How do you reactivate ghost customers?

Well, let me explain.

During the second world war, a young soldier from Lille attended a dance for servicemen about to be deployed. One woman caught his eye, and eventually, he worked up the nerve to ask her to dance.

Thinking that he would ask again – as most of the other young men would – she politely declined. The young soldier was shy, though, and took her refusal at face value. Not knowing her name or if he would even return, the young soldier went off to war.

Nearly a century later, their granddaughter – my very closest friend for all of three days – told me the story as we drove through the French countryside between Lille and Arras.

We love stories like that – the romance of chance encounters, unintended separations, and reunions that could only be an act of fate. Maybe it’s having an answer to the so-often unanswered question What might have been? that’s the thing that really resonates. Personally, I’m just really nosy and I like stories.

While most of us have some variation of “a friend of a friend’s second cousin’s grandmother was reunited with her first love by total accident,” the truth is, we rarely experience these reconnections without some sort of deliberate effort by one or both parties.

But we lose touch with people all the time. High school best friend. University mentor. Pick-up game buddy. Customer whose payment didn’t go through and involuntarily canceled their subscription to your service because they didn’t realize it.

Happens all the frickin time. But there is no missed connections column for lost customers. If you want them back, you’re going to have to be proactive. Fortunately, not only am I good with stories, but I’m pretty good at solving problems, too. (Or, at least, nagging our CS and Ops Team Manager, Blake Bailey, until he spills all his secrets.)

Either way, in this Process Street post, I’ll share the 5 things you need to know to put some life back into those ghost customers haunting your MRR.

• The journey to passive customer churn
• 5 tips to bring customers back from the dead
• Ghost customer resurrection a plan

Let’s reconnect!
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Welcome emails are the one email you should be sending.

Why?

Because they have a 91.43% open rate, can create an 86% lift in unique open rate, and have on average 5x the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign. I’ve uncovered heaps more stats that I’ll share with you later in the post.

For this article I took the time to subscribe to 40 top tech blogs and applied quantitative research to categorize and break down their welcome emails. Hopefully, this article will offer some kind of insight into how to write kick-ass welcome emails.

If you’re asking yourself whether your welcome emails should include power words, links, emojis, rich formatting, or plain text, or what’s the best way to sign off a welcome email – then this post is for you. Specifically, I’ll cover:

• What are welcome emails & why are they important?
• How welcome emails have changed over time
• Welcome emails broken down
• A quantitative approach to welcome emails: The results
• Welcome email teardowns
• Email marketing & Process Street

Let’s get to it. 🚀
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A proposal has a lot of different purposes, but there’s only one good way to write one: the way that pulls together all of the information in a concise and persuasive way and helps you get what you want … whether that’s a whole new software system, or just a tweak to your marketing strategy.

This Process Street article isn’t about a business proposal — also known as a quote — but instead about the document required when formally pitching an idea for action and execution by managers or department heads.

To explain how to write a proposal document and get what you want, we’ll go through the following:

• Free proposal writing template
• When are proposals necessary?
• Why are proposals important?
• Examples of proposals
• How to write a proposal: step-by-step
• Last steps before submitting the proposal
• More free proposal writing checklists
• Even more free proposal writing checklists
• Customize your proposal checklists with Process Street

Let’s get started.
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Kamelia Stone is Content Manager at Marketbusinessnews. She likes to travel, meditate, and draw inspiration from different sources, primarily from books.

Software Requirements Specifications (SRSs) document describes the various software features, capabilities, coding tests, and functions that are to be implemented in the product.

These parameters also include characteristics, design details, and implementation obstacles for the development team. The structure of SRS can be modified, depending on the project, and various features/functions can be added during the process.

SRS lies in the initial, bottom stage of the entire development process. The next stages include user requirements, which detail the needs of end-users, and describing beyond the goal of the final product (business requirements).

No matter how the SRS structure is shifted during the development process, functional (if/then, data handling, etc.) and non-functional (usability, scalability, etc.) requirements always take place.

This post for Process Street will discuss:

• Choosing a development model: Waterfall or Agile?
• Key attributes for composing a strong SRS
• Tools to simplify software requirements specification management
• A final word on the software development process

Now let’s get straight to business.
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In 2018 the green technology market was valued at $6.85 billion.

This figure is projected to increase to $44.61 billion, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 26%.

This change comes as a response to our present-day environmental crisis. In this sense, green technology provides a knife for our noose, to help us move forward, past plastic pollution, poisonous chemicals, and climate degradation.

“The concept of ecological modernism, which sees technology as key to solving big environmental problems, is getting a lot of buzz these days.” – The Guardian, Technology as Our Planet’s Last Best Hope

Like The Guardian, at Process Street we also believe technology plays a vital role in helping society move forward, to work with the environment and our planet… rather than against it.

In this article, you will learn what green technology is, why it is important, and 6 easily applicable ways you can utilize green technology in your business or line of work today.

In addition, Process Street as a green tech solution gives you free access to our leading business sustainability templates. Sign up to Process Street here for free and check out our ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist below for a taster.

Click here for free access to our ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist!.

Click on the relevant subheaders or scroll down to find out how to be both lean and green in business.

• What is green technology?
• Green technology as a positive and proactive approach for solving our environmental crisis
• Green technology examples: 6 top examples of green tech for your business
• Using Process Street to become more sustainable

Right tech-perts, let’s get started!
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I’ve written before about how we collect feedback on our marketing material and how that helps us write useful posts for our subscribers, but the other reason we gather user feedback focuses on expanding and improving the Process Street app.

With user feedback data, we can:

• Choose which features to build based on the frequency they’re requested
• Get data on bug reports which helps our engineering team build fixes
• See the most common industries and use cases for our product, which guides our marketing in the right direction

Whether you’re in software or not, you still need to be gathering and processing feedback from everybody possible: leads, prospects, free users, and paying customers.

In this post, I’m going to outline the three methods you can use to gather feedback for your company. These are three methods we’ve used ourselves in the past as our business has evolved, so the complexity and usefulness of each method is higher than the last. Which method is right for you?

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“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” – George Patton

“Once I have X, I can do Y.”

This phrase is the defining characteristic of the toolbox fallacy: thinking you can’t do something until you have the right tool.

The toolbox fallacy is self-deception disguised as excuses or a lack of “tools”. The issue with these tools is that you believe that you need them and thus, can’t (or won’t) start a project without them.

“As soon as my Apple Watch arrives, I’ll start training for the 5K.”

The problem is when X arrives, do you crack on and get started with the Y? Often times, it’s too easy to continue down the slippery slope of toolbox logic.

“My Apple Watch arrived, but now I need a coaching app – which I am yet to have downloaded.”

So, how do you overcome the toolbox fallacy? Simple: You default to action. In other words, you get the ball rolling – whether you have all the tools you think you need or not.

The solution, in a sense, is to be more agile.

In this post I’ll be looking at how to overcome the toolbox fallacy by putting the systems in place to move fast, and with virtue. I’ll try to address:

• How do you plan and structure clear action items, so you can move fast and be sure you’re making the right decisions?
• How will you move fast without breaking things (by things I mean humans)?

And, to sum things up I’ll take a look at how we at Process Street use OKRs to decide when it is we should be moving fast vs when we should be slowing down.

To jump to a specific section click the appropriate links below:

• Toolbox fallacy: Once I have X, I can do Y
• Moving fast with the toolbox fallacy
• A framework to move fast (& with virtue)
• How our OKRs help us avoid the toolbox fallacy

Let’s start by unpacking the toolbox fallacy in more depth! 🛠
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Imagine if Google broke. That one day, it just stopped working.

I know it’s a scary thought…

In 2013, Google actually did break, although, only momentarily (for a whole 5 minutes to be exact). The outage affected all of its services, meaning Youtube, Gmail, Google search, Google Maps … everything stopped working.

The outcome?

Global web traffic plummeted by a whole 40% and the blip is estimated to have cost Google around $500,000.

If your product or service suddenly stops working as intended, then it’ll cost your organization a hefty sum, too.

That’s why, in this quick but informative Process Street post, you’ll learn all about test plan templates and how to use one yourself to ensure your product or service runs like a well-oiled machine. All-day, every day.

Alternatively, to jump to a specific section, click appropriate the link below:

• What is a test plan?
• What is a test plan template?
• Where the software test plan began
• Best practices for creating a test plan template
• Software test plans today
• How to write a test plan template

Let’s get started! 🚀
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This article is based on a segment from Process Street‘s Highway 2021 virtual event, where Leverage CEO Nick Sonnenberg shares with us how his team kicked their operational efficiency into overdrive from start to finish.

Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Leverage CEO Nick Sonnenberg was the fourth segment of Highway.

You can check out our playlist of the full Highway event here, and don’t forget to create a Free Account with Process Street!

Here’s the Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Nick Sonnenberg segment in full:

• The scavenger hunt problem
• How fast should you scale your business?
• Complexity scales exponentially with team size
• CPR: Communicate, Plan, Resource
• Static knowledge vs. dynamic knowledge
• Pro-tips for optimizing company processes

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“Without IT process management, there is no way to assure [cost-effective IT services]” – Casper van der Kolk

Whether you’ve been in the IT business for years or are just starting to make your mark, there’s no question that managing your processes is vital.

With processes, you can you do more with your current resources by standardizing and optimizing your work. And, when your team knows exactly what to do for each recurring task, they can greatly improve their productivity and motivation.

However, the benefits don’t just stop at a happier and more efficient team.

Integrating these recurring workflows into your IT management resource basket can reduce incident response times, increase customer satisfaction, ensure security compliance, manage department stock and – perhaps best of all – enforce consistency, to give you peace of mind that everything is running as expected.

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