I’m sharing with you seven of my favourite apps that will help your business run smoothly. Now, it’s not to say that these are the absolute best apps, and you must use every single one of these apps. There are alternatives available, and you can absolutely use different applications to do the same tasks as some of these apps. What I want to share with you is that
I guaranteed each of these applications looking at the success of the company, the health of the leadership team, the product roadmap, the integrations with other apps. I've chosen applications that all communicate well with each other, are affordable for small businesses, and create a well-rounded tech ecosystem for small business owners.
There’s no perfect app to run your whole business, and running your business with 10,000 different apps is not very productive. So, without further delay, let me share with you seven of my highlights and why you should consider each one.
1. Hiver App
This is a effectively a shared label setup for your Gmail. Now, everyone works with customers and delivers your products or services. Maybe you have a customer service department. If you’ve got a product business, Gmail is great for responding to emails on a one-on-one basis, but as soon as you have a team, you need a way of responding to customers from a central location that multiple people can share.
You can set up group mailboxes inside Google Workspace out of the box, but they don’t scale very well. Hiver handles all of those things and turns your Gmail inbox into a productivity powerhouse for your team. We use this not only for our sales team but also for our delivery team and our finance team. We manage hundreds of requests sometimes every day and use this to manage our whole customer database. If you've got 25,000 customers under management, then Hiver can handles it really well.
They’ve also released some cool tools like live chat, which can be integrated. So, check out Hiver if you’re interested in delivering better, more consistent customer service to your customers and want to have a shared mailbox that can be shared amongst your team members to do that right within the Gmail interface.
2. Zapier App
You’ve probably heard of this app before, but you may not know exactly what it does. Zapier is a connector tool that helps cloud apps talk to each other. If you have someone fill out a form on your website and you want that form fill to automatically send a message into your Google Chat so your team knows that a new lead is coming to your business, you can set up a Zap for that.
If you want to have a person who’s just signed up for your product or service have an invoice generated automatically from your Xero accounting package, you can have that happen too. If you have someone who’s just signed up for your newsletter to download an ebook and you want to have an automated email sent from your email address, reaching out to them and prompting them to potentially respond back and start a conversation, you can do that using Zapier as well.
You can create some really smart Zaps with conditional fields. For example, if you have a form with different options, you can have different actions taken based on the different options. Like, if I have a form where a customer has the option to sign up for Concierge there and then on my website.
If you choose to sign up, your request goes straight to my support team. But if you click a button and say, “I would like to speak to someone first,” that’s going to go to our Concierge team, which is our sales team. All of that is automated using Zapier, and it sends an alert to our sales team anytime you fill out a prospect form.
3. Asana app
This is my favourite task management app. One of the reasons to chose Asana like, if you are a global partner, is that you'll love the way the app has been built by Facebookers and ex-Googlers. It’s been built to a quality standard that we can expect from only the best Silicon Valley startups. There are plenty of other options out there—Trello, Monday, ClickUp, and more—but what I really love about Asana is it’s been consistent, simple, and a very powerful app that’s been able to scale out as our business has scaled. You can built a pretty good cohort of customers around.
As I mentioned earlier, Asana is free for up to 15 people, so it’s a great app to get started with without adding another subscription to your monthly account. You can also create multiple teams if you have more than 15 people in your company, and that means you’ll be able to get started with better tasking for your business as your business grows. When you’re ready to budget for some licenses and want extra features, you can choose to upgrade.
4. Copper App
This is one of my favourite apps. This is a relational CRM, meaning it helps you manage your relationships inside your business. Copper has a bunch of machine learning and AI tools that automatically pull in data from all your different apps like email and populate customer records.
One of the most annoying things about customer databases is having to update them manually, but Copper will automatically pull in someone’s LinkedIn and social profiles, their address, company details, and all the emails you’ve ever sent to them. Copper lives right inside your Gmail, so you don’t even have to leave the screen you’re working with.
It’s a fantastic tool that not only lets you do deal management but also provides phenomenal reports that talk to the rest of the Google ecosystem, including Google Data Studio. You can get great insights from your sales team and see high performance, low performance, who needs coaching, and who needs help. You can keep track of the pipeline of your business as it grows and scales.
5. Dialpad App
This is a cloud-based phone system deeply integrated into the Google ecosystem. It pulls in your calendar events, email records, and documents shared with prospects. While you’re on the phone with a prospect, you can easily access any documents they’ve shared with you. Dialpad includes voice AI, which uses customer sentiment analysis to provide reports on how customers perceive their experiences based on the words they’re using. Dialpad also offers great analytics and integrations with the Google ecosystem and other apps like Salesforce.
6. LastPass App
This is a password manager that helps you keep your team’s passwords secure. Now a days, our password and data are not secure anywhere, this app will give protection to your password that are important for you guys. It’s important to avoid storing plain text records of passwords for your team’s security. LastPass is an excellent tool for managing and securing passwords.
7. Cloudflare App
This app is a techie tool that manages your DNS and website traffic. Cloudflare is crucial for speeding up the web experience for your customers, improving Google rankings, and providing a better experience for potential buyers. Cloudflare integrates with the Google ecosystem.
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