Top tech tools for small businesses
TBTech takes a look at the top tech tools that help small businesses thrive
Technology is one of the best tools that small businesses can incorporate into its business. Online ordering, mobile payments, and contactless transactions are now the norm and this will continue to increase. Unlike large businesses that tend to be slow with digital transformation, small businesses can quickly implement new technological tools into their everyday operations. For a small business, technology can help in reducing costs and increasing its customer base.
Here are some of the top tech tools that will help small businesses thrive:
Communication:
Slack
Slack helps teams stay connected and make important decisions quickly by providing one place for all work communication. Slack gives employees access to real-time conversations with teammates, partners, vendors, clients and more. Unlike email, where every new message is given equal weight, it’s easy to grab a specific person’s attention with a notification when you need a quick response. Slack also helps connect all business work tools making it easier to find information or perform quick actions without leaving conversations. In addition to this, it has become easier and more efficient to send various types of files.
“Slack has become the backbone for facilitating secure collaboration and social connection across our enterprise. We’ve seen a significant reduction in email usage, and teams are communicating more effectively.”
Vijay Sankaran, Former CIO, TD Ameritrade
Project management:
Asana
Asana helps teams organize its work, from daily tasks to strategic initiatives. With Asana, teams are more confident, faster, and achieve more with less, no matter where they are located. More than 107,000 paying organizations and millions of organizations across 190 countries rely on Asana to manage everything from company objectives to digital transformation to product launches and marketing campaigns.
Asana can help small businesses:
- Track progress
- Improve collaboration
- Stay on schedule
- Streamline communication
“There are three main benefits of using Asana for our team. We became more efficient, we are able to contain our communications in a shared space, and we are able to cross-functionally collaborate better than ever before.”
Catherine Galutera, Marketing Operations Team Lead, GoodRx
Trello
Powering a productive team means using a powerful tool. From meetings and projects to events and goal setting, Trello’s intuitive features give any team the ability to set up and customize workflows for just about anything quickly. Trello can be used to manage internal teams as well as various freelancers, and makes it 10x easier to communicate with them. It also allows businesses to easily connect the apps that teams already use into their Trello workflow or add a Power-Up that helps fine-tune one specific need.
“Very simple to use, great automation and keeps me on track with all I need to do. I also like that it can be shared with others.”
Kerry Parker-Evans, IT Project Manager, Egencia
Marketing/presentation:
vMix
vMix is a Software Video Mixer and Switcher that utilizes the latest advances in computer hardware to provide live HD video mixing, a task previously only possible on expensive dedicated hardware mixers. vMix also functions as live streaming software that allows businesses to publish live productions directly to the Internet. Whether it is big budget live concert productions, small webcasts, client presentations, vMix is a great tool to incorporate into a small business.
“I use vMix to improve my virtual presentations. If you’re making a pitch, you don’t want to look like just another lame Zoom call. vMix allows you to give your presentations bells and whistles that will make it stand out. It’s not very expensive and the company has tons of “how-to” videos.”
Rick DeBruhl, Communication Consultant
Hubspot
HubSpot’s CRM platform has all the tools and integrations businesses need for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. Each product in the platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when using them together.
The various hubs provide the business with:
- Marketing software to help grow and convert traffic, run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale, and achieve unparalleled alignment with the sales team.
- Sales software to help sales team eliminate friction from their process and achieve cross-functional alignment. Get deeper insights into prospects, automate the repetitive tasks, and close more deals faster.
- Content management software that’s flexible for marketers, powerful for developers, and gives customers a personalized, secure experience.
- Customer service software enables businesses to scale its customer support, unite front office teams, and provide proactive service that delights and retains customers.
- Operations software lets businesses easily sync customer data and automate business processes. Get one unified view of every customer interaction so it can deliver frictionless customer experiences.
“HubSpot is truly a life-saver–and its CRM is free. It gives us a 360 view of our customers and suppliers and we can also see the whole team’s interactions on a real-time basis. We use it to track our leads and ongoing conversations. It means that we can operate transparently and it also saves us time. Without it, we would be significantly less organized.”
Francesca Yardley, Threads
READ MORE:
- Why small businesses would benefit from the cloud
- Top 6 trends that will drive small business in 2022
- From Surviving to Thriving: Utilising EPOS Technology to Navigate Pandemic Recovery
- Dropbox continues building tools to keep you organised at work and home
Security:
LastPass
LastPass provides businesses and its employees with effortless password management. Unfortunately, 80% of data breaches are caused by weak, reused or stolen passwords. Excellent business password hygiene and practices are necessary to avoid data breaches. However, traditional password management practices can be overwhelming for both employees and admins. LastPass Business empowers a businesses workforce by reducing friction for users and IT teams. Save time by simplifying employee password management while granting admins actionable oversight, from advanced reporting to 100+ customizable security policies.
“We have teams of people spread out around the world and some departments use the same tools that share the same password. LastPass allows us to easily and securely create passwords that are being shared across departments. We established a process when creating a new credential that forces our team members to use the “auto-generated” password option within LastPass so we avoid any random “12345” less secure passwords.”
Javier Vasquez, Revenue Manager, Dharna Home Suites
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