The 9 Must Have Small Business Tools You Can’t Live Without

So maybe that small business you started isn’t so small any more.  Or maybe you are just about to launch your new endeavor and want to make sure you don’t miss a beat.  

Here at VOIPo we have helped countless small business owners and teams save costs and improve their thriving businesses.  It’s no secret that it takes a lot to make your creation come to life.  Our goal is to make that process easier for you.  Unfortunately we can’t build your business for you but we can give you the tools to help! This is a list of the 9 small business tools that you won’t be able to live without.  Don’t just take it from us!  Try these tools out for yourself and drop us a comment of your favorite tool.  

  1. Slack (Messaging/ Communication)

In the early and late 90’s AOL Instant Messenger was the communication platform of choice among teens and young professionals while email prevailed in the work place.  Slack brought business communications into the 21st century by taking what we loved about Instant Messenger, cleaning it up, and giving it a professional spin.  Email will probably have it’s place in the business world for decades to come but in just a few short years Slack has become the go to source for small business text communications.  The service offers extremely affordable and easily scalable cloud or app based messaging and tools for you growing small business.  Do everything in one place.  Upload and share files, send individual or team messages, tag users, easily search archived messages and integrate your communications with a whole host of 3rd party applications.

2. Google Suite (Everything)

Google may have a plan to rule the entire world but you can start by using their GSuite to rule your small business domain.  The Google GSuite offers their entire list of services for your business.  From gmail to google docs, nowadays its tough to do much without using Google.  Check out the full list of features and pricing options here.

3. Freshbooks (Accounting)

Freshbooks is the “Small Business Accounting Software that makes Billing Painless.”  Ahhh technology.  If there is one thing technology has given us that we can all be grateful for it would have to be cloud accounting software.  If you are anything like a large portion of business owners who favor doing anything but accounting, then Freshbooks is worth a look.  They have taken all the headaches out of doing small business accounting and dropped it in one easy-to-use cloud based software.  That’s right invoicing, expenses, payments, time keeping, and reporting all at your fingertips.  

4. Evernote (Organization)

If you ever feel like you need a second brain to process everything you have going on Evernote is small business tool must have.  This is every note taker’s dream program.  Create notes, organize them into notebooks, add tags, upload images and audio, and even instantly clip text or full articles from the web.  If your entire team uses Evernote you can even invite them to collaborate on notes or notebooks with you and message them directly from the platform.  While they do over an extremely robust free account, you can opt into the premium account for a nominal fee.  The software is available in a cloud-based or app-based format with a mobile app and google chrome extension for increased accessibility.  

5. Trello (Project Management)

Trello is a great small business tool for visually inclined project management teams. Create projects, add members, labels and due dates and boom you have easy project management.  Once you have created your projects Trello seamlessly integrates with Evernote, Slack and Google’s GSuite.  The company started in 2011 and within a year had reached more than 500,000 members.  Today it is trusted by companies like Adobe, Pixar and National Geographic.

6. Kayako (Customer Support)

Customers are at the core of every business but when you are running a small business you can’t afford missing a single interaction.  Kayako keeps all of your customer interactions in one place.  Kayako allows users and support staff to open, close and manage tickets with due times and archived ticket history.  With a sleek interface and live chat as an add-on feature, make sure your team is winning every customer communication.  Kayako integrates with your small business email, social media, billing and even third party softwares like Zapier and Slack.  They also make it easy to add an ‘Help Yourself’ FAQ section to your site to give your customers accessibility to the things that matter.

7. Proposify (Sales)

Sales is the lifeblood of every business and when it comes to selling, eliminating friction points is critical.  Proposify helps your sales team generate professional proposal documentation using online templates that look amazing.  Using their online platform you can review and send proposals to prospects and even see when the prospect has received and opened the proposal. Accept online integrations and even connect your Proposify account to stripe so you don’t have to chase down your new clients.  They host everything in the cloud so you can access your proposals on the go and even use analytics to see how your business is doing.

8. Hubspot (CRM)

As your small business grows so will your relationship base.  Hubspot helps you manage that asset.  Heralded for their incredible marketing and award-winning CRM platform Hubspot makes relationship management a breeze.  They offer a free tool and more advanced Sales and Marketing add-ons for a fee.  The best part about Hubspot is the ability to archive your emails, calls, meetings and notes in one place.  

9. Zapier (Bridging Software & Service)

Alright, so now you have all the premier small business tools but how do ensure you are getting the most out of them?  Zapier has the answer.  Software integrations are great, but they don’t always work just right.  Sensing an opportunity in the market Zapier set out to build a service that could bridge gaps between programs and automate your workflow.  The company gained more than 600,000 users in three years and today supports more than 750 apps.  So how does it work?  Create a trigger, specify an action, add filters.  For example say you get new product orders via multiple gmail accounts with the heading ‘New Order.’  Instead of constantly checking each of the inbound email channels you create a new workflow with Zapier.  Each time you get an email with the title being ‘New Order’ automatically send a slack message to your fulfillment team.  See what Zapier can do for you! 

10. BONUS: VOIPo

Still need telecommunications for your small business?  We’ve got you covered.  Our small business packages include 40+ features out of the box.  Get unlimited calls to the US and Canada for less than $8 month.  Switch over to the Likeable Phone Company to start saving today! Get started HERE.

Let us know what your favorite tool is in the comments below.  

 

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