Thinking the terms ‘quality control’ and ‘quality assurance’ can be used interchangeably is a common mistake.

Whoever coined those terms did nothing to clarify their differences, but in fact:

• Quality control (QC) makes sure that your product isn’t riddled with bugs.
• Quality assurance (QA) makes sure engineers are following processes to reduce future bugs, and write code more efficiently.

Quality control is something development teams do every day. They squash bugs in the code they wrote, and run tests to catch future errors.

Quality assurance is the overall management of development processes that make sure less testing and QC needs to be done.

At Process Street, we’ve already looked at the wider implications of QC and how to run tests on your software. We’ve even provided you with a bunch of pre-made software development processes you can adjust to your own team.

In this article, I’ll go into an explanation of quality assurance in software teams, and how you can use this information for your own developers.

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What is BANT qualification?

Let’s say you’ve got a list of leads. You don’t know which, but some will be ready to buy right now. Others, however, won’t have the slightest bit of interest…

The only way to find out is to call them. And that’s where BANT qualification comes into play.

Invented by IBM sales teams, BANT is a series of criteria, which stands for:

• Budget. What is the prospect’s budget?
• Authority. Does the contact have the right authority to buy?
• Needs. What needs does your prospect have? Do they match your product or service?
• Timeframe. How soon are they wanting to implement a solution?

Any one of these questions can be used to disqualify a prospect, or at least help you decide how to proceed with that particular contact.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Matt Goldman: Churn Buster CEO and co-host of Rocketship.fm.

We’ve looked at how churn can kill your SaaS company before on the Process Street blog…

But today we’ve had the pleasure of talking to someone who works entirely with churn and reducing its effects for tons of major SaaS companies.

Churn is the rate that customers cancel their subscriptions to your software. It can happen either because your product isn’t giving them enough value, or it can happen because of a failed payment method.

In fact, over half of total churn is because of an expired credit card or another technical payment issue…

Matt built Churn Buster to fight this particular type of revenue loss, and today he’s here to tell us all the secrets he’s learned along the way.
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If you’ve been reading our content about the importance of processes, you know the kinds of things that happen when standard procedure isn’t followed. Satellites crash, nuclear reactors melt down, and information security disasters ruin huge corporations.

For software companies, failure doesn’t always have such wide implications but it can mean carelessly shipping a product that creates catastrophic problems for your customers and destroys their trust in you. And of course, it’s a pain in the arse for your development team to fix.

In this article, I’m going to go over some famous software disasters where Quality Control dropped the ball, and look over some common quality control methods.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we learn video production tips from Chris Lavigne, head of video at Wistia.

You’d expect a video startup to have a wealth of wisdom on video creation, production, and editing, but this episode is insane.

We speak to Chris Lavigne, Wistia’s head of video, and learn everything from creating a business video with your iPhone, editing on free software, and the biggest mistakes you can make with lighting and audio recording.

Whether you’ve just got a laptop and an iPhone, or a bit of a budget to afford a mic and camera, there are tips here that will help you create video content that engages your audience, makes emotional connections, and strengthens your brand.

While you’re here, check out an earlier episode we recorded with Wistia CEO Chris Savage.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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So you’ve decided to hire remote? Good idea.

Working with a remote team can vastly increase your talent pool, save significant amounts on office overheads (on average $11,000 per company), and allow your staff to work in ways which suit them.

Your remote staff are 13% more productive. And, according to Chris Byers, CEO of Formstack, they’re twice as likely to work beyond 40 hours a week. You’re getting more hours, and more out of each hour.

…But don’t get too excited. Managing, training, and onboarding a remote team comes with its own challenges and difficulties. If you fail to train, you train to fail.

Here are 4 crucial points to remember when training a remote support team:

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Wendy Tadokoro from ‘Organising Works!‘ — a business systems consultancy based in Australia.

You’re not going to be able to scale your business properly if you don’t use systems…

The problem is, businesses think they don’t have enough time to create processes.

What they don’t realize is that every day you go without a process, you’re wasting time and setting yourself up for failure.

Processes help you:

• Train new employees
• Assign tasks to anyone
• Automate tedious jobs
• Scale your business

So, how do you start systemizing your business from scratch?

If that’s what you want to know, this is the episode for you. Joining me this week is Wendy Tadokoro from Organising Works!, a systems consultancy with years of experience working with enterprises and small businesses. She walks us through everything she does when starting with a new client, revealing how you start making systems from the very beginning.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Jon Butt. Jon is the CEO of Fire Protection Online, an e-commerce store he built that generates $3m in annual revenue. He also runs marketingforowners.com, where he shows people how to build a successful, self-marketing company.

Want to spent less than an hour a week on your business?

It’s totally possible when you break down your business functions into simple processes, and automate anything that doesn’t need doing by a human.

With a bit of planning, you can start today…

Learn these techniques from Jon Butt, who built a $3m annual revenue business with customers such as Cornell University, Canary Wharf, and Buckingham Palace.

After selling his first company in 2003, Jon made enough to comfortably retire… but then went on to accidentally start an outsourced e-commerce company that took off without much marketing needed to get it off the ground.

All the while, Jon was paying cash to the neighbors every week to borrow electricity and hosting his office in a grim building without a toilet…

Using teachings from The E-Myth, Jon scaled up faster than his suppliers could handle, all while on holiday in Greece.

Learn how to build every process in your business, then gradually remove yourself from them, outsourcing and automating as much as possible.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Cameron Gray, the CTO of NeonMob — a marketplace for digital art.

So, you’ve got some funding, or you’re fresh out of an accelerator. You’re ready to go.

A VC handed you a bunch of cash, and said: “go hire as many developers as you can“.

Sounds great, right?

If only it was that easy.

We live in a new wave of the Californian gold rush. Skilled developers are snapped up by corporate recruiters with much more experience and better offers than you could hope to make.

How on Earth are you supposed to compete with that?

Well…

In this episode we speak to Cameron Gray. Cameron is our CTO’s advisor as well as the CTO of NeonMob. He’s a man experienced with recruiting for software teams anywhere between 5 and 100 people.

We find out the best places to find developers (and the absolute worst) as well as some quick hacks for screening them over the phone in 30 minutes before bringing them on for an interview.

Cameron shares some of the red flags that come to the surface when you’re screening a developer, as well as specific questions you need to be asking in your first interview.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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Ah, procrastination, we meet again. For all of my talk on how to improve productivity, to a certain degree I find it impossible to permanently find the answer for how to stop procrastinating.

What I can do, though, is explain why we procrastinate and give some tips to some out on top as much as possible.
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