9 Small Business Tools Your Growing Teams Need

Connecting with customers on social media is a must for small businesses. These relationships make it easier to market to customers and prospects, build brand awareness, and deliver responsive customer service.

But managing multiple social media accounts can get stressful: You have to remember when to post, what to post, and what you’ve already posted. That’s where social media management tools can help.

These tools allow you to schedule your social media posts in advance, posting on a certain day at a certain time. Consistency, which is one of the keys to success with social media, is the greatest gain from these tools. By using this small business tool, you are better able to consistently update your content across all of your platforms and improve user engagement.

The learning curve for automation tools isn’t steep since most take a plug-and-play approach and are user-friendly. A great option is Hootsuite.

Closing sales is the foundation of any business’ success. Sales software tools provide insights that help you move through the sales cycle more quickly. In this way, sales intelligence, lead generation, sales prospecting, and sales communication can all benefit from technology.

One of the most powerful sales tools that small businesses can implement is a customer relationship management platform, known as a CRM. This software differentiates stagnant businesses from those that grow and succeed long term. A CRM platform should be a single source of truth that keeps all your customer data organized so you can focus on your customer relationships, view their entire lifecycle, and collate their interactions with your company. With this focus, you can close more sales and grow your business.

Managing the financial aspects of a small business is an important task that must be done accurately. Financial management technology can minimize the time spent in the books, while also helping to ensure you are making smart financial decisions.

There are small business tools that can create efficiencies in areas that are important to your company’s financial success, including accounting, payroll, budgeting, billing, and financial analysis. Payroll software, as an example, tracks your hourly team members’ time and can automatically send payments, at a specified time, to all your hourly and salaried staff.

The best financial management software also handles tasks like benefits and regulatory compliance. If, for example, you have a contract with a government agency that has strict rules regarding what constitutes overtime pay, the payroll automation tool can apply the government’s parameters and ensure everyone who works overtime is paid fairly — no spreadsheets or manual calculations necessary.

How, exactly, do these tools help a small business owner? Take the payroll management example. Payroll is a laborious process prone to mistakes, and by investing in a good payroll system, instead of doing everything manually, you decrease the chance of errors, create efficiencies, and streamline your payroll process.

Hiring is a major process for all businesses. It can be especially difficult for small businesses that face unique challenges, such as the lack of dedicated human resources professionals and processes that aren’t compliant. These problems are exacerbated by the heavy administrative activities necessary in HR management.

Supporting your small business with HR management software will relieve some of the administrative pressure on the people who perform HR duties. In the long run, it can help your business grow from the inside out.

Solid internal communication helps maintain maximum productivity in a small business. Though there may not be many employees, they all need to be connected to each other and moving in the same direction for a business to succeed.

Effective internal communication ensures that your employees are working collaboratively towards a common goal. It develops a cohesive culture and enables employees to make the right decisions in line with the organization’s goals.

There are different types of internal communication tools that would work with any size business. Some of the more common ones are:

• Intranets: This is essentially a company’s own private internet that facilitates the use of multiple collaboration tools in a business. Happeo is a popular option, and it integrates with Google Workspace (which includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, and more).
• Messaging tools: These platforms allow co-workers to chat in real time as opposed to sending emails back and forth.

The internal communication tools you choose for your business depend on your processes and goals.

Much of today’s economy is functioning in a paperless environment. This can be a dramatic shift for small businesses as they outgrow their paper processes and transition to a paperless business. Still, it’s a move that can have positive results: Going paperless streamlines processes and centralizes information for easier access.

With the transition comes the need for tech tools to manage electronic documents. Document management systems (DMS) help companies digitize, store, manage, and track documents, data objects, and images electronically. The greatest benefit of these tools is that they allow you to centralize your documents while providing security to protect them from digital privacy invasions.

Then, you can use software like DocuSign or SignX to electronically sign documents, which makes it easier to conduct business, and even hire people, remotely.

Most of these small business tools are based in the cloud or have cloud-based options, since most businesses use cloud-based software for website analytics, non-website analytics, marketing automation, file sharing, and Salesforce automation tools.

What is cloud computing? When people talk about information being stored on the cloud or being connected through the cloud, they are referring to software and services that run on the internet instead of on your computer.

The biggest advantage of using the cloud is that you can access your information from any device, at any time, from anywhere. You don’t have to be logged in to a particular device. The cloud also frees up storage on your devices, including servers, and gives you more flexibility in your workspace. The only downside is that if you can’t connect to the internet, you won’t have access to the cloud or your cloud-based programs.

Using the cloud is especially useful for small-business owners who work from home, for employees who work remotely, and for people who work while traveling. Harnessing the cloud allows everyone to stay connected and grow the business even when they are on the move.

Small business owners who embrace the power of technology and its tools can get ahead of their competitors. These tools are the key to future-proofing small businesses. That’s why small business owners must take the time to learn about these tools and understand what role each one can play in growing their company.