8 Example Processes to Guarantee Consistency in Your Business

8 Example Processes to Guarantee Consistency in Your Business process.st /example-processes/ 4/10/2017

Ben Mulholland April 10, 2017

“Imitation is the sincerest [form] of flattery” – Charles Caleb Colton

There’s nothing wrong with looking at example processes and learning from what they do – if anything it’s the best way to improve your own business practices.

Plus, after learning the basic and advanced features of Process Street from the first two chapters of our consultant’s guide, looking at how others use the app is a great way to see those features in action.

After all, anyone can run a customer support checklist, but we want to make even creating processes more efficient.

To get your own processes kickstarted, I’m going to highlight 8 example processes (with ready-to-use templates) to boost consistency and efficiency in your business with Process Street. These include: Scheduling a recurring daily routine Tracking your employee onboarding Surveying your email list or clients Automatically managing customer data in Salesforce

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Tracking your daily routine One of the simplest ways to use Process Street is to create a daily routine template to keep yourself on track and productive. This could include steps such as planning out your day, prioritizing tasks, eating breakfast, spending time with family, and what times to take breaks.

The routine doesn’t even have to be manually triggered – instead, you can schedule checklists to run with you assigned on custom days of the week. That way the daily routine will run and email itself straight to your inbox each morning, since email notifications are sent when you’re assigned to a checklist.

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In fact, we already have a public daily routine template ready to go.

Onboarding an employee Employee onboarding is an incredibly important process to keep on top of, but it’s also easy to let it descend into a sprawling mess. Thankfully, it’s also one of the best (and most common) use cases for Process Street.

By creating an employee onboarding template and running checklists for each new employee you eliminate the chance of steps being forgotten, such as introducing them to the rest of the team or giving access to important resources. The new hire can even work with you on vital tasks and save your team some of the trouble.

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Obviously, a general template won’t fit all cases – some employees will require specific training. However, that’s where the beauty of public templates lies, as you can use our general templates as a base and edit them to your needs.

Check out our collection of 6 employee onboarding processes ready-to-use in your company.

Applying for holiday leave Processes like applying for holiday leave shouldn’t be mired in an endless (and delayed) back-and-forth between everyone involved. It should be as simple as asking permission, getting reviewed, then having it approved or not.

With a little help from Process Street’s advanced features like variables, a holiday leave application has never been easier to create, track, and approve.

First, you’d run the leave application checklist and fill in your details, such as the start and end dates of the leave.

Next, it’s up to your HR team to review and approve or disapprove the time – usually, this is the first hurdle of communication.

Thankfully, with Process Street, the company’s HR group can be automatically pre-assigned to the task of review and approval (remember, this sends them an email notification with a direct link to the task). Not only that, but inside the review task are variables which update to show the data you entered – HR can open the email, click the link, and review the entire application from a single task.

In short, you go into the first task and fill in your leave details, HR goes into the second task and approves or disapproves, then your manager goes into the third task and confirms the decision with a reason to explain why. The final task collects all of this information together and creates a custom email which can be directly sent back to you, saying whether your leave is approved and why.

Surveying your clients With a little creativity, Process Street’s checklist setup can be used to survey your audience and record the results for easy review. All you have to do is create a survey as a template and allow viewers to use form fields to record

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their answers.

For example, each task can be posed as a question with a dropdown field to cover potential answers. You could even provide other form fields like paragraph and email to capture longer-form answers and details about the user filling them out.

Best of all, all of this can be tied together by creating a checklist run link and putting it into an email to your subscribers. This means that anyone clicking the link will run a new survey checklist without needing a Process Street account, making it quick and easy to fill out.

Learn more about surveying and helping your customers with our free customer success guide.

Automatically generating invoices Checklists are great for storing information during important processes, but we can go one step further than that.

After all, you have the data, so why not automatically generate documents instead of creating them by hand?

One of the best examples of this is using Process Street to generate an invoice automatically. By filling in a checklist for creating an invoice , you can then have Zapier shift the data into an invoice document and format it automatically.

Whether you want to create the invoice with WebMerge or send it as an HTML email, Zapier can even automatically post it both to yourself and to whoever the invoice is for. It’s never been easier to file an invoice and get paid.

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Tracking meetings Speaking of Zapier, one of my team’s favorite time-saving processes is to link our Slack channel to Process Street.

Whenever we type “run a meeting”, our meeting checklist fires and a link to it is posted back into Slack.

This makes our meetings even more efficient – we don’t have to stop to run the meeting checklist and make sure everything is recorded. All we have to do is type “run meeting”.

During the meeting, we’ll make notes in the checklist on what we’ve all worked on, what we’re getting stopped by, and what we’re going to focus on until the next meeting. This way we can keep track of what everyone’s been doing and that we’re hitting our targets, whether we’re looking a week or a year into the past.

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Once the meeting’s over, ticking off the final task posts a copy of our notes back into Slack, giving everyone an easy overview of the latest meeting. Multiple copies of notes, all for no extra work – that’s what I call efficient.

Onboarding clients with a Salesforce integration Onboarding clients should be a smooth process, with as little friction between you and a fully integrated new client as possible. Unfortunately, it’s hard to power through and maintain momentum when you have to switch between Salesforce (or any other CRM) and your onboarding checklist to copy over copious amounts of data you’ve already recorded in one or the other.

So why not integrate your onboarding checklist and automatically sync data between the two?

In the following example, we’ve linked our client onboarding checklist to Salesforce using a run link (a link which triggers a new checklist). This run link has been put into Salesforce as a custom button, but also uses variables to push important data straight into Process Street.

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In other words, by clicking a link in a Salesforce entry to run an onboarding checklist, you’re also automatically pushing through data from Salesforce, such as the client’s name, email, and company.

You don’t even need to use Zapier to achieve this, so there’s no need to learn how to use another program to get this up and running.

Qualify leads with a Close.io integration Whether you’re getting clients through inbound or outbound marketing, at some point or another you’re going to want to qualify your leads to assess their needs and whether they’re good to follow up with. After all, your product and services aren’t going to be suitable for everyone, and trying to sell someone something they don’t need will only alienate them sooner or later.

Unfortunately, qualifying leads often involves a lot of data management, as recording data in a CRM during a call with a lead isn’t good practice – you’ll end up rushing your notes or constantly having to take small pauses and breaking up the flow of the conversation. Not to mention that there’s a strong chance you could forget a vital question because you’re focusing too much on entering data correctly.

So, much like with onboarding clients using Salesforce, you can integrate Process Street with your CRM to automatically sync data to and from your qualification checklist.

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For example, if you used Close.io, you could click a link in an opportunity to run the BANT qualification checklist.

Doing so would push existing data in Close into the checklist, so you don’t have to spend time setting it up. During the call you can follow the checklist to ask all the right questions and record the answers directly into the checklist.

Using Zapier, Zaps can detect when particular tasks are checked off and then automatically update Close to reflect your qualifying checklist. For example, ticking off the “Create an opportunity” task will create an opportunity in Close (automatically calculating the annual contract value, etc), follow-up tasks can be pushed through, and all of the information you gather can be synced posted into a note in Close.

Remember; these example processes are only the beginning These are just a few example processes for using Process Street to make your business processes actionable and more efficient – the possibilities, however, are endless.

In the end, there’s an almost infinite number of ways you could save time and effort by using, integrating, and automating Process Street, and the best way to discover is to test for yourself. Sign up for a free account today.

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