As a small business owner, you know the exhilaration of hitting that exciting $1 million revenue mark.
But with great success comes great responsibility – and often, a whole lot of operational headaches. That's where SaaS (Software as a Service) tools come in, acting like your digital Swiss Army knife to help you manage the complexity that comes with growth.
If the term SaaS means nothing to you, there is no need to worry: we will publish an article soon explaining what Software as a Service is and what it means for your business.
At STOA, we understand the challenges you face as you scale. We've seen firsthand how the right digital tools can transform a business from chaotic to streamlined. So, let's dive into the top 10 SaaS tools that can help you maintain your sanity (and your profit margins) as you navigate the exciting journey beyond $1 million.
Disclaimer: We are not associated to these software products. We are not making any money from affiliate programs. We just know these tools from years of experience and the potential for small and mid-sized businesses.
Project Management: ClickUp
Remember the days when your to-do list fit on a Post-it note? Those days are long gone. Enter ClickUp, the Swiss Army knife of project management tools.
ClickUp is like having a super-organized assistant who never sleeps. It offers task management, custom views, time tracking, and integrations that will make you wonder how you ever lived without it. Whether you're juggling multiple client projects or trying to keep your team aligned on that big product launch, ClickUp has got your back.
While there are many great Project Management options available in the market, such as Monday.com, Notion (much more than a project manager and an essential tool at STOA), and Todoist, ClickUp offers a quality, reliable solution that we favor above others.
Pro Tip: Use ClickUp's custom views to create dashboards that give you a bird's-eye view of your operations. It's like having a control room for your business right on your screen.
Customer Relationship Management: Monday CRM
As your business scales beyond that coveted $1 million mark, keeping track of your growing customer base becomes increasingly complex. Enter Monday CRM, your new best friend in managing customer relationships.
Monday CRM stands out with its flexible, visually-driven approach to customer relationship management. It's like having a customizable command center for your sales and customer interactions. With its intuitive interface, you can create pipelines that match your unique sales process, making it easier for your team to visualize and manage deals at every stage.
At STOA, we switched from a basic CRM setup in Notion, which is a valid option for small operations that need to quickly organize a simple pipeline, to Monday CRM when we realized that we needed a more serious option for our commercial process.
One of the standout features of Monday CRM is its customizable pipelines. Whether you're selling products, services, or a mix of both, you can tailor your sales funnel to fit your specific business needs.
Contact management in Monday CRM is a breeze, allowing you to keep all your customer information in one place. Also handy, the platform's email integration means you can manage your customer communications without constantly switching between apps. It's like having your email and CRM holding hands, working together to keep you informed and productive.
As your business grows, the power of automation becomes increasingly valuable. Monday CRM shines in this area, offering automation features that can take repetitive tasks off your plate. From automatically assigning leads to sales reps based on criteria you set, to sending follow-up emails after specific actions, these automations can save your team hours of work each week.
STOA Insight: At STOA, we appreciate how Monday CRM's visual nature makes it easier for teams to adopt and use consistently (adoption by the team and actually getting people to use the product is one of the biggest challenges we have seen our clients experience). When we're building websites for clients, we often find that integrating with a user-friendly CRM like Monday can significantly boost the effectiveness of lead capture and nurturing processes.
Accounting and Finance: QuickBooks Online
Accounting isn't sexy, but it's the backbone of your business. QuickBooks Online takes the pain out of financial management, giving you a clear picture of your cash flow, expenses, and overall financial health.
At STOA, we are in fact currently switching to QuickBooks as we scale. Our original tool for accounting purposes, Moxie, is an amazing software that we used over the years to manage proposals, invoices, and expenses but has a freelance nature that is no longer compatible with the evolving situation of our organization.
With features like automated invoicing, expense tracking, and financial reporting, QuickBooks Online helps you keep your finger on the financial pulse of your business. And when tax season rolls around, you'll be thanking your past self for keeping everything so organized.
Money Matters: As you scale beyond $1 million, accurate financial reporting becomes crucial. QuickBooks Online's robust reporting features can help you make data-driven decisions about your business's future.
Human Resources: BambooHR
Your team is your most valuable asset, and as you grow, managing that asset becomes increasingly complex. BambooHR is like a smart assistant for your HR needs, handling everything from applicant tracking to performance reviews.
With BambooHR, you can streamline your hiring process, manage time-off requests, and even conduct employee satisfaction surveys. It's like having an entire HR department in the cloud, freeing you up to focus on strategic growth.
Growth Tip: Use BambooHR's onboarding features to create a stellar first impression for new hires. A smooth onboarding process can significantly improve employee retention – crucial as you scale your team.
Communication and Collaboration: Slack
Email can become a liability for growing businesses that rely on stable communication. Slack brings your team communication into the 21st century, creating a virtual office where ideas flow freely and collaboration happens in real-time.
With channels for different projects or departments, direct messaging, and integrations with other tools, Slack keeps your team connected and information flowing smoothly. It's like having a digital water cooler that actually boosts productivity.
STOA Sync: At STOA, we recently switched from the good ol’ email to Slack to put some order in our team’s communication. Each of our clients and their projects (when we have multiple project per client) have their own channel and all-thing-important are store there in the form of conversations and important files. It's a game-changer for keeping everyone on the same page, especially when working on complex web and app development projects.
Email Marketing: Mailchimp
Even in the age of social media, email remains a powerful tool for nurturing customer relationships and driving sales.
In fact: your customers’ email list is the only thing your business truly owns. Social media platforms can shut down your profiles without provocation or notice or someone can hack into your site and take it hostage… but nothing can take away your capacity of communicating directly with your leads and customers via email
And when it comes to quality email marketing tools, Mailchimp is difficult to defeat. Mailchimp makes email marketing accessible and effective, even if you don't have a dedicated marketing team.
From creating beautiful email campaigns with a drag-and-drop interface that actually works (beware of tools offering drag-and-drop capabilities as many of them can live up the standard but that’s a conversation for another article) to segmenting your audience for targeted messaging, Mailchimp helps you stay connected with your customers. Its analytics features also give you insights into what's working and what's not, helping you refine your marketing strategy over time.
You can run A/B tests that ensure the best results for your marketing efforts and automate campaigns for maximum effect, which is especially important for us at STOA.
Engagement Boost: Use Mailchimp's automation features to set up welcome series for new subscribers or re-engagement campaigns for dormant customers. It's like having a tireless marketing assistant working 24/7.
Content Management System: WordPress
Your website is often the first point of contact between you and potential customers, the bridge that connects what you do with the people and businesses that can benefit from it. WordPress makes it easy to create and manage a professional-looking website, even if you're not a tech wizard.
We recently published an article on website platforms and which one is more appropriate for each case, mainly focusing on WordPress, Framer, and Webflow. While these three options are outstanding (the STOA website is powered by Framer), WordPress more often than not is the right option for small and mid-sized businesses. It is powerful, flexible, scalable, and the standard of the web (according to some reports, over 40% of the web is based on WordPress).
With its user-friendly interface, vast library of themes and plugins, and SEO-friendly structure, WordPress gives you the flexibility to create anything from a simple blog to a complex e-commerce site. As your business grows, WordPress grows with you, scaling to meet your evolving needs.
STOA Specialty: At STOA, we specialize in creating custom WordPress sites that not only look great but also drive results for your business. We can help you leverage WordPress to its full potential, creating a powerful online presence that supports your growth.
Customer Support: Zendesk
Happy customers are the lifeblood of any successful business. Zendesk helps you keep those customers smiling by streamlining your customer support operations.
With features like a ticketing system, live chat, and a knowledge base, Zendesk ensures that no customer query falls through the cracks. Its analytics tools also help you identify common issues and improve your products or services accordingly.
This SaaS tool is specially helpful for B2C businesses that are working to serve large amounts of private customers. Its recent and ongoing implementation of AI capabilities makes it very interesting and worth considering for organizations that care for customer satisfaction.
Service Upgrade: Use Zendesk's knowledge base feature to create a robust self-service option for your customers. It's like having a 24/7 support team without the overhead.
Data Analytics: Google Analytics
In the digital age, data is king. Google Analytics gives you the industry standard of marketing analytics, offering deep insights into your website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates.
By understanding how visitors interact with your site, you can make informed decisions about everything from your marketing strategy to your product offerings. It's like having a crystal ball that shows you exactly what your customers want.
While, as mentioned, Google Analytics is an industry standard for businesses with a website, we have found many organizations that have been trying to make their websites work for a long time without having Google Analytics implemented. This service directly from Google is completely free and only requires a straightforward implementation through the website’s code.
STOA Strategy: We always integrate Google Analytics into the websites we build at STOA. We can help you set up custom dashboards and reports that give you the exact insights you need to drive your business forward.
Social Media Management: Planable
As your business grows, managing multiple social media accounts can quickly become a full-time job. That's where Planable comes in, turning social media management from a headache into a manageable task that, if you want to run in house, can produce more results.
Planable is like your virtual social media command center, designed with collaboration and visual planning at its core. It's not just about scheduling posts; it's about creating a streamlined workflow that keeps your entire team on the same page.
One of Planable's standout features (and our favorite by far) is its visual content calendar. Imagine being able to see your entire social media strategy laid out in front of you, with the ability to drag and drop posts, visualize how your feed will look, and ensure a consistent brand image across all platforms.
For growing businesses, maintaining brand consistency and quality control can be challenging as teams expand. Planable's approval workflows is the solution. You can set up custom approval processes, ensuring that every post goes through the right channels before going live. It's like having a quality assurance team for your social media, without the added overhead.
The platform's multi-platform scheduling capabilities mean you can plan and schedule content for various social media platforms all from one place. Whether you're posting on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn, Planable has got you covered.
STOA Insight: At STOA, we've found Planable to be a game-changer for our social media operations. This is the tool we use to run all of our clients’ social media operations, especially when they have a presence in multiple platforms. The visual calendar helps us maintain a consistent brand image across all our channels.
Bonus: Automation Tools
We cannot talk enough about automation. After 10 years working with dozens of SaaS tools, the possibility of connecting them with each other and automating specific actions have changed the very nature of how we use these tools.
At STOA, our clients will hear us talk about internal tools and automation very often; this is because the value these tools provide must not be ignored.
Zapier
As your business grows, you'll find yourself doing a lot of repetitive tasks and asking more members of your team to invest time in this. Zapier is here to save you from that groundhog day feeling.
Zapier, our definite favorite at STOA, connects your various apps and automates fully customizable workflows between them. For example, you could automatically create a new task in ClickUp when you receive an email with a specific subject line, or add new Mailchimp subscribers to your CRM.
And recent AI integration into Zapier’s core features allows to use the power of AI to take customization in every automation workflow even further (imagine giving specific instructions to data to be modified and used in very specific ways).
The possibilities are endless, and the time and money savings are real. Whatever tools and processes you are using at your business right now or plan to integrate, Zapier can connect and automate for you.
Make (formerly Integromat)
If Zapier is like building with Lego, Make is like having a 3D printer for your workflows. It offers more complex automation capabilities for when your business processes become more sophisticated.
At STOA, we used to use Make for our automation projects. While we switched to Zapier in early 2024, Make remains a strong option for any integration and automation needs. You may ask, “why did we switch to Zapier?” and the answer is simple: Zapier fits our clients’ needs better. Make is a very capable yet complex tool that always felt like overkill.
With Make, you can create intricate, multi-step automations that can significantly streamline your operations. It's particularly useful for businesses that have outgrown simple automations and need more tailored solutions.
STOA Automation: At STOA, we can help you implement these automation tools to create custom workflows that streamline your specific business processes. Imagine the time and resources you could save with a fully optimized, automated backend!
Wrapping Up
Scaling a business beyond $1 million is no small feat, but with these SaaS tools in your arsenal, you're well-equipped to handle the challenges that come with growth.
Remember, the key is not just to work harder, but to work smarter. This sounds like a cliché and it is but the tools above make it a reality from which your business can benefit.
At STOA, we're passionate about helping businesses like yours leverage technology to reach their full potential. Whether it's creating a custom WordPress site that integrates seamlessly with your CRM, or implementing automation workflows that save you hours each week, we're here to support your journey to the top.
So, take a deep breath and dive into these tools. Your future self (and your bottom line) will thank you! And if you want help choosing, implementing, and learning, shoot us a message.
