When it comes to small business administration, you may have to wear multiple hats and what you would like to do is save money and time on what you do. Fortunately, it is now possible with many technological tools that come with the businesses’ help to execute their tasks in a more effective, automated way and save a lot of time and money to be reinvested into other progressive areas.
For this article, we have interviewed a few successful small business owners. They have put forth many options to grow a small business with different tools, which fall into 7 major categories. Here we are trying to enlist those standard categories of business management tools for small business owners to explore these and identify the best suiting tools for their purpose.
Categories of business management tools
#1: Task management tools
There are many easy-to-use tools and identified by many small business entrepreneurs as a cost-effective way for business administration. Tools under this category will let you track the planning and execution of administrative and operational tasks digitally rather than doing them manually. This is a boon to the busy entrepreneurs who want to effectively utilize their time in progressive and visionary tasks rather than the daily operational tasks. It will also help the business admins to track their own and other team members’ activities in real-time to gauge the progress.
The top tool for task management online, like Trello and Asana, will help the business admins stay on top of their to-do lists, schedules, and project management. It is possible to set reminders and one-click updates on these so that there is no need to check every little thing on your own. These tools can also be integrated with similar tools others use so that every team member will remain on the same page.
#2. Email and social marketing tools
It is possible to automate many of the marketing tasks using intelligent tools so that the business owners may focus more on developmental activities. Email marketing platforms like MailChimp and Aweber will let you keep your mail subscribers alerted about the latest offers and news about your business. Email Marketing Systems (EMS) can also effectively push out mail newsletters based on the set schedules and engaging with the social networks.
Social media scheduler tools like HootSuite and Buffer will let you schedule the posts to go out in the desired time without wanting you to stay behind it. Without setting foot on actual social media sites by yourself, you can also avoid any distractions and stay focused on your marketing campaigns. With these tools, one can set up social media posts for a week or even a month in advance and use the automated scheduling system to push your promotions at the right time. Flosum consultants can suggest better tools for your business administration.
#3. To schedule meetings
Setting up and executing the meetings successfully mean a lot in terms of effective business management. There is a lot of communication required to an email and messaging back and forth to set up a meeting with various parties at an agreed-upon time. The scheduler tools like Acuity and Calendly etc., will help to automate this process by bringing them all on the same page in terms of meeting schedules. You may set up the meeting and share the link with other people who can also pick from the available time slots to set up the meet.
#4. E-Signatures on documents
In the modern-day global business environment, it is impossible to get the physical signature of the concerned on every document like agreements and contracts, etc. So, tools like DocuSign and HelloSign can help with it. With the use of these tools, you may upload your documents and note where the signatures are needed, add an email address, and the system will generate the signed documents for you. It will also ping the authorized persons with reminders if there are documents to be signed at a specific time. With a good E-signature tool, there is no hassle for enterprise people to sign documents physically or wait for the post office to open to get your contract documents in a hurry.
#5. Manage business clients
To gather and retain business clients and uncover the hidden revenue, you may use good Customer Relationship Management or CRM platforms like SalesForce, Hubspot, Insightly, etc. These can be your invaluable resources in business client management. A good CRM will track potential customers and interact with them through the sales funnels. These platforms also have advanced tools to nurture your relationships with them.
Usage of CRM will also help you to make some solid decisions based on data instead of intuition. You can see the customers in real-time and track them to gain some actionable insights about them. You can also view the contracts based on specific data points like the type of product they are interested in or the region where they are located. With this, you will be able better to target them with personalized follow-up messages for repeat business. This approach will make your marketing results go much farther with minimal effort.
#6. Document collaborator
In enterprise management, you need to collaborate with many others and different teams, whereas online file-sharing platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive are of great help. These are digital tools, which will ensure that all working on the same version of office documents can access the same updated version of the same. Shared docs prevent anyone’s document repository from getting clogged with various versions of the same document and creating confusion.
You can also work in real-time on the documents and view what other peoples have added to the docs. You may also manipulate these documents by assigning privileges to other team members to view only, view and edit, add, update, or delete documents, etc. Apart from internal teams, you can also use these tools to collaborate with clients and vendors to keep track of what everyone involved may need.
Similarly, there are plenty of technological options that will make your small business administration much quicker and effortless. However, you need to learn the features in each and be savvy with the technical aspects to leverage these at best.
