Today’s startups have quite the daunting tasks in front of them. On the one hand, technology has made it easier and more efficient than ever to start and run a business. But on the other, with so many options out there for communicating with customers, managing payroll, ensuring customer information is secure, etc., it can be overwhelming to decide what services are best for you. With this in mind, we compiled this list of the top six solutions for startup success.
Seamless.AI, a sales intelligence platform, is an excellent tool for finding and organizing contacts, automating your list building and data entry, and ultimately saving you precious time, enabling you to focus more on sales and less on clunky, hard to navigate databases. Integration with your favorite tools makes prospecting … well, seamless! Plus, a real-time people search engine means you’ll never spend another minute scouring websites for contact information ever again.
FOR SOCIAL SELLING:
LinkedIn is a no-brainer for those looking for ways to promote their career accomplishments or search for a new job, but did you know it’s also essential for showcasing your brand’s personality, identifying and contacting prospective clients, and building relationships with buyers? LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, their flagship product for sales teams, can help you do all of this and more. Thanks to its powerful search capabilities, visibility into networks, and personalized algorithms, Sales Navigator makes it easier to not only identify prospects, but helps you reach the right decision maker at the right time.
FOR HR/PAYROLL:
HR functions can seem completely overwhelming without a full-fledged HR department to manage them. Don’t get us wrong, HR is a very necessary function that can make or break a company, but with so many companies going remote, a remote HR platform often makes more sense than a multi-tiered department. Enter Gusto – a “people platform” that offers full-service payroll, benefits management, time and attendance tracking, onboarding assistance, and more. With a variety of plans designed to meet the most basic needs to the most complex, you can pick and choose what you need or even contact their sales department for a crafted-to-scale plan with additional support.
FOR SECURITY & COMPLIANCE:
Building trust is essential for any business, but can be especially challenging for the startup – it’s that catch 22 that we all know so well; one needs to establish credibility in order to win business, but how does one establish credibility without a solid client base to tout your accomplishments? A critical piece is providing potential customers with evidence of your platform’s security, and that evidence is best proven through compliance and certification standards such as SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO 27001. Depending on the nature of your business, you may need one or several of these. Strike Graph is a trusted compliance expert that can help even the leanest, greenest of startups better understand compliance and build a simple, reliable, and effective program, enabling you to achieve certifications quickly and focus more time and effort on revenue and sales.
FOR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM):
The more your business grows, the more challenging it becomes to manage prospects and customers manually. HubSpot’s CRM software is designed to give you full visibility into your sales pipeline in real time and to arm your sales team with time-saving tools they’ll actually use. Acknowledged as the top CRM platform in G2, HubSpot is much extolled for its integrations, workflows, and automation. And, it’s free! If the idea of jumping into a CRM cold intimidates you or you’d simply like an expert to shepherd the experience, check out Theia Marketing, whose areas of expertise include HubSpot implementation, onboarding, and configuration.
FOR VIDEO CONFERENCING (AND MARKETING!):
Zoom meetings have become a way of life for many, thanks to the pandemic, but what some companies may not realize or take advantage of is the potential for using the platform as a marketing tool. Customizing your background to incorporate your logo makes for a nice touch and gives the prospective client on the other end of the meeting one more way to remember your company name. Zoom also makes it easy to create video content promoting your brand, such as customer testimonials, interviews with executives, panel discussions, video blogs, and more. And finally, Zoom integrates with a number of marketing-centric tools, to help simplify event registration, capture customer information, publish video recordings to your various platforms, and more.
