Building the Right Toolkit For Your Business
I was at a business development meeting the other day and the speaker was talking about the dangers of getting sucked into the switching to the newest, fanciest, best marketed application to help run some portion of your business. “This new app will blow your mind,” someone had said, “it’s a real game changer.”
Anyone who’s been responsible for organizing business functions has fallen into this trap. The advertising says that the new app will make your business easier and will help you run your operations more smoothly than ever before. And while this may (or may not) be true for the task the app was designed to do, the real headache begins when you try to integrate it with all the other apps you are using in your business.
A lot of small businesses start their operations with a grab bag of applications that manage sections of their activities. One for marketing, another for email, bookkeeping, eCommerce, customer relations, sales, the list goes on and on. It’s not uncommon for new businesses to find themselves using a dozen different apps to keep their business going, with minimal information sharing between the different software tools.
It’s that lack of integration that can rapidly cause problems as the business grows. If you don’t have the ability to sync up information between the tools, it becomes increasingly challenging to find the data you need. 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.
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 exactly that.
- Move to a fully integrated platform: There are a number of business application software providers that can share information across different business applications quickly and easily. Picking one of these platforms can save 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.
Do you have some tools that are not playing nice? Do 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.