6 Enterprise Ready but Affordable Tools to Sizzle Business Management

by Tracy Vides

Here’s a pop quiz: What’s the hardest part while running a business?

1. To get customers?
2. To hire the best talent?
3. To keep cash flow healthy?
4. To manage operations?

Answer: All of them.

It’s not easy to run a business and manage it. Yet, you’d have to. You have taken the leap.

So, can technology help?

As Paul Graham of Y Combinator puts it, you’d still have to “Do things that don’t scale”. You still need people. You’ll do some things the good old-fashioned way. You’ll need technology too. The final point is to use technology for your business.

This already gives you a jumpstart at least or a competitive edge at best.

The good news, however, is that if you plug technology in, a lot of the hard part is taken care of. From that point on, it’s all about managing technology and a few other areas that you have to do anyway.

When it comes to robust, fully powered solutions, you might think that some tools are just plain out of your budget.

How about enterprise-capable, affordable tools? You’d want to check a few of those out. Here are some of them:

HootSuite

Social media is likely to an important part of your digital marketing strategy, and it should be. Managing social media, however, can be a major time suck. If you aren’t careful with your social media strategy, you could be spending a whole lot of time on it. According to Marketing Charts 18-34 year old Americans are spending an average of 3.8 hours a day. Most 35-49-year-olds spend 3 hours a day on average.

Marketers could be spending an average of 6-10 hours per week on social media alone, according to Neil Patel. It doesn’t have to be this way.

HootSuite is an enterprise-ready, highly capable, and ultra-efficient way to manage your social media — one dashboard, many possibilities. Schedule your posts (across networks), add images to the mix, respond to mentions, and manage your interactions with others.

HootSuite also provides you with analytics per account and plenty of apps to help you manage social media better, curate content, or find content to share.

Agiliron

Running an e-commerce business isn’t as easy as it might seem. Agreed that you don’t have to hustle for space or book expensive rental space in commercial areas. Yet, just managing different aspects of e-commerce business including inventory management, taxes, and shipping, can be daunting. We didn’t even begin to talk about marketing, see?

Agiliron makes management a better experience for affordable prices – it’s a multiple-channel e-commerce management solution.

Agiliron makes it easy to track and manage multiple logins, PCI compliance, a 360-degree view of your entire business, custom domain URLs, and full feature integrations with any e-commerce platform you could be using such as BigCommerce, Magento, or Shopify.

Xero

As your business grows, you’d need a lot more than spreadsheets or half-baked invoicing solutions. You’d need invoicing that you can manage or have accounting/finance teams manage it for you. In short, the invoicing solution should be easy to use, robust enough to do what’s needed and scale up as your business grows.

Xero is an invoicing solution built for organizations – small or big. It can be as small as exhaustive as you want it to be.

Xero features regular invoicing, recurring invoicing, tax compliance, multiple currencies, smart lists, templates for invoices, and automated reporting for financial data that you’ll need for efficient bookkeeping.

Xero also has plenty of third-party services integrated to make it easier for you to run and manage your business.

Board

Business Intelligence has always been an important aspect of running a business. However, the early solutions were expensive and clunk for small or growing businesses. Board All in One is a business intelligence software that lets you build and craft a corporate performance management application without knowing a line of code.

Board isn’t a patchwork derived from other similar systems. It’s a single product that promises to ease the pain of gathering and analyzing data as you run your business. An advanced, intuitive interface makes it a pleasure to use. Customize the solution to your needs, crunch your numbers better and whip out reports in an instant.

ShipStation

E-commerce runs by the phrase, “Always be shipping”. Shipping, however, isn’t simple. Add multiple channels to your business and it’s easy enough to see why shipping can be a nightmare if you leave it unmanaged. You have a store that processes orders. You then have multiple e-commerce platforms or marketplaces where you sell your products. How are you possibly going to keep track of sales, inventory, orders, and shipping information?

ShipStation is your “nirvana” – as they call it. All your orders show up within ShipStation along with the necessary information. Retrieve information when you need to, create labels easily, pick your favorite shipping carrier, and build integrated workflows to complete fulfillment.

Process orders across your multiple channels and automate processes. ShipStation is on the cloud making it easy for you to access it anytime, anywhere. Plus, you also get discounted shipping rates when you pick your carrier (FedEx, UPS), etc.

Retention Factory

Do you know the scariest thing an e-commerce business owner lives with? It’s called the “shopping cart abandonment rate”. The average documented shopping cart abandonment rate is at a staggering 67.91%, according to the Baymard Institute.

As if it’s a progressive disease, if you could achieve a lower shopping cart abandonment rate, you’d then have to deal with the “single sale syndrome” when customers make a purchase never to return again.

Retention Factory promises a better retention rate with “hyper-targeted email”. It’s a “fit and forget” automated solution which allows you to send targeted emails and then learn from data gleaned from campaign results. Small or big – Retention factory is a great way to protect leaks from your sales funnel.

What are some of the greatest challenges you face with your e-Commerce business? What are some of those tools you bank on? Tell us all about it. Share your inputs in the comments below.