This is a guest post from Derek Gallimore from Outsource Accelerator. Derek’s blend of extensive international business and travel experience means that outsourcing came relatively naturally to him. Derek has been in business for over 20 years, outsourcing for over seven years, and has lived in Manila, Philippines – the world’s outsourcing capital – for over five years. He has worked and lived in five countries and worked and traveled through dozens more.

A great business focuses on building customer relations. They need to reach out to their customers to fulfill their service needs, such as inquiries, service-related concerns, and marketing offers.

Someone needs to follow up on billings and collections. Another person needs to send out newsletters to its clients. When a new product or offer comes out, someone must inform the customers either through calls or emails. In some cases, someone also needs to gather data regarding customer satisfaction and commentaries on what needs to be improved in their products.

It can be tedious, especially for startups and small businesses with a few people on it to man these tasks at once, so strong customer service and sales teams are needed to fulfill these tasks.

Good thing is, businesses can rely on call centers to manage these activities. This article will tackle:

• Pros and cons of call center outsourcing
• Costs of an outsourced call center team
• How to find and hire a call center
• Best practices in hiring a call center

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This is a guest post from Stella Lincoln who works as a Business Executive at Academist Help. She is a passionate blogger and owns the blog Educator House. Lincoln has many years of experience in digital marketing and specializes in search engine optimization (SEO).

In this era of globalization and digitization, marketing takes many forms. We at Process Street recommend one marketing strategy: Make sure you strongly focus on email marketing, or more specifically, your email conversion rates.

Why?

Email marketing is a successful strategy. Done correctly it can bring in the highest Return On Investment (ROI) relative to other marketing channels. Email marketing offers a return of 30x your initial investment.

Wow.

But let me emphasize, such a high ROI is only possible if you get your email marketing right.

How do you get your email marketing strategy right?

One aspect is through email Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Through intuition, I am guessing you are ready to optimize your email conversion rates – after all, you came here. Well, reader, you can use this article as your top-tip list for all things CR and email optimization.

In this article, we give you our 12 top ranking tips to optimize your email conversion rates. You can click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that given section. Alternatively, scroll down and read all we have to say.

• Optimize your email conversion rates: CRO meaning
• Optimize your email conversion rates: Email optimization and why it is is important
• Optimize your email conversion rate with these conversion rate optimization best practices
• Use Process Street to optimize your email conversion rates

Let’s get started!
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This is a guest post by Ivan Boychuk. Ivan is a freelance writer who specializes in creating quality SEO content that ranks high in search engines like Google.

“Do what you do best, and outsource the rest.” – Peter Drucker

Peter Drucker, who was a legendary thought leader in the area of marketing, understood that outsourcing work to freelancers can be an effective strategy to increase overall business productivity.

Why?

Because hiring a freelancer can save you time, money, needless headaches, and it can bring fantastic outside talent onboard. But with so many people chasing after the freelance lifestyle, it can be a daunting task to sift through countless candidates and hire a quality freelancer for your business.

Don’t worry, though.

In this guest post for Process Street, I’ll explain what a freelancer is, what to look for when hiring a freelancer, and show you 9 great websites for hiring freelancers! Just read through the following sections:

• What is a freelancer?
• What to look for when hiring freelancers
• How to hire freelancers: The best hiring websites around!
• Use Process Street to help hire freelancers & keep them on track

Let’s get started.

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If you hear the term “fleet management” and assume its only importance is to keep track of your fleet and the location of your vehicles and drivers, then you’ve assumed wrong.

Over the past several years, fleet management software has evolved beyond the basic tracking system most people expect from it and the number of business owners choosing to implement it is growing every day.

Fleet management may not be challenging if your company has only a few vehicles, but if you have hundreds or thousands of vehicles, you’ll need to implement fleet management software, because the manual labor needed would be completely out of hand.

Managing your fleet manually leaves a lot of room for potential issues. To name just a few, you might struggle to get in contact with your drivers when necessary or, if an accident occurs, you’ll run into more complications when filing an insurance claim.

Using fleet management software alleviates these problems and helps avoid any new problems that may arise.
In this article, we’ll cover:

• What is fleet management?
• What is fleet management software?
• Benefits of fleet management software
• Key features of fleet management software
• Tips for choosing the right fleet management software for your company
• Best fleet management software
• How to use Process Street to streamline your fleet management

Before we dive into the different fleet management software mentioned in this article, here’s a quick list of useful fleet management templates:

• Facility inspection checklist
• Forklift inspection checklist
• Inventory management process
• ISO container inspection checklist
• Order fulfillment
• Order processing checklist
• Vehicle inspection checklist
• Warehouse safety checklist
• Scheduled maintenance notification
• Vendor management: Supplier evaluation
• Vendor management: Contract negotiation

If you’re not sure what a Process Street template looks like, check it out here:

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Information. Documents. Critical business material.

As businesses scale from a several-person startup to one that’s larger and more robust, it’s important to have a place where all this business-related content can be stored, organized, and easily accessed.

To boot, it’s also necessary to have the requisite processes so all this content is, well, managed properly.

Why?

Because by 2025, the amount of global data created each day will reach 463 exabytes – and the majority of this data will be unstructured.

If a business is not using a centralized repository and doesn’t have the right processes in place, there will be bedlam.

This is why ECM exists.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is the solution for modern businesses wanting to keep content safe, secure, useable, and accessible through its life cycle.

In this Process Street post, you’re going to learn all about ECM, from its exact definition to understanding why it’s beneficial, and learning what ECM tools are capable of and what they’re not designed to do. Read the sections below to get the complete lowdown:

• What’s the enterprise content management definition?
• Why is enterprise content management useful?
• What can enterprise content management tools do?
• What can’t enterprise content management tools do?
• The best tools on the market for content management
• Use Process Street to get the best out of ECM and BPM!

Let’s begin your journey to becoming content with your enterprise’s content management. 📁

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$22 trillion.

That was the cost of the financial crisis to the U.S. economy. This created a less than ideal environment for any business to survive in. The period saw 200,000 small businesses vanish into a black hole of recession, engulfing 3 million jobs down with them.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: The 2008 U.S. financial crisis and the devastation it brought was the result of audit process failures. This has been concluded by The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC).

Like the FCIC, we at Process Street understand the importance of following a set audit process. Not doing so can bring devastating consequences on all scales. To country economics, right down to small businesses.

In this article, we will:

• Define the term audit process
• Explain why it is important to follow a set audit process
• Outline an audit process followed by professional auditors
• Show how you can implement this set audit process into your business for free

Read this article and action the advice we give. By doing so you will be protected from common audit process pitfalls and the resulting cataclysmic consequences. You can click on the relevant links below to jump the section of your choosing:

• A definition for audit process
• Audit process: Internal vs external audits
• Audit process: Why are audit processes needed?
• Audit process: The audit process done right
• Audit process: The auditing process
• Audit process: Why do auditors follow a set process?
• Preserve your audit process using Process Street

Alternatively, take the time to read all we, at Process Street, have to say.

Shall we get started?

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Picture this: You’re on vacation.

(Sounds good already, huh?)

It’s summer. The sun’s shining. You’re on a beach with white sands and an ocean so clear you can see the coral.

You think, “Hey, I wouldn’t mind an ice cream right about now.” So you go to the ice cream kiosk before it closes for the day, choose your flavor of choice, go back to your towel, and eat it.

It’s the best ice cream you’ve ever had.

You want more.

But it’s gone. (And the kiosk is shut, too.)

Your vacation is ruined. R U I N E D.

Sometimes, one of something isn’t enough. Not just when it comes to delicious food, but also concerning more practical things like iPhone charging cables (why are they so flimsy, Apple?!), and of course, checklists.

Having multiple checklists holds you and your team in incredibly good stead when it comes to all kinds of business-related activity, no matter if the team works in marketing, engineering, sales, or customer support.

But don’t take my word for it.

Take the word of the 30+ businesses who’ve offered their insights to the Process Street community regarding the types of checklist they use (and why). Read through the following sections to get the complete lowdown:

• What makes having different types of checklist beneficial?
• How teams utilize their varying types of checklist
• Tips and tricks for making various types of checklist for your team
• Tools used to create different types of checklist
• Use Process Street for every kind of checklist imaginable!

Now, forget about that ice cream – there’s work to do!

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With the market size of enterprise performance management expected to grow from $6.44 billion in 2017 to $11.72 billion by 2023, you know that to ignore it is to ignore something monumental.

Enterprise performance management lets you plan, structure, track, and improve your performance across the board.

Whether it’s through creating achievable goals that don’t leave you overreaching, improving your tracking metrics with apps like Process Street, or simply letting you know what’s going well and where the biggest improvements can be made, the practice isn’t something you can ignore.

That’s why I’ll be breaking down precisely what it is, why it’s useful, and how to use it.

If you want to dive into a particular segment, feel free to use the links below:

• What is enterprise performance management?
• What makes a good enterprise performance management system?
• The benefits of enterprise performance management
• How to carry out enterprise performance management
• Process Street: The perfect addition to your enterprise performance management software

Otherwise, let’s dive right in!
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This is a guest post by Sarabeth Lewis, a freelance SaaS copywriter and UX writer based in Austin, Texas. Lewis regularly writes for AppSumo, a team of amazing folks who run insane lifetime deals on the best software tools in the world… while eating an impressive number of tacos.

Email. What a blessing (and a curse).

If you’re anything like me, you’ve let your inbox get away with far too many shenanigans. You want to take back control and organize your Gmail. But how?

At Process Street we understand that email is ubiquitous for working professionals. Despite its ubiquitous use, many complain email has a central flaw: a tendency to become your to-do list.

Am I wrong?

This usually occurs passively, inadvertently causing you to lose control of your own time.

When your day is commandeered by your inbox, it means that other people are controlling your calendar.

In this article, you will find out how to take back control and organize your Gmail. Click on the links below to jump to the relevant section, or scroll down to keep reading.

• Organize Gmail: Remove email distractions
• Organize Gmail: How to obtain inbox zero
• Organize Gmail with Kelly’s Gmail system, our 9 step process
• Organize Gmail: 2 more (optional) Gmail tips
• Organize your Gmail with Process Street
• Organize Gmail: Take it one step further with an automated email

Let’s get started.

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70% of all businesses fail within the first 10 years.

Business owners reading this: for every ten of you, 7 will fold.

Despite that morbid start, I begin this Process Street article looking at the operational audit. I will demonstrate how using an operational audit can refine, improve, and evolve your business operations, setting you up for business prosperity. Wouldn’t it be nice to alter the above stat to 100% business success?

A tall order but, as the Westlife song goes, Nothing is impossible – apologies if you are not a Westlife fan. I believe that optimized operational audits play a significant role in driving business success. In this article, I will explain why. You will also find out:

1. What an operational audit is
2. The benefits operational audits bring to Business
3. Operational audit best practices
4. How you can implement internal operational audits with Process Street. These will be recurring processes within your business

To jump to the relevant section, click on the links below. Alternatively, scroll down and read all to become an expert in the auditing world.

• Operational audit: What is an operational audit?
• Operational audit: What do operational auditors do?
• Operational audit: Best practices used by the experts
• Integrating operational audit best practices into your internal operational audit process
• Operational audit: Why you should use an audit checklist to conduct your internal operational audit
• Use Process Street and our audit checklists to conduct your internal operational audit

Let’s get started!

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