The early days of a startup are crazy.

You have a small group of brilliant and adventurous people taking on tasks they’ve probably never done. Tight budgets leave you doing things like building desks out of doors because they’re cheaper. Your whole focus is solely directed at the goal of getting your product out there in front of customers, who probably don’t even realize how much they need your product yet.

Fast forward a couple of years and those brilliant and adventurous people now have job titles and (more or less) set job descriptions. Your engineers are spending most of their time finessing the UI and developing new features rather than building fundamental structures and foundations. You have a solid customer base that’s avid about your product – and just keeps growing.

Except – as brilliant as they are – that small group of people no longer has enough hands to do everything that needs to be done.

It’s time to scale your startup – but you need to do it fast, accurately, and strategically. So where do you start?

To find out, I sat down with Process Street‘s very own head of talent, Rosy Bellorini, to get an inside view on how to get the talent you need to scale your startup.

• So you’re ready to scale your startup…
• The first rule of Startup Club
• The Process Street acquisition process

Let’s dig in!
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Hello, and welcome readers to the experience economy.

Take my hand and I’ll guide you to a place of psychic gratification. Feel your senses tingle, and your attention sharpen. You’re entering a new chapter of customer success, one that’s immersive and marks the next economic stage.

Businesses are no longer competing on a commodity level. In a digital world, with growing immersive processing power, organizations must crack the whip and adopt the experience mindset. This is a mindset that’s focused on customer success and delivering exceptional experiences instead of commodities.

In this Process Street article, we take a look at how one particular tech unicorn is succeeding in this experience economy.

You got it, I’m talking about the tech-tycoon Salesforce.

Salesforce is one of the largest tech companies to date with over 49,000 employees in 28 countries and has built the world’s most demanded CRM. Part of Salesforce’s triumph lies in the organization’s customer success capabilities. And today, you will learn how they’ve perfected customer success using principles from the experience economy.

Grab onto your seatbelts as you’re about to be blown away!

• What is the experience economy?
• 8 ways Salesforce achieves complete customer engagement in our experience economy

Here we go!
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According to a 2020 Walker study, 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience.

Customer experience is a key brand differentiator, and getting it right can determine the difference between success and failure.

In this Process Street article, we examine a customer-centric approach and explain how you can use it to be more product-oriented. That is, you’ll learn how to focus on the customer’s experience when using your product.

Taking a product-oriented approach to provide a great customer experience will set you apart from your competition, and give you the edge you need to succeed.

You need to be thinking about your customer and how they interact with your product to draw appropriate customer success milestones. Following the 8 steps in this article will help you do that.

By the end of this article, you’ll have customer-success milestones that act as a guide for the delivery of an exceptional in-product user experience.

• Rising to the digital transformation and why you need to be product-oriented
• How to track the customer journey
• 8 actionable steps to make your customer success milestones product-oriented

Let’s get started!
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79% of marketers state customer experience strategies need to focus on customer retention. Yet, according to McKinsey and Company, there’s too much focus on churn reduction with a lack of consideration on what the customer wants.

When thinking about common metrics used in customer success – e.g. customer health scores – these are in-the-moment snapshots designed to communicate the likelihood of churn. They do not consider what it is the customer wants to achieve and whether they are on track to achieve this. To do this, you need customer success vectors.

A customer success vector gives the here-to-here journey a customer has with you, detailing where they are at today, where they will be tomorrow, and where they want to go.

In this Process Street article, I’ll explain what a customer success vector is, and why you need to supplement your customer experience metrics with vector measurements. You’ll learn how to ensure your customer success vectors are actual vectors with my 5 top tips. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to leverage success vector results to drive growth from the customer’s perspective, and consequently, from the perspective of your bottom line.

• Customer health score: Moving from a customer success KPI to a KSI
• Customer success vectors describe the customer’s maturity and where they’re heading
• 5 tips to ensure your customer success vectors are actual vectors

Let’s jump to it!
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Every 28 days, a lovely Hermes delivery-person brings a crate of the world’s finest craft beer to my house.

But if it were up to me, I wouldn’t receive these beer boxes at all.

In early 2020, I tried to unsubscribe from [REDACTED] — a monthly beer subscription company — as I felt it was an unnecessary expense. I soon realized, though, that unsubscribing would be a Herculean task. There was no way to cancel digitally, and if I wanted to stop my subscription altogether, I’d need to ring them up during their (very limited) business hours.

Having to go through all that rigmarole dissuaded me from unsubscribing.

Annoyingly, I’m still receiving my delicious craft beers a year later.

These frustrating (read: unethical) tactics to stop customers from unsubscribing have been deployed by all manner of companies — from those in the food and drinks industry, all the way to those in the tech world.

And while it may seem tempting for your SaaS company to do similar, it’s nothing more than a quick win when, in reality, you should be focusing on improving the customer lifecycle. After all, it’s positive business-to-customer interactions that’ll stop people from wanting to unsubscribe in the first place.

That’s why, in this Process Street post, I’ll be discussing SaaS renewal. I’ll go over the definition of SaaS renewal, explain why customers think about unsubscribing from SaaS products, and provide you with actionable SaaS renewal best practices that’ll stop folks from hitting that unsubscribe button. (Providing you have one!)

Read through these sections to get in the know:

• What SaaS renewal means & how to figure out your SaaS renewal rate
• 5 reasons why customers unsubscribe from SaaS products
• 5 tried-and-tested SaaS renewal best practices for boosting renewals

You’re about to become a SaaS renewal pro — let’s cheers to that!
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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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For sales professionals today, only 34% of their time is spent selling.

This begs the question, what are they doing for the remaining 66% of the time?

Sales teams struggling to keep up with data entry, quote generation, and other tasks drag sales reps away from potential leads. As such, 54% are expected to miss their quotas every year.

What you need are optimized sales processes that outline the best sale practices drawing from up-to-date research and findings.

This is where Process Street comes to save the day.

In this article, you’ll find 20 structured sales processes based on industry best practices which you can access for free. Simply click Edit Checklist to add any process to your Process Street account, so you can start supercharging your sales process today!

For a quick taster, check out our MEDDIC Sales Process Checklist Template below:

Click here to get our MEDDIC Sales Process Checklist Template!

You can click on the relevant link below to jump to your template of choice.

• The MEDDIC Sales Process Checklist Template
• Sales Training Process Checklist
• Weekly Sales Prospecting Checklist
• Cold Calling Checklist
• BANT Sales Qualification Call Process
• Sales Presentation Template
• Sales Pitch Planning Checklist
• Closing The Sale Checklist
• Order Processing Checklist
• Monthly Sales Report
• Churn Prevention Checklist
• Cold Email Checklist for Sales
• Company Research Checklist
• High Touch Client Onboarding for SaaS Companies
• Investor Pitch
• Sales Competitive Analysis Checklist
• Sales Forecasting Checklist
• Sales Onboarding Checklist
• Sales Service Handoff Process
• Upselling Process for SaaS Companies

Click on the subheader below to jump to the relevant section, alternatively scroll down to find out all we have to say and perfect your sales processes.

• Sales processes: What they are and why it is important to have established sales processes
• Our top 20 free sales processes
• A quick tour of Process Street and the benefits of using our sales processes

With that said, let’s get started!
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This is a guest post by Daniel Ndukwu. Daniel has extensive experience in digital marketing and is the Founder of KyLeads. There he helps business owners and publishers increase their leads and audience engagement with smart popups, interactive quizzes, and surveys.

In 2017, I had a brilliant idea.

Many of the tools for conversion rate optimization are point solutions. They make popups, landing pages, quizzes, surveys. Very few of them – if any – combine those functions into one.

I decided I would tackle the challenge by building a tool (now called KyLeads). It would allow people to create surveys, popups, and quizzes for lead generation and customer research.

After going through two development teams, rebuilding our user interface, and learning first-hand how hard it is to make software, we launched.

There was little fanfare and only a few customers when we started. But my team and I kept going. We knew it would be a long journey to success – and it’s paying off.

This article shares the best practices, tactics, and processes we used (and are still using) to improve our SaaS onboarding and grow our business into something spectacular.

Want to turbocharge your business’ onboarding successes and conversion rates in half the time?

Just read through the sections below to uncover these insider tips and tricks yourself:

• What is SaaS onboarding?
• What’s the importance of SaaS onboarding?
• Our top 5 SaaS onboarding best practices
• Use Process Street for SaaS onboarding!

Now, let’s get stuck in.

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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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Your average pitch gets examined by investors for about 3 minutes 44 seconds and (if successful) is worth around $1.3 million.

That’s more than $5800 per second.

With figures like that, you need to know how to pitch to land investors, customers, employees, prizes or whatever it is you’re aiming for.

That’s where we here at Process Street come in.

We pitched to over 2500 top SaaS professionals and investors at SaaStr Europa 2019, walking away with the grand prize from the pitch competition, the contact details of several venture capitalists, and collaboration opportunities for months to come.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. In this post I’ll show you;

• How to pitch: the basics
• What the SaaStr pitch competition was
• The pitch deck we used to win it
• The results and prizes in detail
• The lessons you can learn from our experience
• The secret technique we used to get even more out of our pitch

Let’s get stuck in.

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