Our Secret Revealed – Best Software Tools Our Web Development Company Uses
Our web development company has tried numerous products online to increase productivity over the years. Anyone reading this post, we’ve provided you the short cut to the best tools so you don’t have to waste your time to try and experiment. These tools have improved our business processes greatly which in turn has translated to the delivery of exceptional web development services to our clients. These products have helped us in following up our clients, leads, follow through our company projects efficiently, and track our staff performance very easily. Doing more with less improves the quality of our processes as we strive to achieve the goals we have set. Although some goals can be difficult, the use of technology has made it easier for us to navigate through managing tasks in our team. I’m going to highlight some of the best software tools we use in our software company; we hope you will use them to achieve more in your business as well.
Streak used in Gmail is a powerful tool that has turned our Gmail into a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool which has helped us to streamline our processes. Streak is a Chrome extension that has completely opened up the power of Gmail. It has helped us in the following ways:
- Tracking the notes, status, and details of our customers.
- Grouping our customer emails.
- Scheduling our emails.
- Sharing leads with our team.
It lets us track the history of emails been exchanged between our team and our customers all in one dashboard.
We have been able to manage processes like hiring, sales, product development and support from just one location, our gmail.
Streak is available in Chrome. It is easy to install and integrates directly with the Gmail interface. At first, it can seem complex because of its detailed features. After a few days, we were able to explore and use it over time to understand how to easily incorporate it within our business.
Most of all, it’s easy for sales people! Yes a tool that is easy for sales people without them learning an entire new skill.
Calendly is a great tool because of its simplicity of access and the seamless integration it has with our corporate Google calendar. It is easy because it makes scheduling simple without any hitches.
Calendly enabled our sales team in our web development company to avoid back and forth we encountered in the past when scheduling meetings with outside leads and clients. Calendly has saved us a lot of time, and we appreciate the value it brings to our business. Our sales team uses it religiously.
I cannot emphasize enough how X.ai (artificial intelligence) has been such a lifesaver in our business. Amy Ingram, a virtual personal assistant actually makes you believe that there is a human being on the other end. X.ai is designed to schedule executive meetings by eliminating the need for back and forth emails. We always link our calendar and CC to “Amy Ingram/[email protected]” in the email conversation on most of our leads and clients. Amy kicks off by taking over the email conversation. Interesting enough, your clients don’t know it’s artificial intelligence… it’s brilliant! Amy will select the best time and location for the meeting; before you know it, everything is done without much human interaction. Off course, like anything else, it’s not perfect but for the most part it gets the job done.
Let me introduce you to the foundation of our team collaboration. Slack is a tool that every business should have. Slack is aligned and shared across our team, making us more productive, more relaxed and active. Slack has made communication between our team members simple, because it brings all the communication together, providing a work space where the conversations are accessible and organized. No more text messages, everything is one place.
Slack’s existence has helped us to scale our business processes and still stay connected to sales, development, project management teams through it. It keeps everyone up to date on everything so nothing slips through the cracks. Team members can still stay informed through slack. Slack stores the conversations, work, and decisions of your team in a searchable archive; that’s pretty power when you have to search through a forest of messages. Slack puts the power of knowledge and information in all your organizations’ hands.
Trello initially came into play to replace the whiteboards in our San Diego web development company offices, where we used to fill the boards with task lists for everyone to see. Trello board is the mother of all lists; we don’t use anything else now. The Trello “board” is filled with “cards” that we use in our organization.
Each project we place on a separate board that has multiple members. It is simple to add people, just by the drag and drop functionality. Each person in the trello board sees all the cards associated with that board. It keeps everyone on track with checklists, tasks and deadlines. By far, this is the best project management tool… and we’ve tried a lot of them (i.e. your usual suspects like Asana, Basecamp, Redbooth, etc.)
Sanebox is one of the best things that was introduced to email. Unimportant messages are weeded out making your inbox become what it was originally supposed to be. Sanebox has features that have helped us track un-replied emails; it also helps in snoozing email and much more. If you have a bad memory, the reminder feature is a lifesaver.
Sanebox has great features that customize your inbox to become a lot more productive so you see only emails you’re supposed to. It saves easily over 10 hours a week! No joke.
Email is the most basic form of communication that we use in our local software company, to communicate with potential leads and some our existing customers. Using an email service that is secure and provides unlimited free online storage is important to ensure seamless communication. We primarily use Outlook as our email client however everyone’s preference is different. There are a ton of options and we hope you explore what works best within your organization.
