As a small business with a distributed staff (fancy business speak for some folks work in the office, some work from home and some are spread across different cities) we need to use technology to keep everything moving smoothly. It's a good thing for MassMonopoly that I am a nut when it comes to tech tools -- especially as it relates to efficiency and collaboration for agencies and small businesses. Over the years I have tested countless solutions to make worklife easier and more efficient. Below are the tech tool winners... For now...
1. Gmail & Google for Business
Long gone (at least at our agency) are the days of emailing around countless versions of word docs or spreadsheets only to have to figure out if you're working from the right version. Or worse... 3 different people made progress on a document... now someone needs to figure out what's different in each one and bring it all together into one cohesive document? Kill me. Personally, I cannot believe people still work like this. With Google Docs, everyone on the team works from the same version, in real time and can even collaborate and edit the documents in unison. Add in version control, mobile compatibity and why haven't you switched yet??
2. Basecamp
We typically have a bunch of projects going on, and different team members, contractors and clients that all need to be involved at different points throughout the process in order to get things done. How do you manage mutli-pronged projects with numerous deliverables and different stakeholders? Simple, you make them all accountable, visible and enable easy communication. Enter Basecamp. It's a long standing favorite for Agencies and other small businesses, but with their newest release of Basecamp 3 they have knocked project management out of the park. We are now able to contain ALL project related communications to within the project itself. This is huge. If you have a question, need a document, want to have a quick chat with another team member or just take some notes during a meeting... it's all done right there in your project.
3. RingCentral
RingCentral is subscription based, digital phone system. We have no need for expensive desktop phone units or polycom conference bases... we don't even use phones during meetings (See #'s 1 & 4). What we do need is a central number our customers can call to reach us along with a way to route the calls to the appropriate person and ring out to them wherever they may be, at their desk, at a conference or snowboarding. We get our calls, and if unavailable, our messages delivered directly to our mobile phones and our emails... the places we will actually see them.
4. UberConference & Zoom
We don't do conference calls anymore. Don’t worry, all of our solutions include call in #'s... people can attend the meeting by phone if they still need to, but the tools we use go way beyond. The main two are UberConference and Zoom. UberConference provides a clean and simple online meeting room, great audio and the ability to easily share screens among attendees. What more could you need? Video. That’s where Zoom comes in. When a face to face is best but you can't be in the same room, Zoom lets us schedule some facetime with clients and teammates here across MassMonopoly locations. Zoom is great, fast, reliable and best of all, it's simple.
5. CRM
There are endless options and endless price points. We have explored them all and there are some great contenders out there. Ultimately we have landed on HubSpot's free CRM. It's powerful yet simple. Professional yet elegant. Now, at a glance, we can see what's cooking, where we need to follow up and what the pipeline looks like so we can plan for projects.
6. Analytics
How are you performing? How are your competitors performing? If your answer is "I don't know" you have some deep introspective thinking to do. In today's day and age, not to have a detailed metrics-backed view of your company’s performance along with your competitors is silly. We use Google Analytics and HubSpot as the basis and augment with platform specific data, such as Facebook Insights where relevant. Check out this post for more on
There you have it! My deeply researched and ever changing list of tools we need to run our business. This list will change over time -- which is awesome. Have I missed anything? Add your top picks in the comments, I’m always open to new solutions. If you think about how many tools are out there that can help you do your job easier or minimize the tasks that eat up your time so you can get down to the brass tacks… it’s a good time to be in business!
