Business software
Business software is in many cases either a fuel for the success of the business or a necessary tool for a wide range of business operations. Therefore, basically all positions of most businesses that exist, require at least basic knowledge and proficiency in most commonly used business tools.
We won’t cover the basic software that any digitally literate person must know and operate, as it’s already been covered in our previous chapter. The aim of this chapter is to better explain the generic set of tools and group them into most commonly used ones regardless of the industry.
It’s worth mentioning that many software and tools that businesses use are both installed on a computer as a standalone program or it can be accessed via online tools, which is becoming an ever growing industry – SaaS. SaaS stands for “Service as a Software”, which is usually a paid access to certain online.
The kind of software and set of tools businesses are using, mostly depends on the industry they operate in, the type of the customers they service – either other business or regular customers, as well as the size of the company. Small companies usually do not depend much on a wide range of tools that are essential to bigger corporations.
Nevertheless, the success of any company depends much on skills and experience their employees possess, especially in using digital tools.
Remote conferences: Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts
Marketing and advertising: Facebook Ads, Google Local Business and Maps, Google Ads, Linkedin Ads
Emailing, automated replies and follow-ups: Mailchimp, MailerLite, Woodpecker
Marketing automation and CRM: Hubspot, Salesforce
Project management, planning and efficiency: Trello, TeamGantt
Collaboration and communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Asana
Website performance monitoring and optimisation: Google Analytics, Hotjar, Google Optimize
Email accounts and many of the above: Google Workspace
Cloud Storage: Google Drive, Dropbox
Data flow, reporting automation and integration of tools: Zappier, Supermetrics, Google Data Studio
Electronic agreement and documents signing: DocuSign, Docobit
File sharing and transferring: WeTransfer
Writing assistant: Grammarly
This list doesn’t cover all the great tools businesses are using in their everyday activities, there are way more tools, dedicated for more niche and unique purposes to different kinds of business.