This is a guest post by Andriy Zapisotskyi. Andriy is a Growth Manager at Mailtrap. He has over 5 years of experience in the field of marketing & loves to network with new people.

Jeff Gardner (Director of Customer Support & Success at Intercom in the early days) on customer communications:

“It’s got to be easy. Don’t make customers jump through hoops to use your product.

It’s got to be effective. Know everything about your product, including its limitations.

It’s got to be authentic. Make sure everyone’s aligned on your fundamental cultural values.”

As a Customer Success Manager, you represent the customer’s interest and your goal is to help them get value from your product. In many ways, they are the link between the user and the company, and that link grows stronger the more acquainted with the product the customer becomes.

CSMs are kind of like a combination of product manager and technical support; one of their chief duties is leading the Customer Success team in handling all communication from the customer about the product, be it questions about service, onboarding, or resolving technical difficulties.

It goes without saying that communication is important. The tone, content, and delivery of any kind of messaging should be refined and optimized to deliver the best possible customer experience. You should consider how to tailor different messages for different purposes, mediums, and customer profiles. A one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to get you very far, and a keen understanding of etiquette around customer success communications is essential.

This means the CSM needs to be able to take into account the nuances of written communication with individual customers and be able to adjust their approach to each specific situation.

In this Process Street post, I’ll detail the core principles vital for a CSM to lead their team to successful communications with all customers.

• CSM communications etiquette: Ground rules
• CSM communications etiquette: Provide a solution
• CSM communications etiquette: Closing a query

Let’s dive in!
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We’re all using multiple apps for work, and we know how quickly this work becomes inconsistent and messy. You don’t always know what’s been done or what to do next.

For years, Process Street customers have been automating work and showing us first-hand the value of integrating Process Street with other tools to create powerful workflows like updating Salesforce opportunities, filing Jira tickets, and sending DocuSign contracts.

Brad Smith is the CEO at Wordable and the founder of Codeless (a content production agency). His content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.

So, you’re ready to scale your marketing efforts, eh?

You’re not the only one: 70% of marketers are taking content marketing seriously — and sooner or later, they start scaling up, increasing competition in the process.

With all the marketing noise out there, it can be difficult to position yourself as an industry leader. But don’t worry, we’re here to help.

In this Process Street post, we’ll cover:

• How to prepare a scalable content marketing system
• 9 Actionable steps to effectively scale

Let’s jump right in!
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Guest post by Ovi Negrean, CEO and co-founder of SocialBee. He and his team help startups, small businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs reach their marketing goals through customer-informed articles and practical social media content. You can also find Ovi on X.

Every marketing team has a list of ideas it wants to try. A useful content marketing strategy turns that list into shared goals, clear ownership, a realistic publishing rhythm, and enough room to learn from the results. That structure is what gets a team excited: people can see why the work matters, where their contribution fits, and what happens next.

Jaron Soh is Co-founder and COO at Traktion, the platform that makes hiring for growth simpler, agile, and more profitable for businesses.

According to a recent survey by The Digital Project Manager, the two biggest project management challenges of 2020 can be neatly summarised as people problems and project problems.

If that sounds a little vague, let’s get specific. 27% of those surveyed experienced challenges with their project stakeholders (i.e. people), while 24% encountered challenges with budgets and deadlines (you guessed it, project).

Thinking about this within the context of a marketing project, it’s easy to get distracted by those project-related concerns, wondering: “How do I deliver this on time and on budget?”

Well, here’s the thing… In my experience, you’re asking yourself the wrong question.

When it comes to marketing, don’t focus solely on the “how”; make sure you look at the “who”, too.

There’s a people problem to overcome. Ask who you should use to help deliver your marketing project on time and on budget; a solo marketing consultant, or a full-blown marketing agency? To answer that, you need to understand how they differ from one another, and the scenarios in which to use them.

In this Process Street post, we help you do just that. Here we explore:

• Agency vs. consultant: Spot the difference (pros & cons)
• Marketing agency vs. marketing consultant: When to use one or the other?
• Which is better for project managers?

Ready? Let’s dive in.
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“Well-defined values don’t sound like the safe platitudes of a Hallmark card” – Patrick M. Lencioni, Management guru

Lencioni also wrote that “Most values statements are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest. [They] create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility.”

For early stage startups, formal value statements are multi-functional; they should help your team understand and act on your internal best practices and empower them to make decisions that will benefit the company as a whole.

These values are the boundaries within which your business will operate in pursuit of its goals, and set the tone for day-to-day operations.

Think of core values as one of the three pillars of principle holding up your business operations; the other two being mission and vision.

In this Process Street article, we’ll explore why core values are important, how they align with mission and vision, and some examples of core values from other companies.

We’ve also got some statements from our own team about how they live and act on our own internal values in their day-to-day work.

• Start with why
• Vision, vale, and mission statements
• Why core values are important
• Examples of core company values
• How the Process Street team lives our core values
• Core values: the backbone of daily business operations

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This is a guest post written by Ashley Ferro, a freelance content writer & copywriter specializing in SEO content marketing.

It’s all too common to find yourself wading through your organization’s shared folders in search of the file you’ve been asked to review:

• PROJECT-PROPOSAL-NEW-v5.doc
• Project_proposal_2020_final+edits.doc
• THIS_is_the_final_proposal_(old-version).PDF

Why does this happen? Why can’t everyone just use proper file naming conventions? The reasons can be lack of proper internal policy or procedure for naming and organizing files, lack of any consideration for folder or information architecture, and just plain carelessness.

With a small amount of effort, you can establish proper file naming conventions and avoid this kind of document spaghetti. The more organized you can be with your internal information, the more efficient and effective you can be in your business goals.

Just imagine – seeing neat, intuitively named folders, knowing which folders contain the documents you’re looking for, and – take a seat – having confidence that the file you’re about to click on will be what you expect it to be.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

Let’s go!

Having everything you need in one place makes life easier, doesn’t it?

That’s why Process Street is launching the Slack App.

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Slack changed the way teams worked by bringing conversations, files, and day-to-day coordination into one shared space. In December 2020, Salesforce agreed to acquire Slack in a transaction with an enterprise value of approximately $27.7 billion, a sign of how central workplace communication had become.

This insider look explains why we built the Process Street Slack App, how CTO Cameron McKay shipped the first version in two weeks, and how teams could bring workflow notifications and approvals into the place where they were already working.

When you’re doing any kind of content marketing, you want to be able to understand how well you’re doing. You want to be able to look at the performance of the content you’re creating and feel assurance that you’re:

1. Driving forward key goals and objectives tied to your content strategy;
2. Continuously optimizing and improving the quality of your content in order to hit those goals.

Especially when you’re creating this kind of content that involves a degree of creative input (writing!) it can be difficult to measure quality.

This is where maturity models come in. Maturity models can be a great way to build and assess how successful an organization or system is at achieving continuous improvement.

Ultimately, it’s the idea that you’re constantly seeking to test and improve the way in which your organization runs. You’re not standing still.

We’ve written before about more generally applicable Capability Maturity Models, but this post takes a look at our internal Blog Asset Maturity Model (BAMM) process that we use to audit and continuously improve the quality of our blog content.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• How to assess content quality
• Content marketing metrics to measure success
• What exactly is a maturity model?
• Our internal process for quality control: The BAMM review
• Using processes to systematize content creation – more reliable and higher quality

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