Some years ago, if you wanted to have a business, you needed to find a profitable product or service and start offering it to the public. However, since the Internet and technology advanced at a really fast pace, this is not enough anymore. Now you need to rely on the different products that technology can offer you to improve the productivity of your company. Increasing productivity and making the most of the resources you have is key to taking your company to the next level. Failing to do so, will cause your company to fade away against the competition. 

Here are some tips you can start applying to grow your business using different technologies that you can find nowadays.

 

1. Time Tracking Software

Money is not what you spend to achieve things. What you spend is time. And time is something that you won’t be able to recover once you have lost it. You need to constantly monitor what you are doing with the time you have on your hands. This is where time-tracking software is extremely useful. Once you start registering the amount of time that you spend on each task, you can check where you are losing valuable time and take considerable actions to be more efficient.

 

2. Project Management Tools

One of the most important things for any business is the ability to deliver what you promised. Fail to deliver once and you might be forgiven, but that won’t happen twice, so you must control your project to deliver what the client requested and on time. For these, management tools are the best help you can get. You will be able to check status, completed tasks, and many other things. If you are managing a team, these tools will be your best friend since you can delegate tasks and overview the progress.

 

3. The Cloud is Here to Stay

It wasn’t long ago when you had to purchase blank media and hard drives to backup everything. Companies had disc arrays that allowed them to have duplicates of information just in case anything happened. But now, things have radically changed with the arrival of the cloud. Many different companies are offering services to backup your information online, with encryption so it can be safe and the best of all is that these solutions are relatively cheap compared with the disc arrays we used to have in offices during the 2000s.

 

4. Online Invoicing Services

Nowadays bank transfers are slowly fading away because of the high fees and the long processing times. Instead of doing this, you can select one of the many online invoicing services that will help you have your money faster while making life easier for your clients. 

 

5. Budget Tools are a Must

The budget is the thing that every business needs to be aware of. This is what will make you see what things you can do and what things you can’t. An organized budget will help to reach profit quickly because you will have everything planned when it comes to the economic part of your company. And the best way to have an effective budget (and make sure you stick to it) is to have a budget tool for it. There are free and paid budget creation tools that you can use for this. All of them have different features, so you should check some of them until you find the one you like the most. You can also have a custom one done for you. 

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6. Take Advantage of Team Messaging Platforms

Today there are really powerful applications like Slack that can be extremely useful to keep the whole team connected and in constant communication. Communication is crucial for the development of any business. You can find a vast amount of different tools for this, so you need to check the ones that you think will fit your company better. In this section, Slack has a lot of advantages offering free and paid plans that can fit almost any company, big or small. 

 

7. Automation is Your Friend

Automated emails on certain triggers that you can determine. In this way you can have certain tasks working automatically, improving the performance and Nowadays, many things that need a human can be done using automation. Did somebody contact you via Facebook or WhatsApp? Use a chatbot and guide them through your support process. Chatbots have evolved to the point where they are not that robotic and lifeless answering machines. Now they can generate a good conversational flow. 

 

In the same way, automate your mailing lists, imagine you need to write manual emails to everybody who comes to your mailing list… you would be crazy in no time. All email marketing providers have features for automation, so you can send increasing the number of people that you can serve in your business. Try to do that without automation.

 

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If you think your business can benefit from any of the tips above, or need expert assistance in making sure your business succeeds with the best that technology can offer, Sanmark is here to help. Contact us today to get started!