Essential tools for a small business

Choice Technology founder Damian Funnell shares some great software tools to help you do more with less.

including a free option for individuals who just want the basics.

HubSpot

Category: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)/marketing automation

Website: hubspot.com/

Price: Prices range upwards from about $60 per month, depending on plan and features.

Google Apps) and Microsoft 365 (Previously Office 365) are the dominant market leaders in the cloud-based productivity suite market. If your business isn’t using yourself or a team, your week or an entire project, you’d be surprised how useful a Trello board can be.

Slack or Teams

Category: Instant communications and collaboration

Website: slack.com or teams. microsoft.com

About $8 per user per month for Teams or $10 per user per month for Slack. Both have limited free options.

Which one do you choose? Teams is very good, and it’s tightly integrated with Microsoft 365, so if you use 365 then Teams is probably the best choice, particularly as it won’t cost anything more. I prefer the power, speed, flexibility and numerous integrations provided by Slack, and the fact that it’s not heavily tied to the Microsoft Office suite.

Squarespace

Category: Website building and hosting

Website: squarespace.com

Price: About $20 per month for the personal version, which is suitable for most small businesses. manager. It’s impossible to create unique passwords for all the websites and services we use every day, so we end up using the same passwords repetitively, which creates a significant security risk.

LastPass is the industry standard for password management. The free version is great, but can only be used on one device. You’ll need one of the paid versions to allow you to share and use passwords across all of your devices (which most of us will need), but it only costs a few bucks per month.

The Teams version is created specifically for business and includes features that allow you to create a password policy and monitor compliance across your entire organisation.

Zoho Analytics

Category: Business intelligence and analytics

Website: zoho.com/analytics/ Price: About $50 per month (up to two users). Use the free version to evaluate it.

Almost everyone has Google Analytics set up on their website, but how many of us use it to regularly report on and analyse traffic to our websites? Very few, in my experience.

Analytics is so powerful and easy to use. It takes a few minutes to set up and requires almost no configuration – the default reports and dashboards are all most smallbusiness owners need, but it’s easy to create custom reports if you need to.

It’s easy to forget how important websites are when you’re busy running a business, but remember that most potential customers will form their first impressions of your business from your website. So it’s important to understand how many visitors you’re attracting, where they’re coming from, how they’re getting there (that is: via search, ads, other websites, et cetera.) and, most importantly, whether visitors are converting to inquiries.

MailChimp

Category: Email automation Website: mailchimp.com/

Price: Starts at $17 per month. Free version not recommended, as it retains MailChimp domains and branding.