It makes sense that the tools a company uses are integral to its success. To help you skip the trial and error stages, we’ve compiled a list of our tried and tested tools that are essential for any startup and that won’t break the bank.
If you’re a business running a website with clients, there will be at least one tool in this list that you could benefit from using. So, let’s get started.
Intercom-Customer Messaging Platform
Intercom automatically registers new customers and allows you to automate onboarding emails to the most relevant clients as well as those who look like they might be slipping away. Intercom has the rather nifty feature of setting targets for all your messages, allowing you to see how you are performing against them.
However, perhaps what’s most impressive about this tool is that when you request features it seems like they ship them within months.
Admittedly, we have not yet utilized of all of Intercom’s available features to their fullest extent. However, we were one of the first to implement having two separate groups (couriers and customers) communicate with each other through the platform, and it’s been a huge success. Hands down this is the best CRM system we’ve used.
Asana- Manage and track your team’s work
After trying a number of other project management tools from Atlassian, JIRA, and Trello, we finally landed on Asana. It’s particularly useful in that it meets the needs of a variety of staff members very well, from developers to marketers.
Asana lets you have everything in one easily accessible place. It’s just an added bonus that it’s also one of the most beautifully designed task management platforms out there, making it a joy to use.
Much like Intercom, Asana also have a good habit of shipping new features quickly, meaning they’re rapidly closing any gaps that they have on the competition.
Slack- Team communication
This really is the central nervous system of the entire business. Using Slack allows you to set up webhooks to other parts of the business, from real time back end data through to customer service and sales. Slack makes it a lot simpler to keep the entire team in the loop, with its transparency making it easy for any team member to get up to speed on activities across the business in an instant.
Pipedrive- Pipeline Sales Platform
Pipedrive is the go-to tool for managing sales and deal flow. We’ve integrated it directly with our back end through the Pipedrive API, which we’d highly recommend that other startups do. Forecasting has moved from Excel spreadsheets directly into Pipedrive, allowing us to keep very close track of how we are doing versus targets set.
However, we’ve only just scratched the surface for what this tool is capable of. Though it’s at the more budget end when compared to Salesforce, Pipedrive provides the essential tools and more for sales management.
Slemma-Analytics and Business Intelligence
An analytics tool, much like Pipedrive this is not at the heavy-duty end of scale when it comes to building a KPIs dashboard, however has proven invaluable. Using their handy guide and some self set internal KPIs, we pulled the relevant data from our back end and other compatible analytics tools (Segment, Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Intercom). This allowed us to determine the best blend of data to understand how we’re performing on a day-to-day basis. Slemma’s real strength is its ease of use, particularly during the set-up of integration.
Alongside these tools, I’d encourage startups to create a dashboard compiling real-time performance stats. This allows you to stay up to date at the busiest of times, and we’ve done just that at Gophr. It’s since become an essential part of the business. However, maybe I‘ll leave that for another blog post…If you have any questions, please do get in touch with us via our site (using Intercom funnily enough). We’re always happy to help.
Guest Contributor: Seb Robert is the founder of Gophr, a London courier startup. Alongside innovating the courier sector, Seb is a foodie with a passion for sneakers. You can find Seb on Twitter