Starting a small business isn’t easy, not one bit! As a small business owner you don’t just have one job, but multiple. You’re the marketer, the sales rep, tech support, and so on.
Since you’re responsible for most of the work, things can often become disorganized and messy, leaving little time and opportunity to make your business grow.
Here’s a list of useful tools to help de-clutter your schedule and make time to focus on expanding your small business. From better managing your time, to tracking leads and follow ups, to automating your marketing efforts, these tools are helpful to increasing overall productivity.
QuickBooks & Method:CRM
As a small business you are responsible for managing accounting, employees, schedules, and contacts in an organized manner. This is what Intuit QuickBooks is for! QuickBooks is the leading SMB and personal accounting software on the market, but what many people don’t know is it has a variety of add-ons that can transform QuickBooks into your personal all-in-one solution.
Method:CRM is the highest rated CRM for QuickBooks. This add-on helps you organize yourself and your team when it comes to communicating with current clients. Use it to track your leads, customers and sales opportunities, and to set automatic follow-up reminders so that you don’t forget! You can also create a customer portal that lets your customers ask questions, see past transactions, make payments and print existing invoices, all without having to contact you.
Here’s one of the most recent reviews about Method:CRM
“We have been using Method:CRM for the past 6 months and find it extremely easy and suitable for our requirements to make the most of our QuickBooks experience. Method’s features add great value to our operations and perfectly fit the missing pieces of QuickBooks. Highly recommended!!!”
RedBooth – For Your Task & Project Management
Task management is one of the keys to a company’s success, as keeping track of your tasks and projects will increase productivity, customer satisfaction and overall team morale.
RedBooth has many great features to make it easy for you to organize and manage your tasks. Features range from time tracking, task management, conversations, HD video conferencing and file sharing. It also integrates DropBox, Google Docs and other valuable apps to help keep productivity at its peak!
You can prioritize tasks and have it send reminders via email. What I love most about it is the mobile app, which allows you to update tasks on the go, time track your meetings and even have a conference call if necessary.
Some businesses use RedBooth to increase customer satisfaction & loyalty by using role-based permission access. Giving access to clients and showing them your day-to-day tasks is a huge customer satisfaction factor, obviously depending on the industry you are in, such as marketing whether traditional or digital, business consulting etc.
Here’s a review on GetApp.com for RedBooth:
“Excellent tool for team collaboration with plenty of apps and features to work with small team efficiently. The ROI in time saving and productivity is 100% clear!”
SimplyCast – Marketing Automation Made Easy!
SimplyCast is a 360 Marketing Automation software that literally covers everything you need, from Email Marketing, Voice Broadcasting, Form Builders, SMS Marketing and a lot more!
Create customer flow communication by dragging and dropping specific elements such as email, post tweets, Facebook posts and forms or surveys, which easily become automated customer communications. SimplyCast allows you to manage complex campaigns that integrate multiple channels of communication into one. SimplyCast combines marketing automation, inbound marketing and interactive communication all in one service!
Here’s a review on GetApp in regards to SimplyCast:
“100% recommend it! Fast, and efficient! Sent voice calls, automated tweets and sent SMS alerts to over 25,000”
RingCentral – Collaborate, Communicate, anywhere!
RingCentral is a phone system in the cloud. Yes – even phones are in the cloud now! Now your desk phones and cell phones can work together. You can manage everything from a web-browser or the RingCentral mobile app, such as voicemail, call forwarding, call answering and all the phone features that would typically be at an additional cost.
Last but not least, RingCentral makes it possible to have your phones work from anywhere, and have multiple phones or offices linked and managed easily.
A review for RingCentral from GetApp.com:
“To get over 100 users on a new phone system requires planning as well making sure that we will never experience downtime. I have to admit that RingCentral specialist who worked with us on the project was very knowledgeable and his experience made our transition to a cloud solution seamless. Aside from all the great features they provide, the most popular that everyone here raves about is their mobile app with SMS and Conferencing. By far, this is the best solution on the market.”
Gotta Love the Cloud
There are many more apps that you should consider, such as accounting software from Xero, statistics software from Camo, and so on. The choices are limitless, and you should explore them out and see whether they can answer your small business’ needs.
All in all, these apps will help you increase productivity, customer service, and keep track of your business minute by minute. These apps are all cloud-based, making it easy for you to have access anywhere at any time and at a fair price.