Don Sesler, The Technology Whisperer: As the owner, I have the honor of leading a team of super-smart individuals who share my passion for helping entrepreneurs and business owners not fall victim to complex technology challenges that can kill productivity. We want to tame your technology so that it works for you and not the other way around. What technology problem is making your life more complicated than it should be? Reach out to me and tell me your story.

Escaping The Small Business App Trap

Building the Right Toolkit For Your Business

I was at a meeting the other day, and the speaker started talking about this new app his team was using to help manage their business. “This new app will blow your mind. It’s a real game changer!”

Tempting. Right?

We’ve all been there, and it’s often a trap.

There are literally thousands of new apps coming to the marketplace all the time. And while the next new hot app may (or may not) be awesome for the task it was designed to do, the real headache begins when you try to integrate one app with all the other apps you are using in your business.

Most Apps Don’t Play Well Together

Small businesses are always on the lookout for better tools to help manage sections of their company, and it is easy to find yourself using one for marketing, another for email, bookkeeping, eCommerce, customer relations, sales, the list goes on and on. Each app helps keep the business running, allowing the department to operate a little better than it did before.

However, if the apps cannot share information easily, it won’t be long before they create at least as much work as they initially saved. Email addresses, phone numbers, sales history, and customer support information can all end up in different systems, making it nearly impossible to find what you need. Even worse, this lack of cohesion can keep you from leveraging the information you have collected to improve your business.

Two Approaches Towards Connecting The Dots

There are two common approaches companies use to consolidate their app information:

  • Build software connectors: Often called API’s, these connectors can sync and share data between different tools. If you want to share information between a marketing application like HubSpot and a bookkeeping tool like QuickBooks, there are connectors that will allow you to do that. Zapier is the most popular app connecting tool, and can be a good option if you are heavily invested in a few mainstream applications and need to patch together a way for them to share information.
  • Move to a fully integrated platform: A better long-term solutions is to settle on a platform that has a suite of business apps for each discipline that are already designed to share critical information.  Fully integrated platforms can ave you a ton of time by automatically syncing data between different parts of your business.

We are a fan of Zoho One as a starting point for small businesses to consolidate their systems. Zoho’s CRM, Marketing, and Bookkeeping modules are all very good, and the Zoho ecosystem offers almost everything a small business needs to get all of their applications talking to each other. Zoho isn’t perfect, and there are good arguments for using other tools in many circumstances, but with over 40 business apps bundled together for one monthly fee, it’s definitely worth considering. Most businesses will also need to invest in either Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 since they are both better tools for document management, email, and collaboration.

Less Friction, More Focus

When your apps can communicate with each other, your team won’t have to waste time duplicating information between them or tracking down which app has the information you need. If you need some help figuring out which tools make the best sense in the long term for your business, book a free consultation with me, and I’ll be happy to share what I know about the options out there and help you get your business ready for the next level.