I started my company a year ago, and in the early days, I wasted a lot of time finding the right support services. I’m talking CRMs, Sales Automation platforms, Project Management Platforms, Office phone numbers, Code Repositories, Hosting, Wireframe tools, Prototype Software and more.
To save everyone else time, I’ve listed below my recommended solutions in each of these categories. I have no relationships with any of these companies (besides being a happy customer). I’ve decided they are the best solution for me (many of them after painstakingly trying other solutions first).
Would love to hear your experiences and comments too.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
My Choice: SalesforceIQ (formerly RelateIQ)
Why? I tried many different system, some for many months. What makes SalesforceIQ so their inbox plugin. It allows you to manage your entire CRM directly from your inbox. If you haven’t used a CRM before, you’ll notice you are constantly switching back and forth, setting reminders to follow up in your CRM, and then going back to email to actually do the follow up. SalesforceIQ has great tools that lets you automatically set reminders only if you don’t hear back from that person — that on it’s own is a huge time saver. But in addition, you can change the state of a deal, add in latest dollar amounts, add new contacts to the same deal, etc. It really is amazing.
Salesforce by itself is very powerful, and I likely would have gone with that, but from a cost side of things, it was prohibitive to start with — especially with the amount of customization we would have wanted to do to it. SalesforceIQ solved all of our needs from the beginning, and is well worth the price.
Sales Automation Platforms
My Choice: Salesloft
Why? I was looking for a solution in which I could write email templates, and then have it auto generate emails to thousands of contacts. After testing many solutions, I found the quality of the support staff, the ease of use of the system, and the fact that is also includes a phone number, so you can batch up telesales too, was a great addition that we may use in the future.
Buying Leads
My Choice: Datanyze
Why? What you’re learn about this space, is it’s VERY tough to buy leads that actually work. I’ve bought tons of crappy leads before, then you try using a sales automation platform to send hundreds of emails. And before you know it, you’re getting error emails back, and Gmail has blocked you for 24 hours. And not having corporate email for 24 hours is a BAD thing.
So a few tips. Use Datanyze. And setup a different email address to send automated emails from.
But overall, Datanyze actually has clean data — and when it doesn’t have an exact match, it tells you, guesses what it could be and doesn’t charge you for it. I wasted so much time and money buying bad leads. Learn from my mistakes.
Project Management Platforms
My Choice: Asana
Why? Hands down, super easy to use. It’s great for large teams. It’s free until around 10 users. So it’s great to scale with. I didn’t have to try too many different solutions as I was recommended this one from great product folks. But I’ve come to love it, and will use Asana with all future companies as well.
However, I do want to try Trello for project management on the next product I build. I’ve used it for coordination projects and it works great.
Office Phones
My Choice: Google Voice
Why? Why waste money on this when you’re just starting up? Google gives you a number for free. Have it forward to your cell number, and that’s it. This is the number you put on your website so people can call. We’re just about to hit the stage were we need more functionality, to be able to transfer calls to people in different offices. So, we’re about to embark on that selection process… however, I’ve heard great things about DialPad, and they are the front runner right now.
Code Repositories
My Choice: Github
Why? Ask any developer, pay the $25/month, it’s worth it. Github saves a ton of time over alternatives with all their plugins and addons. Plus all developers are on this already. Don’t look around for anything else.
Hosting
My Choice: AWS
Why? The built-in tools, cost and developer familiarity make this another no-brainer. AWS has also become a household name that adds trust and credibility to your product from day one. I’ve done a number of sales pitches and people are happy to hear we are on AWS. We actually started on a different platform, and the reception was always confusion… what is this other platform? Why wouldn’t you use AWS? Is there something else you’re not telling me? We changed to AWS mainly because of the developer tools and flexibility, but the creditability it adds is a nice side benefit.
Wireframe Software
My Choice: Balsamiq
Why? When you’re building any product, I believe in starting with a wireframe, of sorts. A tool like Balsamiq speeds up the process by including many pre-built objects such as webpage frames, selectors, drop-downs, tables, etc. These are all items that don’t need to be stylized in the wire-framing stage, but you need them to demonstrate the functionality. Then once you reach the design stage, you can stylize everything. Balsamiq is a great, easy-to-use, web-based tool. And my team would rather look at a great Balsamiq wireframe than my terrible drawing skills.
Prototype Software
My Choice: Invision
Why? Every have a hard time getting what’s in your head onto the screen? Invision is amazing at helping you do that. It let’s you easily turn a static design into a clickable prototype. This helps us from a user experience perspective to be able to “click-through” what we’re building before spending time coding it. Invision also acts as a great way to explain the product interaction to the developers.
Team Messaging
My Choice: Slack
Why? We are a remote team, so communication is very important. We setup Slack #channels for every part of the business. This allows everyone to know what’s going on (since you don’t have the “water-cooler”) and lets you consume the data on your schedule. It has all the great parts of traditional messaging too, emojis, direct messaging, etc. But even more important are the bots. We have our sales contact forms tied to Slack, so our sales team automatically gets pinged with a new sales inquiry, the entire team can watch Github commits, and more. It’s the perfect way to communicate allowing everyone to stay up to date with all parts of the company, while also helping you focus on what’s most important to you (and not getting lost in email).
Video Chat
My Choice: Skype
Why? Skype always works (well almost always). I love what Google Hangouts and others try to be, but I’ve had too many issues, and Skype is just easy. I wish Slack had video chat, then we’d have all our messaging in one place.
Conference Calls and Screen-Sharing
My Choice: Uber Conference
Why? I started out loving the voice quality. When you get two people on voip, the quality is awesome — think the difference from regular TV to HD — but in audio. It’s reliability could be a bit better, and I’m sure is improving. But it’s so easy for my customers. They don’t have to download any plugins, they go to a website, they can dial a number (without any pins) and just get connected. If you’re worried about one conference call running into another, you can just easily “lock” the conference room until that one is done, and then start the next call. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I’ve found. (and I’ve tried them all….)
Marketing Site CMS
My Choice: Wordpress
Why? Tons of plugins — makes adding tools and functionality easy. Also, a huge developer network here, so always easy to find people to work on your site.
And yes, build your product and marketing site as two separate platforms. You’ll want to roll out A:B testing, customer chat, tracking pixels, etc on the marketing site, that you don’t need to worry about on the main product as much.
And, since there is a big developer network here, you don’t need to get your core-product-engineers to work on your marketing site. Because what usually happens is it takes weeks or months to make marketing site changes, which you want to iterate on quickly… and Wordpress isn’t something your core product engineers are going to be excited to work on anyways (many of them will describe it as beginner stuff). So use Wordpress, plan on hiring contract developers to build it for you (or just learn it yourself).
Social Media Tools
My Choice: Buffer — but no clear winner
Why? Don’t love it — don’t hate it. It gets the job done for $10/month.
Customer Success Management
No winner here. I have used Intercom, pros/cons to it. Still on the lookout for something great. But just a year in, we don’t have a ton of customers yet, so hasn’t been a burning need for us yet. Open to suggestions.
Originally published at blog.johnfoxjr.com.
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