5 Tools to Make Your Company More Efficient – in this article our experts review their takes on which tools are the most effective at driving productivity and efficiency for small businesses and startup teams.
You want your company to run as efficiently as possible and bring in as much revenue as possible without overworking your team. No matter which industry you’re in, your team should have a simple yet reliable group of tools that make your workday easier and allow you to free up time to focus on what really matters. There are a handful of tools that can make your company more efficient, ranging from internal messaging platforms to automation platforms and project management tools. We’ve rounded up five tools that will make your company more efficient, including Zapier, Slack, AirTable, ClickUp, and HubSpot. Let’s get started!
Zapier
Zapier is the best tool for automating tasks, connecting your tools to one another, and ultimately, freeing up your time. By automating traditionally manual workflows, you’ll be able to spend more time on the actionable outcome rather than the time-consuming processes. Zapier works through a process referred to as a “zap,” which is essentially a workflow based on triggers to get information from point A to point B. Zapier cuts out a lot of time typically spent on data collection, data entry, and task management by streamlining your entire process with automation.
Zapier Pricing: Depending on how many tasks you need to automate, your price tier for Zapier will change. However, Zapier has an excellent free tier for those teams who only want to automate ~100 tasks per month. The more complex your tasks and the more tasks you want to automate, the higher the price, but that’s to be expected!
Slack
Slack is every startup’s best friend. In fact, even enterprise businesses are adopting Slack as their company communication platform. It’s one of the easiest internal chat platforms, with a surplus of plugins and apps available to customize to your business’ needs. Slack is excellent for messaging, calls, video chats, and group chats, which will allow your team to spend less time emailing (and waiting for responses) and spend more time communicating more efficiently.
One great feature of Slack is its Workflow Automation. When you integrate Slack workflow automation into your existing work, you’re able to automate the manual tasks that you’d normally be discussing and planning in Slack, then putting into action within an additional platform. By triggering the workflow within Slack, you can remove some steps in your process. Slack has some workflows already set-up that you can apply to your workspace, such as adding new deals to your CRM with Zapier, sending information to Google Sheets, tracking product issues with Jira, and more.
Slack Pricing: Slack is a tool that is technically free, forever. However, if you want more features and capabilities, they have three additional pricing tiers.
AirTable
AirTable is a popular project management tool used by a wide variety of teams and businesses. AirTable is essentially a highly interactive and responsive spreadsheet. Whether you’re a marketing team, product team, or sales team, AirTable will take your project management and data collection to the next level.
Not only do AirTable bases (spreadsheets) talk to one another, but they integrate with other apps that are already in your software toolkit. AirTable has a robust marketplace of apps, many of which are powered by GitHub. You can turn your data into charts, pivot tables, and even collaborative Miro whiteboards. With AirTable, you can outline projects, stakeholders, timelines, deliverables, analyze data, and more. Nearly anything you’d do in a traditional spreadsheet, you can do it in AirTable, with more features and capabilities.
Airtable Pricing: AirTable is a very affordable tool, no matter the size of your team. The highest pricing tier is $20/month, but even the free version of their platform offers many benefits and can help make your team more efficient.
ClickUp
These days, there are a lot of apps and platforms to choose from. While it can get overwhelming, it is possible to simplify the tools you’re using while also increasing efficiency. For teams who want to keep everything in one place and limit the number of tools they use, ClickUp is the solution. ClickUp is a one-stop-shop for nearly all of your team’s needs. You can manage projects, teams, time, produce reports, and more, all in one place. ClickUp has a public API and integrates with the productivity tools you’re already using, and they have an entire integrations library. By leveraging ClickUp’s platform, you can improve your workflows and minimize the locations in which your data lives.
ClickUp Pricing: Like many of the tools on this list, there is a free tier, forever, with unlimited tasks and unlimited users. If you want to scale your team’s capabilities in ClickUp, there are additional pricing tiers for you to choose from.
HubSpot
Whether your company is just beginning and you’re looking to scale, or your company is looking for a new CRM, HubSpot is a great place to begin your search. HubSpot is great for marketing, sales, and customer service teams who want to get a lot done with one robust tool. HubSpot hosts your website, blog, social media, email marketing, help desk, chatbot, and sales activity management.
Additionally, HubSpot has a well-rounded list of partner applications and integrations that will help you customize your experience and give your teams the extra boost they need to get their jobs done.
HubSpot Pricing: HubSpot has free tools for Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, and CRM. As you continue to grow your team and your business, HubSpot grows with you, and offers a full suite of tools that will help improve your productivity and efficiency across your org.
These five tools will help you make your business more efficient by automating traditionally manual tasks and saving your team more time. The best part about these tools is that they are all affordable and integrate with many of the tools you already use. With the right workflow set up, you can make a number of platforms communicate with one another, ultimately increasing your productivity and efficiency. If you want even more help to automate your workflows, reach out to Workload’s team of automation experts.
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