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When you're running your consultancy firm - whether it's business, coaching, management, or law, you'll always have to complete multiple tasks. These tasks often happen simultaneously, and as the head, you need to keep an eye out to ensure everything is running smoothly. Consultants have to ensure that their day's work is carried out correctly and to do so, the right apps need to be employed.
With the influx of technology in business, business apps have become a dime-a-dozen. But what truly separates an average and great app is the value proposition it has for you. As consultants, these tools can help you not just grow your business but stay at the top of the game too.
What Benefits can Good Apps Bring?
Creating relationships with your customers and sustaining them is highly important. CRM is an integral part of every small business as they help to scale business productivity. You need to have an app that can help you manage the entire onboarding, nurturing, and conversion process, among others. Apart from that, there's a whole new effort that goes into maximizing your team's and your own time to achieve great productivity.
Good apps can help you achieve all that and more. They can enable smoother process workflows, project management, and organizational excellence.
The good news? There's plenty of apps. The better news? We've listed them down below, exclusively segregated so that they can benefit consultants across domains:
CRM and Sales
Followup.cc
This is a super handy addition to the Gmail inbox for your business. It offers two solutions, namely the emailer and the other for the personal CRM. The former can help you keep track of all important emails, with which you can also set up reminders and add notes. There are also real-time notifications that give you timely insights when receivers open your emails.
The personal CRM front was developed to create and nurture business relationships. It can replace address books and spreadsheets, so you're always in touch with important contacts. These can all be stored within the Gmail account, where you can even add notes.
Price: The monthly fee for Followup for email begins at $18 for the Starter Pack. The Salesforce version is $40/month, which comes with a CRM input.
Pipedrive
This is another popular CRM solution, and it presents data from various sales in a visually appealing way. This can help you make your sales process get more efficient and transparent. This visual pipeline makes it easier to organize information about customers and leads and get input easily.
Pipedrive also easily integrates with emails, making it super easy to send out too. It makes use of automation tools to save effort and time. Also, the CRM software provides you with options for sales forecasting features and reporting. There are also reminders built-in to sync with the Google Calendar.
Price: The Silver plan begins at $14/month. You can also use the Gold plan at $28/month or Platinum at $56/month.
Teamgate
If you're a consultant who works with Zapier, Quickbooks, Mailchimp, or Zendesk, Teamgate is the software your company needs. It helps you customize and organically grow your business while remaining simple in its operationality.
The user-friendly interface and customer service and support are two of its other significant strengths, and a seamless onboarding team supports them.
Price: The Starter plan begins at $9/Month. You can also use the Professional at $22/month or the Enterprise plan, which is $65/month for other features.
Productivity and Time Management
Whether you're an independent consultancy or working with a large team, time's always going to be precious. How you fit multiple responsibilities within a single day in itself is an art. With the right software, your time management can be more efficient.
Here are a few good ones:
Hubstaff
One of the major challenges consultants face is managing a slew of tasks that require regular attention. Among the many productivity mobile apps, Hubstaff can effectively take away a handful of responsibilities off your plate.
The app offers easy tracking of online time for both yourself and the team, and it can be deployed quickly. You can ensure the monthly timesheets are taken care of well too.
As consultants, you're most likely traveling from one client site to another. Having robust mobile time tracking apps and easier reporting is essential, and Hubstaff provides that with a GPS location and other business features.
Pricing: Free for a single user. The Basic plan begins at $5/month a user. To get the complete set, use the Premium plan, which starts at $10 per user.
factoHR
factoHR is a unified solution that administrates all the concerns related to the workforce of your organization. Among them, tracking employees’ work hours and determining their productivity levels is one of the major concerns handled by this automated platform.
The software and the dedicated application empower the employees to input their tasks and respective timing for completing them. The managers further analyze this to determine workers’ productivity regularly. This ensures to keep the timesheet streamlined and up-to-date to keep track of the ongoing projects effectively.
Moreover, as a consultant, you can rightly figure out the project costings and access downloadable reports about clients, projects, work timings, and many more in just a couple of minutes.
Pricing: factoHR does not publicly share its pricing as it offers different plans based on the size and specific needs of the business. So you can get a personalized quote based on your requirements.
Focus Booster
Based on the highly followed Pomodoro time-saving technique, the app's goal is to create better working habits, free your time and help you stay on top of all your tasks. As consultants, you charge by the hour, and giving your clients the most is important. With the Focus Booster app, you can easily overcome your distractions by working in specific sprints and relaxing post-work.
Price: The app is available with up to 20 Pomodoro sessions in a single month. The Individual package begins at $2.99/month, and the Professional plan costs around $4.99/month. These come with a one-month free trial period too.
TMetric
The app automates time tracking for consultants and helps invoice clients accurately. It will count every minute you spend while providing consulting services, enable you to assign different billable rates per hour, and create detailed reports to have a clear understanding of what client is the most profitable. With TMetric, you can log your work time anywhere you are with your client (office, online, on the go, etc.) because the app is available on the web, mobile, and desktop.
Price: Free plan is supported for teams of up to 5 users and offers limited functionality. The paid subscription provides access to more features and its pricing starts at $4 per user per month.
Accounting and Project Management Software
Mavenlink
This is another popular project management platform that comes with specific solutions designed around consulting. The goal is to help you maximize utilization, improve margins, and delight clients simultaneously. You can track project progress, schedule your plans, plan financial resources and improve results.
This is designed to work and connect with CRM and other tools. From resource management, project accounting, and business intelligence, you can manage your entire business from one place.
Price: The Teams plan comes at around $19/month for up to five users. The Professional program comes at $39/month per user.
Deskera
Deskera gives you everything you need to run your business right out of the box.
Invoicing, bank connections, accounting, inventory, order fulfillment, online payments, financial reports with local tax reporting. Build deals & pipelines, segmented marketing campaigns, knowledge-base, support ticketing.
Run unlimited payroll as per local regulations, view payslips, manage tax reporting, apply for vacations, scan expenses, and an ALL-IN-ONE Dashboard like no other!
Features:
- All In One Dashboard
- Unlimited invoices and bills
- Connect your banks
- Multi-currency
- Add your own custom fields
- Get complete inventory management
- Run payroll for 100 employees
- Apply and approve leaves & expenses
- Create your own sales pipelines
- Run email campaigns
- Build landing pages
- Email & chat support
- Access to Helpcentre & Deskera Academy
Pricing: Explore Deskera’s affordable plans starting at 1,399 INR per month per user. For more information click here.
Scribe
Scribe is a desktop app and browser extension (Chrome and Firefox) that automates the creation of how-to guides. Simply click “Record” and complete the task you want to show a client, and Scribe automatically writes the instructions, takes the screenshots, and highlights your clicks. You are then able to add extra instructions, delete steps, modify screenshots, redact information, and more. Gone are the days of hopping on a Zoom call to show a process or manually creating guides in Word documents. You can also reuse common guides with all of your clients, saving time over the long run.Price: Free plan supports unlimited document creation within web applications with some limited functionality. Paid subscription of $29 per month enables the desktop application plus functionality like screenshot redaction.
Evernote
Evernote is one of the best apps for note-taking and for many good reasons. It offers a blank page to write down the minutes of the meeting, handling and storing your tasks and other pertinent files. It's excellent at keeping coaching and consulting work efficient and organized.
The other features include templates, web clippers, syncing notes, handwriting search, notebooks, tags, and document sharing.
Price: The Basic plan is free. Premium costs $8/Month, and the Business plan is $16/Month.
Xero
This is one of the best tools for any small consulting firm or business. If you're looking to save effort and money, this is the perfect app. You can handle all the invoicing with the available payment options and connect your bank with daily transactions. You can also check bills and invoices against bank statements and conduct the necessary bank recon.
The app also allows you to smartly track necessary inventory, claim, record, and manage business expenses. The other extra features include:
- Reporting, quoting.
- Processing payments.
- Managing purchase orders.
- Handling various currencies.
- Handling sales tax and storing files.
Price: The Early plan begins at $9/month. Growing is at $30/month, and Established comes at $60/month.
Branding and Marketing
SendX
When it comes to marketing, you can’t ignore the bountiful results you get from email marketing. And while we are talking about emails, you can’t really accomplish good results without good software. One such tool to try is SendX.
It is a full-fledged online software for email marketing that can be used by any consulting business. It can craft email marketing campaigns with ease and optimize engagement, and growing the email list.
You can also create better email campaigns and choose 1500+ ready-to-use templates to improve engagement with your audience and take your email game up a notch. Other features include A/B testing, automated advance email sequence, drag and drop email editor.
Price:
The email plan begins at nominal pricing of $7.49/month for 1000 subscribers. Reach out to them for customized pricing for business and enterprise plan.
Databox
Databox is a dashboard reporting software that can be used for any consulting business and help you easily monitor and report on marketing performance, starting from your SEO campaigns, to email marketing campaigns, PPC and more.
There is no need to create a dashboard from scratch because they have over 200 marketing dashboard templates ready to use for free. Each template is also fully customizable.
Price: They have a freemium that includes 3 Data Source Connections, all standard features and 60+ Databox Integrations. Starter plan begins at $72/month.
Brand24
The last app on this list is Brand24, which allows you to understand what comments are being made online regarding your brand. It gives you a fully-fledged feed with mentions and metrics in the form of a volume chart on discussion, sentiment, and mention analytics. You can also influence the overall participant score so you know which people can be engaged with.
With the analytics available, you can spot the brand image problems before they go out of promotion. The app can also send customizable alerts on changes in the volume of any discussion regarding the brand.
Price: Personal Plus begins at $49/month. Professional Premium is at $99/month, and Professional Max is at $399/month.
Clearout
Clearout is another excellent option for those who want to create sound branding for their emailers. The site allows you to smartly integrate a slew of features to effectively enjoy email verification with up to 98% accuracy.
It’s important to note that Clearout is a great way to verify your user base, after which you can spend, so you’re not wasting money on non-leads. Their other features include greylisting verification, syntax validation, and sub-address removal.
Price: Clearout allows you to purchase credits that begin from $21 onwards.
To Sum Up
Thus, it becomes easier to go forth with these apps and create a consultancy that's technologically integrated. Once you take care of your various emailers, in-house activities, and branding, you'll be well on your way to attracting more customers and growing effectively in the business world.
Choose the business app that works best for you, and soon you'll see the various benefits they can bring. Once you do so, make sure you use all the services available to maximize your profits.
Good luck!
About The Author
This post is written by Rohan Mendiratta. He helps marketers with building an engaged audience and increasing their sales via SendX: Email Marketing Software.
