How to Choose the Best SaaS Tools for Your Company?

When it comes to the market of SaaS, keeping current on your software in an evolving market is only half of the battle. Ensuring your business is running smoothly is enormously benefitted by using SaaS tools and products equipped with features designed to help scale and add flexibility to your business.

Because the market of SaaS tools varies greatly, it becomes necessary to select a specific feature you’d like to employ in order to catalyze your business. Selecting the right tool for the job fortifies good business practices; but before you dive in and download more tools than you know how to manage, it is prudent to do some preceding research to make sure you’ve selected the right product for the task at hand.

By breaking the array of SaaS tools into categories such as accounting, retention, pricing, and analytics, we are able to pinpoint which product to add to our tool stack.

Reasons to Invest in Tools

Attracting customers, and retaining them, is a huge part of growing your business; focusing on increasing efficiency keeps you in the game. There are several main benefits to working with SaaS tools:

  1. Increase revenue. Whether you aim to upsell current customers to a higher level of service or are looking to market your product to a fresh audience, growing your revenue is a pivotal element of scaling business upwards. Tracking MRR through a SaaS tool can help you to discover trends in MRR and learn how to maximize recognized revenue.
  2. Reduce churn. Because SaaS business models rely on retaining customers for their income, reducing churn becomes even more important. By investing in tools designed to monitor customers’ contract lifespan as well as discover ways to keep those customers coming back, you are better equipped to reward your loyal customers and encourage retention.
  3. High quality analytics. By effectively measuring returns on advertising investments, for example, a business can better understand their liquid assets and make continued investments accordingly. By optimizing your analytics through a high-powered SaaS tool, you can take the guesswork out of important decisions and focus on growing your business.
  4. Streamline accounting. Because of the nature of SaaS business, tracking deferred revenue becomes even more vital to keeping your business on track. By utilizing accounting software that is globally compliant, you can rest assured your company is working within its means and is doing so legally.

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How to Avoid Overburdening Your Tool Stack

In order to avoid tool bloat, there are a few simple questions you should ask before downloading any new applications. To cut through the overwhelming number of tools available, ask yourself the following questions before downloading your next steps:

  • Will the tool increase efficiency?If the tool you’re considering will weigh down your toolbox without reducing the time necessary to perform a task, then it’s not worth the investment.
  • Is the tool a quality product? It’s no use investing in a subpar tool that isn’t up to the industry standard if you’re trying to be on the cutting edge of the market. Do some research before you buy and make sure the product you’re thinking about will perform its task at a high level.
  • Will the tool provide insights you would not otherwise have? Make sure the tool you are investing in is not simply reaffirming metrics you already have access to and is, in fact, broadening your net of data.
  • Is the tool secure? Choosing a tool with a high level of security through passwords and other forms of authentication is crucial to ensuring your business’ data is kept safe.
  • Will the tool offer a return on the investment? If the tool won’t bring you more income than it costs to maintain, it’s not worth purchasing.
  • Is the tool compatible with other tools? If the tool you are considering won’t play nice with the rest of your tool stack, there’s no reason to add it to a system that’s already working for you.
  • Does it have customer support? In case you encounter bumps along your road to success, it’s good to have a network of support to answer questions and guide you through any hang-ups.

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25 High-Caliber SaaS Tools to Grow Your Company

There is no shortage of SaaS tools to choose from available on today’s market. Here are some top contenders to choose from to narrow your search.

Accounting

  • Recognized™: Designed to handle complex arrangements, deferred revenue, human error, software bundles, different revenue models, and evolving conditions, this audit-proof revenue recognition software saves its users time and valuable resources by providing a single source of accounting data.
  • Quickbooks: Geared towards small- and medium-sized business, Quickbooks can be operated as an on-campus software or can be used via the cloud. Businesses can use it for managing bills as well as undertakings like tracking project profitability.

Analytics

  • Mixpanel: This tool offers a deep dive into product user analytics by monitoring customer retention and engagement, as well as which aspects of your product are used the most. It also contains user survey forms which can be used to develop custom reports which can shed further insight on customer engagement.
  • Google Analytics: This highly popular analytics tool offers insights on attribution data. By monitoring and tracking website data, Google Analytics can track advertising ROI as well as flash, social media sites, and apps.
  • Piwik: This free and open-source web analytics solution offers insights into website traffic, keywords used to bring viewers to your content, preferred languages, and others. This program must first be downloaded to your server, then a JavaScript code must be pasted onto the website you wish to track.

Pricing

  • ProfitWell: Aimed at starting a larger conversation around a product’s actual pricing, ProfitWell focuses on finding the right price point to both attract customers and retain them to grow your revenue.

Project Management

  • ProofHub: Available in the App Store and Google Play, ProofHub helps you stay engaged with your project by assigning specific tasks, tracking milestones, and enabling collaboration.
  • Basecamp: Marketed primarily as a tool for team collaboration, this simple program offers features such as scheduling, reporting, and file sharing.

Live Chat

  • EngageBay: Designed for small- and medium-sized businesses, this platform is used as an all-in-one for sales, marketing, and customer service through its free live chat. Aside from using canned responses as housekeeping for common queries, EngageBay offers seamless transfers between agents so serve a client’s needs as well as robust analytics to better improve customer support.
  • Freshchat: This moderately priced cloud-hosted platform is used to meet the messaging needs of teams of all sizes and offers multiple channels for communicating with customers.

Human Resource Management

  • JotForm PDF Editor: This user-friendly software can create a wide array of professional documents, from contracts to invoices, and turns collected form data into PDFs. With over 600 ready-made templates, this tool is relatively secure and is compatible with a multitude of devices.
  • BambooHR: This software solution has attracted businesses of all sizes and offers features such as personnel data modules, as well as the ability to share job opportunities across multiple popular forums and manage the incoming applications. This tool is perhaps most useful to those looking to hire quality employees.

Team Collaboration

  • GoToMeeting: This basic web conferencing software is available internationally is touted as a intuitive interface for setting up meetings in minutes.

Content Management

  • HubSpot: This popular sales, marketing, and service software integrates many marketing tools in order to optimize your content, convert more visitors, and to attract more traffic to your website. With the ability to create landing pages, blog posts, emails, and site pages either through the use of a template or from scratch, Hubspot can optimize, track, and manage all of your brand’s content with ease.

Employee Monitoring

  • Time Doctor: This user-friendly time-tracking software was designed with teams between 20-500 members in size. With features such as session monitoring, screenshot recording, project reporting, and invoicing, it streamlines meetings for maximum efficiency so businesses can make the most of their time.
  • Hubstaff: Integrated through over 30 apps, Hubstaff aims at streamlining meetings through features such as managing invoicing, tracking time, creating reports, working directly through a desktop or mobile device, and identifying roadblocks.

Knowledge Management

  • Bitrix24: This free turnkey intranet solution was designed with small- and medium-sized businesses at heart and can be used to safely harbor data. All data is stored in a secure, centralized repository at a high level of security.

Link Management

  • Rebrandly: This link management platform’s main functions are to shorten URLs, and to brand and track links. This solution also offers detailed analytics which provide insight into your audience such as time of day your content is viewed and in what country, as well as from what social media platform the hit originated.

Customer Support

  • Freshdesk: This award-winning cloud-based customer support software and ticketing system is designed to work with businesses of all size and features an intuitive platform compatible with Live Chat and Phone Support. It is multichannel, collaborative, offers reports, and is customizable, among other benefits.
  • ProProfs: This popular cloud-based solution is hosted by IBM, which affords its users round-the-clock access to chat and customer support. This tool requires minimal set up and has a familiar layout to those who have used Gmail. Through this platform, agents can track, assign, prioritize, label, and resolve customer requests through a shared dashboard.

User Onboarding and Employee Training

  • Userlane: Primarily used as a user retention and onboarding platform, this fully interactive solution is used by many medium- and large-sized SaaS businesses to onboard new employees. With no coding knowledge necessary, this program layers over an existing software app and even features a virtual assistant to provide support.

Document Management

  • Microsoft SharePoint Online: This cloud- and web-based platform is almost universally familiar in the industry and offers features like uploading or downloading a document, tracking changes made to a document, as well as making co-created real-time edits, this solution also offers the feature of sending alerts every time a change is made.
  • M-Files: This tool works for businesses of all sizes to digitally manage files. Making your files easy to access saves your business time to move from logistics into action.

Website Building

  • Wix: A popular website builder, Wix offers attractive, modern website designs for a minimal cost. With features like Wix Code, Wix ADI, and Wix Editor, this platform offers multiple tools for you to create your dream website.

Social Media Tracking

  • Zoho Social: Reaching your customers on many different channels can be difficult to manage. That’s why Zoho Social works to help businesses establish their brand in real-time and stay up to date with customers as they build their network. This tool can reach potential customers on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and more.

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Conclusion

When it comes to choosing the right SaaS tools for bolstering your business, it’s important to keep efficiency at the forefront of your decision-making. It is better to have a lightweight, specialized toolbox which offers a palatable selection of products and services rather than a cumbersome one with overlapping features.

While at first it may seem like a good thing to offer a litany of different features to your customers, it does little good if you are bleeding money through a slew of inefficient SaaS tools in an overburdened toolbox. Identifying the functions you wish to hand over to a SaaS tool is a pivotal part of selecting the most beneficial solution for your company. Once you have a set tool stack optimized for running your business to its maximum efficiency and growth potential, most of the heavy-lifting of making important business decisions will have been made for you.

Thanks to SaaS business tools, you can continue to place your focus on carrying out your team’s mission rather than getting bogged down in logistics. With focused, selective investments and careful nurturing, you can build a sustainable garden to grow revenue and scale your business by more successfully attracting, reaching, and retaining customers for the long term!