36 strumenti efficaci per mettere il turbo allo stack della vostra startup

Comunicazione e coordinamento del team

Slack
There’s no going around Slack these days. It has become one of my best friends since I joined Salesflare. Not because I don’t have a social life anymore (which is also not untrue) but because it’s just kind of ‘there’ all the time. I actually have troubles imagining how teams coordinated team communication in the pre-Slack era. If used to its full power, Slack acts like a central hub where everything comes together. You can set up an army of bots to keep you notified of everything happening throughout your startup, or to just keep fun levels high with the occasional meme and GIF. It’s an ever-changing blackboard filled with output of your team’s efforts, from every possible corner of your endeavours.

Gestione di progetti e attività

Trello
Un ottimo strumento per tenere il team sempre al corrente del lavoro. Tutto ciò che abbiamo fatto, stiamo facendo e abbiamo in programma di fare nella nostra startup è su Trello. Ogni riunione inizia guardando la bacheca di Trello e finisce con l'annotare le idee in compiti attuabili su quella bacheca. Questo approccio efficiente può snellire il vostro processo di revisione del progettoconsentendovi di monitorare i progressi e di prendere decisioni informate. Interfaccia semplice e minimalista, ma altamente configurabile. Raddoppia il divertimento con il plugin Slack.

If you’re looking to get on with something else following Trello’s recent acquisition by Atlassian, check out UpWave — a slick alternative that was recently launched on ProductHunt.

SEO

Rispondere al pubblico
Everybody’s searching for something, right? Finding the right keywords to grow your organic search words starts with knowing what questions your target audience is looking answers to. Answer The Public will give you beautiful visual insights in the questions most frequently asked about your topic.

Ahrefs
Ahrefs is about the best thing around for organic traffic research and SEO. It can show you backlinks (including its URL and domain rating as well as other cool data) of every website out there, which makes it great to dig into the SEO strategy of your competitors. There’s also a keyword explorer, which can be of great help to determine the keywords you should be targeting. You can use it day-to-day to keep track of how you rank in search engines, in different locations, for different keywords etc. I’ve written a more in-depth guide on how to effectively use Ahrefs for keyword research su Quora.

Strumenti come Moz.com e SEMrush offrono funzionalità simili e sono anch'esse ottime.

User engagement, testing and tracking

Intercom
Talk to your website’s visitors in real-time. Intercom’s in-prompt personal messaging allows you to activate leads in the early stages of the sales cycle and is a great way to provide support for customers. Moreover, it’s great for tracking frequency of use and behaviour inside your app. Hands-on, low-threshold solution to get and stay on top of your users, whether they’re still in your sales funnel or already locked in.

Google Analytics
Default analytics tool for your startup’s website and web apps. There are some great, arguably more powerful alternatives out there, but this is still solid as a rock and just very convenient to use with your Google apps and accounts.

CrazyEgg
Google Analytics will tell you which pages your users visit and how much time they spend on your website. What they won’t tell you is what those visitors are actually doing on those pages. CrazyEgg is a lightweight but powerful heat-mapping tool that can fill in those gaps. It will tell you exactly where users have clicked, scrolled and which parts of the pages they’ve spent the most time on. You can segment clicks on your website by variables such as referrer and search keyword and visualise the results on what is called a confetti map. Crazy Egg is far from the most powerful heat-mapping tool around but does stand out for simplicity and affordability. It does one thing and it does it well.

SurveyAnyPlace
Surveys are a great way of getting a hold of your customer’s feelings and thoughts. Too bad surveys are among the most boring things in the world and nobody really likes to take them. SurveyAnyplace is changing that with beautifully designed, interactive surveys that are easy to make for you and fun to take for your target audience.

UXProbe
UXProbe is a remote user testing tool that allows you to have users test your website or app without you or them having to physically move. You can set and customise the different tasks you want the user to carry out. Both the user’s activities on-screen and his expression in front of it are recorded to give you the most accurate idea of how they experience your website. This frees you of having to go through all the trouble of inviting people, setting up the session and providing all the gear. After the session, the app provides you with insightful metrics, giving you a full-fledged idea of how your website ranks in terms of user experience so you know where and what to improve.

Prospezione e generazione di contatti

LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn’s very own sales solution is not likely to be the cheapest tool you’ll come across, but nor are you likely to find something a lot better for prospecting. Sales Navigator is a great place to kickstart your sales pipeline for the simple reason that it allows you to fish from the biggest pool of business professionals there is to be found. Its wide range of filters allow you to search for very specific customer profiles. Sales Navigator comes with powerful analytics, insights and recommendations so you can stay updated and focus on the right people.

Dux-Soup
We use Dux-Soup to automate lead generation from Sales Navigator. Dux-Soup is a Chrome extension that acts like a teeny-tiny robot you can send out to visit LinkedIn-profiles from a given list and collect their data on its way. Just set the filters of Sales Navigator to target a certain person and tell Dux-Soup to go and visit the search results. Not only will all these people be notified of you visiting them, you’ll also have their names, industries, roles, company domains and more. Data you can extract as a .CSV and use for several other purposes later on.

Email Permutator+
Una volta che si dispone di nomi e domini, il modo per ottenere i loro indirizzi e-mail consiste nel fare ipotesi ragionevoli e confermare la loro esistenza. I formati più comuni sono firstname.lastname@domain, firstnameinitial.lastname@domain e [email protected]. Naturalmente ne esistono anche altri e la compilazione di tutti questi possibili indirizzi e-mail richiede molto tempo. Fortunatamente è possibile automatizzare questo processo con Email Permutator+. Permutator+ genera possibili indirizzi e-mail a partire da nome, cognome e dominio. Questi possono essere controllati con altri strumenti menzionati in questo post, come Hunter, Rapportive e Salesflare.

Hunter.io
Hunter will help you find out e-mail addresses based on company and domain — which you can thus easily get from the magical Sales Navigator + Dux-Soup combo. Just bulk upload email addresses in a .CSV and Hunter will tell you which ones are ‘deliverable’. Hunter is not perfect though, we’ve had confirmed email addresses that turned out bad anyway.

Elucify
If guessing and Hunter don’t cut it, try Elucify. It’s a crowdsourced and free database for business contact information. Just enter what company you want email addresses from and see what it has in store for you. It’s free, like really, free.

Compatibili
Rapportive is a Chrome plugin that shows you linked accounts like LinkedIn, Google and Twitter for any given e-mail address, straight from a sidebar in your Gmail inbox. You can use it to guess e-mail addresses you didn’t find with Hunter and Elucify. Try typing possible email addresses according to the most common formats or others you found with Email Permutator+ and see the magic happen while Rapportive digs up linked accounts. If you haven’t found email addresses with company domains at this point, you might want to try gmail.com as domain, as a lot of people have a Gmail account next to their company email. We don’t use Rapportive because Salesflare può fare queste e altre cose dal suo plug-in per Chrome, che si trova ugualmente nella vostra casella di posta elettronica.

Datanyze
Datanyze is another intelligent lead generation tool you can use to fill up your sales pipeline. It does this by telling you the exact software stack of a given company. You can even find out exact dates of when a certain technology was dropped by the company you’re investigating. In addition, Datanyze can also be useful to help you find email address and other contact information, per website. In fact, Datanyze offers a free Chrome plugin you can use to request technology reports, company information and contact data on websites you visit.

Socedo
Socedo è uno strumento che consente di raccogliere e attivare lead dai canali dei social media e di aggiungerli efficacemente all'imbuto di vendita. Funziona analizzando i social network in base a parole chiave, handle di Twitter, tag di localizzazione e simili e individuando i lead che corrispondono a questi criteri. È quindi possibile attivare il loro coinvolgimento tramite strumenti di outreach automatizzati. Socedo creerà automaticamente un database con i dati sociali che potrete esportare e utilizzare nel vostro CRM, nelle campagne di sensibilizzazione via e-mail o in altre strategie di marketing e vendita.

Raggiungimento via e-mail

MailChimp
MailChimp è lo strumento di riferimento per la gestione di newsletter-ey email campaigns. It allows for effective email campaigns that won’t end up in your recipient’s spam box. To minimize your chances, set up your Record SPF. Oltre a questo: curva di apprendimento ridotta, analisi potente, tracciamento delle e-mail, grandi risorse sui modelli di e-mail e facilità di integrazione con altri strumenti. Semplicemente meraviglioso e facile da usare.

Mixmax
Mixmax è lo strumento per mettere il turbo a Gmail. Lo usiamo per il cold emailing perché invia le e-mail direttamente da Gmail, a differenza di quanto avviene per le e-mail di lavoro. MailChimp e alternative. This makes it perfect for cold emailing, as it will prevent your email from ending up in the ‘Promotions’ section of your lead’s Gmail account. Furthermore Mixmax gives you a lot more power in setting up your email sequences; it allows you for example to break off a sequence when a recipient responds to your first email. Mixmax is filled with a bunch of cool features to spice up your email game: slash commands, email templates, email and click tracking, embedded surveys/polls and an awesome meeting scheduler.

CRM / Gestione dell'imbuto di vendita

Salesflare
Our very own intelligent sales CRM. Salesflare is built to automate most of your sales funnel. It automatically fills out your address book with data it pulls from sources like social media, email signatures and company databases. It tracks and logs all interactions of leads towards you (phone, email, calendar), including email and website tracking. All that is handed to you in an automated timeline so you have everything you need at your fingertips at every stage of the sales cycle. There’s more: from the data it gathers, it will tell and remind you what to do about specific leads so no deal can fall through the cracks anymore. Basically all you have to do is write emails, do meetings and have coffee. It’s not a robot yet, but it does do most of the working and thinking for you. There’s a desktop and a mobile app, but we mostly use it straight from our Gmail, where it gives us everything we need on a customer from an integrated sidebar. Besides Gmail, it’s perfectly integrated with our Google apps and other productivity apps like Slack, Stripe, MailChimp and Trello.

Gestione dei pagamenti e degli abbonamenti online

Stripe
Stripe è l'amico che si prende cura della vostra pagamenti online. Non è richiesto alcuno sforzo da parte vostra. Se volete verificare le loro tariffe, potete utilizzare diversi calcolatore delle tariffe di stripe tools out there. Very easy to work with and great in handling different subscription plans. Highly flexible in its integrations and a friendly API. Hook it up to Salesflare to automatically mark an opportunity as ‘won’ when the customer starts paying in Stripe.  Then have it tell in real-time you when your money is flowing in by linking it to Slack. Awesome, right? You’re gonna need Zapier for this though, read on.

Gestione delle password

LastPass
With the gazillion tools and accounts you and your team are using, you’ll have a lot of passwords laying around. LastPass allows you to have everything safely stored and easily accessible at all times so you don’t have to waste time anymore getting headaches trying to remember that one password of that one website.

Hosting e analisi video

Wistia
Wistia is a video hosting service that will give you insightful analytics and heat maps on the views and viewers of your videos. You can completely customise the video player to fit your brand and control the pre — and post-roll behaviour of the video. It has an API so you can make adaptations to videos, accounts and statistics in the back-end. Perfect for tutorials, how-to videos and a lot more.

Creazione di contenuti

Applicazione Hemingway
Must-have if you’re serious about creating great content. Hemingway will analyse a piece of text and grade it on readability. It does so by taking into account stuff like complex sentences, use of adverbs, use of passive voice and common spelling errors. We use it to make sure our content is easy on the eye and suited for publication.

BuzzSumo
Un ottimo contenuto inizia con la comprensione del tipo di contenuto che piace ai vostri utenti. BuzzSumo può darvi informazioni sui contenuti più popolari su un determinato argomento o su un particolare sito web. Funziona come uno strumento di ricerca che tiene traccia dei contenuti sui social media e li classifica in base al numero di condivisioni su Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ e Pinterest. È possibile monitorare i contenuti per argomento o per utente e ottenere informazioni sulle condivisioni medie, sulle condivisioni per rete, sul tipo di contenuto, sulla data di pubblicazione, sulla lunghezza del contenuto e sui domini condivisi. Tutto ciò lo rende ideale per la SEO, l'analisi dei concorrenti e la ricerca dei principali influencer nel vostro settore.

Grafica

StockSnap / Pexels / Unsplash / Pixabay
Great pictures shouldn’t cost you any money.

Flaticon
The internet’s largest stock of free icons, available in all possible formats.

Canva
Canva is the place where you make magic with the stuff you found on free stock photo directories and Flaticon. It’s probably the most user-friendly graphic design tool you’ll ever come across, and it’s free. Canva gives you the power to create practically anything — social media graphics, banners, invitations, infographics, flyers, business cards — by just dragging and dropping. It’s filled with great resources and templates you can easily combine with your own images. The paid version, Canva for Work, packs all this power plus the possibilities to create brand kits with consistent fonts and colours, customise templates and set up shared folders. The Canva Design School is a great online virtual community stacked with tutorials, inspiration, tools and templates. Your graphics will have never looked better.

Piktochart
Piktochart è un programma di creatore di infografiche e uno strumento di comunicazione visiva all-in-one per creare infografiche, relazioni, presentazioni, grafici per i social media e stampe dall'aspetto professionale. Piktochart consente agli utenti di trasformare rapidamente qualsiasi contenuto ricco di testo o di dati in una storia visiva di grande impatto. Inoltre, non richiede alcuna formazione o competenze di progettazione grafica. Illustrazioni, icone e immagini integrate nella piattaforma vengono aggiunte tramite drag-and-drop. Le immagini possono essere create da zero o partendo da uno delle centinaia di modelli liberamente disponibili, progettati da esperti.

Colorcinch

Colorcinch is an intuitive photo editor and graphic design tool that lets you craft beautiful social media and blog visuals on the fly. You can add texts, vectors & icons, masks, and overlays to your photos and personalize them. You can give your photos a revamp with hundreds of AI-powered effects and filters. And make their colors pop as you have full control over exposure, clarity, sharpness, etc. It’s free, you just have to upload your photo or choose from their collection of stock photos to start with.

Marketing di affiliazione

GrowSumo
Partner programs can be a great way for startups to accelerate traction across multiple channels and get your sales pipeline going fast. Partners bring in leads, set up advertising for you and put backlinks all over the internet, which is great for boosting your SEO. And you only have to pay for actual results, which makes it very cost-effective as well. All you have to do is set up the partner program and find your partners. GrowSumo makes this process wonderfully easy, by providing a platform where you can quickly find partners to promote your startup and vice-versa. Once you’ve found yourself some partners, you can train and reward them while tracking their progress from your GrowSumo dashboard.

Media sociali

Buffer
Per essere veloce e intelligente, Buffer è uno strumento di gestione dei social media che vi aiuta a condividere efficacemente i contenuti sui vostri canali di social media da un unico hub. È possibile programmare la diffusione dei post e far scegliere a Buffer i momenti più opportuni per la pubblicazione.

Crowdfire
Si può pensare a Crowdfire come a una piccola spalla che vi aiuta a fare le cose per bene e a crescere velocemente sui canali dei social media. Funziona come un piccolo bot che vi assiste nella ricerca di grandi contenuti da condividere e del pubblico giusto con cui condividerli. L'utilizzo di Crowdfire richiede circa 1 o 2 minuti al giorno, il che rende davvero facile continuare a usarlo quotidianamente.

Automazione del flusso di lavoro

Zapier
If you don’t know about Zapier yet, you’re missing out. It’s pretty much the holy grail of all SaaS tools for the quite simple reason it can make them all work together. You can just pick out your favourite tool for every job of your sales cycle and tell Zapier to streamline them into an effective app flow that is perfectly aligned to your startup. For us, Zapier is like an engine in which every single app of our toolset works together. Workflow automation done right.