Alright, so your most recent marketing campaign has generated a ton of interest among your target consumers.

You’ve seen a huge spike in web traffic, mailing list subscribers, and your social media following.

But, despite all this, you still aren’t seeing much of an increase in the area that really matters:

Sales numbers.

It’s a disheartening feeling, for sure – especially considering how high your hopes were after seeing such a huge spike in traffic and engagement.

If it’s any consolation, you’re not alone.

According to data collected by HubSpot, 79% of marketing qualified leads never end up converting. In other words, nearly four of every five people who show a genuine interest in a given brand end up walking away without making a purchase from said company.

Now, one of the main reasons this number is so high is because many companies implement sub-par strategies for nurturing these qualified leads – if they implement lead-nurturing strategies at all.

On the bright side of things, this means that if you focus heavily on nurturing your qualified leads, you’ll almost definitely be doing more than your competitors are in terms of providing value to your target customers.

In this article, we’re going to focus on how to use email workflows as part of your marketing strategy to nurture leads and increase their probability of converting into paying customers.

Before we get into the best practices for creating automated email workflows, we first need to explain exactly what email workflows are, and how using them can benefit your company.

Let’s get started.

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Business systemization gained notoriety from the bestselling book by Michael E. Gerber, published in 1986, The E-Myth – Why most businesses don’t work and what to do about it. In 2011, this groundbreaking book was named the number 1 business book of all time by The Wall Street Journal. In The E-Myth (Entrepreneurial Myth) Gerber explains how businesses are usually started by those who know the content of a business – so-called “Technicians”, people who know how to do the technical work involved in an enterprise – rather than by those who know business itself – so-called “Entrepreneurs” – and why start-ups are therefore by definition prone to failing.

In order for a company or business to thrive, it must move beyond relying on the so-called “Technician” who is now also the company owner. Gerber uses the franchise model to demonstrate how a business does this: Franchises are prototype businesses that are operated in terms of well-documented systems, i.e., there are manuals describing in minute detail how to run the business. Gerber argues that the entrepreneur should spend time creating a business that can run by itself, without the presence of the entrepreneur, and this is achieved through business systemization.

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British Airways chief executive described the incident as “catastrophic” as 800 flights were canceled and 75,000 travelers were affected.

Flight compensation website flightright.com estimated that British Airways would have to pay around €61m to passengers for refunds alone under EU legislation. Add to this the cost of reimbursing angry passengers for unexpected hotel stays and other inconveniences, and the total financial damage to British Airways has been estimated at £100m.

Why? Someone turned their data center off and on again.

The entire airline was down for almost 2 days. This wasn’t a natural disaster, it was a process failure.

In this article, we’ll explore how to spot process failures before they occur using a system called Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). We’ll assess an overview and then delve in deeper to ground our understanding and include a premade Process Street FMEA template to help you run your own assessments in future.

In this article we’ll cover:

• Your free FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) template
• FMEA? What is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis?
• When do we use FMEA?
• Conducting and documenting Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: A user’s guide
• What happened to British Airways?
• Why did it happen?
• How can FMEA help us prevent this happening again?

Writing standard operating procedures is a cumbersome task but a serious requirement for businesses the world over.

In many industries it is important to have documentation which shows you have been adhering to ISO guidelines. This can help you clinch major clients and demonstrate your professionalism.

However, when you’re starting out with your first SOPs it can be difficult to know where to begin.

That’s why we’ve pulled together a range of the best free and premium SOP templates for you to work from.

Simply go through the available SOPs below and pick out the one best suited to your needs. We’ve included Microsoft Word templates and Process Street ones too. You’ll also find a guide for writing SOPs to help you get started.

Given that it can be intimidating writing standard operating procedures, we have provided a number of industry-specific examples plus suggestions for how you can pull together basic SOPs even if they’re not documented according to ISO standards.

Read through the following sections to get completely clued up:

• Process Street helps you effortlessly manage your SOP templates
• Our Process Street SOP template for creating procedures
• Writing standard operating procedures in 16 steps
• Using Process Street for your SOPs
• Process Street SOP templates for every industry and sector
• Free Microsoft Word templates to build your SOPs
• More NHS standard operating procedure templates
• Risk assessment SOP templates to review your procedures
• Premium SOP Templates
• Pick the right SOP template and get started

Let’s dive in.
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A 2018 survey by BPTrends found that 93% of the organizations studied used multiple process improvement tools.

This is because business processes are the life-blood of your organization. Process improvements, therefore, prime your organization to run like a well-oiled machine, bettering your chances of business success.

On that note, in this Process Street article, we take a look at our top 46 process improvement tools. Using these tools will improve customer satisfaction, save you money, strengthen customer retention, and boost project success rate (+ more).

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Why you should care about improving your processes
• 46 top process improvement tools
• How to improve your business processes using business process documentation

For clarity, I’ve split each tool as per the following subheaders – click to jump to the unique tool category.

• Process improvement visualizations
• Process improvement exercises
• Process improvement frameworks
• Process improvement methodologies ‍

Cutthroat. Ruthless. Dog-eat-dog.

No, I’m not introducing this year’s hottest action movie – I’m talking about the world of business.

Nowadays, it’s quicker and easier than ever to get a business up and running. Hell, with the emergence of low code and no-code platforms, it’s not just quick and easy but downright simple.

But only 3 out of 4 companies featured in the S&P 500 list will still be relevant – and even exist – in 2027.

With this stark realization, how do startup hopefuls and the Fortune 500 alike know if they’ve got the resources and capabilities to not only stay in the game for the long-haul, but have an overall competitive advantage?

VRIO.

I last discussed VRIO in my post What is VRIO? The 4-Step Framework for Continuous Business Success, where I laid the foundation for understanding what VRIO is, where it came from, and how to navigate the framework.

However, in this post, I’ll be taking things one step further.

I’ll recap what VRIO is (handy for those who don’t already know!), discuss the specific benefits of VRIO analysis, and even provide you with a free VRIO analysis checklist – made by us here at Process Street!

Just read through the following sections to get started:

• What is the VRIO definition?
• The benefits of using the VRIO model for business analysis
• Using Process Street’s VRIO analysis checklist
• Tips for undergoing VRIO analysis with our checklist
• Additional resources for a sustained competitive advantage

The clock’s ticking, so let’s jump in! ⏱

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At Process Street, we’re all about process optimization: creating, implementing, analyzing, mapping, improving, and automating.

There are a lot of layers to processes and it’s easy to get caught up in the complexities.

But really, it’s quite simple.

You need to document your workflow and then follow it, making improvements where necessary over time; continuous improvement.

All of this can be summed up by the concept of process optimization.

In this Process Street article, we’ll give you a quick actionable overview of how to optimize your processes with some tips and tricks of what to look for and how to do it.

We’ll cover:

• Process optimization basics: What you need to get started
• The business process optimization workflow
• How to work out the goals of your process optimization
• How to optimize processes with automation
• Process optimization resources to get started now

If your processes are designed and run properly, you likely shouldn’t have any delays. 

But what if the great processes that you’ve constructed to the nines are still delivering delayed outputs? Did you miss something? Is the process simply not good enough? 

NO. 

If your processes are good, there could be another reason for delays. The answer: Bottlenecks. 

Think of your processes as a sunny day at the beach. You’ve come prepared with sunscreen, hats, sunglasses, snacks, an umbrella, and tons of water. But in the middle of your beach day, you run out of the water screaming with a jellyfish attached to your leg. 

The jellyfish is the bottleneck, and trust me, it stings just as bad for your business when one of those babies wraps itself around your company processes. 

The only difference is you can’t plan for the jellyfish. You can plan for bottlenecks with an effective process management strategy. 

Here’s how: 

• What is a bottleneck? 
• Signs you have a bottleneck
• Types of bottlenecks 
• How to identify bottlenecks in a process
• How software tools can help with bottleneck management 
• Bottleneck management: Prevention is better than cure

One of the key parts of driving your business forward is being able to identify and tackle muda.

Is a process taking too long? Is it creating a bottleneck? Are your workers struggling to be productive?

In this Process Street article, we look again at what managers can learn from the Toyota Production System about how to improve your business processes.

The specific concept we’re tackling is muda. Muda translates roughly as waste, and refers to the inefficiencies within processes which you can seek to reduce or eliminate entirely.

As Rene T. Domingo outlines in his paper Identifying and Eliminating The Seven Wastes or Muda for the Asian Institute of Management:

The elimination of waste is the primary goal of any lean system. In effect, lean declares war on waste – any waste. Waste or muda is anything that does not have value or does not add value. Waste is something the customer will not pay for.

We’ll look at the core 7 types of waste Toyota see within processes and production systems and consider the claims for the addition of an eighth.

Microsoft SharePoint is a bit like a Swiss army knife. It has a ton of different functions, some of which are useful, and some that aren’t. If you’re using SharePoint or one of several SharePoint alternatives and you’re not careful, you might wind up with a tool that’s so bloated with features it doesn’t really succeed at any of them.

As SharePoint consultant Jason Masterman says, “Customers are [implementing SharePoint] because they own it. It’s not that they’re doing research and choosing [SharePoint]. They’re doing it because they own it.” In a 2013 survey, only 6% of respondents reported completing a successful SharePoint project. In 2015, that number was up—but just to a mere 11%.

We think more than 11% of users deserve to be happy with their workflow tool. So we looked at 7 SharePoint alternatives and examined how they stack up in terms of price, capability, and user-friendliness. Here’s what we found.