Base: Big CRM Features For Less
Link to other sites like Facebook and Mailchimp in order to share data, as well as import contacts from Google Apps, Highrise, Excel and other places.
Several key features include:
- A simple lead capture form that you can embed in your site
- A “Client Space” where you can communicate back-and-forth with a prospect as you work to close their business
- A Contacts database
- Over 20 reports including total incoming deals, forecasted sales, deal source performance and more
- A free companion app called QuoteBase that helps you create basic yet reasonably attractive online quotes to send to prospects
Cost: Free (up to 50 accounts), then $15-$125 per user/month depending on the features
Easily Track Mileage & Expenses With Taxbot
It’s tax time (ugh!). If you log a lot of billable miles for work, you will surely appreciate Taxbot at this time of year. The app (for iPhone, Android and web) let’s you track your business mileage using your phone’s GPS. To do so, you must launch the app first and type in your destination. Then Taxbot will magically track and record the mileage. It also lets you snap photos of receipts and store them in the cloud. At tax time, you can print reports of all your business expenses to deduct them on your tax return.
Here’s the rub—it’s not cheap. However, as part of the monthly fee, you also get access to a bunch of tax-saving video lessons from financial expert Sandy Botkin. He advises businesses on things like how to deduct 100% of your medical expenses and reduce your risk of an IRS audit. In addition, you can link your bank account or credit cards, and Taxbot will look for deductions you might have missed and allow you to import them.
Cost: Free 2-week trial using the link above , then $19.99/month
Clean Up Your Twitter Account With ManageFlitter
Need to clean up your Twitter followers? ManageFlitter is the place to do it.
This site let’s you quickly unfollow fake accounts or people who are not following you back. There is also powerful search feature that lets you find people by keywords in their profile and follow them.
ManageFlitter includes some Twitter analytics on your followers which are marginally interesting (such as who followed or unfollowed you), but I don’t consider them essential.
Perhaps the best semi-hidden feature is the ability to automatically cross post from your Google+ account to Twitter (with a Pro account). For those of you who think Twitter is becoming less effective (I do), this will help you focus more of your time in Google+.
Cost: Free to $12/month for one Twitter account; additional pricing plans for more accounts are available
Best Tools To Create Photo Collages
Looking for a quick and easy way to create a photo collage? PicFrame is the best app for this and is available for iPhone and Android phones.
It features lots of effects, frame shapes and patterns, as well as sharing to other applications (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and email).
Cost: $0.99
What if you want to add a captioned font onto a photo? Over is hands-down the best app for the iPhone (I don’t know the best app for Android users—sorry). It’s fun to use, offers wonderful fonts and lots of ways to share your photos.
Cost: $1.99
If you want to add free caption overlays to photos online, use Google’s Creative Kit, which is baked into Google+. You will need to create a Google account and upload images to Google+.
Save Web Pages Intact For Reference Using Bo.lt
I’m a big fan of online bookmarking apps that let you save web addresses and such. But most of these only save the link and not the actual page as you originally found it. That’s too bad, because sometimes you really want to refer back to a killer design or an article that may disappear weeks or month later.
Fortunately, there’s a site that will save full pages for you called Bo.lt. It’s free and requires the Chrome browser. Any time you come across a page you want to save, you just use their Chrome extension or bookmarklet and pick the image you want to represent it with. You can also add a comment and choose a collection to put it into for easy sharing and retrieval later.
Bo.lt looks remarkably similar to Pinterest.
You can also share your Bo.lted sites to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Buffer and Pinterest.
Cost: Free
Book Corporate Calls And Meetings With Timetrade
Timetrade is a different way to book appointments at the corporate level. It’s a very slick online appointment scheduling system for setting up meeting or calls with new sales prospects, accelerating the sales and customer service process and making it easy and fast to interact with customers.
Timetrade lets all authorized employees integrate their calendars with the scheduling system. You can also specify scheduling “rules” using an Appointment Router to match the best person in the company to handle a specific request.
After embedding a scheduling button on your website, your customers and prospects can use it to easily request a meeting. All the right people are notified, and Timetrade emails a confirmation to everyone once an appropriate mutual date is selected.
Timetrade has a mobile app, integration with Salesforce and marketing automation services and more features, making it a very attractive productivity tool for businesses.
Cost: Free for 1 users (5 appointments per month); professional versions ranging from $49-$99/month+
Schedule Meetings More Easily With Doodle
Doodle lets you schedule meetings with people more easily.
We all know the hassle of composing an email, jumping back and forth between your calendar several times to find a few open slots, and suggesting your best times to someone else—then getting a reply that none of the dates work for them—then starting the process all over…
Doodle cuts down on all that back-and-forth, wasted time. You start by filling out a short form with the name of your event, the location and your name and email address. Click a bunch of dates you would like to meet and the proposed times for each day. Then you can create either a basic poll or one with a few more options, such as whether respondents can pick more than one option, and whether all responses are confidential. Finally, you send the poll using your own email address or through a free Doodle account. After everyone on the list indicates their availability, the best date “wins” and your meeting is set.
To make it even easier as the meeting organizer, you can connect your calendar (Outlook 2007 and 2010 on Windows; Google Calendar; Apple iCal and a few others). There is a mobile version and an iPhone app.
Finally, you get a personal MeetMe page you can direct people to when they want to request a meeting with you (here’s mine).
Cost: Free and premium accounts (pricing not available on their website)
