Starting a small business is one of the most challenging things. You have to do a lot to ensure your business does not fail within the first year of opening doors.
Whether you are running an online business or a production facility, you have to ensure you meet your productivity goals and deliver the best quality products and services to your customers.
Productivity, efficiency, and quality are some of the issues we deal with as entrepreneurs daily. We want to ensure we spend the shortest time on tasks and create opportunities for our team to learn and help the business grow.
An entrepreneur’s day is full of ups and downs, and for that reason, there is a need to incorporate some internal tools to boost productivity.
As CEO or manager of a small business, you need the following tools for customer support, marketing, and sales.
Marketing Tools For Startups
Marketing is an essential activity in every business. If you are launching a new product or want your brand to get noticed in a busy market, you have to invest in marketing.
Today there are multiple tools you can use to launch successful online and digital marketing for your brand. These tools can also help you collaborate with your marketing teams daily and know what challenges they face. Here are two essential marketing tools that your small business will need this year.
1- MailChimp – Best Email Marketing Tool For Startups
Most marketers prefer using MailChimp for email marketing. Marketing your business through direct emails is something you don’t want to procrastinate, especially if you start a new business.
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MailChimp has over 11 million customers, and when you join them, you start your journey to hassle-free email marketing. The tool is one of the best you can get for email marketing, and these are some of the reasons you should choose it for marketing:
- It was founded in 2001, which means it has over two decades of experience in marketing. The tool came into the limelight even before email marketing became a norm to most marketers.
- If you have technical questions, their customer support team is readily available for help.
- If you have less than 2000 subscribers on your email list, you can use the free plan and send over 12,000 emails to your customers.
- It comes with a mobile app that enables you to create, edit, and track your emails. It is much easier to find out when people receive and open your emails.
- Mila Chimp was named one of the best global software in 2021 by G2.
2- Deskera – Best All-In-One Platform To Run Your Startup
Deskera is an all-in-one business suite that is essential for startups. It offers products for accounting management, HR management, and payroll management.
Deskera streamlines your business by letting you send and receive money from anywhere in the world. It allows you to integrate all your ecommerce stores together and sync all the orders and payments.
The powerful CRM software lets you manage your sales pipelines with ease and helps to offer an impressive customer experience.
The report builder helps you compile all your business data together for better decision making. Deskera pricing starts from 1099 INR a month.
3- HubSpot – Best Marketing Software For Startup
HubSpot has become one of the best tools for CRM, sales, and marketing for small businesses. Let’s major in the marketing aspect of this tool for the sake of this article.
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When you subscribe to the premium version of HubSpot, you get access to software that helps you with social media marketing, lead management, landing pages, blogging, website, and CTA.
This is an all-in-one software that enables you to carry out online marketing and analytics, making it a top choice for most start-ups. It has every plugin you need to launch successful digital marketing.
You don’t have to pull yourself in a different direction with this inclusive tool at your disposal.
Sales Tools for Startups
The efficacy and enablement of your marketing team determine how much sales your business can make. When you finally launch and bring your product and service to the market, you want to ensure you avail it to the right customers on time.
Selling is an essential function of the business. It creates more capital for the company you can re-invest or use in daily operations.
While managing sales, you still have to streamline workflow, ensure automation and create a personal touch. It makes sales one of the most challenging activities. Here are some of the sales tools you can use in your business and make the process swift.
4- noCRM.io – Best End-to-End Sales Management Tool For Startups
If you want to double your profits as a startup, you have to generate and qualify as many leads as possible. To achieve this, you should invest some bucks in reliable and multi-functional software like noCRM.io to help you manage your end-to-end sales.
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This tool can also assist you in keeping track of all sales activities like prospecting, pipeline management, and nurturing. When you sign up for noCRM.io, you can link your website to the tool and start doing lead nurturing straight away. With this tool, you can:
- Organize the lead data
- Assign specific activities for a lead
- Label all leads in order of priority
- Make your daily sales more proficient
- Create leads from phone calls, email, and business cards
This tool, noCRM.io, is the best you can have as a startup looking forward to generating a high number of leads in a short time.
5- Clearbit – Best Marketing Data Engine For Startups
Clearbit is a reliable sales tool every startup can use to generate more leads and increase sales. This tool provides different products that your sales team can use to make prospecting and sales much easier.
For example, you can use Clearbit Connect to find your customer’s emails in just seconds. You can then include the customer on your email list or reach them with custom emails to remind them of new offers in your store.
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This sales software not only assists you in finding new leads but also helps you to build a connection with customers. It does this by displaying more information about the company and individual just next to every conversation you have on Gmail.
Clearbit gives you the correct data that helps you establish long-lasting relationships with customers.
6- LeadGnome – Best B2B Reply Email Software For Your Startup
If you are looking for a tool that helps your sales team generate more leads, you can count on LeadGnome.
With this tool, your marketing and sales team can easily collaborate to develop a successful campaign to generate leads, track and automate email marketing.
This tool digs more into your email conversations with different customers to find out any potential leads you mentioned in any replies. This email mining strategy can grow your contact list and generate more leads in a year.
Related: How to Calculate Email Marketing Conversion Rate
7- Prospect.io – Best Sales Automation Platform For Startups
Every business needs a solid email list to reach out to customers at the right time and generate more leads. That is where Prospect.io comes into play.
With this tool, you can easily find and verify all email addresses and grow your email list. It gives you accurate and updated information about every customer so that you can reach them anytime.
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You can integrate the information into your CRM to track how customers interact with your marketing messages and automate your drip campaigns.
Additionally, Prospect.io enables you to customize and schedule follow-up emails, so you don’t miss potential leads.
Customer Support Tools For Startups
Customers are the most important people in any business that looks forward to growing. As a startup, you have to know who your target customers are, what they like most, and what you can do to keep them coming for more.
You also need to have a strategy that helps you drive new customers and keep existing ones to your business. Therefore, having a reliable customer support tool is the only way of taking care of things that your customers are not pleased with and build empathy with them.
A customer support tool enables fast, easy, and more effective responses to customer inquiries. You can also use the tools to uncover great potentials for growing your product and service line. Below are a few options you can rely on for customer support:
8- Zoho Desk – The Easiest Customer Support Tool For Startups
Zoho Desk is a customer support tool you can use to look, track, and close customer service tickets from different customer support channels. If you look forward to improving the performance of the customer care team, you can use Zoho Desk.
The tool is equipped with a contextual AI with powerful helpdesk functionalities. It helps you gather details to build a rich knowledge base to boost self-service and customer support in your business.
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You can also use this software to create a comprehensive workflow for your customer care team. It comes with different integrations that enable customer support to make and receive phone calls in seconds.
9- ProProfs Live Chat – The Best Live Chat Tool For Startups
ProProfs is one of the best tools for startups which offers live chat customer support software you can use to communicate to your customers whenever they visit your website.
According to a recent survey, it has been established that most customers prefer an instant medium of communication when making purchase decisions.
Therefore, adding live chat tools like ProProfs into your website can boost your interactions with customers, increase leads, and generate more sales.
Live chat helps customers to make instant purchase decisions. For an online store that uses live chat tools, it is much easier to convince customers to buy, especially when they are visiting for the first time.
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You can respond to some technical questions customers may have about your brand on time and give them peace of mind to purchase. For instance, if you are selling clothes online, a customer can chat with a fashion consultant in your team and choose attire that fits their body type the most.
ProProfs is one of the best live chat tools you can use for customer support because:
- It provides critical customer information in real-time. You can view this information about customers at any time and help them in making purchase decisions.
- You can use this tool to monitor and track customer interactions with your website.
- It enables you to capture customer details using the pre-chart from that customer fill before engaging with you.
- Its post-chat feedback helps you understand the various needs of your customers.
- It is integrated with Google Analytics for better performance and convenience.
Project And HR Management Tools for Startups
Meeting deadlines is one big challenge to most people when handling projects in a business.
If your business is still in the product stage, you need a project management tool to succeed. These are some of the HR Management tools every startup needs to ensure a successful project.
10- Asana – Most Comprehensive Project Management Tool For Startups
Asana is one of the most effective project management tools you can introduce to your business. You can use it to manage the day-to-day development projects.
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The tool is more flexible, and as you get used to its dashboard, you can use it to assign tasks, track progress on scheduled tasks, and set reminders.
The clean and clutter-free user interface makes it easier for your team to concentrate on the project. It is free of distractions which makes it fit for a busy team.
11- Breezy HR – Best HR Management Tool For Startups
All your HR problems are sorted out when you introduce Breezy HR to your team. As one of the best tools for startups, it provides an inclusive solution to most of the HR issues you will be facing in your new business.
It can handle problems with collaborative hiring, candidate management, and job advertisement.
The simple UI and dashboard on this tool make it easy to use for a beginner. Unlike most HR tools, Breezy HR is not just limited to HR. Anyone involved in hiring workers in your business can use this tool as well.
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The tool makes it easier to find the right talent for your team. It has a wide network of job boards online like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and ZipRecruiter, making it easier to find information about possible candidates to fill job vacancies in your company.
Final Thoughts
Most small businesses or start-ups don’t make it to the second year of business because of poor management. Small companies should incorporate different productivity tools to boost their management and growth cycle to succeed.
In this article, we have highlighted some of the best marketing, customer support, sales, and project management tools for startups. When you resort to any tool, you should find out if it is suitable for your business.
Most of these tools, like HubSpot, are free for trial. That means it costs you nothing to try them out and watch your business grow this year.
