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:

• How to assess content quality
• Content marketing metrics to measure success
• What exactly is a maturity model?
• Our internal process for quality control: The BAMM review
• Using processes to systematize content creation – more reliable and higher quality

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We’re an ambitious bunch here at Process Street.

In terms of numbers, we’ve published over 1,000 onsite blog posts, over 300 offsite blog posts, penned 5 huge ebooks, attended many an external webinar, and created many a podcast, too. And this is only our content marketing team’s efforts. If I were to discuss the phenomenal accomplishments of our other departments — from engineering to sales, product to customer success — we’d be here all day.

Despite our company-wide accomplishments, we knew in 2020 that we could push ourselves further (especially considering our $12m cash injection from Accel, Salesforce, and others). Naturally, we turned the ambitious goals and objectives we’d set ourselves up a notch.

This meant that, rather than only working with KPIs, we threw OKRs into the mix as well.

Not to toot our own horn too much, but I can say with confidence that the choice to do so went in our favor. In fact, we’ve had some of the best months ever since deploying OKRs!

This is why, in this post, I’m going to tell you everything that we learned from internally deploying OKRs at Process Street. Specifically, I’ll give you a quick recap on what OKRs are, go over our method for implementing OKRs in detail, recount my experience of getting used to (and then loving) OKRs, on top of providing 5 tried-and-tested tips for deploying OKRs at your company.

Just read the following sections to get completely clued-up:

• OKRs: A quick breakdown
• How we deployed OKRs at Process Street
• Deploying OKRs: How do they impact the rest of the company?
• 5 tips and tricks for deploying OKRs at your company

It’s time for you to pivot to OKRs and hit challenging targets like a pro, too.

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Netflix doesn’t do bonuses. They don’t do formal reviews and they don’t do staff training.

Instead, their HR practices involve heavily scrutinizing employees’ skills and capabilities, and ruthlessly firing them for being good, not great.

“Netflix and chill” it is not.

But, despite these seemingly harsh HR practices, 71% of Netflix employees would encourage their friends to become co-workers. They’re officially the best place in the world to work (even beating the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple). Their employee turnover is only 11% a year, which is below the 13% annual average for tech companies. They’ve maintained a voluntary attrition rate of 3-4% over the last two years, and they make around $2 million per employee.

“Netflix has not only captivated the attention of its customers around the world, but also continues to grow its reputation as an attractive, sought-after employer.” – Forbes, Incubating Culture: How Netflix Is Winning The War For Talent

So, why is Netflix the best place to work, how do they maintain such a productive workforce, and what lessons can we take from them?

Grab some popcorn and let’s find as we go through the following in this Process Street post:

• HR practices: How Netflix does things
• 4 HR practices that changed HR forever
• How Process Street embraces Netflix’s HR practices & why they work for us
• Are Netflix’s HR practices right for you?

Settle in for the story of the year (that you can’t stream)… 🍿

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Process Street is a simple, free and powerful way to manage your team’s recurring checklists and procedures.

Process Street helps you automate tasks, track progress, and manage documents — plus it integrates with over a thousand of your favorite apps.

Thousands of businesses in every industry use Process Street to make their recurring work fun, fast and faultless. We’ve been listening closely to our customers, and Process Street 3.0 proves it. Sign up for a free trial and take Process Street for a spin.

Processes are a part of daily life for every person in every role in every business. We designed Process Street to power any kind of process: employee onboarding, rental property inspections, new client onboarding, firewall security audits, monthly sales forecasts, and many more.

We’ve built strong lines of communication with businesses who use Process Street every day; with the launch of Process Street 3.0, their feedback has helped us make our platform:

• More powerful, with greater control to orchestrate and automate complex multi-departmental workflows.
• More intuitive, with a redesigned user experience to help you implement and manage all your processes even faster.
• More accessible, with new time-savers like application speed improvements, single sign-on, and a slick iOS app.

Before we dive into all of our 3.0 features, you have to check out our new explainer video! As you watch, consider what it can mean for your business if every person on your team knows what to do, and when.

Satisfying, right?

The feeling of working together to get processes done right, and right on time.

Ok let’s jump into it.
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Slack has changed the way we work.

From being able to easily stay in touch with colleagues, no matter where they are in the world, to sending important files and docs in real-time, teams can work more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

It’s no wonder, then, that Salesforce bought Slack for a whopping $27.7bn (and just a few months after they invested in Process Street’s very own Series A).

But Slack really becomes a productivity powerhouse when using Slack Apps — additional made-for-Slack applications that can help you communicate, receive crucial information, and complete work faster.

That’s why Cameron McKay, Process Street‘s CTO, built a Process Street Slack App enabling teams to simultaneously superpower both their Process Street and Slack usage!

Sound exciting?

It is.

In this Process Street post, I’ll be discussing why we decided to build a Slack App, how our CTO managed to build a Slack App for Process Street in just 2 weeks, and how you too can install the Process Street Slack App immediately.

Read the following sections to get clued-up:

• How Slack Apps can help you improve workplace productivity
• How we built a Slack App in 2 weeks
• How to install the Process Street Slack App right now

Ready for a peek behind the scenes? 👀
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Major setbacks. Lengthy delays. Unnecessary bottlenecks. When important items aren’t rejected or approved in time, progress is halted.

Take the United States’ government shutdown in 2019.

The shutdown meant the U.S. Small Business Administration – which backs entrepreneurs and small businesses with financial loans – could no longer approve loan applications.

The result? Small businesses turned to high-cost, short-term lenders, entrepreneurs couldn’t buy the necessary products their business relied upon, and the delay itself caused widespread anxiety among those who were relying on loans being granted. Financially-speaking, the lack of approvals caused a delay of $2 billion in SBA lending.

At Process Street (if you don’t know our app, it’s state-of-the-art BPM software!) we know how important it is for teams to get items approved or rejected, so that business processes and projects can be completed on time.

That’s why we’ve introduced approvals.

With approvals, decision-makers can give the go-ahead (or rejection) regarding important items, on top of providing any necessary comments.

Want to know more about this game-changing feature and how it can dramatically improve workflows for your team? Read through the following sections:

• A brief explanation of approvals
• Supercharge approvals with Process Street’s features
• Using approvals in Process Street
• Approval use case #1: Holiday and time-off requests
• Approval use case #2: Client onboarding
• Approval use case #3: The hiring process
• Approval use case #4: The time-strapped CEO
• You can approve (or reject) tasks directly from your phone’s email app
• Harness the power of a simplified approval workflow today!

Now, let’s dive straight in.

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I was once abandoned when I was six years old.

We were shopping in a busy department store when I decided to ride the escalator one more time, while my parents kept on walking.

Although I now know that my parents were completely oblivious to my own decision to take a solo trip down the escalator, I’ve never forgotten the fear, anxiety, shock, and anger I felt when I reached the bottom of the next floor down.

I didn’t know where to go, what to do, or how to find them again. I felt lost, uncared for, and cruelly abandoned.

Ok, so I wasn’t really abandoned and I was, in fact, entirely to blame for this incident – but I’ve never felt the same about escalators or busy department stores since. I still avoid both.

I’m sure we’ve all had similar “abandonment” experiences when we were kids, but maybe we’ve had some more recently too…

Feeling lost, abandoned, and unappreciated is the #1 reason customers move away from products and services and is why 52% of customers will never touch a brand again.

“Humans are driven by feelings. So if you want the consumer to remember your product or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your company.” – Inc, Harvard Professor Says 95% of Purchasing Decisions Are Subconscious

Not with Process Street though. Thanks to our customer success team, no customer of ours ever feels lost, uncared for, or abandoned.

How? Let’s find out together as we go through:

• The 4 best practices our customer success team follow
• How our customer success team succeeds at customer success

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As there are so many different types of recurring work happening in every part of your company, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

You can often spend too long looking for answers to questions like these:

“Which processes in the Sales team run smoothly and which take longer than they should?”

“Who in the Underwriting team completes their tasks on time and who misses their due dates?”

“Have we reduced the time it takes HR to complete the onboarding process, for new Account Executive hires in particular?”

“How many different processes is the IT Helpdesk team involved in, and how many tasks have they completed in the last 30 days?”

“How long does it take the Customer Success team to onboard a customer, and which onboarding tasks take the longest to complete?”

Wouldn’t it be useful to have a custom-made dashboard so you can get answers to these types of questions with one, quick glance?

Well, with the launch of Process Street’s new Reporting API, now you can.

To find out how you can export, store, visualize, and utilize all your Process Street data in the way that you want to, take five minutes to read through the following topics and find out:

• What is the Process Street Reporting API and who is it for?
• How Process Street’s Reporting API works
• What benefits the Process Street Reporting API brings
• How to get the Process Street Reporting API

Let’s get started.
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I have a riddle for you:

What has four sides, often goes missing, comes from trees, and can be expensive to reproduce?

I’ll give you a hint.

It wastes up to 40% of on-the-job time, and about $120 billion per year in the US alone.

Need another?

Around 7.5% of them will be lost or misplaced each year (about one lost every 12 seconds), and for each that gets lost you’re looking at a loss of between $350 to $700 in employee time.

Did you get it yet?

Condescending sarcasm aside, I am of course talking about paper forms. But this article isn’t about paper forms, per se; it’s about how you can get rid of paper forms in your business with form automation software.

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For organizations, updating prices is like getting plastic surgery (I imagine).

You’re painfully aware that people can see what you’ve done, but under no circumstances will you ever talk about it. It’s a forbidden topic.

“The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing” – Medium, The First Rule of Pricing is: You Do Not Talk About Pricing

Until now. I’m sticking two fingers up to the stigma surrounding pricing and I’m lifting the lid to reveal what goes on, behind the scenes, when organizations like Process Street change their SaaS price model.

😱

I know. I’m brave, right?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve coerced and cajoled the Process Street pricing team into sharing some of the biggest pricing lessons we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way), since we launched in 2013.

And, here they are…

• SaaS price model lesson #1: Pricing is a never-ending process
• SaaS price model lesson #2: Pricing is about perception
• SaaS price model lesson #3: Yearly is better than monthly
• SaaS price model lesson #4: Listen to customers, not competitors
• SaaS price model lesson #5: Involve the whole team

Curious?

Let’s hope I still have a job at the end of this… 🤞

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