The 8 Best Software and Tools for Businesses in 2020
For many business owners, choosing the right software and tools that will take care of the tedious details seems like one of the most difficult tasks. The market is filled with awesome products that help streamline business processes, thus letting you focus on more important things, which makes the decision even more complicated.
And still, it’s a decision that has to be made.
If you need some help, we’ve compiled a list of software solutions and tools that might help narrow down your choice.
1. ETL
ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) is a three-step process of extracting data from various sources, cleansing it according to a business’ requirements, and loading it into a database for performing analytics.
ETL solutions provide better business insights, thus allowing business owners and managers to make data-driven decisions.
If you’re looking for an ETL solution for your business, this list of best ETL tools will help you to make detailed comparisons before deciding which one is the best for you.
2. Collaboration Solution
SharePoint is a website-based collaboration system that uses list databases, workflow applications, and other features to enable teams to work together. SharePoint also allows companies to automate workflow processes and control access to information.
Migration to SharePoint helps increase the overall productivity and reduce the costs of a company’s digital workplace.
However, if not done right, moving from one tech platform to another can seriously damage your business. That’s why you should consider using professional Microsoft SharePoint migration services.
Companies that offer such services will plan the entire process from start to finish and will make sure that your business doesn’t have to go through any disruptions before you get used to your new configuration.
3. Lead Generation Tool
Sales statistics say that the most challenging aspects of salespeople’s jobs include prospecting (nearly 40%), closing (about 30%), identifying leads (nearly 20%), and qualifying leads (more than 15%). In addition, only about 30% of sales agents’ productive hours are spent talking to prospects. Most of them reported spending much of their time writing emails, entering data, and researching leads.
Having a lead generation software can significantly boost your sales team’s efficiency.
Lead generation software is a solution that enables you to automatically generate and collect leads, and then route them to your marketing or sales teams for conversion.
Leads can be found and generated from various channels, like social media, landing pages, or email, so there are different types of lead generation tools (for example, you can choose a social media-focused lead generation solution). However, there are also solutions that offer all-in-one lead generation as well as marketing automation.
Having a lead generation tool offers a number of benefits. By choosing the right option for your company, you will be able to generate and convert more quality leads from various channels, boost conversion rates, expand your customer base, and increase sales.
4. Internal Communication
Tools like Slack provide a single, centralized place where all the team members can work together and communicate. They allow every team member to reach out to another one individually or as a group, thus providing seamless interaction across the entire organization. Depending on the type of business you own, your employees can use the mobile app version, helping your team adjust and stay connected even on the go.
5. Email Management
Too many business owners, opening the inbox (nevermind responding to emails) seems impossible. There’s just never enough time!
But missing emails can mean death for your business because every one of those emails might mean a growth opportunity that you had failed to seize. An email management tool will help you stay on top of your inbox at all times. It automatically tags your emails and resurfaces them in case either you or the sender doesn’t follow up within a given time frame.
6. Social Media Management
As you might already know, being present on social media is a must for any business. Social media is one of the most important channels for a business to reach new customers and set itself apart from the competition. But how do you manage all those social platforms?
Social media management tools like Buffer will help you schedule all your posts at once and analyze the results each of them is bringing for clicks and engagement.
In addition, monitoring solutions like Mention help you to keep track of what people are saying about your brand. These tools pull in conversations from around the internet into a simple dashboard with an easy-to-export capability, so you can have an insight of what is happening around your brand in the online world.
7. Accounting Software
Accounting is probably a soft spot for any business. You need to have a record of how your business is doing but it can really look messy. Accounting software solutions like Wave and Freshbooks will help you simplify things by offering a seamless way to record payments and invoices, allowing for collaboration between team members, and providing easy-to-understand analytics.
8. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
What better way to find out more about your customers than with customer relationship software? CRM is a database that allows you to store insights and notes and gets updated every time your employers contact a customer.
Final Thoughts
Most entrepreneurs tend to juggle with many tasks at once, risking to overlook important things and decrease the overall efficiency.
Luckily, the advent of business technology offers busy business owners a number of solutions that will improve organizational skills and increase the team’s productivity on every level.
These software solutions and tools will take over certain daunting and boring tasks, allowing you to focus on what you do best – growing your business!
