You might use the most efficient software on the market. Maybe you’ve hand-picked the most dedicated team available. Perhaps you documented and improved your methods until every rough edge and bottleneck has been wiped away.
You’re still going to fail if you can’t track your processes.
Continue ReadingThe 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…
Documented processes don’t just save you time, money, and give a consistent method for your team to follow. They make everything you do more reliable and efficient, even increasing project success rate by 70%.
Unfortunately, getting started is the hardest part. Whether you don’t feel like you have time to set up your management system or just don’t know what to use for your needs, it’s difficult to get over the initial learning curve.
That’s why I’m going to outline the 9 organizational tools you can use to get started right now.
From their pros and cons and best use guidelines to general tips on what to do with your organizational tools, this post will cover:
It’s time to learn what organizational tools you need to manage your processes, and how to use them.
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.
After Elon Musk’s successes sending Falcon Heavy into space with his Roadster attached, the fanfare around his achievements has reached new highs.
But not everything is rosy for Musk.
Tesla is struggling. It’s not hitting its production targets for the Model 3, and this is not for the first time.
The goal for Tesla has been to hit 5,000 units per week and though Musk is confident of reaching that figure the Model 3 production has been mired by continually failing to meet demand.
It’s not enough just to have a good product, you also need to have high performing production systems in place to take that product effectively to market.
In this Process Street article, we’ll tackle the machine which builds the machine and we’re going to look at:
Documenting processes is great in theory, but creating and following them can be a pain.
Your processes need to be standardized so that everyone’s performing the same tasks consistently. However, that often leaves you with either a large, complex and unusable process which covers every situation or lots of smaller, specialized processes which become difficult to manage or track.
Conditional logic saves you all of that trouble by letting you create processes which change to suit the situation at hand.
By setting rules for your processes to follow and update based on their outcome, you can simplify your processes and make even the most complicated task list easy to navigate. All optional tasks can be automatically hidden from view until (and if) they are required to keep your dashboard clear and encourage teams to avoid taking shortcuts.
Nobody wants to work through a horribly complex process that you know you won’t need half of to complete your task.
However, as with business process automation, conditional logic’s power is best shown through examples, so today I’ll be showing you both how to use it and giving eight example processes which take advantage of it, including client onboarding and user support.
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.
When it comes to hiring staff you’ll go through multiple important stages to vet the candidates and make sure you choose the right one.
For many managers, the interview is the most important step.
The interview allows you to ask questions and interact with the other person; verify their claims, test their knowledge, and start to figure out whether you would be happy working with them in future. This allows you to go beyond simply the information on a CV.
As Ray Dalio, founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, phrased it:
Weigh values and abilities more heavily than skills in deciding whom to hire.
Knowing about the human sat in front of you is crucial to a successful hire.
In this article, we’re going to give you a selection of Process Street templates which should help the whole process run smoothly:
DenaliTEK is an Anchorage-based IT services company which uses Process Street to perform and track everything from payroll to client maintenance. This lets them provide quality services to their clients more consistently and in less time.
We spoke to their Controller Lisa Clark about how they use Process Street in their business.
The franchise model of doing business is a decidedly American affair.
The concept marries the power and scale efficiencies of large corporate bodies with the entrepreneurialism and hard work of mom-and-pop small business.
According to the United States International Trade Association:
there are over 780,000 franchise businesses that directly employ over 8.8 million people and account for over $890 billion in direct economic output.
The franchise model is one of the powerhouses of the US economy and features countless household names – McDonald’s being one of its truly global successes.
In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:
