The Best Online Tools To Make Your Small Business Successful
While we say that Administrate is the platform to manage your entire operation, we do recognise that there are other areas within your training business that you may need other tools to run to the best of your ability. Our focus is training, and we can help you manage all your training administration in one place, but if you want to make other areas of your business more successful as well, you may be looking for a little help.
Luckily Administrate integrates with a number of other systems, which we believe complement our offering, and will help you run your training business as successfully as possible.
Finding the right tools for the job can be especially key for a smaller business, where you may not have the scope or budget to hire a large team to cover every aspect of your business, so the use of tools allows you to carry out more work, and have it look professional, even with a limited workforce.
Let’s take a look at some of the best tools out there for small training businesses, which as an added bonus for Administrate customers, all integrate with our training management software!
1. MailChimp
If you send any marketing material by email, then you need to make sure it looks good! Even if your content is amazing, if your emails are dull and don’t engage your audience in the first couple of seconds, chances are they are going to be deleted before they’ve been read.
MailChimp makes it really easy for you to send amazing looking marketing emails and newsletters in no time at all. You can design as many templates as you require to fit your needs, and then simply slot in the content to create beautiful marketing emails.
MailChimp also allows you to keep track of things like who opens your emails, which emails bounce, and which links are clicked on the emails you send. You can then use this data to help you create content for future marketing campaigns.
If you use Administrate and MailChimp you can integrate the two, which will allow you to pull your contacts through from Administrate so you can send emails to all the lists you have already created without any duplicate work. It will also pull all the stats from MailChimp back into Administrate, so you can use them in our reporting system, and always make sure you’re reporting on all the key data in your business.
2. Xero
If you don’t have a massive Finance team, accounting software such as Xero can really be a lifesaver for smaller businesses. Xero makes creating invoices really easy and helps cut down on all that paperwork by keeping everything online. You can also manage your business on the move with their easy-to-use Xero app, so you don’t even have to be in the office if an invoicing emergency crops up!
As well as invoice creation, you can also pay bills, manage your payroll, claim expenses, and create purchase orders – so all your finances are managed in one place.
If you use Administrate, our integration with Xero means that any finalised invoices created within Administrate will automatically be pushed to Xero. Any contact details will also be pulled across, so if they’re not already in Xero, they will be added when you sync your invoices. This means you can manage and keep track of all your finances within Xero, and you don’t need to do any duplicate data entry to pull the information across from Administrate.
3. SurveyMonkey
We talk a lot about how important feedback is, and you really should use any chance you can to gather it from your customers. This is especially true for smaller businesses, as constructive feedback can help you shape and grow your business along the way.
You want your surveys to look good, convey all the information they need to, and be easy and clear for your students to fill out, and that’s where SurveyMonkey comes in! Using online surveys over hard copies is a lot easier and cheaper for you, which is great for smaller businesses who have a tight budget and limited manpower. They are also more convenient for your students to fill out, so you’re likely to get more responses than you would from a paper version anyway!
SurveyMonkey allows you to choose from expert-written questions and professional looking templates to make sure you create the best looking surveys possible – you can even customise them to fit your branding.
Administrate integration with SurveyMonkey means that you can send the surveys you create to the contact lists you have already created within Administrate. This allows you to segment your audience in exactly the way you need to, without having to copy any data across or worry about creating duplicate lists. Once you get responses to your surveys, these will be pulled into Administrate, meaning you can analyse the data within our reporting system, and compare it to any other data you have collected already!
4. Salesforce
Salesforce is the world’s number one CRM platform, so chances are there are a lot of training companies out there using them! Salesforce is designed to help you grow your accounts, find new customers, and close those deals faster, ensuring you get that revenue with much less effort – just what a smaller business needs!
Administrate’s integration with Salesforce allows you to synchronise your data between our CRM and Salesforce’s CRM, meaning your customer data is always completely up to date on both systems. This is great if you use Salesforce to manage some aspects of your customers relationships and Administrate to manage others, as it means all your data will be synced across both system without any additional work from you, and you won’t have to keep checking two systems to make sure you’re looking at the right data.
You also have the ability to pick exactly what data syncs and how it syncs, so everything is displayed exactly how you want it to be, and both systems work how your business needs them to.
5. Lead Liaison
If your business uses marketing automation, then a tool like Lead Liaison could be the solution that you’re looking for. Marketing automation is a great idea for smaller businesses as it means you can run lots of marketing campaigns automatically, so you don’t need to rely on a huge Marketing team to have a substantial output.
Lead Liaison is a marketing automation and lead management tool, which gives you the ability to do things like create bespoke marketing campaigns which will send when triggered, collect leads through lead capture forms on your website, and score your leads depending on how they interact with your business – things like clicking on links in emails, visiting certain pages on your website, and watching marketing videos. Once they reach a certain score (determined by you), these leads will be classed as qualified and can be passed to your Sales team to follow-up with.
Integrating Lead Liaison with Administrate means you can sync any lead details you collect with Administrate’s CRM, so all your details are stored in one place. You can pick exactly when you want them to sync to Administrate though, so you don’t end up with a CRM leads which you don’t think will end up being qualified. Each new lead that is pulled through will create a new opportunity within Administrate, so they’re nice and easy to keep track of, and your Sales team can start chasing them right away.
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Originally published at www.getadministrate.com.
