Remote work is becoming more common, but managing a distributed team poses unique challenges. Without seeing employees daily, you must build trust, align work, and create connections remotely. Here are tips for effectively managing remote teams:

Hire Team Players Who Thrive Autonomously

When hiring remote workers, emphasize finding self-motivated professionals who proactively manage their work and communicate well.

Evaluate attributes like independence, accountability, problem-solving ability and comfort working alone. Onboarding sets the tone for autonomy and trust.

Set Clear Goals and Metrics

Prevent misalignments by setting clear goals and key performance indicators for each employee tied to company objectives. Make sure everyone understands priorities and how they ladder up.

Establish regular check-ins on progress and blockers. Use tools like Asana to track work and key results. Shared clarity enables productivity.

Maintain Robust Communication

Overcommunication is key for distributed teams. Establish open channels for discussions and information sharing.

Tools like Slack, Zoom and dispersed meetings keep everyone looped in. Leaders must be highly responsive to prevent gaps. Prompt video chats build rapport.

Document Processes and Policies

With remote staff, diligently record institutional knowledge, processes, policies, guidelines and other references in a knowledge base like Notion.

Documented information prevents confusion when not co-located. Ensure team members can reference details on procedures, guidelines and objectives.

Enable Water Cooler Connections

Don’t lose camaraderie just because a team is dispersed. Facilitate informal social connections through chat channels, virtual coffee breaks and team building activities.

Occasional in-person meetups keep relationships strong. Have fun together as a team to cultivate trust and friendship.

Recognize and Appreciate Progress

Without daily presence, managers must find other ways to recognize employee contributions. Catch people doing good work and call out achievements publicly.

Send thank you notes or small gift cards when goals get crushed. Celebrate wins together virtually. Recognition motivates and builds loyalty.

Conduct One-on-One Check-ins

Meet consistently, even over-communicate, with direct reports. Check on current projects, roadblocks and needs proactively. Provide mentoring and feedback.

One-on-ones enable managers to take the pulse, build connections and deepen trust. Make it safe for employees to share concerns early before problems escalate.

Monitor Productivity Closely

Carefully analyze productivity levels and trends to catch lagging work quickly. Review work volume data, cycle times and individual output relative to peers.

Develop lead indicators for performance issues like missed deadlines. Confront problems promptly through supportive coaching rather than micromanaging. Teach them the trending skills to stay updated with the modern way of working remotely.

Visit Remote Workers Occasionally

While most interaction is virtual, visit remote workers periodically to strengthen relationships. Meet at their home office or nearby coworking location.

In-person time enables deeper connections and insights into environment and work style. Change up locations to keep it fresh.

Managing remote employees well relies on clear goals, proactive communication, performance visibility, appreciation and relationship building. Prioritize frequent interactions and strong team cohesion despite the distance.

The post Tips for Managing a Remote Team appeared first on The Startup INC.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is vital for every business to manage customer relationships. 

It’s hard to digest but the fact is, around 20% of startups fail within the first year of launch.

Therefore, you need a CRM tool to increase engagement and customer experience.

When choosing a CRM for your startup, you need to consider factors such as flexibility, learning curve, and cost. 

With so many CRM tools launching, choosing the best CRM for your startup can be daunting. In this article, you will learn the five best CRMs for startups to help you make an informed decision. 

7 Tools to Provide Impeccable Customer Support at Times of COVID-19 Outbreak

Before we begin, let’s have a look at the features you need to take into consideration when choosing a CRM solution. Keep reading!

Features To Look For When Choosing The Best Crms For Startups

Before buying your CRM software, please consider the following features:

Accessibility: You should easily log into the CRM software using a desktop, laptop, or mobile phone.

Sales and marketing automation: The CRM software should automate sales and marketing processes to save you time.

Lead scoring: Understanding your leads increase customer lifetime value. So, it’s imperative to choose a CRM software that offers lead scoring at an affordable cost.

Integration: Make sure your CRM software has application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow it to integrate with a wide range of third-party applications.

Customization: When dealing with many customers, personalized sales or marketing pitches are generated. Hence, choose a CRM that allows customization.

Reporting measures: Your CRM should offer a seamless dashboard to display various analytics and reports, vital in predicting future sales via forecasting options.

Mobile and social support: Research shows that mobile phones generate 51.3% of global web traffic. So, CRMs should be compatible with mobile devices, and their features should support social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Here are the five best CRMs for startups.

EngageBay

EngageBay is a powerful customer relationship management tool. It offers workflow automation with targeted personalization to offer an exceptional customer experience. This CRM is best for your startup as it helps in boosting engagements that you can convert into sales. It offers a wide variety of marketing tools like landing page assistance and email marketing, thus allowing you to create awareness about your business effectively.

Pros

• The free plan offers a robust selection of tools
• You can maintain all your contacts in one place
• You can view your sales pipeline and check the status of every deal
• You can also leverage the power of gamification to keep your team motivated
• Ability to track activities like click rates, web activity, and email response
• Provides live chat integration tool for your website

Zoho CRM

Your startup needs to utilize social media for potential customer engagements effectively. Zoho CRM is the best bet for your business as it can integrate with social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This integration allows you to monitor conversions, share content and generate leads. Therefore, you can grow your leads from content marketing.

Zoho offers robust tools for lead generation, work automation, pipeline management, robust reporting, and analytics. This CRM offers a free plan that helps manage leads and collaboration using direct messaging and syncing team calendars. However, if you want sales forecasting and social media management features, you will upgrade to the standard plan.

Pros

• Easy to use and navigate 
• Allows you to manage leads
• Offers robust products

HubSpot CRM

The HubSpot CRM is the best and the most innovative CRMs in the industry. This CRM comes with fantastic e-signature, email tracking, and automation tools. Additionally, it offers free live chat software that you can use to connect with your online clients. Having this connection can increase your chances of converting leads to customers. If the main goal for your startup company is to build trust and new relationships, then HubSpot CRM is the best bet.

Pros

• Availability of rich training resources
• Discounts for qualified startups
• Excellent customer experience

Agile CRM

Agile CRM  offers a free plan with robust sales and marketing features like thousands of company records or contacts, a lead scoring tool, custom deal milestones, and an in-built appointment scheduler. You can hold friendly competitions among your sales teams to keep them on their toes and keep your workplace organized.

You will need to upgrade to a Starter plan to use email integration and marketing automation. However, telephonic capabilities via integration are only available on Regular plans.

Pros 

• Offers a free plan for up to ten users
• The free plan offers lead scoring and appointment scheduling
• A wide variety of deals

Insightly

Insightly is the best choice for startups that require project management tools in their CRM. It helps you manage your project effectively using calendar syncing and task tracking.

This software comes with powerful features to increase efficiency in your startup and save time. You can, for example, send, track, and create emails from within Insightly’s email marketing tools. Plus, you will know the kind of click and open-through rates your emails are generating.

Pros

• Affordable and easy to use
• Project management capabilities
• You can design and customize your dashboard

Endnote

CRMs are vital for your company’s growth, organization, and efficiency. It helps in the daily processes to save time using features like marketing automation, lead, and contact management.

Make sure that your CRM is affordable and flexible enough to adapt to changing environments and that it offers powerful features that will help your startup grow. Additionally, ask for personalized training before installing your CRM to ensure it’s working in line with your customer dynamics. Plus, choose a straightforward software to use across all organizational levels.

There are many CRMs in the market, making it challenging to tell the right one for you. The above list offers an excellent choice for startups, so go for the one that suits your business needs.

The post Five Best CRMs for Startups appeared first on The Startup INC.

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected countries across the globe. From the developed first world nations of Europe and America to emerging third world nations across Asia and Africa, it’s almost as if the entire world has reached a standstill. Consequently, all businesses had to shut down their brick-and-mortar address.

Shutting down these businesses has brought a significant overall impact. These shops still play a major role in the economy, and as such, anything that affects them affects the economy as well.

Even though things appear dark for physical stores, all hope is not lost. Digital marketing has not been more lucrative than now. Now is the perfect time for companies that haven’t gone digital to take this plunge finally. For the companies that made the transition, now is the perfect time to step up to the challenge in front of them.

The Challenge for Online Stores

In an arena where millions of companies vie for the attention of customers, how do you stand out? The answer is paradoxical, easy, and hard. Impeccable customer service is the solution, but providing it is the real challenge.

At a time where you can’t have your support team in-house to manage high volumes of customer support requests, digital customer support tools can prove beneficial.

We have curated the top 7 customer support tools that you should utilize to help both your customers and your support team during this Covid-19 outbreak.

Here are our top picks: 7 Customer Support Tools in COVID 19

1) ProProfs Survey Maker

Understanding your customers’ pain points is the first step to serving your customers better. Once you know what works and what doesn’t work with your customers, you can improve them.

Getting this knowledge involves interacting with your customers in an environment where they feel comfortable talking to you. This is where online surveys can help you.

ProProfs Survey Maker is a robust tool that will allow you to create customer surveys within minutes. It also provides you over 100 professionally made survey templates that you can send to your customers and add to the importance of customer experience.

You can create different types of surveys, including in-app surveys, popup surveys, NPS surveys, and quizzes. The surveys can be customized to your brand logo and colors. The advanced reporting features provide you with presentation-ready reports for you to study and analyze.

ProProfs Survey Maker can be integrated with a suite of other marketing and support tools, making it a comprehensive package for business organizations.

2) Qualaroo

How would you like to gather insights from your customers about the page they are visiting? Say you’re running a successful blog and want to know from your customers about the topics they would be interested in reading or just about a particular blog in general. Qualaroo allows you to do this exactly.

Qualaroo is another customer support tool that helps you to create customer surveys. It allows you to conduct customer surveys at any point in the customer journey. This is especially helpful when you want to conduct instantaneous pulse checks.

Qualaroo provides users with detailed reports and analytics to get better insights into the pulse of their customers. All the surveys created using Qualaroo are optimized for all devices and operating systems, thus ensuring seamless support irrespective of the medium.

Qualaroo can also be integrated with popular CRM and other marketing tools, making it extremely versatile and handy for the brands that use it.

3) Bitrix24

This current pandemic situation has forced all brands to incorporate work from home policy. Ensuring seamless workflow and collaboration amongst remote teams can prove to be challenging for companies that haven’t always had a remote workforce.

Bitrix24 is a collaboration tool you can use to ensure proper task management, collaboration, and communication during this lockdown period.

Bitrix24 gives you an integrated platform for all your tasks, messages, contacts files, and projects. With this tool, you can delegate the task to team members and effortlessly keep a track on team activities. The tool also supports team collaboration via file sharing and chat.

The core solutions generally comprise document management, social network, file sharing, HR management, CRM, email management, calendar, and planning, sales team management, and telephone management.

Bitrix24 is optimized to work for all devices and operating systems, making it easier for your support agents to respond to customer requests.

4) Zingtree

Customers usually prefer calling a customer support operator only if they cannot find the solution themselves. During this COVID-19 outbreak, utilizing the Zingtree tool can make it super-easy to build and preserve interactive troubleshooters and process flows with minimal to no coding.

Zingtree makes it easy for your support agents to guide anyone visiting your website by creating a decision tree that can be navigated easily. This automated decision tree can be used to guide the customers towards solutions they most commonly look for.

This not only reduces the time spent by your operators on repeated questions but it also makes your website more accessible for a first time user. Furthermore, it also provides your support team with comprehensive analytics on how your decisions are being used to guide process optimizations, service, or product.

Zingtree can be integrated with different helpdesk and CRM tools like Freshdesk and salesforce. Zingtree follows a plug and play format, thus ensuring that even a first time user with absolutely no prior experience in coding can add it to their website.

5) Hootsuite

Social media has become a major part of every brand’s customer support strategy. Often, customers prefer to air out their dissatisfaction with a particular product or service over social media.

Like Jeff Bezos once said, “If you disappoint a customer in real life, they tell six people, if you disappoint them on social media, they tell six thousand.” It is only obvious that you also get a tool that can help you stay on top of all your social media mentions and discussions.

Hootsuite has built its reputation as one of the best customer service tools of the digital age, and that reputation is not undeserved. It comes with a geo-search feature that helps you track conversations within a particular geographic location.

Hootsuite also aggregates all your mentions across different social platforms, making it easier for you to track and manage multiple conversations at once. You can also respond to customer mentions and requests directly from the Hootsuite dashboard.

All of these are just additional features on top of the main USP. Hootsuite allows users to schedule and curate content for social media posts. It also helps users measure the ROI on their social media campaigns.

From a single user plan up to a personalized enterprise account, you can choose a plan as per your business needs.

6) Deskero

Deskero is an effective customer engagement tool for organizations requiring a helpdesk and ticketing software. The tool facilitates users to engage and interact with their customers in a meaningful manner. Deskero collects service requests from all channels, including emails, APIs, and social media platforms on one dashboard.

Deskero provides an efficient ticket management system loaded with amazing features such as automated ticketing, reporting, service notifications, email import/export, multi-channel support, etc. Not only this, but it also offers users to customize the theme, font, etc. of the dashboard, according to their liking.

Deskoro is ideal for small and medium businesses with a customer support team that handles large numbers of text-based requests.

7) Zoom

In this lockdown phase, Zoom has emerged as a real lifeline, especially for individuals and small businesses. It is the new virtual meeting room for organizations. Zoom is a free tool for customer support that unifies cross-platform group, video conferencing, and simple online meetings into one integrated platform.

Participants can connect on Zoom, via web conference, or through standard text chats as well. Zoom allows users to create virtual chat rooms and invite as many participants as desired.

During a video call, Zoom allows users to share their screens for better interaction and collaboration. The video can also be recorded and shared with others who were unable to join the meeting.

Organizations can use Zoom to get in touch with their customers, especially in cases where being able to view the customers’ screen could help provide a quicker solution.

Zoom has already shown its effectiveness as a meeting room across all industries. Whether it’s corporations holding their weekly team meetings, or teachers delivering lectures to their students, Zoom has endless potential and should definitely be a part of your customer support strategy to stay connected remotely.

Final Thoughts

No one knows how long the Covid-19 outbreak is going to affect business across the globe. For most brick and mortar businesses, this extended lockdown may or may not be a breaking point. Change is the only constant, and now is the perfect time for brands to finally embrace the idea of going digital.

These seven tools mentioned in the article are just a few of the many tools available to brands to choose from. The most crucial objective for all organizations during this lockdown is to be able to retain the quality and standard of service they were providing before the Covid-19 outbreak.

These tools are certainly not the definite arsenal to do that, but they sure are a start, and as an organization, making these tools a part of your customer support strategy will only benefit you.

Employing any or all these tools will help brands build lasting relationships with their customers and come out of this enforced shut down as a versatile brand.

The post 7 Tools to Provide Impeccable Customer Support at Times of COVID-19 Outbreak appeared first on The Startup INC.

We experimented with various tools keeping in mind the several aspects of a business from project management, social media optimization to analytics and CRM. Interestingly, we found a few of them to be unimaginably powerful.

Also, as we have gone through the reviews, most of these tools seemed to have already done an excellent job over the years in assisting both small and big businesses.

Even if you are a newbie and you are on the way to starting your business, this post can enlighten you about the various important aspects of a business to consider and the right tools to use.

In fact, no business can have a taste of success until and unless one emphasizes on productivity and these start-up tools will not only save you a lot of time and effort but also, help you enjoy running your business with a consistent smooth flow.

As a matter of fact, there are a few powerful tools that shouldn’t be overlooked in any case and investing in them is always worth it.

In this post, we are going to share 10 powerful tools for the startup for various categories that can largely get things more productive and accelerate the growth of many start-ups.

Here’s our list of The Best Startup Tools:

Social Media Monitoring Tool

No one has ever thought that Social Media could turn out to be such an effective platform for digital marketing.

In fact, Social Media has proved to be massively effective in increasing traffic for various websites over the years and that’s the reason why a lot of emphases is laid upon analyzing and comprehending the interests and behavior of the traffic on Social Media platforms.

A Social Media Monitoring Tool is a pretty powerful tool for business optimization and can be pretty handy in analyzing the actual interests of the traffic and also, understanding how they respond to various posts.

This eventually helps in developing more relevant and engaging posts for the various Social Media Platforms.

• Brand24

Brand24 is an unimaginably powerful Social Media Marketing Tool that offers powerful keywords, mentions, users’ collaboration, sentiment analysis, data analysis, slack integration, mobile alerts and more.

It offers brilliant features for every type of users from individuals, professionals to teams and agencies.

The tool is available in three plans; the Plus at $49/, the Premium at $99/month and the Max at $399/month.

Most importantly, one can use it for a free 14 days trial with no hidden charge and without having to enter any credit card details.

Project Management Software

Things are a lot different from it used to be ten to twenty years back from now. Time and Productivity have been increasingly getting more and more emphasis in every field of life.

This holds true for start-ups as well. Handling projects and teams may seem to be quite an easy job but in reality, even an expert may find it difficult sometimes and it’s surely not everyone’s cup of tea.

Project management software can be pretty effective in analyzing and evaluating the performance of a team.

Also, it can largely help project managers in reaching fast and accurate decisions which will eventually help in accomplishing a project in time and with great accuracy.

• ProProfs Project

The ProProfs Project is an excellent project management tool that has created a huge difference for many organizations over the years.

Meeting deadlines and dealing with projects in the most organized manner was never easier until ProProfs Project came up.

It offers an extremely user-friendly interface and the tasks can be conveniently managed and moved by simply dragging and dropping.

Tasks can be further broken down into subtasks to get things even organized. Recurring tasks can be automated to save a huge amount of time. Also, it offers exclusive control to the project manager over the various permissions.

Team collaboration, as well as file sharing, is ridiculously easy too. Also, users can store their files safely in the cloud for faster access. Most importantly, a user can track their time constantly on the move.

The tool is available in three different plans; the Solopreneur at $19/month, the Team at $49/month and the Unlimited at $199/month. Also, it offers a 15 days trial wherein a user can try any of the three plan absolutely free for

15 days.

Web Analytics Tool

Running a website isn’t an easy job any longer and it certainly has to do a lot with the increasing competition over the years.

In fact, running a website nowadays involves taking well care of a whole lot of aspects and web analysis happens to be one of the most important aspects for sure.

It comprises collection and analysis of web data pertaining to measuring web traffic, determining the success of advertising campaigns, page views, comparative analysis and more.

This has proved to be pretty effective in improving websites’ performance as well as in planning further marketing strategies.

• Google Analytics

Think of web analysis and what crosses your mind first? It’s undoubtedly Google Analytics for most of us and this pretty much indicates how effective it has proved to be so far.

As a matter of fact, the Google Analytics tool offers a perfect mix of various powerful features to businesses with accentuated traffic and sales.

Google Analytics makes collection and management of data incredibly simple. The actual needs of one’s business can be conveniently comprehended by segmenting and filtering the reports.

Also, it helps users in understanding the customers’ behavior and requirement. Most importantly, it helps users in improving marketing campaigns.

Graphic Design Tool

We can’t overlook the importance of Graphics in Digital Marketing. In fact; a lot of businesses have achieved massive levels of success over the years because of their amazing advertisements enriched with stunning graphics.

Basically, Graphic designing plays a very important role in catching the attention of the visitors or the traffic at the very first glance and the content keeps them engaged.

Hence, Graphics and Contents are pretty complementary to each other. However, Start-ups can handle the graphic design aspect on their own now without having to hire a professional graphic design as it may turn out to be pretty expensive.

In fact, there are some excellent Graphic design tools available in the market that can help you create graphics that look absolutely professional.

• Canva

Canva has certainly brought about a massive difference in the perception of graphic design over the years. A lot of people who used to actually shy away from the idea of ever designing graphics on their own, taking it to be quite a complex thing and who would actually hire professionals are now conveniently doing it on their own.

Canva has made graphic designing ridiculously simple and users can now create graphic designs for any category, be it a logo, posters, brochures, banners and more.

Of course, there’s no denying the fact that nothing can actually beat the graphics designed by a professional designer. However, with tools like Canva, Start-ups and small businesses can cut down the expenses to a large extent.

Canva offers folders to organize the various artworks, team collaboration, photos and assets storage, templates and more.

The tool is available in three plans; the Free Plan, Can for Work at $12.95/ per team member/month and Canva Enterprise.

Web-Based Office Suite

Hardly, there’s an office without a web-based office suite installed. Documents, worksheets, presentations and notes are almost needed on a daily basis for documenting various facts and figures of every small or huge business.

Most importantly, file sharing, cloud storage, team collaboration, document encryption and offline access are some of the features that can be really effective in carrying out the daily office operations in a proper manner.

In fact, a web-based office suite is such a software which is required in every field.

• Google Docs

Purchasing a Microsoft Office 365 can be a bit expensive. If you think you can’t afford to purchase a Microsoft Office 365 at the moment, that’s absolutely okay and in fact, you may not have to ever buy one.

Google Docs is probably the best Microsoft Office 365 alternative with a whole lot of powerful functionalities such as file sharing, team collaboration, real-time editing, remote access, offline access, powerful add-ons and you can avail all these features without having to pay a single penny. Isn’t that amazing?

Appointment Scheduling Software

Business in today’s world is about building a strong relationship with the clients. Comprehending the interests or requirement of the various clients or customers needs spending a good amount of time with them which is why we often need to schedule appointments.

An appointment scheduling software can relieve you to a very large extent from multiple back and forth emails.
There’s another side to it as well.

Appointments are not just scheduled with clients but also with team members. Building up a strong bonding among the team members can greatly improve the team’s performance which would, in turn, improve the conversion rates.

• Appoint.ly

Finally, we have a way to break out of the noise of back and forth emails. Scheduling an appointment is unimaginably easy with Appoint.ly and it’s merely a matter of a few seconds.

Furthermore, it offers integration with all the major calendars. Also, it allows you to keep a close monitoring on the team’s performance as well as identify the best converting aspects.

On top of that, the tool looks and works equally well on all devices, the tool allows you to set buffer time, customize email notifications and reminders and more.

The tool is available as free and as premium plans. Users can upgrade to the Premium plan at a monthly subscription of $8/month charged annually.

Customer Relationship Management Platform

In this extremely competitive world wherein every single commodity has multiple vendors, it takes a constant emphasis on building up an excellent relationship with the customers to give one’s business a leading edge over its competitors.

However, it isn’t as simple as it apparently seems to be and it certainly takes a great deal of understanding of the customers’ behavior.

A CRM or a Customer Relationship Management Platform can help businesses with accurate Data analysis and customer retention.

A lot of businesses have experienced incredibly effective results in terms of customer retention, sales, and ROI after having used CRM over the years.

• Streak

The streak is an absolutely brilliant CRM especially designed for Gmail that offers unimaginably outstanding features such as Simple collaboration, multi-purpose interface, Email tracking, compatibility with Google apps, and more.

Also, it is available as a mobile app to use it on the go. The tool is available as the Personal plan for free, the Professional Plan at $49 per user/month and the Enterprise Plan at $99 user/month.

Scheduled Sending and Email Reminders

For those who are into an extensive use of email service for most of their business interactions would certainly be aware that approaching clients at the most favorable times often turns out to be a success.

Scheduled sending and email reminders can be a lot effective in increasing the conversion rates.

As a matter of fact, most of the free email services don’t really have this feature incorporated. However, there are a few third-party tools that can be conveniently added to our email service to experience the immense power of email scheduling.

• Boomerang

Boomerang is an extremely powerful emailing tool which can be integrated with Gmail with the greatest ease and is widely used by marketers and agencies.

A lot of individuals, professionals, team, and agencies from all over the globe have experienced an imaginable improvement in productivity as well as sales ever since they used Boomerang.

It not only helps users schedule emails but also reminds its users if they don’t hear back within a specific time frame. Also, it’s available on iOS and Android platforms.

The tool is available in four plans; the basic for free, the Personal at $4.99/month, the Pro at $ 14.99/month, and the Premium at $49.99/month.

Invoicing Software

We are pretty much aware of paper invoices and invoicing is certainly a very important aspect of a business, be it small or big.

However, as time had gone by, the invoice requirement has changed which eventually led to a by far more innovative and advanced approach to invoicing.

In this digital age, we need more than paper invoices to keep everything pertaining to sales and products at its perfect place.

As a matter of fact, invoicing software offers a whole lot of advanced features from accepting payments online to tracking time and expenses.

• Invoicely

Invoicely is certainly the most popular invoicing software and is used by people from all over the world. In fact, it is more than invoicing and it had made invoicing unimaginably effortless.

Besides, it helps you create invoices that look absolutely stunning and professional with brilliant features such as multiple language options, multiple currency options, recurring invoicing with automated payment reminders, and estimate to invoice.

Also, it offers a huge space for customizing your invoices. The tool is available in four plans; the Free plan, the basic plan at $ 9.99/month, the Professional plan at $19.99/month and the Enterprise Plan at $29.99/month.

Accounting Software

Nothing is ever clear without proper accountability and this holds true for business as well no matter it is big or small. A proper accounting is important to keep everything well organized as well as under close monitoring.

Hiring a professional accountant can be a bit expensive for start-ups but this doesn’t really stop you from maintaining your accounts.

If you are wondering how you can do it by simply using various accounting software.

Interestingly, anyone with even an average knowledge of business transactions can handle this software and maintain the accounts in the most professional way so that you could be ever ready to produce your accounts anytime to meet any legal compliance.

• Wave

Wave is the ideal accounting software especially if you have a small business with a limited target audience. Creating estimates, invoices, and receipts that looks extremely professional is only a matter of a few seconds with Wave.

The Wave interface is pretty user-friendly and it isn’t difficult to comprehend things. Tracking the status of invoices and payments is extremely easy.

Also, it offers various modes of accepting payments such as credit card payment or direct bank transfer.

Most importantly, with every transaction status reflected on the same dashboard, one can focus on one’s core business without having to worry much about anything pertaining to transactions that are missing.

Email Marketing Software

We are no stranger to the power of Email marketing and in fact, a lot of websites, as well as blogs, depend a lot on this strategy for building a huge audience base. If you are looking for an extremely powerful yet free tool to start Email Marketing with, MailChimp is the ultimate tool for you.

• MailChimp

MailChimp is an excellent tool for those who what to build a huge audience. The tool helps you create powerful campaigns with the greatest ease to reach your audience at the most appropriate time and place. It can largely help you with email marketing and campaign creation. It helps you attract your audience by providing you with the right assets for your Email marketing, Landing pages, Postcards, Signup forms, Google remarketing ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads.

Pricing:

Free Plan
Grow: $10 monthly
Pro: $199 monthly

Web Conferencing Software

Communication is certainly a very important aspect for any organization and in fact, business nowadays emphasizes a lot upon keeping in constant touch with their clients by constantly beating the barrier of distance and time. Web Conferencing or Video conferencing is a way to communicate with one’s clients or employees over the internet from any part of the world.

• Skype

Skype is a pretty powerful web conferencing tool powered by Microsoft and over the years, users from all over the world have found it to be highly effective for communication. Most importantly, Skype offers the right mix of features. You can make both video and voice calls using Skype. Besides, you can use it as a messenger as well.

Also, Skype allows you to send photos and files. One of the most salient features of Skype is Screen sharing wherein you can actually share your current screen with the person you are conferencing with and the person on the other end can share one’s screen with you as well. Skype is available in both web and android version. Also, you can use Skype alongside your outlook mail.

Content Management Software

CMS or content management software is a tool that helps users manage their website content without having to need any coding. CMS such as Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress are pretty popular and in fact, the advent of CMS has had a revolutionizing effect on web hosting and also, it has encouraged many people to start their websites.

• WordPress

WordPress is certainly the most popular and powerful open source CMS. Ever since WordPress was developed, creating a website has got a lot easier than ever before. Using WordPress, you can actually start a website without having the slightest need to touch a single line of code. Also, it offers a wide range of plugins for extended functionalities.

Starting a Website using WordPress actually makes it easier to rank sites on the search engines. WordPress Plugins like Yoast SEO can help you optimize your contents accurately by highlighting the areas that need improvement. This will increase the chance for your content to rank higher on the SERP.

SEO Tool

SEO Tools are extensively used these days to rank websites and blogs on the SERP. There are various SEO Tools available in the market these days. However, keyword research, competitor analysis, and Backlink Research are few of the most important purposes that these tools are used for.

• Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an unimaginably powerful competitor analysis tool that is used by marketers and website owners from all over the world. The tool actually helps you comprehend the reasons as to why your competitor is ranking higher so that you can try the same strategies or better strategies to rank your own site higher. The tool helps you with a very comprehensive analysis by offering functionalities such as Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Research, Content Research, Rank Tracking, and Web Monitoring.

Pricing:

Lite: $99 monthly
Standard: $199 monthly
Advanced: $399 monthly
Agency: $999 monthly
Productivity Software

In today’s competitive world, every business has been constantly striving to accomplish more work in lesser time as well as maintain the quality. Productivity Software can help you accomplish various small tasks accurately and in less time. Most important, these are kind of software that we may need much frequently; almost daily.

• Grammarly

Spelling errors in emails can be pretty embarrassing and Grammarly is a tool that can largely save you from such embarrassment. Also, it can be used as a powerful proofreading tool as well since it only helps you correct your spelling errors but also, helps you with punctuation errors. Also, you can set your preferred language in Grammarly and the tool will suggest you the right spellings as per the chosen language.

The tool is available as the web version, as an extension, desktop version, Ms Word add-on, Android keyboard and also, there’s an ongoing Beta testing with of Grammarly with Google Docs. The Premium version offers even advanced features such as Plagiarism Check, Unclear sentence structure, Wordiness, Inconsistent writing style, Overused words, Hedging language and more.

Pricing:

Free Plan
Premium: $11.66 monthly
Business: $10 monthly

Conclusion

We are completely aware of the challenges by most of the start-ups which is why we thought of sharing this post with you all to make things a bit easier and convenient. We tried a whole lot of tools and software to reach the ultimate list of the 10 best start-up tools that we mentioned in this post. We are pretty sure that you would find them to be pretty effective as well.

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