Kevin Elliott is a Marketing Manager for NiceJob, a platform that helps businesses collect and share customer reviews to improve their reputation and leverage it to increase sales and drive growth. He enjoys writing about business tips, workflow management, digital marketing, and customer experience. He has a cute puppy named Karl.

SaaS businesses and B2B sellers face unique challenges across the business landscape. You have to deal with long sales cycles and supposedly fickle buyers with multiple stakeholders who need to comply with internal policies—barriers unknown to many small, B2C businesses. But it’s exactly these circumstances that make tried-and-true techniques from consumer marketing so valuable for SaaS brands.

Think about it – getting a lead to book a demo or convert on a landing page, let alone actually buy, ultimately comes down to one thing: trust. In other words, are you a trustworthy brand?

All buyers, at the end of the day, are human. B2B buyers of enterprise software carefully evaluate SaaS providers for a reason: they want to feel like they can trust you. And there’s no better indicator of trust than leveraging social proof – the act of using client data, feedback, reviews, or sentiments – to your advantage to gain the trust of leads. So it’s no surprise that social proof is incredibly valuable to B2B companies.

Clearbit – one of the world’s largest marketing-data companies – added a testimonial to their landing pages and increased conversions by 84%!

In this Process Street article, you will learn all about what social proof is, what its benefits are, and some examples of social proof for SaaS businesses to help your company take off to new heights!

• So what is “social proof” exactly?
• The benefits of social proof marketing for SaaS companies
• 4 tips to jumpstart your social proof marketing strategy

Let’s dive in!
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In our first episode, we join with two of the team from On Deck, Michael Gill and Curtis Cummings. They join our hosts Philip Lakin and Blake Bailey to give us their insight into where no-code can take new startups and how you can use it to iterate at lightning-fast speeds internally.

Masters of Process brings you the no-code revolution in full. Join us as we meet with top innovators in the space and explore how they are reinventing the way a modern business operates. Brought to you by industry insiders from No Code Ops and Process Street, each half hour episode is a goldmine of productivity, products, and scaling.

Listen now on your favorite podcast platform. Subscribe now so you don’t miss out on the most in-depth no-code insights!
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The customer lifecycle begins with awareness and matures to advocacy, from the first interaction with your brand, to an evangelized super-user who raves about and recommends your product to friends, family and associates.

This Process Street article focuses on the customer lifecycle management – how to understand the different stages of the customer’s lifecycle, and guide them from initial awareness to long-term advocacy, with the help of tech.

Optimal customer lifecycle management is vital as this can maximize customer lifetime value (CLV) by boosting customer retention. This, in turn, will bolster your bottom-line by:

1. Selling to an existing customer base: There’s a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer base relative to a 5-20% chance of selling to new prospects.
2. Increasing customer retention: A mere 5% increase in customer retention is enough to raise a company’s profits by 75%.

Getting customer lifecycle management right can be tough. To help you, we’ve put together this list of essential tools to complete your customer lifecycle software stack, for optimal customer lifecycle management.

Each tool is chosen as per the customer lifecycle stage it’s best used for. Each customer lifecycle stage will have differing aims, which means it’s vital you use the right tools to meet your objectives. For this article, we’ve done the work for you.

• Understanding the customer lifecycle in detail
• Customer lifecycle software to help build brand awareness
• Customer lifecycle software to promote customer engagement
• Customer lifecycle software to ease customer evaluation
• Customer lifecycle software to help your customers make a purchase
• Customer lifecycle software tools to use post-purchase
• Customer lifecycle software tools to promote customer advocacy

Let’s dive right in!
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We’ve just wrapped up our first ever virtual event Highway, and we are super excited to share this roundup of everything!

Highway 2021 was an event we hosted to chat with industry leaders about everything process-related. From exciting developments to life (and business) changing use cases, Highway brought the best that the industry has to offer and streamed it live to an audience of hundreds.

Everyone involved, from our internal team to the guest speakers did such an amazing job pulling this together, and we’re super proud and excited to share the recordings with everyone.

So grab a coffee, sit right down and let Process Street show you to the future of process management!

Here’s an overview if you want to jump ahead:

• Welcome to the Future of Process Management!
• Introducing Pages: The Best Way to Create a Knowledge Base Next to Your Processes
• Remote Team Management Secrets with Zapier CEO, Wade Foster
• Supercharging Operational Efficiency with Leverage CEO, Nick Sonnenberg
• Client Onboarding 101 with Adam Schweickert of Wetmore Consulting Group
• Talking Customer Success Strategies and Tips for Remote Teams with Jay Nathan
• Managing the Process: Secrets and Hacks From Process Street Experts
• Process Design Masterclass: What I’ve Learned Building Processes for Hundreds of Teams
• Why Processes Are Vital to Scaling a Business with Rich Wong, General Partner at Accel
• Setting up a No-Code Operational Culture with On Deck (Masters of Process Podcast Preview)

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Bora Lee is the Manager of Customer Enablement at ChurnZero. She is passionate about helping customer success teams succeed by crafting big-picture strategies executed through automated, streamlined processes that put the right data in front of the right customer at exactly the right time. She works hand in hand with customer success leaders to create fruitful, long-term relationships and to maximize customer satisfaction. In her free time, you will find her scuba diving and traveling.

Since customer success (CS) is still an emerging field, it’s not uncommon to find CS leaders who are founding their company’s first CS team or creating CS processes from scratch. Being the new department on the block, you may have had to find workarounds to other team’s more established processes. Or you might have encountered the common workplace scenario of inheriting your predecessor’s way of working.

No matter how your processes came to be, I can tell you one thing: they’re not perfect.

You can’t put your processes on a pedestal or become complacent with their adherence. Your market, solutions, and customers are constantly evolving. Your processes must adapt to the people and to the context – not the other way around.

Especially when you’re implementing CS processes for the very first time, it’s impossible to account for the multiple variances that will occur when you put concept into practice.

Instead of striving for process perfection, a goal more worthy of your efforts is the continuous improvement of your processes – routinely assessing their design, usage, output, and effectiveness.

And that’s where audits come in. By auditing your processes, you can uncover if dips in your performance metrics are merely a fluke or perhaps the cause of an undiagnosed bottleneck. Or if outwardly unrelated customer complaints actually stem from the same source.

As you audit over time, your small incremental efficiency gains add up. Consistent and measured refinement is the key to sustainable growth.

When auditing, it’s all about asking the right questions to uncover both the visible and underlying issues in your processes. To keep your customer success operations running smoothly, in this Process Street article, we’ve detailed a few simple, yet commonly overlooked questions to ask during your next process audit:

• Does your process align with your team’s responsibilities?
• What parts of your process generate the most feedback?
• Outside of the process, what other work does your team perform?
• Where do you have process bottlenecks?
• Where’s your team spending too much time?
• How should the process ideally work?
• Are you getting the data you need?

Let’s get right to it!
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“It is largely determined by the mindset and practices of teamwork, not by the design and structures of effective teams. Teaming is teamwork on the fly.” – Professor Amy Edmondson, Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy

When I started this post for Process Street, it suddenly occurred to me exactly how much of my time is spent on the concept of “teams” – writing about them, talking about them, thinking about them, participating in them.

Teams have taken over my life. It was only a matter of time before I ran into “teaming.”

Teaming was coined and developed by Professor Amy Edmondson, who also has the rather distinguished achievement of founding the MIT Leadership Center.

Obviously, she’s a very qualified person who knows what she’s talking about, but when has that ever stopped my skepticism before? 🙃

I’m kidding. Teaming is an idea purpose-built for the contemporary tech-centric, remote office, pivot on a dime work environment. This post will explain what it is, how it’s been used, and how Process Street makes it easy for anyone to adopt.

• “Teaming on the fly”
• Successful teams, teaming, and a Chilean mine
• Teaming the Process Street way

Let’s team up!
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During Sicily’s summer heatwave, Floridia’s famouse snails were baked alive in their shells when temperatures reached an alarming ~120 Fahrenheit (49 Celsius).

Wildfires have been blazing elsewhere in Italy, as well as in France, Greece, Australia, California – can anyone remember when there wasn’t a relentless, uncontrollable wildfire somewhere?

2021 was also the year it rained on a Greenland ice cap for the first time and Canada’s last arctic shelf collapsed.

Meanwhile, July 29, 2021 was declared Earth Overshoot Day, meaning the world’s population had already consumed more that year than the planet could regenerate.

(For the record, the US and Canada hit their overshoot day on March 14, while the UK managed to last until May 19. Pat yourselves on the back, folks.)

What does this have to do with HR management? Isn’t green branding more of a marketing problem? Or operations? Or any other department but HR?

Actually, no.

The fact is: No company can go green without employee buy-in. Don’t get me wrong – leadership has to be all-in, too, but if your people aren’t on board with your green initiatives and policies, they’re going to fail and fail hard.

Which is where HR comes in.

In this Process Street post, I’m going to lay out 9 fairly simple best practices that you and your team should be doing if you want to ensure that your pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs) succeed.

• The business of going green
• Best practices to boost your GHRM yield
• Reaping the rewards of GHRM

Let’s get to work!
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Unless you work with small children or large animals, the expectation of staying dry at work is pretty high. I know my workstation is very not water-resistant.

So when Blake Thorne (our product marketing manager) pitched me an article about DRY, I had no idea what he was talking about. According to our three wise men in engineering, that’s to be expected. The DRY principle is almost exclusively used in software development; those of us outside don’t have much cause to consider it.

Or do we?

And this is what Blake wanted to get at. “It’s the principle of ‘don’t repeat yourself,’” he explained. “Cut out all the unnecessary, repetitious code.”

“But one of our values is to overcommunicate,” I countered. “Everything. Twice, even. Don’t those two concepts cancel each other out?”

“Maybe,” he conceded. “But what if they actually don’t?”

I am a sucker for a good what-if.

Here I’ll go over the principle of DRY – plus WET and AHA (oh, those rascally devs) – and how here at Process Street we manage to overcommunicate without repeating ourselves. Because I’m such a nice guy, I’ll also point out the 4 best features to get you on the same path.

• The 3 principles of programming (when you’re not a programmer)
• Process Street’s DRY-est features
• At the risk of repeating myself…

Let’s get to it!
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I view most management gurus with the same wariness and suspicion the average person might approach a traveling medicine show peddling sparkling water as a miracle cure. Or, in this case, basic common sense as innovative management techniques.

Recently, I picked up Reengineering the Corporation by Dr. Michael Hammer and James Champy, both highly lauded as leading practitioners of their own concept. Based on their personal bios and their book, both are imminently pleased with themselves about this.

Fair enough. If I’d built an entire career on a single concept, I’d be pretty pleased with myself, too.

But is their idea still relevant nearly 30 years later?

I wanted to find out, so I asked many experts many, many questions (shoutouts to the ones who didn’t file restraining orders! You’re the best 💖) and read far too many long-winded reports.

These are the things I’m willing to do for you. That’s how much I care.

And because I care, I’ve taken all that super relevant knowledge, filtered it through my usual scampishness, and now offer you an overview of the book, the concept, and what it means for your favorite COO.

• Be the process that you want to reengineer
• If it ain’t broke: Reorganizing organizations the Hammer & Champy way
• Reengineering the Corporation: Benefits & backing
• Reengineering the Corporation: Criticism & consequences
• Can today’s COO still learn from Reengineering the Corporation?

Let’s go break some stuff.
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Reports indicate steady growth in CS functionality since 2013. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, this growth has substantially increased. In 2021, 76% of surveyed CS professionals said they had a team consisting of more than 10 people. With this expansion comes the development of CS as a discipline.

Welcome to the customer success era.

In this CS era, business focus is on customer experience. And when it comes to your product, this means to show and let your customer try your offering. That is, be product-oriented to drive product-led expansion.

In this Process Street article, we identify the 4 key customer success metrics you need to develop your CS functionality. These metrics will inform your product-led growth strategy by measuring acquisition, adoption, retention, and expansion. This article is structured as follows:

• Understanding product-led growth and its benefits
• 4 key product-led customer success metrics
• 3 bonus tips to rocket your expansion revenue

Let’s jump to it!
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