If you landed here it probably means you are looking for a way to be more time efficient when doing your job. This is usually to cut costs, but also avoiding doing slow and tedious tasks. But you’re in luck – down below we list the most important ways to become more efficient at work.
Letting technology handle repetitive and monotonous tasks can allow you to increase productivity. With fewer chances for mistakes, it’s easier to focus on more important, revenue-generating tasks. What’s more, it frees up human resources to focus on core business activities and revenue-generating activities.
1. Streamlining workflows with tech
A company that has been niching themselves towards workflows is HubSpot. HubSpot is a customer relationship management, sales, and marketing platform. They collect and organizes client information and daily customer interactions in one place.
But what HubSpot do really nifty are workflows. This allows your sales, marketing or customer service team to swiftly automate your business processes and make them operate more efficient. This could be by segmenting the sales leads into different funnels and target them with tailored content.
There are of course alternatives to HubSpot, but they have by far out grown competitors, especially since they are free. But in point 3 Webhooks in Slack, we discuss a different way of doing this.
2. CRMs
CRM (customer relationship management) are software platforms / apps that meets every prospect’s needs and helps businesses engage with prospective clients. This lets clients make the right moves on their own terms, which in itself turns prospects into clients and leads potential clients to take the next best action they need to.
A good CRM allows you to save information about both businesses and contacts. It would allow you to easily send out emails and invoices making all conversations and information readily available for everyone in the team.
3. Webhooks in Slack
Yes, we are presuming you are using Slack.. But let’s face it, most companies do. This point touches on the first one about workflows as you can use Slack webhooks in channels that you can have as a trigger you or someone in your team needs to take action. You can have what kind of action predetermined depending on what channel you have the webhook in.
A great example of this is Asana, Trello and Jira which can trigger messages when a task is closed. This helps aligning the team’s efforts and makes sure everyone is immediately looped in when tasks are completed. For example if one team member is waiting for someone else to finish a task up. But remember you need to work properly in the integrated task to make full use of them.
4. Design like a pro
One of our absolute favourite tools out there is Canva. They have a great free version, but they also offer an excellent and price worthy premium version. They allow you to be inspired and use thousands of templates.
In the premium version you may save your brand book so you can easily keep consistent, you are access to more designs and you can remove background with a simple click – on both movies and images. Canva makes all kinds of documentations easy to create – and in a far more superior design than what most business professionals could accomplish themselves. This includes important pitch decks and good looking invoices.
5. Use a proper language
Grammerly is a must use add on, This nifty plugin does not only corrects your spelling but it also tells you what tonality you have and what you should use. It’s so worth having this and ensuring you don’t make any silly spelling mistakes, even when you are just casually writing coworkers.
6. Next level translations
Let’s face it – we have all used Google Translate, and we have all laughed at some silly translations (even when those of us who do not master more than 1 language). Well, Google needs to watch out, there is a new kid on the block: Deep L. As for google, the better the original language the better the translations (hint use grammerly) but the give you suggestions to your translations.
They skip words that shouldn’t be translated (such as brand names). It’s smart & fast.
7. Detailed extension
Any SEO:er ought to have the detailed Google Chrome add on, but even if you aren’t an SEO:er you should still add this to your bookmark bar.
Mostly because you can look at the headings and links. This gives great insights in all kinds of business development and growth. In other words, it’s a great way to get a quick overview of your competitors and how they work.
8. Pricing made smart
Forget about advanced calculations or gut feeling when it comes to setting your prices. Priceagent is a pricing intelligence software that gives you real time data on actual pricing and your customers and/or potential customers ‘willingness to pay’. It is easy to use, you do not have to know how to conduct market research, not do you have to interpret data. You get to play around in graphs with an easy interface. The tool gives you recommendations in terms of the highest price points per demographics.
9. Databox
How about all your data in one dash board? Yes please! It’s so time consuming reviewing all your data points, then adding the KPIs to a Google sheet for tracking. Whether if it’s for your team, management group or board you can adjust the KPIs, and the same is of course true for your industry. Databox offers templates for different kinds of businesses so it’s both easy and fast to set up.
They have a broad integration with all the most popular business tools; HubSpot, Google ads, Facebook ads, Google Analytics, Stripe, Sales force, ahref and much more.
10. Project management
We already touched upon a few of these solutions in the 3rd point about web hooks in Slack, especially Asana, Click up and Trello have grown tremendously popular over the year. Different project tools fits different industries.
But a good project management platform can help you and your team organize your goals and tasks. A project management tool will ensure you stay up to date with what you have in your pipeline and up coming deadlines. Especially if you are working client facing, a project management tool can make it much easier for you to communicate with your clients.
11. Trend report tools
No matter what the industry you will need to keep up to date on what other people are searching for and interested in, that’s in relation to your industry or business. A few great ones are google trends, also asked and ubersuggest. Make sure you are up to date with issues and questions your customers are dealing with.
12. Social media management
If your business are like most that means you have an online presence across a variety of social media platforms. This is usually a headache to manage, login in and out of everywhere. But there are a bunch of handy online tools that allows you to manage all your businesses social media account from one place. Hootsuite is a great tool for your social media marketing campaign.
13. Converters
Sometimes we get documents in the wrong format, and some people spend hours copy pasting. Or worse, they rewrite everything by ‘hand’ in the new desired format. Please don’t there are easy to use converters only that will take car of that for you.
14. Background removers
Whether you are in marketing, dev or in sales, you are likely to have experienced the hardship of finding a logo without a background to fit on your post, presentation or website. And let’s face it most of are not photoshop savants (nor do we have canva pro). Well, how about a simple upload and with a 10 second render and voilá. Remove background is a fantastic online tool, completely free to use.
15. Google sheets
If you are not using google sheets, start now. The hurdle of learning Google sheets is much lower than microsoft excel. It also connects with a bunch of APIs and have a variety of add ons to create kabana boards. While at the same time you can use all those nifty excel features such as VLOOK-UP and Macros to create VBA code.
Conclusion
There are many useful tools online that will help your business and team to be more efficient. We hope this list helps you to make your business a success.