marketing communication mix?
• Twelve factors of the marketing communication mix
• How to make the most of the marketing communication mix

Before diving into the specifics of the marketing communication mix, let’s first discuss the 7Ps of marketing.
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This is a guest post from Julia Samoilenko, a marketing specialist who writes about digital marketing trends and strategies for the Chanty blog. This powerful and free Slack alternative is aimed to increase team productivity and improve communication at work. Feel free to connect with Julia on LinkedIn.

Many of us like the idea of working remotely (especially if we have never experienced it). Out of bed and —Voila!— you are ready for work. No commuting, no noisy colleagues. Top level of independence and flexibility.

But what is remote work really like in practice? One day here at Chanty we had to answer this question and discovered what new benefits and challenges teams face when transitioning to remote-only mode.

Spoiler: there were many productivity pitfalls on the road to beneficial collaboration. It turns out that being an efficient remote worker is quite challenging. And that it’s twice as tough to manage a high-performing virtual team.

If you want to adapt to remote working best practices and maximize the benefits, then you’ve come to the right place. We’re going to reveal the ugly truth and teach you everything we’ve learned about a successful transition to remote work. After reading our ‘confession’, you’ll understand the challenges and methods on how to overcome them.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• How to successfully transition to remote work
• Our key takeaways for remote work transition
• Additional self-management and productivity resources

Let’s dive right in!
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This is a guest post written by Ashley Ferro, a freelance content writer & copywriter specializing in SEO content marketing.

There’s nothing more frustrating to a project manager than witnessing the slow, painful death of a healthy project to the beast known as scope creep. When last minute changes transform their straightforward, A-to-B project plan into a sprawling mess of up-ended sprint plans and gold-plated feature requests, branching out in all directions with no concern for time or resources.

In one extreme example, the head contractor for the extension of a city library ended up actually suing their client in a scope-creep induced rage, claiming that their almost 55-week delay was a direct result of the large number of last minute changes.

In order for a project to be successfully completed on time, the project manager and their team need to agree on a clearly defined project scope before getting started.

However, life isn’t so straight forward and changes to the project will inevitably need to happen.

But additional problems can arise if the changes aren’t dealt with properly.

Scope creep can quietly sneak its way into your project and set your team down an unproductive and self-destructive path, wasting your company’s resources, missing deadlines, weakening team communication and, ultimately, ruining any chance of your project’s success.

So what can you do to avoid this fate, and overcome scope creep once and for all?

In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering everything you need to know scope creep–from what (and who) causes it, to how to manage it, even in an agile environment where change is embraced.

We’ll be covering:

• What is scope creep?
• How different stakeholders can contribute to scope creep
• What are some common causes of scope creep?
• Most effective ways to manage scope creep
• What we can learn from Agile to prevent scope creep?
• Using Process Street to avoid scope creep
• Additional project management resources

If, however, you’re struggling with planning your own projects and want a quick solution, grab our free Project Request Form Template below!

So, let’s get started with the basics!

Product roadmaps are an essential part of understanding how to align your product to a long-term vision for product-market fit. They are also one of the key deliverables for product managers and are useful to almost all teams and stakeholders.

What the product roadmap should provide:

• Clear overview of key launch dates and milestones
• Clearly communicate which teams are responsible for what
• Clearly communicate important deadlines and time allocation
• A beacon to align different teams to core company goals and objectives

What the roadmap shouldn’t include:

• Goals and objectives unrelated to the product
• Overload of information about specific product features and specifications for development
• Big Surprises
• Too much data without clear association with company goals or objectives

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is a product roadmap?
• Planning the product roadmap
• Key elements of a product roadmap
• How to build a product roadmap
• Free product roadmap template
• Best practices for creating a product roadmap template
• Mistakes to avoid when building your roadmap
• More tools for product success

First off, here’s a template you can use to get started building your own product roadmap.

Product roadmap process

For those of you who came just for the template, here it is:

If you’re interested in the why behind this template design, and more insight into an effective product roadmap approach, read on!

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Travis Taborek is an SEO and content marketing specialist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s a graduate of General Assembly’s digital marketing course, and has since written content and optimized websites for Wescover and TiVo. He also has a side-business doing PR and social media work for indie games and reviews indie games in his spare time. His most recent accomplishment was finishing Homestuck and thereby winning shelter-in-place.

Back in 2011, you might have been able to get away with uploading your indie game to Steam’s marketplace and expect a revenue of $30-50K in the first year, without any effort or marketing knowledge.

Hell, you might have even been able to get away with that as late as 2014. But these golden days for indie game developers are long gone.

Steam has made many changes to the way it promotes indie games and the current market is far more saturated. There are more game developers than ever and tools like Unity and Unreal have made game development more accessible than ever.

Just getting that final build finished and uploaded to your storefront of choice is no longer enough. To have a successful launch, whether you’re a solo dev or a small team, you have to understand how to market your game.

In principle, marketing your game is relatively straightforward; you just need to know where to start. If you understand who you’re making the game for (your audience) and how to talk about your game as a product (meaning: you’re able to communicate what your game offers and how that aligns to the expectations of your target audience), then you’ve already done most of the hard work. The rest is as simple as following a process.

Once you have this base knowledge, it’s just about taking your product to market and doing the legwork that’s involved with getting the word out and making sure you get eyes on the finished product.

This Process Street article takes a look at one strategy for marketing your indie game: social media marketing.

What is social media marketing?

It’s basically exactly what it sounds like: using social media to get your game in front of your target audience. The term ‘social media marketing’ is a bit vague and encompasses a bunch of different approaches; we’ll be looking at some of the different ways you can use social media to market your game in this article.

Social media marketing is great for connecting on an intimate level with your fans and building lasting communities around your game, from early development until launch, and beyond. When done properly, it can allow you to develop trusting relationships with your audience that will drive them to not just purchase one of your games, but every game you put out.

Here’s a high-level overview of what we’ll be looking at:

• The theory of social media marketing, and how it relates to indie games
• Social media best practices for indie games
• What platforms do I use, and how do I use them?
• A/B Testing and Analytics: How do you know whether what you’re doing is working?
• Social media management tools to use
• Additional marketing resources

Let’s get started beginning with the theory of social media marketing.
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People are the most important asset in a company; processes need people to execute them, and the outcome of these processes is often a function of how well the instructions have been put together.

If the outcome is less than ideal, then don’t just blame your employees: check your processes.

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are there for your employees to follow so that the job gets done properly. SOP software is all about figuring out how to innovate and improve efficiency in your internal processes.

This Process Street article will help you understand the benefits of SOP management software and give you some actionable SOP templates to get started. We’ll be looking at:

• What is SOP management software?
• Should you implement standard operating procedures at your company?
• 5 features to look for when choosing a SOP management software
• Benefits of a SOP management software
• Using Process Street to manage your SOPs
• More SOP resources

Let’s start with a simple introduction to what SOP management software actually means.
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If you’re on the front lines fighting COVID-19 and want to use these processes to help your facility, please contact us and we will set you up with a free account*

COVID-19 hit hard, and many communities, organizations, and small businesses are struggling to shoulder the increased pressure put on by circumstances of economic downturn and uncertainty.

This article is an attempt to offer some aid in the form of 8 free coronavirus workplace templates, to help you improve efficiency in your organization by streamlining and automating manual tasks in recurring COVID-19 processes.

Some of these templates are straightforward, linear processes, while others are more complicated processes with various different outcomes. They will all be embedded below with relevant descriptions and links to sources.

The Process Street checklists in this post were all informed by procedures established by the following leading health authorities:

• World Health Organization (WHO)
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
• Government of Alberta’s Emergency Coordination Centre (ECC)
• New York Department of Health (DoH)

Each process template will be embedded below with a description. The article will be structured as follows:

• Coronavirus template quick-links
• How to use these coronavirus workplace templates
• 8 COVID-19 procedure templates to organizations and businesses fight coronavirus in the workplace
• How to use Process Street for crisis management in a downturn

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If you’re chronically ill, pain medication will help but not solve the issue. Just like if you’re experiencing abnormally high customer churn, the last thing you want is to spend all your time firefighting.

You need to find the cause.

That’s exactly why root cause analysis is a vital process. It helps you to understand the causal focus and underlying issues behind your biggest business problems.

For example, Eastman Chemical‘s customer complaint numbers were cut in half after conducting a logic tree root cause analysis to pinpoint their deeper issues. Clipper Windpower saved $1 million in lost revenue by identifying the underlying causes of their turbine malfunction.

In this Process Street article, we have a root cause analysis template for you to follow. Our aim is to give you a comprehensive overview of the root cause analysis process, from a simple introduction and break down of the key principles to when and why you’d want to perform a root cause analysis.

We’ll be covering:

• Root cause analysis template
• What is root cause analysis (RCA)?
• Why conduct a root cause analysis?
• Key principles of root cause analysis
• How to conduct a root cause analysis that actually works
• Root cause analysis tips
• Using Process Street to conduct a root cause analysis

Let’s take a quick look at the root cause analysis template.
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SOPs (often pronounced S-O-P) are basically just another way to think about processes. Specifically, with a focus on formally defining the best way of doing something.

In business terms, that means saving time and money by building a clear, concise set of instructions for all of your internal processes. Policies (or standards) are important too; SOPs are kind of like a hybrid of policy and procedure.

Traditionally, SOPs were useful in principle, but often suffered from being difficult to maintain and crucially, hard to enforce. What good is an SOP if it lives its life sat on a dusty stack of paper forms? Your SOPs should be actionable, and that’s where BPM software like Process Street comes in.

If you understand how to build, maintain, and optimize SOPs with software, you can supercharge your standard operating procedures.

In this article, we want to give you everything you will ever need to know about SOPs, including:

• What is an SOP?
• Importance and benefits of standardizing your processes
• SOPs as a facet of BPM
• How to write SOPs
• SOP management software
• SOP templates
• Auditing your SOPs
• SOP & ISO
• Using Process Street for superpowered SOPs
• More SOP resources

Each section will be as concise as possible, with links out to further reading wherever appropriate. Let’s start with the basics.
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