Businesses big and small have suffered a setback in 2020 when COVID-19 hit the world. The pandemic swept off everything with it and the world almost turned topsy-turvy. But as COVID-19 is still wreaking havoc across the world, things have started to turn around a bit for the better with the discovery of vaccines.
Amidst all these difficulties, the businesses have taken the worst hit last year. But the good news is, they are trying to turn things around and are on the path to recovery. Now is the time to perform at your best in business to set your footprint in the market.
Benjamin Franklin once famously said, “The best investment is in the tools of one’s own trade.”
Going by the quote, you should be aware of the tools that can help you in your business. As per recent research, most SaaS companies have spent at least 50% more of their budget on various SaaS tools in 2020 than in earlier years.
Findings also mention that most companies now use at least 25 to 75 different SaaS tools for their business. Now that figure is huge. And there is no reason for SaaS business to slow down in the upcoming years. Why would you want to stay behind when your rivals are taking the edge with the help of tools that are making their business more productive and more employee-friendly?
Here is a quick list of 5 wonderful SaaS tools that can help you take your business to the next level this year.
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5 best SaaS tools for growing your business this year
While most SaaS tools talk about driving revenue to your business and accentuate growth, it might be a good idea to filter out the best SaaS tools that are relevant for your business. Save yourself the research since this article will guide you through the top 5 SaaS tools that can help your business thrive at its best in 2021!
MS Teams — a tool for team collaboration
With the pandemic keeping everyone at home, team collaboration has never been so important. 86% of corporate employees consider a lack of team collaboration as the reason for their workplace failure.
Collaboration can help in delegating tasks equally and setting up processes to ensure the team is on the same page. It lets your people work together as a team and achieve the business objective as their common goal.
MS Teams is a team collaboration tool that can help you in achieving all tasks with a single click. The tool connects multiple employees working remotely via chats, meetings, and calls, and can access and edit documents. You can also use this tool to maintain and share files in real-time. You can also maintain the calendars and notes that are required for your business.
Features of MS Teams
- Chat and collaborate: chat with your employees and share important files with them.
- Calls and meetings: meet and call multiple people online. MS team has the options like custom backgrounds and also screen sharing to make it easier for you.
- Apps available: productivity apps and services like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are also available.
- Compliance and security: all your business data is safe and secured with MS teams as the data gets encrypted during transfer and during storage.
- Administration: manage the app settings and the user settings in MS Teams. Also, configure and customize the app.
- Receive support: there is an uptime guarantee of 99.9% along with 24X7 web and phone support.
Pricing: MS Teams is really reasonably priced at $5 per user every month.
Maze — create unique user experiences
Almost all businesses use design tools for their assignments like designing brochure or flyers. Each product development needs the help of UX design tools at some point in time.
There are several different types of tools that fall under the category of UX. Maze is a UX design tool that works as a rapid testing platform for designers. Use this tool to run tests to validate your ideas and designs, concepts, and copies.
Features:
- Great integration options
- Third-party prototyping
- Offers research surveys and user feedback
- Works on all browsers
Pricing: For individual projects, Maze is free. Paid plans start from $25 per user per month.
Trello — the project management maestro
Trello is a project management collaboration tool that helps you concisely organizing your work. With the help of this tool, you can build a workflow for your business. Manage and track the progress of your team and also share feedback and other checklists with your employees. It is one of the most popular projects management tools worldwide.
Features:
- Unlimited workflow: use as many cards as you want to create a workflow and manage tasks.
- Boards and lists: create flowcharts for your projects with the help of boards. Manage your daily tasks with the lists available in Trello.
- Automation: enhance your productivity by automating repetitive actions.
- Endless activity tasks: keep easy track of all the activities of your team.
- Loads of templates available: no need to build from the scratch anymore. Simply customize and use the available templates.
- Broad integration: integrate the tool with all other apps that you use at the office like Gmail and Dropbox, Salesforce, and Outlook.
Pricing: Limited features free plan is available. But for a Business Class Plan of up to 100 people, the price is $10 per user per month. If you want to choose the Enterprise Plan, the pricing is $17.50 per user per month.
Zoho — a cloud software suite
Zoho CRM is again a customizable tool that is excellent for sales and marketing. Use this tool to convert your leads to revenue. Zoho is in fact one of the most popular CRM tools in the world.
Features of Zoho
- Journey Orchestration: Track the customer’s journey right from the inquiry till the product purchase. This will also help you in tracking your customer’s requirements.
- Salesforce Automation: get routine sales and marketing automated for your business. Needless to mention, it will enhance your company’s productivity to a significant extent.
- Analysis: use analytics for creating the reports and sales forecasts for your business.
- Process management: create blueprints for all your sales processes.
- Omnichannel: get connected with your customers on a real-time business and gather regular feedback.
- Marketing automation: use automated email marketing campaigns.
- Team collaboration: form employee groups and share updates with them.
Pricing: The free trial tool is available but the standard business edition starts at $14 per month. The Enterprise version however comes for $40 per user per month.
5. Acquire — digital customer engagement
Acquire.io is a tool that can provide your customers with instant assistance for a better user experience. It is a live chat software powered by Artificial Intelligence. It can certainly boost your business sales and enhance your revenue.
Features:
- Offers relevant conversational chats with your customers and visitors.
- Available both for website and mobile.
- Helps in solving the real-time queries of your customers.
- Improves the customer retention rate for your business.
- Embedded features include chat history and real-time conversations
- Profile management with two-way communications
- Canned messages and targeted messaging
- Intelligent routing with screen sharing and co-browsing capabilities
- Video and voice call functionality
Pricing: The basic plan starts from $300 per month. And the pro plan is available at $950 per month.
Bonus tool
6. Pitch — create engaging presentations
“Stunning presentations. Made together.” Pitch offers one workspace with boundless possibilities. With its wide variety of templates, you can now design beautiful presentations in no time at all. All the templates have been thoughtfully designed to reflect the modern user needs and experiences. Pitch comes free of cost for the starter pack while the Pro version is priced at $8 per member, per month, billed annually. For the Enterprise version, you will need to contact the sales team.
Conclusion
When growing your business is the only focus, you must ensure ways to enhance productivity while keeping the interests of your people in mind. You need not be extremely tech-savvy to implement SaaS tools for your business. Regardless of the kind of business that you have, you can set up the SaaS tools for your organization and start managing your business more effectively.
The definition of SaaS tools is a broad one. There are different tools useful for different tasks but they all stand for cloud operations to make it easier for handling business. While you work on expanding the productivity of your business with the help of SaaS tools, it is important to remember that there is nothing best for your business. Things can only be better going forward. Choose tools that are a crucial gain for your business in the long run.
The above-mentioned SaaS tools are changing the business landscape significantly. They do not need a lot of investment or support. But at the same time, it is wise to invest in tools after you are certain about the kind of business requirements that you have.
