Small Business Boost Thanks to These Smart Tools
Starting a business is a good idea. Growing such a business is a twice-better idea you should definitely realize. Surely, get better results! Still, there are lots of important points to cover here – starting from communications and completing with accounting. Is it possible to grow your business doing this manually? That is impossible. But, that is possible thanks to advanced software that may be very useful in different areas of small business operation.
Basic Points to Start and Cover
What is the most important thing about ensuring software application? That is effectiveness. It is strongly determined by the suitability of a tool you use to the tasks you wish to solve, thanks to that. Ensuring the stable growth of a small business is impossible without a comprehensive assessment of how it operates. How to do that? Pay attention to the effectiveness of these important aspects your small business needs to deal with for sure:
- productivity of employees;
- communications that are associated with better engagement and interaction;
- project management;
- decision-making;
- funds management;
- operations management;
- information storage and processing;
- documents management and flow;
- bookkeeping;
- marketing.
These are basic points that may be easily automated and made more effective thanks to applying advanced software and approaches.
Not Standard but Intriguing for the Start
To grow your business and get competitive advantages, it is better to think out of the box sometimes. This becomes especially important while working on mistakes and gaining new business contacts. For instance, have you ever heard about business transcription? This is an effective approach to transfer voice and audio recordings you have and process those later easily. If you have such for hours, you may easily process those in around 10 minutes.
Where may this be helpful? For example, you have an enormous number of voice recordings from your customers, having this content transcribed may facilitate a lot with reviewing weak points of your sales and other strategies. Simply switch audio to text or video to text you have. Asking professional transcriptionists or applying automatic transcription at least may help you a lot with catching important but missed ideas, details that can help you negotiate better with customers or business partners, and also help with other daily business things and not only.
If you have any business matter that worries you, think about how you can solve that in a less standard way your competitors can likely choose. Pay attention to matters that can save your effort. They should also bring you more accurate results. Or it can bring you at least room for developing new and workable strategies to solve issues at stake.
Good and Fresh Suggestions to Take Already
If you have realized you need to think about how to improve your business operation at the moment, we suggest you start with simple things. Don’t miss developing non-standard approaches from the focus of your attention. But, also emphasize more common things in the first turn. Form a good background for your business imagination and future growth.
Communications
Flock is one of the best applications for communications that a small business may use. Apart from working as a messenger, this app may serve as a collaboration hub. Here you may easily switch from group to direct messaging channels, arrange files and notes sharing securely, have video conferences, customize team mailing lists, and do many other communication-related things.
Productivity
Here we can suggest you Shift as a workstation for entrepreneurs and teams who want to increase their productivity. It can help with managing apps, social media accounts, extensions, and email accounts more effectively. It keeps everything you work with, in one place and in an easy-to-access manner.
Another good suggestion we recommend to try to boost productivity is TimeDoctor. Make sure your time will not be wasted by tracking that. This app will not only do that but also provide a report about time management you and your employees have at the moment. Find out how much time you have spent on a certain project, conversation, or other business-related matter.
Zapier is an amazing tool for very bust teams who are eager to grow. It is focused on the automation of business processes enabling getting access to 1,500+ business tools and applications while you may focus on more important work for you. The application moves information between apps automatically and automates repetitive tasks.
If you want to arrange your schedule more effectively, Calendly can help you with that. It works with most common applications, like Google, Office 365, Outlook, and others. It also creates automated tasks along with other apps, like Zapier mentioned above, for instance.
Project Management
Asana is a good tool that can easily help teams to stay focused on reaching their business goals to grow. The software enables reviewing all existing projects in a list, calendar, or board view. It assigns different tasks to various stakeholders with due dates to complete such. Apart from being good from a technical perspective, this software also has a good interface too. This tool is one of the most popular in the market and one of the most effective for small businesses.
Files Management
Apart from the must-have Google Docs, there is also another good suggestion to try. Dropbox is a good application that can effectively manage all files available, has different add-ons and file-recovery functions.
Marketing
Zoho CRM may serve you as a good CRM tool that is suitable for small businesses. It brings together customers and businesses, ensuring the delivery of sales, marketing, customer service, and, of course, commercial services. Create a pipeline and get more leads thanks to this app.
Accounting
FreshBooks is an all-in-one application for small businesses. It can administer various tasks, like managing expenses, invoicing, and arranging relations with vendors. This is a tool worth trying for the start.
Final Words
Getting to the next business level is impossible without optimizing your internal process. This requires covering, among all important matters, communications, project and time management, marketing, accounting, document management, and, of course, productivity. Start with these aspects, and don’t be afraid to develop non-standard ideas to find what you need. That is a thing appreciated in any business enabling it to grow. Surely do that!
