Deadlines.

Meetings.

Presentations.

As an employee and business owner, your agenda is jam-packed full of to-dos. It can sometimes be difficult to stay afloat. This is why we at Process Street have created this article to make your working life a lot easier.

We’re going to look at making checklists for the effective management of your work.

We asked business owners and employees across the globe: What tips or tricks would you give someone for making checklists?

We gathered our responses, sieved out significant commonalities, and wrapped up our findings to produce this article.

Click on a subheader to jump to any section, or scroll down to read a full in-depth account on making checklists.

• ‎Making checklists: Why use checklists?
• Making checklists: Tip 1 – Split up your large projects
• Making checklists: Tip 2 – Keep your checklists manageable
• Making checklists: Tip 3 – Group your tasks
• Making checklists: Tip 4 – Keep a record
• Making checklists: Tip 5 – Regularly update your checklists
• More tips for your checklist templates
• How to make superpowered checklists using Process Street

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How do you stand out against overwhelming competition? You need an edge; a value proposition isn’t enough on its own.

You need to make sure you’re out-competing the competition by keeping costs down and understanding the value you’re delivering to your customer. But how do you continuously improve your value offering while keeping costs down?

Enter the value chain.

A value chain is a model of looking at all of your business processes and figuring out how to gain a competitive advantage by focusing on developing maximum value in your product or service, while keeping your profit margins in the green at the same time.

Originally proposed by Harvard’s Michael Porter in his 1998 book Competitive Advantage, there’s a lot of ground to cover. Where do you start? What’s the process? What kind of tools exist to make the value chain analysis easier?

Well, if you’re looking for a clear, concise introduction to Michael Porter’s Value Chain model, you’ve come to the right place. Read on for a breakdown of:

• What is a value chain?
• Michael Porter’s original value chain model
• Value chain analysis
• Benefits of value chain analysis
• Value chain analysis process
• Value chain vs supply chain
• Porter’s primary value chain components
• Porter’s secondary value chain components
• Bonus: Porter’s Five Forces

By the end of this article, you should have a firm grasp on the value chain model, with a better idea of how to apply it to your own business. We’ll also investigate how to integrate BPM software like Process Street into the value chain.
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This is a guest post from Shawn Mike. Shawn has been working with writing challenging clients for over five years. His educational background in the technical field and business studies has given him the edge to write on many topics. He occasionally writes blog articles for Dynamologic Solutions.

According to statistics, it is claimed that US organizations suffer a loss of $62 billion a year thanks to unsatisfactory customer service.

Customer service represents your secondary acquisition test, beyond actually getting that customer on board in the first place.

It’s very much a short-term game of conflict resolution, and your business depends mainly on how you deal with customer feedback and requests.

For maximum lifetime value, you need to consider how to synergize customer service with customer success.

It must be kept in mind that customers are the heart of every business and should be at the top of your priority list.

Satisfied customers help increase sales and build brand identity and reports claim that 77% of customers are estimated to recommend a brand or business to a friend depending on how good their experience with your product is.

Which is why focusing on keeping your customer base satisfied with great service and excellent products can go a long way in improving your sales.

Nowadays, consumers expect more than just a great product. They need you to guide them through the perfect experience. A better customer experience equals a greater lifetime value expectancy.

This article is all about figuring out the best way to analyze and improve customer experience by automating a lot of the manual work that can get in the way.

We’ll focus on:

• Understanding customer success
• Difference between customer service and customer success
• How to improve your customer success strategy
• Benefits of customer success automation
• How to successfully automate customer success
• Example customer success process template

Read on to learn more about how to optimize your customer success strategy. There’s even a free Ebook for you at the end of it!
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How do you know whether you’re going to be successful or not with a new business or product?

Well, you’ll probably look to pour your heart and soul into it. You’ll work hard to make it the best product or service you can. You’ll endeavor to make each and every customer happy.

And well done to you for that.

But you’re not the only one who impacts on whether your efforts are successful.

It’s no secret that one of the hardest parts of business is the competitive nature of the market.

What your competition looks like, how it’s constructed, and what opportunities their weaknesses provide you, are crucial factors which can determine your success.

This is where you’ll need to do some kind of competitive position analysis.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at a framework which is designed to help you understand your competition called Porter’s Five Forces. We’ll cover:

• What is Porter’s Five Forces Model?
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 1: Threat of new entrants
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 2: Threat of substitutes
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 3: Bargaining power of customers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 4: Bargaining power of suppliers
• Porter’s Five Forces – Force 5: Competitive rivalry
• Resolving the 5 Forces: An Economic Moat

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CRM and marketing automation software both help businesses use customer data, but they are built around different jobs. A CRM gives sales and service teams a dependable record of relationships. Marketing automation helps marketing teams segment audiences, run campaigns, and respond to behavior at scale.

That distinction matters because buying the wrong system first creates more work instead of less. The right choice depends on the problem you need to solve, the people who will use the system, and the handoffs that connect marketing activity to revenue. This guide explains the practical differences in CRM vs marketing automation, then shows how the two can work together.

Approvals are everywhere. If you’ve worked on any project involving any kind of deliverables, chances are you’re all-too-familiar with the approval process (or rejection process, depending).

Documents, prototypes, reports, mock-ups, wireframes, storyboards, and even more internally-facing elements like simple holiday leave requests. All of these represent different kinds of approval process, and approvals are an integral workflow element.

Approvals can also represent a major bottleneck.

Consider how you are currently approving work in your business. Perhaps you have a vague process involving emails, and if you’re particularly attentive you might be tracking it in a spreadsheet.

These methods are slow and prone to delays. You have no way of tracking anything reliably, you are more likely to miss approval windows, and information has to be sent manually between individuals.

What’s more, it’s quite difficult to improve this process without the proper system in place. You need to make sure you’ve got the right tools to optimize your approval process.

Process Street‘s approvals feature is the solution to this problem.

We created the approvals feature to make the process of approving work as fast and easy as possible.

With approvals, you can:

• Get notified as soon as work is ready for approval
• Approve (or reject) work with zero friction using a clear, streamlined interface
• Approve on-the-go, from your phone’s email inbox
• Synergize with many other Process Street features to optimize process efficiency
• Save time and stay on top of your workflow

In this post, I have a trove of templates to showcase the approvals feature. All of the templates in this article are custom-built to make your life easier.

They also take advantage of Process Street‘s other powerful features like rich form fields, conditional logic, dynamic due dates, and role assignments.

So, read on for:

• A quick introduction to approvals
• Different types of approval process
• How to add approval tasks in Process Street
• Approval process best practices
• 20+ free approval process templates (each use-case explained)
• How to approve tasks straight from your phone
• Optimize your approvals with more process street features
• More great workflow automation resources

Read on to learn how to hit the ground running with the approvals feature.

Content marketing. Content strategy. Content… development?

There are so many content-related words buzzing around the world wide web.

Confused?

I don’t blame you.

However, any marketer or content creator worth their salt will know that content development is not a process to skimp out on.

That’s why, in this article, I’ll be discussing – and all in plain terms – what content development is and why it’s important. Plus, I’ll provide you with a content development process that’ll ensure you’ll research, create, edit, and promote stellar content audiences will want to engage with. Every. Single. Time.

Simply read through the following sections to get the complete low-down on content development:

• What is the content development definition?
• The difference between content strategy, marketing, and development
• Why is content development so important?
• An 8-step content development process for success
• Become an excellent content developer with our superpowered checklists!

Ready to become content with your content?

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For over half a decade now, the team at Process Street has been creating stellar content so that businesses around the world can become the best they can be.

In terms of numbers, that’s nearly 1,000 on-site business blog posts we’ve published!

Considering this vast swathe of content, there may be a few times where, if you’re a veteran reader, you’ve missed posts that would’ve been high-value resources for your business.

Similarly, if you’re a new visitor (welcome, by the way! ) you may not be sure where to get started.

That’s why we’ve created this roundup post of our greatest business blog posts. To boot, the posts have been categorized into separate sections so you can find relevant content quickly:

• What business content can you expect from the Process Street blog?
• Process Street’s greatest business blog posts, categorized!
• Business blog posts: Automation
• Business blog posts: Case studies
• Business blog posts: Human resources
• Business blog posts: ISO and quality management
• Business blog posts: Marketing
• Business blog posts: Management and organizational theory
• Business blog posts: Property management
• Business blog posts: Productivity
• Business blog posts: Sustainable business
• Business blog posts: Tools and tech
• Business blog posts: Just for fun!
• How does Process Street stand apart from other business blogs?

Now, let’s learn a thing or two.

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Only 23% of surveyed CEOs believe that they have comprehensive information about the risks of their business.

Can you confidently state that you belong in that 23%?

Even if you are not a CEO, as an employee, are you sure you know all the risks within your workplace?

If not, then keep reading.

In this article, you will learn about risk and how to manage it, specifically via risk mitigation. You are also provided with a thorough list of Process Street resources and templates. These are designed for you to gain a good understanding of business risk, risk management and risk mitigation.

This article is structured as below:

• A definition of risk
• What is risk management
• What is risk mitigation
• Risk mitigation application
• Risk mitigation and risk management: A broader picture

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When your average pitch is worth $5,800 per second you can’t afford to get things wrong.

You have an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds to convince potential investors that your business potential is worth their money.

Oh, and that you know what on Earth you’re doing.

That’s a lot of pressure for any business owner. So, we here at Process Street have taken our own experience pitching to 2,500+ investors, venture capitalists, and business owners to give you the ideal formula for creating a winning pitch deck.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a pitch deck?
• How to make a pitch deck
• Why should you believe this works?
• Pitch deck examples

Let’s get started!

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