Finding the right business tools can make the difference between success and failure in today’s competitive business world. You can accept failure through not having the right tools or learn how to use the right business tools to ensure business success.
These days most businesses use a combination of online and offline software and applications. The following is a list of business tools available to small business owners.
Zendesk
Zendesk is a cloud-based help desk management solution offering customizable tools to build customer service portal, knowledge base and online communities. The solution offers a customizable front-end portal, live chat features and integration with applications like Salesforce and Google Analytics. Zendesk’s online customer portal helps support agents to keep track of tickets raised and their status.
Survey Monkey
SurveyMonkey is a tool that allows users to create their own surveys using question format templates. The basic version of SurveyMonkey is free; an enhanced version is also available at a cost.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps you to use the social web to execute marketing campaigns, spot and grow your audience, and send them targeted messages via multiple channels. Your team can utilize its social media dashboard to collaboratively schedule posts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and other popular social sites via desktop, web, and mobile platforms. In addition, you can easily track industry trends and campaign results to tweak your strategies as you go.
The Hootsuite dashboard has tabs that organize all the social profiles that you link with the application. Today, many businesses use their social profiles to provide customer support, offer personalized deals to followers, and motivate them to become repeat buyers of their products or services. Such companies can utilize Hootsuite to effortlessly manage multiple social profiles simultaneously. With the premium plans, you get advanced features such as security, team collaboration, audience engagement, and social analytics.
WordPress
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Get the WordPress Lead Capture Plugin for 1CRM.
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WooCommerce
WooCommerce has become the most popular online shop system in the world, and now 1CRM and WooCommerce have joined forces using an integration created by visual4 GmbH.
With this integration, your WooCommerce orders automatically are stored in 1CRM, alongside the customer information, your customers can see status changes to their order (that you do in 1CRM) in their order history in WordPress. Your products from 1CRM get synchronized to WooCommerce as soon, as you check “Available in Online Shop” and WooCommerce stock changes are reflected within 1CRM product reservations until you finally ship the products.
Best Project Management Software – nTask
Forget about effective business management without using a dedicated project management tool. That’s why we’re starting off the list with nTask. A project management software coming with a multitude of features to help you complete your business projects successfully.
nTask comes with powerful native modules that provide a multi-dimensional solution to all your project needs. A single platform to plan, collaborate and monitor your project performance without switching applications. With nTask, you can get a holistic view of what lies ahead in your project lifecycle.
Through beautiful Gantt charts and built-in timesheets, the tool also allows you to track your project performance seamlessly.
Let’s see what you can accomplish through nTask:
Top Features
- Create and manage your projects through systematic workflow which allows you to add things as you move along with the project
- Use it as a to-do list app and assign tasks instantly to your team members and make roles transparent
- Automatically repeat tasks by setting task recurrence according to a frequency of your choice
- Execute successful team meetings through powerful native meeting management solution which lets you take control of your meeting details with more precision
- Create and associate issues with your respective projects and resolve them proactively through smart issue metrics, like issue severity and issue priority
- Safeguard your project from potential hazards by documenting risks earlier in the project lifecycle
- Monitor your project performance through built-in Gantt charts and auto-generating timesheets
- Communicate with your team members and provide timely feedback through comments within tasks
Pricing Plans
nTask comes with three plans:
- Free plan: unlimited tasks, unlimited meetings, timesheet reporting, and unlimited workspaces
- Premium plan: starting at $3 – unlimited projects and Gantt Charts.
Best Email Service – Gmail
Email serves as a critical component of a robust business management system, which is why the 4th tool in our roundup of best business management software is Gmail. Powered by Google, Gmail is one of the most widely used email platforms around.
An easy to use application, coming with an array of free features, Gmail is a go-to option for most individuals for personal and professional communication alike.
With powerful spam filtering, the application automatically detects junk and keeps it out of your inbox. Furthermore, the program organizes emails into designated folders according to their type and categorizes them as primary, social, promotions, and others.
Key Features
- Spam filtering
- Email categorization
- Free storage
- Conversation threads
- Instant messaging
- Video chat
- Virus and malware scanning
- Search bar
- Language support
- Offline access
- Powerful sync with other applications
Pricing Plans
- Gmail is free for personal use. The business account plans start from $5 per user/month, with a free trial of 14 days.
Best Business Resource Planning Software – ProductPlan
ProductPlan is one of the best business management tools that can help you create and manage your product or project map. This tool is preferred by project managers to create a visual roadmap that their projects will follow. From product development, software testing, to project completion, this roadmapping tool can be used to manage your projects from start to finish.
Moreover, you can collaborate with your team to create the visual roadmap of your product, apply estimates, building work in the process to let your team know the complete picture of your plan. It has an easy drag and drop interface that can help you make the product timeline, and remove the obstacle in the development phase.
To give your roadmaps a fun activity to create you can use different color codes for the progress bar, set milestones, and make a connection with dependent items with many other amazing features to nail your project.
Key Features:
- Timeline and list view for roadmap based on dates
- Create multiple roadmaps in your master plan for an entire product portfolio
- Make use of planning board to manage backlog items
- Create milestones and set the connections between taskbars
- Easy drag and drop functionality
- Create a private link and share it with stakeholders
Pricing:
- Business plan at $39/month per user when paid annually
- Enterprise plan at $69/month per user
- Enterprise Plus plan at $99/month per user
Best Business Sales Management Software – Pipedrive
Pipedrive has secured multiple user choice awards during the last two years as being a resourceful asset for CRM software end-users. Although the extensive list of features has a narrow-to-wide scope, we can sum up Pipedrive’s remarkable usefulness as a highly responsive sales management system for sole proprietors and small businesses alike.
When Pipedrive was still in its infancy, they had to consult with professional sales market respondents to make the final version of the software more user-friendly and professional. For a majority of users, this program is more of a ‘dream come true’ sort of thing because of a sleek, straightforward, and easy to retrieve functionality.
Setting up accounts for first-time users only takes a few minutes. You can fill in all your individual sales-oriented project requirements as you go along. Top it all off with an automated integration with Google Calendars for pop-up reminders at appropriate dates – and you are looking at a fully-fledged third party business solutions system.
Key Features
- Compatibility with portable mobile devices for uninterrupted sales project management
- Ability to set up company and individual goals
- Monthly, weekly or custom time scale milestone settings
- Google Contacts and Google Calendar integration
- To some degree, the API can be configured, depending on your sales portal
- Excellent customer service alongside 24/7 multi-language support
Pricing Plans
- Pipedrive is a paid program, which means that the modules are broken up into different tiers. You can go for a basic silver plan at $12 per user/month.
- For advanced features that offer added storage capacity, multi-user support on the same license and vice versa, the Gold & Platinum plans are worth checking out at $24 and $50 per month.
Scoro
Scoro is a powerful business management solution that combines all the features you might need to manage your company: projects & tasks, contact management, quotes, team collaboration, billing, and reporting.
Top features:
- Real-time customizable KPI dashboards
- Customer management & sales pipeline
- Detailed reports on every aspect of your business
- Quoting and invoicing with pre-set templates and automation
- Project, task, and time management
- Shared team calendar & meeting scheduling
What’s special about this tool: Scoro helps to streamline your entire work progress, so you don’t need to use different tools for every task. Scoro also has the most advanced business intelligence features – detailed reporting and custom dashboards.
Pricing: From $26 user/month
Read on: Scoro Named #1 Business Management Software
StudioCloud
StudioCloud is a solution that gives small businesses all the features they need to manage their work successfully.
Top features:
- Manage clients, leads, organizations, partners, and vendors
- Schedule, events, appointments, locations, and more
- Create and send professional invoices and quotes from customized price-lists
- Send personalized text and email reminders, payment requests, etc.
What’s special about this tool: Are you a one-man band? Then this software is for you! StudioCloud provides mobility by syncing all of your data between the cloud, your desktop, and all of your internet-enabled devices.
Pricing: $65/month for teams of 3 + (additional cost for every new user account)
Zoho One
Zoho One — The tools you need to create, collaborate, and communicate with your teams, in one integrated suite of apps.
Top features:
- Sales & Marketing – CRM, email integration, online forms, live chat
- Collaboration – documents storage and sharing, team chat, online meetings
- Finance – accounting, invoices, expense management, inventory management
- Create custom applications and automate your personalized business workflows
What’s special about this tool: You can integrate 37 of Zoho separate applications such as CRM, Mail, Finance, Creator, Books, Recruit, etc. to manage your business.
Pricing: From $30 user/month
Check out this Zoho Alternative
Conclusion
Tools are used in many ways, from construction to writing. Every business uses tools. In order for your business to succeed you need the right tools. In fact, Bill Gates states that if you were starting out today, you wouldn’t need a lot of the things he had – namely, these tools: spreadsheets, word processors, and Windows.