In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Zachary Sexton, host of The Productivity Show for Asian Efficiency.

Whether you’re a maker or a manager, you could use a little more efficiency at work. It’s not like you’re choosing to goof off and doing a Homer Simpson, but you might be spending way too much time on email or less important work.

But how do you know? What really is the most important task for today?

We’ve looked at this topic a lot on the Process Street blog, but today it’s a focus on improving efficiency at work from the perspective of building a culture of productivity in your workplace.

Zachary tells us the tools, systems and methods he’s learned while running Asian Efficiency’s Productivity Show and the Buckets consultancy.

Listen to this week’s episode to supercharge your productivity, and find out what to do when you have a few bad days in a row.

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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If you think your writing’s any good, this book will cut you down to size…

I used to think that I could write well enough…

See William.

See William run.

See William write a 300-page book which taught me how to correct the mistakes I never knew I was making.

That’s what this book is; a display of how bad both you and I are at writing. As such, this On Writing Well review is as much to show the key points to William Zinsser’s thoughts as it is a review of the past year of my own work here at Process Street.

Here’s to improving our writing and avoiding common content writing mistakes, all whilst making an ass of myself.

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Sales will make or break your business

Outbound sales feed your team. Your cold-callers are foragers. Your senior sales staff are hunters.

They find the new clients and bring them back to the tribe of engineers and human resources staff who depend on them.

But we live in a more complex world than the hunter-gatherers of old, and with that comes the need for more complex processes.

The key to a successful sales process is understanding the overview.

There are lots of individual processes you can employ to improve different aspects of your sales and they need to fit together into a coherent sales narrative. Some call this narrative a sales funnel, and others a sales pipeline.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, Vinay explains the system he uses to hire at Process Street.

Hiring is the single most important thing any company does.

It’s right at the top of the chain, and the effects filter down to impact revenue, reach, signups, customer satisfaction, and more.

So, instead of settling on someone early because you can’t be bothered to manage relationships with hundreds of candidates, you should try the system described in this podcast.

The system involves ways to automatically reach out to great potential candidates, screen with automation, and use AI to schedule meetings. And, it’s nowhere near as complex as it sounds.

Listen to this episode to learn this semi-automated system for yourself and get it set up in a few hours!

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:

Quote to tweet:

“People are the ultimate system. It’s all about the team. Your company is how you hire” (tweet this)

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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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