Member Article

5 Tools for better Startup management

Every segment of business development brings new challenges and hardships. In recent years, software developers created hundreds of new apps, which help entrepreneurs tackle various business issues. In this article we reviewed 5 useful business apps that will increase your productivity and make your life easier.

WordPress – for publishing

Website publishing is the most essential part of every digital marketing strategy. Entrepreneurs need to prove their expertise by publishing niche-specific content on their web presentations. More than half of all web administrators use WordPress for web publishing tasks. This platform is the most popular blogging tool and content management system. Reason for such rising popularity of this CMS lies in its simple interface and many customization options.

Shift Planning – for creating staff schedules

Shift Planning is a very practical staff scheduling and workforce time attendance software. It allows entrepreneurs to create full employee schedules without using the MS Excel or other spreadsheet apps. At this very moment, more than 40,000 businesses use this software. Shift Planning’s impressive client list includes names like Chipotle, Kohl’s and ACE Hardware.

Managers can easily create shifts with Shift Wizard tool, which uses predefined rules. On the dashboard they can organize created shifts with practical drag and drop options. Shift Planner also allows managers to send schedules to all of their employees with only one click.

Salesforce – for customer relationship management

Most entrepreneurs think that customer relationship software is reserved for the Fortune 500 companies, but since Salesforce offers special packages for small businesses, even beginner entrepreneurs can use it for managing their customer contacts. Salesforce is very customizable, which can be a little bit intimidating for new users. Even its dashboard has several dozen report widgets that give you a bird’s eye of your company’s customer service performance. Some of the best Salesforce features include:

1. Contact management – loads and saves customer lists and keeps important data about each individual;
2. Lead generation – tracks marketing leads;
3. Opportunity management – used for managing opportunities and closing sales;
4. Forecasting – creates sales forecasts;
5. Mobile access – Salesforce dashboard can be accessed through full-featured Salesforce1 Mobile App;

Google Analytics – for website analytics

Entrepreneurs should master this app in order to collect useful insights from their websites. In recent years, Google Analytics introduced Pixel and several other features which allow web administrators to precisely measure their website’s conversion. Even with all these advanced features, Google Analytics is still a free app and that’s why it’s perfect for small businesses and new entrepreneurs. Bigger e-commerce enterprises, usually choose Kissmetrics, which provides more elaborated data about each individual who has visited their website.

MailChimp – for email marketing

Although some entrepreneurs have already buried email marketing, this marketing technique still represents a very efficient way for building customer loyalty, trust and brand awareness. Of course, spam emails won’t take you far, especially because new email platforms can easily single them out. New email marketing strategies require marketers to build interesting and niche-specific newsletters and use them for sharing their content and promoting their sales and discounts. MailChimp has advanced design tools and helps marketers build and maintain long lists of email contacts, completely free of charge.

These, and many other useful apps will increase your team’s productivity and speed up your business development. Most of these apps are very affordable (or even free), so they are ideal tools for small business entrepreneurs who don’t have enough funds to outsource some of their business departments.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Marcus Jensen .