It takes a lot of time, effort, and coffee to make a profitable business out of an idea. You aren’t just required to have an in-depth knowledge but there is always something or other that needs to be done. There are meetings to be attended, clients to be called, emails to be sent, and blogs to be posted.
To drive revenue and gain an edge over your competitors, one needs to take care of work management, team communication, harnessing social media, task automation, and other aspects of your business. That’s why we have come up with a list of 10 must-have tools for anyone running a business. Let’s take a look at them:
ProofHub
ProofHub is a powerful business management software that combines all the features you might need to take care of your business. It makes it easy to visualize your tasks and track their progress easily. Plus, it acts as a central place for your tasks, projects, and communications so that you can manage your work easier, smarter, and faster. Its mobile app can be used by both Android and iOS users on the go and stay on top of everything.
Top features:
- Effective project and task management
- Gantt charts to keep your projects on track
- Dynamic reports to get clear insights
- Time tracking to track time spent on tasks
HubSpot CRM
It’s hard for small and medium-sized businesses to find the right CRM taking into account limited resources and budget. Hubspot’s free CRM is very user-friendly and comes with a lot of features that are often paid in other CRM software. It comes with powerful marketing, sales and service suites that can be easily integrated and offer increased functionality. You can sort deals won and lost, appointments scheduled, and contracts sent over any time period, and track performance against parameters you set.
Top features:
- Manage your work with full visibility
- Automatic log sales activity
- Easily syncs with your mailbox
- Integrate various tools, data, and processes in one place
Google Keyword Planner
Search engine optimization plays an important role to help you reach the right customers with the right keywords and increase your website traffic. So, it makes sense to opt for a keyword tool like Google Keyword Planner and boost your business growth. This tool gives you valuable insights that help you to focus on the right keywords, see what people are searching for, and determine the competition around a specific keyword. Such information is helpful in getting more visitors to your website and increase their chances to convert into customers.
Top features:
- Search words and phrases related to your product
- Compare keyword trends
- Create ad groups and set bids for each keyword
GrowthBot
GrowthBot is a free chatbot that helps marketers, sales executives, and others to grow their business with a quick access to information and services. If you want to look up some information on a company or search relevant keywords for the next blog, just ask GrowthBot. It will get you quick answers from a dozen of systems and provide you the required information.
Top features:
- Easy access to information and services
- Quick to set up and easy to use
- Easily integrable with multiple tools
Wave
Financial matters are the most important thing when it comes to managing businesses. If you don’t want to waste your time filling excel sheets, then it’s high time you should get help from a financial software like that of Wave. Hundreds of professionals and businesses are already using Wave to create and send professional invoices, estimates and receipts in seconds. The billing and reporting features would help you manage both your finances and business smoothly.
Top features:
- Track status of invoices and statuses
- Useful reports and dashboards for better insights
- 100% free software
Netsuite
Netsuite is a business management suite being used by more than 40,000 large, mid-sized, and small fast-growing businesses. It comes with a wide range of functionalities for ERP, financials, CRM and more. Popular for its flexibility, you can scale up or give it a spin-off easily with NetSuite and make it work for your business just the way you would want it to be. Whether you are an entrepreneur or a budding startup, it will provide you a customizable, customer-specific, and pixel-perfect experience.
Top features:
- Effective project accounting, resource, and expense management
- Flexible and customizable
- Cloud-based, mobile-enabled, and social
Optimizely
Needless to say that business owners must keep check of the continuously changing behaviors of customers to be on the top of their game. You can replace digital guesswork with evidence-based optimization and drive more results from your current visitors. Known as one of the world’s leading experimentation platform, the tool enables you to power every experiment across the customer experience on any device.
Top features:
- Faster and easier A/B and multivariate experiments
- Delivers marketing driven business results
- Launch digital experiences with evidence-based decisions
- Easily achieve up to 5x increase in yield
Boomerang
Boomerang is one of those must-have tools that lets you take control of when to send and receive email messages. With Boomerang, you can write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time. There are times you need to make sure you follow up within a specific time frame and it reminds you to do just that. If you wish to have a clean and organized mailbox, start using Boomerang and boost your productivity.
Top features:
- It uses artificial intelligence to help you write better and actionable emails
- Stops new email from coming into your Inbox until you’re ready for it
- Communicate seamlessly with people in different time zones
Manager.io
Manager.io is a free accounting software that helps businesses to take care of their accounts, billing, invoicing, account payables, expense claims and much more. It is simple and quite functional software.
Top features:
- A comprehensive free accounting software
- Getting started requires a few configurations
- Saves time and money
- It has no time limits, no usage limits, no ads
- Available for download on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux
Evernote Business
Whether you’re managing a project, capturing ideas from a brainstorm, or coordinating with a remote team, Evernote Business keeps everyone on the same page. It is a cloud-based office productivity software that lets you connect with remote teams so that anyone can access the information they need in an instant from any part of the world.
Top features:
- Team Spaces for sharing and collaboration
- Unlimited users and devices
- View and restore previous versions of notes
- Central admin console for permission management