The world of business is ever-changing and those changes seem to be for the better. However, nothing changed the corporate world as much as technological advancement. In just a few short years, business owners started to use various tools to run their company and perform their activities more easily.
Every successful company uses multiple tools to ensure top performance these days, and if you want your employees to perform better than ever before, give them the tools to do the job.
However, you need to understand that not all tools were created equal, and if you’re looking to be the best, you need to use the best tools as well.
MS SharePoint
Microsoft is a company that has been around since 1975 and businesses have been using various tools from this company for decades. Their Microsoft SharePoint, also known as MS SharePoint, is a tool that’s meant to be used in collaboration with Microsoft SQL Server.
These two tools when combined can provide business intelligence analytics as well as BI content such as reports, data connections, scorecards, and dashboards, just to name a few. When you use SharePoint, you can share data, resources, files, and news within your organization easily. Furthermore, knowing how to use SharePoint for project management empowers teams to create and manage project-specific sites. These dedicated sites serve as centralized hubs where team members can access project-related documents, collaborate on tasks, and track progress. SharePoint’s robust document management capabilities ensure version control, document sharing permissions, and real-time updates, promoting efficient collaboration and reducing the risk of information silos.
With this tool, you’ll be able to make informed decisions, as it allows you to discover data, insights, and expertise, all of which are pivotal during the decision-making process. SharePoint also comes with content management features so your team can maximize their velocity of knowledge.
Finally, you’ll also be able to transform processes and greatly accelerate productivity. You can speed up tasks such as notifications and approvals to operational workflows and generally create a great digital experience within your business that your employees will undoubtedly appreciate.
If you use another similar tool and want to switch to SharePoint, your best bet is to hire professionals to do the job. Microsoft SharePoint development will offer just what you need and minimize all the transition issues that may arise.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a go-to-market intelligence platform used mostly by B2B sales and marketing teams, as well as recruiters to optimize their lead generation efforts. Seeing as how 39% of B2B companies explored AI and automation in 2020, it’s clear that this industry is ready for some advanced tools.
The ZoomInfo platform will provide your team members with multiple business contact databases as well as sales intelligence and prospecting tools to make certain jobs easier. With it, tasks such as lead scoring, target outreach, territory planning, and prospecting become much easier.
This tool can also be extremely useful to your marketing team, as it allows you to understand your ideal customers on a deeper level. Not only that, but it also targets all of the companies that visit your website in real-time.
The platform also comes with hyper-specific search query filters that recruiters can use to find the best candidates and reach out to them. The tool provides you with this and much more, but there is one downside – its price.
Over the past few years, ZoomInfo has increased its prices, so many companies started looking for other similar tools. By opting for a ZoomInfo alternative, you get to accomplish the same goals for sometimes even half of the price. If you don’t want to spend more money than necessary but still want a high-quality tool, this is your best course of action.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a premier analytics platform for tracking website and app performance, and it’s just one out of multiple tools Google provides to its users. This platform will collect a large amount of data, process it intelligently, and then give you a detailed picture of your website’s performance.
Every business needs a good analytics tool because these tools are instrumental in collecting, processing, and understanding data. Almost every industry nowadays uses big data, but sadly, most companies only analyze 12% of the data they have.
Nonetheless, if you use Google Analytics, you will be able to analyze all of that data and use it for various purposes. For instance, the insight you gain from this platform can be used for marketing, as you will know details such as where your website visitors are from and what your conversion rate is.
You can also use this data to improve your site performance, as you’ll be able to see things such as loading time for pages, what page visitors decide to leave most often, and which pages get the most traffic.
Slack
Slack is one of the most popular workplace communication tools and it currently has 12 million daily active users. This instant messaging tool comes with a plethora of add-ins for other workplace tools, which means that Slack is a single place for sending messages, files, and tools.
The main functionality is centered around talking to people in a business setting and there are two ways you can chat on the platform:
- Be a part of group chats via channels
- Send direct messages in person-to-person chats
While Slack certainly isn’t the only messaging platform out there, it gained its popularity because it has a very simple format that anyone can use with just enough functionalities to satisfy everyone.
A special thing about Slack is that its developers listen to what their customers want, and that’s why they decided to create an ecosystem of app integrations. Slack can integrate with over 1500 apps, including business tools such as Google Analytics and MailChimp.
And finally, another feature that was added to increase user satisfaction was complete privacy. Slack administrators can’t read any private channels of direct messages without the open consent of all the members in those chats.
Trello
And last but not least, we have Trello, a project management and team collaboration tool that is also very popular in the business world. Its popularity mostly comes from its simplicity because, unlike other project management tools that have more complex features, Trello is simple and easy to use.
Most people can understand Trello in just a few minutes, and as it looks very similar to a board with sticky notes, the design is appealing. It’s not all about the aesthetics, since you can easily move around cards, assign people to tasks, create deadlines, and much more to indicate things such as workflow and status.
But don’t let the tool’s simple design fool you, as it’s very powerful. Every card (or task) you create can contain a plethora of information. Add things such as file attachments, members, notes, and status tracking data to make sure all tasks are well-organized.
And finally, Trello is another tool that supports hundreds of integrations with third-party apps and services. Just some of the apps you can integrate are Google Drive, Slack, Jira, and OneDrive. Not only that, but it also supports a plethora of custom plug-ins that were made only for Trello.
Final thoughts
Tools have become a big part of the business world, and companies can be divided into two groups. We have those that use tools and have a chance in succeeding, and those who refuse technological advancement and face certain failure.
There are so many different tools currently on the market and sometimes it can be hard for business owners to choose the right ones. But the five tools we talked about here are practically a necessity for any company, no matter its size and niche.
