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The Minimum Virtuous Product: Is the Move Fast & Break Things Era Behind Us?

Minimum Virtuous ProductIf you’re moving fast and breaking things, at what point in time do you realize things are broken?

When there is public uproar against your product? Such as the Amazon case in 2019 involving job listings for the role of “union buster” (someone who reports on fellow employees seeking fair labor practices).

Or, when regulators come down on you like a ton of bricks? As was (and continues to be) experienced by Airbnb whose platform has been home to grotesque racial discrimination.

Allow me to introduce the topic of this blog post: The minimum virtuous product (MVP).

It seems the concept behind the traditional minimal viable product (MVP) which prioritizes quick launches and basic feature sets has been replaced by something a little more virtuous. The new MVP, minimum virtuous product, encourages companies to focus on diversity and transparency by building morally sound design principles, from the start.

This post will take a look at what this change in acronym has to do with the way companies grow and scale; along with an eight-question framework that will help start-ups assess the social impact of their products; and finally, it will cover what moving with virtue could mean for future startups.

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How Our Sales Team Use Checklists to Identify Sales Opportunities & Close Deals

How Our Sales Team Use Process Street

“To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.” – Benjamin Franklin

Is your sales team prioritizing their time and channeling their efforts for the highest return? Are you sure you have the systems in place to take advantage of every sales opportunity that presents itself to you, from outreach to closing the deal?

Over the years, our sales team has built a few processes that help them maximize the impact of their daily recurring tasks. In turn, these processes are partially responsible for helping us along the way to over 450,000 registered users, including likes of Colliers, Salesforce, Accenture, Spotify, and Airbnb.

In this Process Street article I’ll share some of those sales processes with you.

We’ll cover how our sales team has used checklists to:

  • Identify & lock-onto our highest value leads: According to the CMO Council, lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year. We don’t want to even lose $1 due to lost productivity. By using Process Street our sales team can manage leads efficiently.
  • Quickly and easily respond to requests for trial extensions, discounts, upgrades, and more: From trial extensions, pricing, product explanation, and demos, a Process Street checklist can be created and run for all sale requests, standardizing processes and keeping teams abiding by best practice.
  • Capture important information during the sales cycle: According to Accenture, 42.5% of sales reps take 10 months or longer before they contribute to the company goals. Capturing sales data helps Process Street’s sales team create actionable sales insights, insights both the sales leaders and reps can refer to and rely on to better reach their goals.

These processes are mainly used by our Account Executives every day – and I’ll cover how each of the checklists map to each stage of the sales cycle.

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UX Research Methods: Behind the Scenes At Process Street

UX Research Methods Behind the Scenes At Process Street

Jonathan Bond is a Process Street Staff Product Designer, Star Wars fan, and human problem solver. Reach him on Twitter @jrbond.

The path you actually take in life is often wildly different from the one you thought you’d take. I spent years undertaking a fine arts degree. However, after I graduated, I wanted to get my hands metaphorically dirty (and literally cleaner — goodbye, paint!) by going into graphic design.

Initially, I bounced between various agencies doing what you’d expect any freelance graphic designer to do: logos and websites. While it was interesting and paid the bills, there was a new buzzword on the block in 2010 that sounded even more exciting: UX.

“A user interface is like a joke.
If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.”
Martin LeBlanc, CEO

User experience (UX) design is focused on the individual thoughts about a product or service a person might have. It takes into consideration qualitative data like the user’s emotions and attitudes towards a product, as well as the more practical elements like ease of use, efficiency, and so on.

The more I read about UX design, the more I liked what I read. I felt it fit my own design philosophy; I just connected with it. This was something I wanted to be involved in.

As luck would have it, a company that wanted someone to improve their app’s aesthetic hired me to be involved with that. I still didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but I kept reading and studying, and ten years later, I’m still doing that – now at Process Street.

This post will cover:

Let’s begin!
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How to Build a Successful Go-to-Market Strategy

go-to-market strategy

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the way in which a company brings a product or service to market.

No matter how good your idea is, you need a go-to-market strategy.

Why?

Because statistically speaking, your business is more likely to fail than succeed.

In fact, if you’re a startup, your chance of failure is a dreary 90%. That’s not to say that your idea isn’t a brilliant one, or that you haven’t got what it takes to bring it to market.

Startups fail for different reasons. Perhaps the market is already awash with companies offering the same solution as yours, or the market isn’t mature enough to welcome your product. Or, maybe the cost of developing and launching your product is so steep that it’s unprofitable.

If successful, a go-to-market strategy will be your salvation and prevent you from failure. The question is, how do you develop a winning strategy? Which factors should you consider?

I asked our VP of Marketing Bryan Sise these very questions. Through the course of his career at companies like Twilio, SendGrid, Twitter, Dynamic Signal, and now Process Street, Bryan has noticed what contributes to GTM success.

In this post I’ll share with you what he has to say. I’ll cover what a go-to-market strategy is, types of go-to-market strategies, the key steps to building a successful go-to-market strategy, and what GTM strategies we use here at Process Street.

Let’s get strategizing.
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Set Up a Home Workspace That Inspires Productivity

home workspaceNouman provides ghostwriting and copywriting services. His educational background in the technical field and business studies helps him in tackling topics ranging from career and business productivity to web development and digital marketing. He occasionally writes articles for carpet cleaning.

Working from home has become the new normal. However, it can be difficult to ensure productivity when you work at home.

Although the concept of a traditional office is no more, we all require a dedicated workspace to get things done.

If you are having trouble staying productive while working from home, then chances are that you need to set up a home workspace that inspires productivity. Not many people realize just how important it is to have a dedicated workspace.

According to data, workspace design plays a huge role in our productivity levels.

The question is: How can you design your workspace in such a way that boosts creativity, connection, and productivity? Fortunately, this Process Street blog post is here to help. There is no need to worry as this guide will provide you with all the information you need to feel motivated to work.

When you decide to work remotely, you need to understand that it comes with a fair share of complications. The main of which involves setting up your home workspace to ensure maximum productivity. Fortunately for you, this article is here to help you get started.

Let’s jump right in!
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How to Save 6,000 Hours per Year with Business Systems Development

How to Save 6,000 Hours per Year with Business Systems Development-03 (1)

This is a guest post by Michael Zipursky, CEO of Consulting Success® and Coach to Consultants. He has advised organizations like Financial Times, Dow Jones, RBC, and helped Panasonic launch new products into global markets. Michael is also the author of the Amazon Best Sellers ACT NOW: How successful consultants thrive during chaos and uncertainty, The Elite Consulting Mind and Consulting Success® the book.

You know the feeling; you’d love to take a vacation and a break from your business…

…but there’s no one to handle the day-to-day operations for you.

You’ve built up years of experience, and you feel like you’re the only one who can run the show. I know, because I’ve been there. Early on in my career, I was convinced I could do everything.

I told myself I was better than anyone at the work I did. It would take me too long to train anyone up to my level. I persuaded myself that this was true…but I was wrong. I could have certainly taught someone else – and it would have saved me a lot of time and energy to focus on higher-value work.

Studies indicate that business system documentation can boost productivity and save up to 6,000 hours per year, equating to 2.4 full-time staff positions.

On top of this, documenting systems and processes builds a foundation to train new team members so that your business can run without you involved in the day-to-day operations.

By the end of this Process Street article, you’ll understand why it’s so important to document systems and processes, see some real-life examples and learn how to do it in your business.

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Customer Success Onboarding: Learn How to Improve Profitability and Reduce Customer Churn

Customer Success Onboarding Learn How to Improve Profitability and Reduce Customer Churn_1

90% of customers feel that the companies they buy from could do better when it comes to how they experience onboarding.

Customer success is about helping your customers understand and leverage the value of your product; you’re basically helping them achieve their goals. In a sense it’s one step beyond traditional customer support, taking a proactive approach to understanding and addressing customer needs.

A key component of customer success is making sure your customers are effectively onboarded.

Onboarding provides a unique opportunity for the CS team to nurture and address the key needs of a new customer, and an effective onboarding program can mean the difference between a long-term customer and a rapid churn.

For customer success teams to succeed with onboarding, CS managers should drive clear best practices and use well-structured processes to make onboarding as effortless as possible for everyone involved.

In this Process Street article, we’ll dive into:

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Improve Business Operations With Economies of Scope

Improve Business Operations With Economies of Scope

The other day, my household experienced one of the great tragedies of the home delivery era: our grocery delivery was canceled.

You know what that means. I had to go to the grocery store. Like, physically, in person, go inside the grocery store.

I survived, but phew. Let’s just say there were a few close calls.

All in all, though, it was a successful trip. I picked up a couple of prescriptions, had an eye exam, switched the pet insurance, got some advice about first-time homeownership, and even remembered to get dinner fixins. I would’ve gotten my oil changed and tires rotated, too, but I don’t have a car so… Yeah. I didn’t do that.

This is what economies of scope look like. Economies of scope are when it’s more cost-effective to produce related items together than it is to produce them individually. In the 21st century economy, it’s also an increasingly familiar model as brands continue to expand their offerings to consumers.

As a consumer, this model is great. We don’t have to run around all over the place to take care of all our responsibilities. For companies, it’s not a bad model, either.

Economies of scope – offering all of these services under one roof – companies are actually spending less by offering more.

But wait – how does that work?

Well, I’ll tell you:

Welcome to Process Street! Right this way, please.
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What is a Blog Maturity Model? How We Create Quality Content at Process Street

blog maturity model

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:

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Make Magic & Embody Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Cross-Departmental CollaborationThis is a guest post written by Kashyap Trivedi. Kashyap is a Project Manager, working with an awesome team at Launch Space. He helps SaaS companies conquer the SERPs with Expert Outreach. When he is not working, you’ll find him playing Table Tennis or Meditating.

The Sales, Marketing, and Support teams form the three significant points of a business’ interactions with customers. Because of this, they must work together to create a seamless transition for the customers that are moving from one stage of the buying process to another.

When all three teams work together in sync, they can easily help each other to reach organizational goals quickly. This article will show you how these three teams can work together and how your business can benefit from it. To jump to a specific section of the post click the appropriate link below.

Let’s start with Sales.
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