4 Business Tools You Can't Live Without

All businesses, small or large, use certain tools that give their marketing, sales, engineering and operations teams a boost. From Hubspot to Slack to Salesforce to Pivotal Tracker, these tools can improve the day-to-day efficiency of your teams. Here are four business tools that you should be using right now:

1) Marketing

Hubspot: All of your inbound marketing efforts can take place in the comprehensive Hubspot portal. It’s where your website lives, your blogs are written, case studies/white papers are hosted and where email marketing campaigns can be tracked and managed. The Hubspot social publishing application is an added marketing bonus that allows you to schedule content across social channels. Also, it offers tremendous customer service for technical issues and responses are sent in a timely manner when any problems arise.

“Raise your hand if you know a business that would like more visitors to its website, more leads for its sales team — and more customers to fuel growth. Chances are your hand is up. We all know businesses that want to grow,” Hubspot writes on their homepage.

2) Internal Communication

Slack: Slack is a messaging app that connects all of your communication in one place. It’s where employees communicate about tasks and share files. Slack’s customizable channels are essential for each department within your business funnel (and some fun categories, for internal culture):

It’s free for small businesses, but enterprise licenses can be purchased for companies exceeding the threshold of users and need upgraded file sharing capabilities. They also offer hundreds of integrations that make business life even easier. Slack has become so popular amongst it’s users that their marketing team started a Twitter account dedicated to retweeting all of the praise they’ve been receiving: @SlackLove.

3) CRM

Salesforce: Salesforce helps companies track and manage leads.  You can utilize Salesforce from the very first interaction your client has with you to making that conversion you want.  It’s an essential part of giving your business a streamlined process for leads that yield quick, timely results.

"The Salesforce Customer Success Platform helps companies connect to their customers in a whole new way with our sales, service, marketing, community, and analytics apps."

4) Engineering

Pivotal Tracker: Pivotal Tracker takes the jumbled web of engineering assignments and turns them into a perfectly manicured dashboard. The software organizes tasks by order of priority and creates a transparent location for all of your engineering projects. Integrations are a large part of what Pivotal Tracker does, and they tie into some of the biggest engineering platforms like Google and GitHub. And they pride themselves on their clients' ability to learn how their system works in a matter of minutes.