![27 Useful Small Business Tools to Boost and Sustain Growth [2024]](/blog/content/images/size/w2000/2021/10/feat-min.png)
Having the right tools can work wonders if you want to supercharge your business. Small business tools can accelerate efficiency in all departments, from boosting your brand to streamlining sales. Say goodbye to endless hours of manual work and hello to growth opportunities.
However, given the millions of available options, choosing the right tool can be overwhelming.
To help you with that, here’s a categorized list of small business tools for your different needs.
- Meeting and Productivity Tools
- Marketing Tools
- Sales & CRM Tools
- Customer Success Tools
- Accounting & Bookkeeping Tools
Let's look at 27 small business tools to boost and sustain your company's growth.
Meeting and Productivity Tools for Small Businesses
1. Fireflies
Fireflies automatically records, transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes all your online meetings and calls with over 90% accuracy. It can take notes from meetings across video conferencing platforms, dialers, and even audio/video files.
Key Features
- With an accuracy rate of over 90%, Fireflies transcribes meetings in 60+ languages.
- Fireflies’ Smart Search helps you find what you're looking for in seconds. Its Sentiment Filters identify positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. For quicker meeting navigation, Topic Tracker enhances the ability to track, organize, and search call data efficiently.
- Conversation Intelligence provides insights like speaker talk time and sentiment analysis by analyzing the conversation between the customer and the sales agent.
- Fireflies AI offers a unique Soundbite feature, allowing users to create short, impactful audio clips from recorded meetings and calls.
- Integrates easily with 40+ apps, including CRM and project management platforms.
- Take advantage of the GPT-4 powered bot, AskFred, for answering questions and generating post-meeting emails.
- Build a real-time knowledge base for your team and categorize meetings using channels.
Enhance Productivity In Meeting Management With Fireflies!
Invite Fireflies to automatically transcribe, summarize, and analyze your meetings.
Try Fireflies for free!2. Zoom
Zoom is perfect for easy and fast video conferencing for effective collaboration. It’s a robust, seamless platform to connect and collaborate virtually from a PC, tablet, or mobile.
Key Features
- With Zoom Team Chat, you can keep tabs on availability, seamlessly transition from chat to meetings, and share whiteboards without any hassles.
- You can customize your team chat experience with sidebar tools, organize contacts, and enhance communication with mentions and file sharing.
- Dive into brainstorming sessions with Zoom Whiteboard's interactive features, accessible across desktop, web, and Zoom Room for Touch.
- Experience modern communication with Zoom Phone's cloud VoIP service, with video voicemail and live call transcriptions.
- Integrate Zoom Phone with your favorite business apps like Salesforce and Slack for a unified experience.
Ayush Kudesia
3. Trello
Trello is a visual tool for project management and task tracking. You can customize your workflow with files, checklists, and automation to suit your team's unique needs.
Key Features
- Gain new perspectives with various Trello views, including Board, Timeline, Table, and more
- Streamline tasks with no-code automation
- Extend Trello's functionality by integrating with apps like Slack, Outlook, and Salesforce
- Enhance your boards with Power-Ups to create tailored workflows, from CRM solutions to social media calendars
4. Slack
Slack is the perfect tool for async communication. With Slack, you can create your workspace (virtual HQ) and collaborate with your teammates seamlessly. It also offers features like voice, video, and group calls.
Key Features
- Keep everyone in sync by centralizing all work communication.
- Comprehensive message archive and easy access to essential work tools.
- Slack supports teams of any size globally, offering limitless channels to match your company's structure.
- Safeguard your data at every level with Slack's enterprise-grade security measures, including enterprise key management, for complete control over data access.
Fireflies
5. Asana
Asana provides thorough task assignments for managers to delegate work, prioritize tasks, and set deadlines.
Key Features
- The timeline view visualizes project schedules, enabling teams to monitor progress and adapt plans instantly.
- Asana's project boards, similar to Kanban boards, provide a versatile and engaging approach to managing workflows.
- It also integrates with business tools like Slack, Google Drive, and Zoom.
6. Calendly
Calendly is like a digital planner that helps people and groups plan out their schedules by setting up meetings, appointments, and events. Calendly helps you find 'free time' easily and automatically.
Key Features
- Automated scheduling to pick a slot from a person's calendar to set up a meeting instantly.
- Send your Calendly link to guests and audience or embed it in your bio/website.
- Automated reminders and follow-ups.
Fireflies
Marketing tools for small business
If you want to grow your small business, smart sales and marketing tools are imperative. But the internet is full of marketing tools.
To help you decide, here's a collection of highly-rated marketing tools for small businesses.
7. MailChimp
Mailchimp is a comprehensive marketing automation and email marketing platform for communicating with your clients, customers, and other interested parties.
Key Features
- Easy-to-use email marketing tools, including customizable templates, audience segmentation, and detailed analytics for tailored marketing
- It is affordable and scalable and offers features like landing pages and social media ad management.
8. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most commonly used marketing tools for small businesses. It offers full-stack growth features to help you grow your business and improve conversion rates.
Key Features
- Foster and expand your business using free CRM software to manage customer relationships effectively.
- Engage with website visitors instantly to turn leads into customers
- Add a meeting scheduler link to your emails and website.
- Tailor your website using a user-friendly drag-and-drop website builder.
Fireflies
9. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the best free marketing tools for small businesses to track and manage customer data. Its wide popularity is due to the simple-to-use interface.
Key Features
- With built-in automation, quickly access Analytics data, predict user behavior, and leverage advanced modeling.
- Get instant insights into customer interactions on your sites and apps.
- Enhance media ROI assessment, optimize budget allocation, and evaluate attribution models effectively.
- Access, organize, and customize data for tailored analysis and seamless sharing with others.
- Easily collect, organize, and manage data with integrated tools.
- Analytics seamlessly integrates with Google solutions and partners.
10. Canva
With Canva, you can create marketing assets for every platform (FB, Instagram, email, LinkedIn, etc). The upside is you can just drag and drop designs from templates and add your touch within a few clicks.
Key Features
- Canva's user-friendly platform is perfect for beginners and pros alike.
- Explore various templates across various categories, from social media to business cards.
- Tailor your designs easily, adjusting fonts, colors, and images to match your brand or style.
- Collaborate with teams, share designs, and work together in real-time.
- Design on the go with Canva's mobile app, which is available for iOS and Android.
11. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is the perfect tool for small businesses looking to market to their target demographics. This small business tool connects businesses to the influencers in their domain.
Key Features
- Creates a database of relevant influencers for your business and reaches out for affiliations.
- Helps you identify the type of content that's growing on a competitor's site.
- Analyses past trends and mentions.
- Also, analyses share-worthy content, who's linking to it, and how you can fit in.
12. Moosend
Moosend is an email marketing automation tool for small businesses. It offers various features to engage with customers.
Key Features
- Creating subscription pages and landing pages.
- Email templates and an easy drag-and-drop editor.
- Advanced tracking and automation options.
- Reporting and analytics for data-backed decisions.
- Offers a wide array of integrations, so you don't have to switch platforms.
Fireflies
13. SendX
SendX is an intuitive, easy-to-use small business tool to grow your subscriber base. You can engage with your customers using email popup forms, inline forms, and landing pages.
Key Features
- Design forms with built-in themes and embed them on any website.
- Design emails without HTML using the personalized templates in the WYSIWYG editor.
- It also offers drip marketing features and audience segmentation to engage with each prospect.
- Heatmap tracks CTA and what links people are clicking the most.
Fireflies
Sales & CRM tools for small business
As your customer base grows, you must manage and segment the contacts. Efficient segmentation can help you send personalized messages and offers to increase the conversion rate.
Further, CRM tools help you evaluate sales performance against metrics like calls made and deals closed.
Here are some of the best CRM tools for small businesses that will help you improve customer engagement and retention.
14. Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the best CRM tools for small businesses. Most businesses are Salesforce loyalists thanks to its robust platform and many features.
Key Features
- Speed up decision-making with smart suggestions and practical insights provided by Tableau.
- Increase productivity by harnessing data and AI-driven insights built directly into your CRM.
- Resolve cases faster and expand round-the-clock support across various channels using AI-powered chatbots.
Fireflies
15. Zoho
Zoho is a premium enterprise-grade CRM software with state-of-the-art integrations and functionalities. However, it also offers packages for small businesses looking to grow their customer base and target prospects.
Fireflies
Key Feature
- Personalize customer journey with CommandCenter.
- Predictive sales and intelligence to manage your CRM data.
- Track sales performance, set achievable targets, and analyze data effortlessly using Zoho CRM's reports, analytics, and forecasts.
- Stay connected with prospects and leads from anywhere with Zoho CRM's remote-friendly features.
Krish Ramineni
16. Agile
Agile is a cloud-based CRM platform that helps small businesses manage and track customer interactions.
Key Features
- Offers custom appointments, drag-and-drop marketing automation, and reports via email
- Also provides widgets, a library of plugins, API-powered integrations, and much more
17. Freshworks
Freshworks (previously Freshsales) allows you to automatically capture website visitors as sales leads and group them into a database according to their engagement.
Key Features
- It helps you assign a relevant sales rep to these leads to offer a customized experience.
- With the help of lead scoring, you can reach out to potential prospects with context and close deals to improve the sales pipeline.
Ayush Kudesia
18. EngageBay
EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software for small businesses and startups.
Key Features
- You get email marketing, automation, templates, landing pages, web analytics, personalizations, and useful integrations.
- The dashboard offers a bird's eye view of all your marketing KPIs and gives insights on improving your campaigns.
Small business tools for customer success
These are small business tools that improve customer satisfaction, reduce churn, and evaluate success metrics.
19. Gainsight
Gainsight is a customer success tool that helps predict and manage customer risk, streamline the customer journey, and align team efforts for growth and advocacy.
Key Features
- Provides insights, collects feedback, engages customers, and transforms customer success.
- Customer Health Scores give each customer a score based on how happy they are.
- Gainsight is built on machine learning, which helps you make data-driven decisions based on customers' behavior.
20. Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer service software with easy-to-use, scalable solutions for your business.
Key Features
- The ROI calculator helps you find how you can benefit from better customer service.
- Compare your business with others using CX Trends Reports.
21. Totango
Totango is a cloud-based platform focused on customer success and retention. By overseeing post-sales activities, it helps businesses speed up customer success, adoption, retention, and expansion.
Key Features
- AI-backed software helps every business optimize the customer journey.
- Exclusive features make it easier to manage customer experience at various touchpoints.
- Real-time access to customer health — stay alert to risks and engage proactively with customers to drive evaluation, onboarding, and product adoption.
Small business tools for accounting & bookkeeping
Small businesses can benefit from accounting and bookkeeping tools as they help track and manage accounts receivable and accounts payable. They provide a clear understanding of business profitability and prepare data for tax season.
Here's a list of small business tools for accounting that increase efficiency while managing money and expenses.
22. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is a cloud-based business and financial management suite. It is a very popular bookkeeping tool among most small business owners.
Key Features
- Educational resources, guides, and tutorials to get started.
- Centralized dashboards where you can track all your bookkeeping from one place.
- Premium features include inventory management, time tracking, additional users, and budgeting.
23. FreshBooks
FreshBooks offers invoicing solutions for service-based small businesses.
Key Features
- Sending, receiving, printing, and paying invoices.
- Bookkeeping with balance sheets, general ledger, and automated bank reconciliation.
- Easy integration with third-party apps such as Shopify, Gusto, Stripe, G Suite, and more.
24. Wave
Wave is a bookkeeping software that offers free accounting, invoicing, and receipt scanning.
Key Features
- Simplifies your invoicing process and minimizes unpaid invoices.
- Offer customers convenient one-click payment options like credit cards, bank transfers, or Apple Pay.
- Accounting helps you keep tabs on your income & expenses, monitor your cash flow, and breeze through taxes.
25. Pabbly
Pabbly Plus is an all-inclusive business management package designed to handle your sales and marketing requirements, eliminating the need for multiple apps.
Key Features
- Real-time data-driven metrics on monthly payments, revenue, net revenue, active customers, and new subscriptions.
- Automates business workflows, customer communication, and invoice creation.
- Offers fixed pricing model.
- No extra fees based on per-transaction and monthly revenue generation.
26. Square
Square is a financial services platform with various tools created for small businesses.
Key Features
- Easy-to-use point-of-sale (POS) system.
- Diverse payment processing solutions — credit card processing, mobile payments, and online invoicing.
- Easy access to inventory management.
27. Xero: Best for Micro-Business Owners
Xero is perfect for small businesses looking for a simple and clean accounting tool. This tool freely integrates with third-party payroll services. Businesses can collect online customer payments via Stripe and GoCardless (Xero's integration).
Key Features
- Offers an early (restricted) plan for businesses that have high-ticket transactions (e.g., consulting or small service providers), valid for a few per month.
- Supports multi-currencies.
- Expense management and project costing.
FAQs
Why do I need small business tools?
Small business tools are vital for smoothing operations, automating routine tasks, and handling different business areas, like finances and customer interactions. They offer valuable insights, boost efficiency, and facilitate scalable growth, which is critical for small businesses to thrive and stay ahead in the market.
How to improve my small business with AI tools?
From chatbots to predictive analytics, AI empowers businesses to make smarter decisions, improve customer satisfaction, and drive growth in competitive markets. You can leverage Fireflies' AI assistance to gain better insights before decision-making.
Wrapping up
The tools discussed above can be leveraged by your business to aid growth, management, and expenses. Before choosing a software, consider these factors: cost, scalability, ease of use, reputation, and accounting features.
Prioritize what matters to your business the most and then sort the tools according to it. The goal is to choose a solution that doubles your efficiency while still being on a budget.
Fireflies is an indispensable asset for small businesses aiming to maintain a competitive edge through superior information management and customer engagement strategies.
Fireflies' capabilities in automating the transcription of meetings, generating summaries, and extracting actionable insights are crucial for decision-making and strategy development. By integrating with popular communication platforms and CRMs, it captures critical customer feedback and team discussions, ensuring no valuable information is lost.
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Manasvi Pawaria
