Growing a small business isn’t always easy. Though it has become a lot easier to promote a brand or service with the right use of technology. Still, it needs a lot of patience, hard work, and dedication to making a company from scratch.
No matter which size your business is, the competition is real for everyone. The recent CORONAVIRUS pandemic has made the situation worse.
Although the whole world is recovering and thus, new opportunities might knock on your door. In case you own a small business or planning to start a new venture, remember the key is having the right tools by your side.
However, there are so many different types of tools out there for small businesses that it’s hard to know which ones you need. On top of that, you don’t want to invest in the wrong tools, as your budget is likely tight as it is. So, being concerned about that, here are 7 types of tools that you should consider adding to your small business.
1. Project Management Software
The first type of tool you might need is project management software. With project management software you’ll be able to track and work on all aspects of your project in one convenient space. This is ideal when you have several different team members working on the same thing and want to make sure everyone is coordinated. To learn more about the benefits of project management software, and what some of the best options are, you can visit this guide.
2. Hiring Software
Though your business is small, you would still require employees to do the job. In such cases, you might take help from hiring software. Generally, hiring software would help you to get details of the prospective employees who would be perfect for your company.
Apart from that, good hiring programming software can provide you some more information about the candidates. These types of software are skilled to perform:
- Background checking of eligible candidates
- Taking accurate details from reference
- Verifies original identification
- Police case records, if any
- Drug screening
Hiring employees is extremely crucial but important; still, no one wants to get into unnecessary legal problems because of the employees. This can ruin your company’s goodwill. This is why a good hiring tool is necessary.
3. Team Communication
A major shift that has happened recently is more people are working remotely from home. If your small business has people working in different locations, you’ll need an efficient way for everyone to communicate. Email will only get you so far, so instead, you should look into things like Slack, Discord, and video conferencing. Look for communication tools that allow you to share files, keep a record of past chats, and don’t cost too much.
4. Comprehensive Accounting Software
The best thing you can do for your small business is to keep a close eye on your finances. You have a small budget to work with, so you need to make sure every dollar is being spent well. To help you track and analyze everything, you’ll need some good accounting software. A great option is Microsoft Dynamics GP. This software will provide you with advanced insights into your business so that you can make the best possible financial decisions going forward.
5. Marketing Automation
For your business to grow, you need to market it. The more people that hear about your business, the more customers you can bring in. The problem is that marketing takes up a lot of time if you don’t make use of available tools. A good way to speed up some aspects of the marketing strategy is by using marketing automation tools.
As an example, let’s say your business has a newsletter. Rather than manually sending this out to each subscriber, you can use email automation software to deliver your newest newsletter on the first of every month. Or you could set up your blog so that new posts are automatically shared on your social media channels. The goal is to look for small tasks that take a long time, then look for a way to automate them.
6. Sales Prospecting
One of the hardest parts for any business is knowing who to sell to. You don’t want to waste your time marketing and pitching to people who are unlikely to convert into customers. By using sales prospecting techniques, you can rate prospects based on how likely they are to become customers, then pass the best ones onto your sales team. To do this, you’ll need reliable sales prospecting software. Here are a few options to look at to get you started.
7. Live Chat and Chatbots
Finally, another time-consuming activity for small businesses is customer service. As you gain more customers, you have to spend more time answering their questions and helping to solve their problems. If you don’t have an efficient way to do this, customer wait times will grow increasingly long and your customers’ experience will get worse.
A great way to fix this is by adding a live chat feature to your website. With live chat, visitors can quickly connect to one of your customer service agents and have a quick discussion with them. Then, to make this feature even more useful, you can add in a chatbot. Chatbots will read the customer’s question and respond with pre-written answers.
If the chatbot doesn’t have an answer, it will then pass the customer on to an agent, meaning your customer service team will only have to work with the hardest questions. This can significantly reduce wait times and improve your overall customer experience.
Invest in the Right Tools
Having the right tools at your small business can make all the difference. Take some time to think about which tasks take the longest or where you have the most trouble. Chances are there is a good tool out there that is worthy of an investment. By finding these tools and implementing them into your business, you can establish a solid foundation for growth going forward.