Our personal mantra is “work smarter not harder”. Time is the most valuable asset in the world and to win back time in our lives, we should always look for ways to get the same, or better outcomes with less manual effort. When you improve efficiency, you gain more time to be spent on the things that are truly important to you. But you should also be efficient about increasing efficiency: it’s usually a good idea to look for the simplest, most elegant solution to a problem. That’s something that the following list of our top five apps for business productivity have in common.
HubSpot Sales
One of our key sales tools, HubSpot saves us a substantial amount of time by automating everyday outreach emails, workflows, and follow up sequences and tasks such as scheduling and contact deal management. Hubspot is our “source of truth” for all of our interactions with our prospects and customers. It’s also a place where our team collaborates to share new messaging ideas, and importantly, track the business results from our sales efforts.
HubSpot’s Free Meeting SchedulerWe love how this has taken the pain out of scheduling meetings so we thought this needed a mention of its own, even though we’ve listed HubSpot already. This add-on to HubSpot is a meeting tool that helps you to simplify meeting coordination and save hours of time by letting prospects see your most up-to-date availability so they can instantly book a meeting with you. As well as the time saved, by smoothing out the friction of the endless email discussion to set up a time for a call, you move the discussion along and maintain energy and enthusiasm. You do need to have your Google (or Office 365 if that’s what you use) calendar completely up-to-date to avoid double booking.
An obvious one, this is our communication platform of choice. Using external connected channels allows us to easily integrate other teams we work with in one central location, eliminating the need to switch between multiple communication channels or platforms. Admittedly Slack can get a bit cumbersome as teams grow and more channels are added, but when used properly, (i.e. in moderation!) it’s a very powerful tool to maximize efficiencies within internal and external teams.
We’re a Google Workspace client, and having all internal documents stored and managed in one place helps to streamline processes and keep track of everything. In fact, I would say the only downside to Google Docs is the inability to collaborate with external platforms.
One of their recent innovations that we’ve found helpful is the new extension. If you haven’t come across this before, try typing docs.new, sheets.new, or slides.new into your browser now and see what happens. Companies can also register a domain name that takes users directly to a page for creating online content, or generating some type of action. We use this hack on a daily basis to create new Google Docs instead of going through Google Drive.
We’re big users of Zapier to automate daily tasks within a wide range of platforms that our product, marketing and sales teams use. For everything from automating Slack notifications, to updating CRM records based on new engagements with our product, Zapier is useful for tying our other apps together. We can eliminate the need to keep track of hundreds of actions and events that usually require deep custom integrations.
Being more productive at work means more personal time and a more sustainable work-life balance. This was one of the top motivators for building Propdocs. Our commercial real estate transaction platform removes unnecessary complexity from the deal process so that time (and money) can be saved by everyone involved.
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