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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If you’re moving fast and breaking things, at what point in time do you realize things are broken?

When there is public uproar against your product? Such as the Amazon case in 2019 involving job listings for the role of “union buster” (someone who reports on fellow employees seeking fair labor practices).

Or, when regulators come down on you like a ton of bricks? As was (and continues to be) experienced by Airbnb whose platform has been home to grotesque racial discrimination.

Allow me to introduce the topic of this blog post: The minimum virtuous product (MVP).

It seems the concept behind the traditional minimal viable product (MVP) which prioritizes quick launches and basic feature sets has been replaced by something a little more virtuous. The new MVP, minimum virtuous product, encourages companies to focus on diversity and transparency by building morally sound design principles, from the start.

This post will take a look at what this change in acronym has to do with the way companies grow and scale; along with an eight-question framework that will help start-ups assess the social impact of their products; and finally, it will cover what moving with virtue could mean for future startups.

To skip to a specific section of the post click on the appropriate link below:

• Minimum viable product vs minimum virtuous product
• Is your product virtuous? 8 questions to ask
• Why you need a minimum virtuous product: Real world examples
• What does moving with virtue mean for future startups?
• Minimum virtuous product: Conclusion

Alternatively, just keep scrolling to read the whole post.
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“To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.” – Benjamin Franklin

Is your sales team prioritizing their time and channeling their efforts for the highest return? Are you sure you have the systems in place to take advantage of every sales opportunity that presents itself to you, from outreach to closing the deal?

Over the years, our sales team has built a few processes that help them maximize the impact of their daily recurring tasks. In turn, these processes are partially responsible for helping us along the way to over 450,000 registered users, including likes of Colliers, Salesforce, Accenture, Spotify, and Airbnb.

In this Process Street article I’ll share some of those sales processes with you.

We’ll cover how our sales team has used checklists to:

• Identify & lock-onto our highest value leads: According to the CMO Council, lost productivity and poorly managed leads cost companies at least $1 trillion every year. We don’t want to even lose $1 due to lost productivity. By using Process Street our sales team can manage leads efficiently.
• Quickly and easily respond to requests for trial extensions, discounts, upgrades, and more: From trial extensions, pricing, product explanation, and demos, a Process Street checklist can be created and run for all sale requests, standardizing processes and keeping teams abiding by best practice.
• Capture important information during the sales cycle: According to Accenture, 42.5% of sales reps take 10 months or longer before they contribute to the company goals. Capturing sales data helps Process Street’s sales team create actionable sales insights, insights both the sales leaders and reps can refer to and rely on to better reach their goals.

These processes are mainly used by our Account Executives every day – and I’ll cover how each of the checklists map to each stage of the sales cycle.

• A day in the life of a Process Street Account Executive
• Where checklists fit into the sales cycle
• How our account executives use sales checklists to make their job easier
• 6 more top sales processes for you to capture and close high-value deals

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A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the way in which a company brings a product or service to market.

No matter how good your idea is, you need a go-to-market strategy.

Why?

Because statistically speaking, your business is more likely to fail than succeed.

In fact, if you’re a startup, your chance of failure is a dreary 90%. That’s not to say that your idea isn’t a brilliant one, or that you haven’t got what it takes to bring it to market.

Startups fail for different reasons. Perhaps the market is already awash with companies offering the same solution as yours, or the market isn’t mature enough to welcome your product. Or, maybe the cost of developing and launching your product is so steep that it’s unprofitable.

If successful, a go-to-market strategy will be your salvation and prevent you from failure. The question is, how do you develop a winning strategy? Which factors should you consider?

I asked our VP of Marketing Bryan Sise these very questions. Through the course of his career at companies like Twilio, SendGrid, Twitter, Dynamic Signal, and now Process Street, Bryan has noticed what contributes to GTM success.

In this post I’ll share with you what he has to say. I’ll cover what a go-to-market strategy is, types of go-to-market strategies, the key steps to building a successful go-to-market strategy, and what GTM strategies we use here at Process Street.

• What is a go-to-market strategy?
• 6 factors to consider when building a go-to-market strategy
• Types of go-to-market strategies
• Key steps to building a successful go-to-market strategy
• Go-to-market strategies at Process Street

Let’s get strategizing.
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Who resolved to read more this year? ✋

Who actually has?

Let’s be honest: you’re never actually going to make it through that folder of bookmarked articles you’ve been collecting since last year. Hey – not judging. I’ve been cultivating my own To Be Read monolith for months.

So what’s the deal? How do you catch up with all those industry insights, actionable advice articles, and entrepreneurial retrospectives when there never seems to be any time to, y’know, read?

Simple: let us read them for you.

Introducing Tech Out Loud – the coolest podcast around bringing those must-read articles directly into your waiting ears.
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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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We’ve never met, but I know who you are.

You spend 90% of your day either in meetings or answering emails, so you’re incredibly short on time.

You’re a big believer in “moving fast and breaking things” but over-regulation, cyber threats, obsoletion, and the availability of key skills keeps you awake at night.

You check in with Twitter and Reddit daily to stay in-the-loop, and you’re a keen consumer of content that’s quick and easy to digest, from reputable sources, and provides clear answers to your questions. You hate waffle!

Am I close?!

Whether I’m right or wrong (and before this gets any creepier), I know all this because I’ve created your customer profile, or buyer persona if you prefer.

Organizations that use customer profiles to create and deliver content enjoy 73% higher conversions than those that don’t. So, I used market research and data to build up a semi-fictional representation of you.

I identified your common behavior patterns, discovered what your key motivations were, and established your biggest pain points so I could write a tailored post that clearly answers your questions, provides value, and delivers useful insights.

I won’t lie; this took a lot of time!

But was it worth it?

Take 10 minutes to read this Process Street post and get insights from the likes of Hiten Shah, Lincoln Murphy, and Tomasz Tunguz, learn how to create a customer profile in five simple steps, and find out:

• Can a customer profile really leverage growth?
• What’s the one thing you must do before you create a customer profile?
• What’s the quickest way to create a customer profile that helps you scale?

Let’s “cut fast, cut deep”, and cut the crap.
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This is a guest post by Angelina harper, a tech writer at Really Simple Systems interested in cloud technology, digital marketing, and ephemeral content. You can find her most beloved articles on her Twitter account.

Thanks to the realization that retaining existing customers is five times less expensive than obtaining new ones, businesses began exploring ways to improve the success rate of their customer interactions. This is termed customer success. What we wanted to find out is: How do you optimize customer success?

To answer this, we turn our attention to SaaS (Software as a Service) tools, begging the question: What are the top SaaS customer success tools out there?

SaaS customer success tools are an integral component of the modern business tech stack. These tools enable a business to understand what their customers want in terms of service, so they can provide it in an automatic fashion via the tool.

Customer success tools generate positive customer experiences at scale. SaaS companies often need to scale their customer success operations, and their software solutions should reflect this.

With that being said, customer success is a relatively new concept, and many businesses are still learning how to tackle it effectively.

In this Process Street article, we will present you with our top 5 customer success SaaS tools. But before all of that, let’s find out exactly what customer success is and why it is important:

• What is customer success?
• Customer success best practices
• How to improve your customer success process?
• SaaS tools: The most efficient customer success tools

Let’s get started! Continue Reading