- Are you a small business
owner or an entrepreneur? If so, you know how valuable
it is to save time and money. That's why in this video, I'm gonna share with you seven
different types of software that every single small
business needs to know and I'm gonna be giving
you a recommendation in each of those categories. Hello, everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done and enjoy less stress. And if you own or
operate a small business, well, then you have customers. And if you have customers, you need a customer
relationship management system, better known as a CRM. Why is a CRM system so important to you? Will you need a centralized place to keep track of all of your clients, even if many of them are
just prospective clients? And when you're dealing with clients, you need to deal with, well,
deals getting to the end sale, no matter what that product or no matter what that service
is that you're selling. Here I am within the Bigin CRM system, which is especially designed for small business
owners and entrepreneurs. Now, Bigin is developed by Zoho CRM, which is one of the most popular and well-reviewed CRMs on the planet. However, Zoho CRM, along
with some other CRM, such as Salesforce, may be
much too much for your needs and also a little expensive. So at the fraction of the cost and with small business owners in mind, Bigin might be the ideal solution for you. So, here we have a list of different deals that I have going on. And why is this so important
within your CRM system? Well, you want to know exactly where someone is within your funnel, within your pipeline as we see here. So for example, I've got a
client which is qualified. Maybe they've reached out to
me for an initial conversation, but then I've got other clients here where I've actually given
them a quote or a proposal. I can quickly and easily see where people are within this stage and hopefully, move them
on along this process until the deal is won and they actually become a paid customer. But the great thing here is
that all of your contacts and those contacts if they
belong to other companies, stay in a single place. So for example, if I open
up this deal right here, I can see further details
in terms of the history of this deal, when it was added and what was going on within this deal, I can take notes and even
see an email history here right here within Bigin. But the great thing is, is that my contact information
stays here as well. So if I click on Alison over here, I'm gonna jump over to
the Contact section. I can see all that
information here as well. So whether she is a brand new customer, whether she's a returning customer, I've got a complete history here, right within my CRM system. Now, the second type of software, I think every small business
needs is a scheduling tool, a quick and easy way for you to book things with your clients, or maybe just people that
help you with your business. In my case, my recommendation is Calendly. I've been using Calendly
for a number of years to make booking, meetings and also booking consulting sessions with myself that much easier. And you've probably
booked a Calendly meeting with someone else even if you're not
currently a Calendly user. So for example, I can share this link and
my users can go directly to this screen and book times
that are most convenient for you. Now, the great thing is, is that I can set up a number of rules as to when someone can book
me, not just the times of day, but also which days of the week and how far out they can book. In this example, you can see that no one can book me on Mondays or Wednesdays, I've reserved that for other activities, but you can also see, they can't book me beyond
the 13th of October, why? Because I've set up a rule that I only want to allow people to book me 21 days in advance. So it's convenient for me,
the person sharing that link, but it's also convenient for
the user who can pick a day that suits them. They can pick a time and select Confirm, and then enter in their details here. And added bonus is that Calendly
makes it very easy for us to add payments directly to our booking. So in this case, if I am hosting or inviting
someone to a consulting session, and I want to make sure
that they complete payment as a part of the booking process, I can do so right here within Calendly. Now, setting up your meetings
is one thing, but next up, you're gonna have to
actually have these meetings. So the next essential piece of software is a video conferencing tool. Now, there's a number of
tools for you to choose from, but for me, my standard
has been Zoom Meetings. In fact, I've been a zoom
user since roughly 2016. I use it for virtually all of my meetings and also for hosting my
webinars and other events. Zoom is my choice because not only is it
easy to launch a meeting and manage an admin and set
all of the controls here, but I also find it's easiest
for my clients to engage with. Let me start this new meeting right here, and let me say hello, there
I am within my Zoom Meeting. So of course, you wanna choose a tool where it's easy and
quick for you to set up either a one-time meeting
or recurring meetings, but maybe just as
important is how easy it is for your clients or the people
that you're meeting with to join that meeting. And in my experience, Zoom is the easiest of
all of the major players. It doesn't matter if the people that I'm meeting with have
advanced technology skills or they're basic users. I find that everyone finds
Zoom very easy to deal with, and it has become just such of a standard over the past two years. So you're looking for something
that is quick, simple, and easy, Zoom Meetings would
be my video conferencing tool of choice. But now that you're having
all of these meetings, you probably have a number
of projects on your plate. So let's see what I recommend when it comes to project management. Now, there are many different
project management tools to choose from but if you're a small team, if you have less than 10 employees, my recommendation would be to
start off with Trello, why? I find that Trello has the
shortest learning curve so that you and other members
of your team can get going and actually get stuff
done in the first few days. You don't have to wait weeks or months to get used to the system, you can start seeing
the benefits right away. Now at first glance, you may think that this
looks an awful lot, like the CRM we looked at at
the beginning of the video. And in many ways, most Trello boards are
designed for a similar concept of dragging a task or dragging a project from left to right. But unlike the Bigin CRM
that we talked about earlier, in this case, we are
talking about projects. So these don't represent new deals, in this particular example, this represents things that
you're actually working on. So maybe you need to
redesign your website, maybe you need to use a
project management tool to manage all of your
content, for example. Trello is an ideal place to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that you can move things through their different processes. Trust me, as someone who's been providing
Trello consulting services for nearly 10 years, I have yet to find an industry that can not benefit from
using the Trello system. So now that your business
is up and running, and you have customers, and you're selling products and services, it's so important for you to keep in touch with your customers or to
reach out and communicate with prospective clients. And with that, you're going to
need an email marketing tool. Now, there's a number of tools out there at various price points
and different features but Mailchimp might be
the best place to start. It's almost that perfect
balance between costs but also with how easy
it is for you to set up and get going. So here I am within my
Mailchimp dashboard, and the great thing about an
email marketing tool is that, it manages all of those subscriptions and people who sign up
for your newsletters or future announcements, which you want to send to. But the great thing is, is that not only does it make it easy for you to send out mass communications, you can see detailed
statistics on those messages. So for example, here, I'm taking a look at some
data from a previous campaign, I can see quickly and easily,
what was the open rate, for example, on this particular email, What were the clicks per unique open? How many total clicks? And other statistics that
are gonna be helpful for me. But if I click this
campaign in particular, I can go into a little
more detail as well. Now, one of my favorite pieces of data that I like to look at right here within MailChimp is Click Performance. Meaning, where did people actually click on the email itself? So in this particular campaign, this particular message which I sent out, I was encouraging people
to go to this link. In fact, there was only one
destination within this email, but if I view the click map, you can see, I actually gave them
a few different places to access that link, a few
traditional links here, I also included a button. And now beside it, I can see what percentage of the people who clicked, chose which option, so this is gonna be really helpful for me as I'm creating new emails and
new campaigns in the future. So for example, it looks like this Register Now button with this green color right in the middle, was perhaps the most successful but not too far behind was
this very first link here as well. So great data, great details that I can use to market to
my clients and my customers. But of course, email is not the only way in
which you run your business. You want to make sure you have a presence on social media as well, so you're going to need
a social media manager. In this case, we're
taking a look at Buffer, which I use to manage and schedule out all of my social media in advance. So, if you're not familiar
with a social media manager, what you can do, is connect your various
social media accounts. So for example, here,
on the left-hand side, I have a Facebook account
and Instagram account and a LinkedIn account, and then I can create
content and schedule it or set it up in a queue, so it goes out at specific
times or specific intervals. So here you can see in the
next few days on the next week, I've got some specific pieces of content, which will be posted
on my Facebook channel. And if I want to, I can post the exact same
thing across my channels, or be a lot more specific. If I click on the calendar
up here at the top, I'm just gonna take a
glance at the month view. Here, you can see a history
of all of the things, which I've posted in the last month. So I can go back and review
and also see the data from those postings as well. Something like Buffer
makes it so easy for us to create new content, all I need to do is click
up here on this space, select which channels, for
example, I want to include, maybe I want all three,
maybe I want just two. Write my content down below, maybe add an image or a
video and then schedule it or just send it all right
here from within Buffer. So not only is it going to save you time, it's going to keep you
engaged with your audience on your various social media channels. Last but not least, if
you run a small business, you need accounting
software, you need a tool, which is going to give you
an accurate representation of where your money is going and where your money is coming from. Now, my recommendation for you
is to use QuickBooks online, not only for its ease of use, but also for the number of integrations in which it connects with other tools that you may already use, including your bank
accounts, credit cards, and other tools that you're
using to receive payment. Trust me, you don't want to wait too long before starting to use a real
accounting piece of software. You don't wanna miss out
on those tax advantages and you also don't wanna come up short at the end of each month. Now, if you have questions
about any of the app categories or the specific tools in
which I've mentioned here in today's video, be sure to let me know in the comments down below. I hope you subscribe right here
to the Simpletivity channel and give this video a like. And remember, being productive does
not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
