Today, over half of North American and Europe businesses expect their spending on technology to increase yearly. In our tech-focused world, there’s no reason why small businesses shouldn’t take advantage of operations software.
Whether you’re looking to streamline sales or improve internal communications, software can help your business expand and increase profits. But with so many apps to choose from, how do you know which software to invest in?
To help you decide, we’ve compiled a list of the five best apps for small businesses.
HubSpot CRM
An extensive CRM should be on top of the priority list for all businesses. As a small business owner, Hubspot CRM can help you organise your contacts and business relationships and identify new contacts. When you’ve scaled your business, the software will also help you to streamline your sales strategy with detailed reports about sales activity and performance.
Timely
Ever considered how much time your business might be wasting? Timely can help with that by automatically tracking you and your team’s workdays, whether you’ve spent it in meetings or working on spreadsheets. You can also make visual calendars, ensuring you get the most suitable employees for every high-pressure task. This insight can help you extract every bit of value out of your billable hours.
Asana
Asana is one of the most popular project management apps around. Its easy-to-use app can help you track projects and tasks across your team and ensure you meet deadlines. But that’s not all; Asana can also help you automate specific work tasks to reduce errors and improve productivity.
Slack
Keeping in touch with all your employees can be challenging, especially if your team work remotely or if you deal with a lot of large projects. Slack can be your ‘digital HQ’, offering you a digital space where you can easily communicate with employees and stay organised if you’re managing different clients or projects in specific channels.
Trello
While Asana can help streamline more extensive projects, you might be looking for a more straightforward service to help with task management if you’re still a small business. Trello allows you to create team boards for different projects, utilising a Kanban-style organisation, so it’s easy to see which tasks are incomplete, which are in progress, and which have been completed. It’s a handy way to see where your projects currently sit and which team members are at work on which tasks.
Our Advice
Software can certainly make your business operations more efficient and improve your employees’ work days. However, you don’t necessarily need to invest in every piece of software to enhance your business operations.
To help you decide, evaluate where your business is currently failing. Do you find time management difficult? Or struggle to communicate effectively with your employees? Reflecting on how your company operates presently can help you land on software that will be worth the investment.
