There are very few things within your control when you are aiming to build a successful, sustainable company. You have no control over the market, regulatory authority, technological changes, competition and economy. But there are some internal factors you can control and in fact, aiming for excellence in these factors can take you to your goal easily. Now with cloud based tools, it is easy to excel with no necessity of accumulating any costlier assets. Let’s see how some cloud based tools can help start-ups function effectively and efficiently.
Business Communication: The easiest way to halt productivity is through ineffective or insufficient business communication. Miscommunications in business costs time, energy and revenue of the company but in a start-up, it can be the death knell. For start-ups G Suite might the best fit for your communication needs. It is offered in different tiers and versions at an attractive price. You get the flexibility of adding or subtracting subscriptions depending on fluctuations in employee numbers. It is easier to create documents and share them. Greater storage capacity, unlimited aliases, email address grouping are a few of the attractive features of G Suite. Get G Suite from https://gsuite.google.com/
Document Renewals & Tracking: In a start-up the number of employees will be limited and one gets to perform multi-tasks to get the company running. When you are in charge of managing various tasks, it is difficult to remember due dates starting with passport & visa expiries to contracts to vendors and recruitment agencies. Getting things together and finding a way to cut through the clutter saves time for more important tasks awaiting you. aladdinPRO is a cloud based expiry reminder app that can keep track of your renewals. One of the unique features of this app is that you can get email, mobile and desktop notifications after setting it up. It comes with two dashboards, the genie view and carpet view. While carpet view is for categorized views, genie view has expiry alerts, calendar and pie charts. It is easy to export or print this dashboard and easier to import records from Excel, Google and Outlook calendars. You can create user groups and assign categories to them, so specific notifications can be sent. Ex: Software expiry reminders to IT group and supplier contract expiries to finance group. This app also can store, categorize and tag your documents to save you time and work. To know more about aladdinPRO, click here.
Lead Management & CRM: Creating a solid customer base competing with innumerable local players and huge brands is the key to building a sustainable organization. A solid system of managing leads and bridging the gap between marketing and sales can help you towards your goal. HubSpot CRM helps you stop juggling between multiple tools to make sales calls, send emails, assign tasks, access contact details, follow up on leads and more without ever leaving HubSpot CRM. You can cut down on the amount of time you spend for sales call/email preparations as HubSpot CRM automatically publishes emails, recorded calls and sales notes to contact’s timeline, so you quickly find the right information to personalize your follow-up. It is also easy to track sales activity across the team with this. Click here to find out more about Hubspot CRM.
Project Management: When the members of a team who need to work together are on different pages, the stage is set for disaster. A company culture is in fact formed by how teams communicate, how decisions are made and how the company performs. Asana is another cloud based tool to improve team collaboration and project management by providing an efficient way to assign and handle tasks. It helps reduce email chains between team members by creating projects to be easily assigned, set a priority and deadline. Each member of the team’s course can be set with an ambitious deadline and charter a path to get to there. You can easily create visual project plans and see how every step maps over time. It is easy to know where work stands at any point and easily align the members on the team’s objectives. Trello is also another card-based project management tool but Asana is used for projects with a more rigorous approach. Trello can be used for side projects and even team vacation too. Try Trello at www.trello.com and Asana at www.asana.com
Invoicing & Billing: Invoicing is a time consuming business process and could become a complicated task if not done meticulously. Hiveage is a cloud-based invoicing and financial management software. It allows you to create, send and track invoices as well as process payments, generate financial reports, prepare quotations for clients, accept online payments and much more. Click here to see how Hiveage can help your business.
Budgeting: In the early stage of building the company, the unknown journey can often be overwhelming if an accurate budgeting is not done. Forecasting with very little historical information can often be very hard. As costs change, you can simply use Mint to adjust your figures and get your business and savings on track. Click here to see how Mint can help you stay organized and get ahead of taxes.
Internal training & Client prospecting: Working as a team requires communication & communication by emails take time. To save time, sending communications by video could be the best way. For every 10 seconds of video, you save 81 seconds of typing time. Loom does just that for you. You can train your team, on-board your customers, deliver client updates, do daily stand-ups, send team updates and more with Loom. Find out how Loom can make your work smarter and simpler by clicking here.
Client Feedback: The most difficult part of business is gathering client feedbacks. If you are a web design start-up, you can understand how difficult it is to receive feedback from the client on each and every item of their website design mock-ups. Click here to see how ProjectHuddle makes the job easy for you by helping you upload your design images, wireframes, mock-ups, logo sketches, photography, etc and allows you to collect visual feedback right on top of them.
