Processes are a lot more interesting than you’d first think. That isn’t some kind of joke — they’re interesting, I swear. But what is a process?

Although they’re defined as “a collection of interrelated work tasks initiated in response to an event that achieves a specific result”, there’s a bit of a backstory that helps us cut through the corporate tranquilizers and understand what a process is, and why processes matter.

First, a few examples of processes:

• Cleaning the store
• Finding an email address
• Deploying software
• Customer profiling
• Onboarding a new employee
• Planning a wedding

But why are those processes? Why aren’t they just jobs to be done? The point is that when you formalize a process, you think about the workflow with productivity in mind and it makes it easier to execute and optimize.

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“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest” – Benjamin Franklin

According to the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), companies with better training investments enjoy a 24% higher profit margin.

Keep this statistic at the forefront and consider the benefits you will obtain if employee development didn’t stop once the training period was over.

Employee development, implemented via an employee development plan, gives an organization the means to continually invest in their employees so they bloom in their role.

Employee development looks to improve employee skills, knowledge, and experience to meet their professional and personal goals. An employee development plan is the set of actions guiding the employee to meet these goals, with back-and-forth collaboration between the employee and the manager.

The research division of Miller Helman Group found that investing as little as $500 in employee development yielded a 46.1% employee performance increase. It is reasons like this that we at Process Street take employee development seriously.

In this article, you will learn what an employee development plan is and how top CEOs use employee development to succeed in their role. On that note, we will also provide you with our free Employee Development Plan Template to help you get started.

Sound good?

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll and learn all we have to say in terms of employee development.

• Employee Development Plan Template
• What is an employee development plan? Professional vs employee development
• Employee development in action: Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia
• Employee development plan benefits
• What should an employee development plan include?

Ready to nurture your best team? Let’s get started!

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Why do you need a MEDDIC process in place?

From sales prospecting to cold calling and emailing, and qualifying leads to closing the sale, it’s a well-known fact that sales reps have their work cut out.

But did you know that, according to research by The Bridge Group, 1/3rd of salespeople fail to meet their sales quotas? Not just from time-to-time either, but on a permanent basis.

As somebody who’s at the helm of your sales team, it’s your duty to supply your colleagues with the right systems, processes, and tools. You must make sure your team succeeds.

For sales success – specifically, qualifying leads for the sales pipeline properly, getting higher close rates, meeting quotas, and dramatically boosting your bottom-line – use the MEDDIC methodology and process.

Never heard of MEDDIC before?

No sweat.

Read through the following sections in this Process Street post to get clued up:

• What is MEDDIC?
• Why is the MEDDIC sales methodology so useful?
• How to do the MEDDIC sales process properly
• Bolster your sales team’s efforts with Process Street!

Or, if you wanted to make use of our MEDDIC Sales Process Template straight away, grab it here:

Click here to get the MEDDIC Sales Process Checklist Template!

Let’s dive on in.

This is a guest post from Olivia Harp, whose easy-reading, approachable pieces help bring important business and negotiation skill-building content to new audiences in an accessible way. With a degree in linguistics, Olivia excels in creating her own engaging content.

Sustaining customer satisfaction can be challenging in business. However, there are several ways to improve your sales and customer satisfaction at the same time. Improving your sales negotiation skills is an overlooked low-hanging fruit route to making a positive impact on your customer relations.

Through sales negotiation training, you can learn how to identify your customer needs better. Understanding your customers puts you in a position to offer better services. By improving your customer relations, you may be able to attract and retain more customers.

This article outlines practical negotiation tips to increase your customers’ satisfaction.

In this Process Street article, we’ll cover:

• Redefine your business strategy
• Analyze your sales negotiation tactics
• Review your negotiation style
• Additional negotiation skills for customer satisfaction
• Get it right every time with Process Street

When you’re building a business, a team, or any kind of system, you need ways to understand how well you’re doing. That means finding the maturity model that matches the state of your business.

You want to be able to look at your performance and set base standards that have to be met and be able to contrast those standards with an understanding of what best practice looks like.

You want to understand where on that scale of performance you are at.

It’s why we use things like KPIs, OKRs, or other goal/objective-driven metrics.

But those metrics, as useful as they are for some things, are often hard to apply to qualitative data.

This is where maturity models can become an incredibly useful tool.

One model we’ll discuss here is the Capability Maturity Model, and the CMMI Institute alone appears to have about +8500 accredited users of this model (interestingly, in 2018 ~80% were pairing it with agile methodologies).

The problem, though, is that maturity models are often shrouded in complex terminology and overly-convoluted systems. How am I supposed to implement one in my business if people can’t understand it?

In this Process Street article, we’ll tear through the jargon and look at:

• What is a maturity model?
• What are the current limitations of business process maturity models?
• Which are the best business process maturity models?
• What is a Capability Maturity Model (CMM)?
• What is the Agile ISO Maturity Model (AIMM)?
• How does Process Street fit into your maturity model?

“Productivity vs efficiency; which do you think is more important?“

A colleague asked me this the other day and I had to catch myself, because my initial response was:

“Aren’t they the same thing?“

That’s the problem – the words have become so overused and confused that they are almost taken to mean the exact same thing in casual conversation. There are, however, key differences between the two that you should know in order to correctly analyze the performance of something.

Simply put, productivity measures output over time whereas efficiency measures input versus output. Together they can tell you how quickly something is completed, the resources it takes to get there, and (through analysis) whether the whole thing is worth your investment.

There are also dangers associated with these metrics. For example, I tried to spend an hour every night working on one of many projects. Monday was playing guitar, Tuesday was physical drawing, Wednesday game development, Thursday digital drawing, Friday playing piano, and the weekend dealer’s choice.

Not only did I give up within a week and a half, but I couldn’t muster the motivation to do any work on any of my projects for weeks following. It doesn’t matter if you’re using the best productivity apps around; when you’re using productivity and efficiency as your goal, rather than the method to reach it, something will inevitably break underneath you.

So, in this post I’ll go through:

• What is productivity?
• What is efficiency?
• Productivity vs efficiency: Which should you focus on?
• Productivity vs efficiency: What’s the final result?

It’s time to analyze performance and improve your workflows without all the meaningless jargon. Let’s get started.

While your blog is the external face and voice of your company, your support team is the internal one, which is why you need an effective customer support process in place. According to Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, SaaS companies — especially startups — should be using their company’s product, even if the teams don’t strictly ‘need’ to.

In Jason’s article, he recounts how PayPal president David Marcus ranted ‘use our app or quit‘ to his employees. While it could be argued that David Marcus is being an angry egotist and going a little too far for an app that everyone may not have a use for, he says that the reason he wants everyone using it regularly is so that PayPal can ‘get better, and better’.

That brings up an interesting issue — by putting every single employee on support in some capacity, you’re tackling several problems at once. You’re lightening the load of the dedicated support teams in busier times, teaching employees about the product they may well be advertising or marketing and gathering vital data from users on how the product could be improved.

Over the several past weeks, I’ve looked at the definition of customer success, why it’s important and how to reduce churn. Now we’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of customer support for SaaS companies, including strategies, workflows, and tips for getting set up.

• Everyone should have a customer support process
• Develop a customer support process document that works for your team
• Create a customer support process workflow (and make sure it gets followed)
• Segment your support tickets to keep engaged with the customer
• Create a recurring workflow to run for each ticket
• How to start this customer support process for every employee
• Get the Ebook: The Complete Guide to Customer Success for SaaS Companies

Let’s get started by looking more closely at the support model briefly described earlier.

Customer health index is a crucial metric to look at.

Why?

The customer’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) was in the highest percentile, yet I found myself closing the account. How did we miss this churning customer? Were there early warning signs we’d failed to notice?

I used to work as a technical customer service representative for an environmental testing laboratory. It was my job to keep an eye on the accounts I handled. I needed to make sure the customers were happy and meeting their goals with us. For this, we relied heavily on NPS scoring, but this measure was failing us.

NPS scoring could be failing you, too.

The problem is that NPS metrics give reactive, snapshot values. Plus there are other aspects to an account’s health beyond customer satisfaction. For instance, you need to understand your customer’s goals and whether they’re on track to meeting those goals.

According to McKinsey and Company, perfecting account health scoring can improve client retention by up to 95%. If I knew this, I could have prevented that one account from churning.

In this Process Street article, we introduce a more comprehensive and proactive means of determining the health of your accounts: the customer health index (CHI).

• What is a customer health index?
• Why you should transition from NPS to CHI
• How to calculate a customer health index in 4 steps

Let’s jump right to it!

Hanson Cheng is the founder of Freedom to Ascend. He empowers online entrepreneurs and business owners to put the HR automation systems in place for growth and 10x their business.

Despite being responsible for managing human resources, the HR department is usually one of the most understaffed and overworked departments in many companies. This is because HR involves many manual, repetitive, and monotonous tasks—these range from recruitment to pay and benefits to everything else in-between.

Automating your HR processes will help you:

• Streamline workflows
• Ensure all your processes are consistent
• Reduce errors

Ultimately, HR automation saves you time and money — valuable resources you could better spend on other pressing HR tasks. Research shows that automation can help decrease administrative tasks by 49 percent for HR employers and 30 percent for HR professionals. The same study also revealed that up to 34 percent of HR departments said their organizations were slow in adopting HR automation.

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

• What is HR automation?
• Benefits of HR automation
• 7 key HR processes to automate in 2021
• Why not automating HR processes can set you back In 2021
• HR automation: It’s not an option anymore

Let’s jump right in!

Some workflow apps you might be using to help manage your processes require constant attention – reporting, updating, or having to contact other colleagues to get them to complete their section of the workflow.

These are interruptions, and according to Professor Gloria Marks from the University of California, with each interruption, there is an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds wasted to get back to the task.

Other workflows experience inefficiencies simply because your current processes take too long. Full stop.

The more time things take, the more work you have to do.

In this article, we’ll guide you through a series of tools which can help you create workflows, follow workflows, and automate workflows.

• Workflow apps for creating templates
• Workflow apps for task management
• Workflow apps for communication
• Workflow apps for storage
• Workflow apps for recording ideas
• Workflow apps for automated reporting
• Workflow apps for task delegation
• Workflow apps for process automation
• Workflow apps for dual-screening
• Start streamlining your processes with workflow apps