Starting and growing a business comes with its fair share of challenges. From complying with increasingly stringent regulations to finding the best product-market fit, entrepreneurs have to keep in mind all the factors that influence their business’ chances of success. It is no wonder, therefore, that almost half of all new businesses crumble and fall within their first five years of business.
Given the high likelihood of failure and the intense competition between growing businesses, success depends a lot on having the right tools. The right business tools will take most of the work out of your hands, leaving you to focus on scaling your business. As you might expect, businesses at different stages require different tools.
In this article, we focus on the best tools for businesses that have only just found their feet.
Marketing Tools
Every business ultimately depends on the success of its products. Consequently, marketing mishaps can lead to a swift end for fledgling businesses. These mishaps often happen when an entrepreneur fails to adequately raise awareness for their product. A successful marketing campaign needs to take into account different consumer personas, which is a daunting task for entrepreneurs without a marketing background.
Marketing and customer relations tools come to the rescue by collating information about all your customers in one place. With this information close at hand, you can quickly craft an effective marketing campaign. Most of these tools also support different communication channels, allowing you to deploy your ads to many different platforms with the click of a button.
Financial Management Tools
One of the biggest reasons why small businesses fail is the mismanagement of funds or a lack of working capital. To avoid this, you must be intimately aware of the amount of money your business requires to stay operational on a day-to-day basis. If you’re any less in tune with the expenses and revenue generated, you could run into cash flow issues that could quickly put your business to the sword.
Having the right accounting and financial management tools makes it easier to keep tabs on your payroll, expenses, income, and budget. Some tools, such as Xero even allow you to easily manage foreign currency accounts because they update exchange rates hourly. In addition to that, you can access all the features even from a phone. Consider taking a short online Xero course to learn everything you should know about this software before you decide on using it for your company.
Analytics Tools
It is difficult, nigh impossible, to grow your business if you have no idea what is working and what is not. Nowadays, because of the deep integration of technology in business, there’s a wealth of data that businesses can take advantage of to guide their decisions. This pertinent data, however, is mostly useless if you don’t have the necessary tools to interpret it into actionable insights. Business data analytics tools do exactly this.
They give you a clear picture of your business –what product is selling best, what product customers are in doubt about, and what products are no longer relevant to the market. Analytics help you set realistic goals based on cold hard facts as the historical trends and current activities paint a clear image of your business’ roadmap, an image that’s key to your business’ growth.
Communication Tools
Clear and effective communication channels between your employees help keep your internal business processes streamlined. Luckily, there are lots of communication apps or software that can help you scale quickly and efficiently. And did we say cheaply? Applications such as Skype, Slack and Bitrix24 come at no cost and can be used as collaboration tools.
Final Thoughts
Running a business is difficult enough, so don’t increase your workload by using outdated or inefficient technology or methods of operation. Doing so might lead you to the bumpy and unfortunately well-trodden path to failure. So, consider the tools listed here to grow your business and increase its chances of success.
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