There’s an overwhelming amount of tools out there. I’m here to cut through that noise and share with you some of the tools that I use to effectively run and scale my own consulting practice. I’m distilling down a list of my 9 favorite tools that will help make your life easier, grow your business, and give you some of your time back so you can focus your attention on the things that matter.
1. Monday.com
Monday is so much more than just a project management tool. It can be used in many ways to run your entire business, marketing, sales, task management, recruiting, and certainly project management. Monday.com is highly customizable — you can make the tool work the way that works for you. Not only does it help you effectively plan, track, and deliver on projects, but the automations are awesome. Monday.com gives you the ability to automate all of your repetitive work in seconds so you can save time and really get back to focusing on your business.
They have a variety of pricing options starting with an Individual plan that is free forever. Monday.com is a great tool to use as your client-facing project management tool — so you’d need to purchase at minimum the Basic plan which will cost you about $24/month. (Stock tip – Monday recently went public and is a great investment opportunity right now.)
2. Google Workspace
Google Workspace (formerly G-Suite) gives your business more control and more features that way you can collaborate and work with clients more efficiently and effectively. Google Workspace is a suite of innovative, cloud-hosted tools like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Meet, Google Drive, and a lot more. You can access the products anytime and anywhere — there’s even an offline feature so that you can continue working if you find yourself in a place without internet.
And the price point is great for a small business coming in at a monthly cost of $12 per user for Google Workspace Business.
3. SEMRush
SEMrush is a comprehensive SEO platform with dozens of tools and crystal-clear reporting. Because SEMrush has so many features and services all under one roof, it makes keeping track of your reports and data much simpler. From domain and keyword analytics to site audits and gap analysis, SEMRush gives you tons of features you can use to arm yourself to land additional work with current or potential clients by providing them with information on how they can grow their business.
SEMRush’s basic plan starts at $119.95/month.
4. Active Campaign
ActiveCampaign is hands down my favorite email automation and CRM tool. It makes it super easy to run your marketing, set up an email welcome series, segment your contacts, and use workflows to automate the marketing that no one has time for. It’s a CRM with email and sales automation that keeps all your customer data organized together so you can manage your pipelines, update deals, and follow up at the perfect moment.
The price depends on the size of your contact list. With a list size of 1,000, the cost starts at $25/month for the basic plan.
5. Calendly
Calendly is a hub for scheduling meetings professionally and efficiently, eliminating the hassle of back-and-forth emails with current and potential clients. It saves you time and uncomplicates scheduling by only offering times that work with your availability across all of your calendars and can be integrated with Zoom and other applications you use with your clients.
Calendly’s features scale far beyond simplifying scheduling allowing you to automate, integrate, and optimize. You can cut clerical tasks with CRM integrations, improve your booking flow using analytics integrations to measure funnels and refine your conversion strategy, and take payments at the time of booking with Stripe and PayPal integrations.
Calendly has a forever-free plan. The Premium plan lets you add more customizations and integrations — it starts at $8/month.
6. SamCart
SamCart is a super simple way to sell online. If you want to sell your own products online, finding the right platform to do it on can sometimes be hard — there’s a lot of options out there. Whether you’re selling online courses or physical goods, a platform I love is SamCart. They have pre-designed templates that make it super easy for you to get started quickly without having to hassle with any complicated tech.
SamCart has 3 tiers of monthly pricing — the lowest monthly cost for the Launch plan is $49/month.
7. LearnDash
LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin that allows you to create impressive online courses the way you want to. It gives you complete control when it comes to selling your online courses. If you’re offering online courses to your clients, LearnDash gives you the ability to choose the pricing model, up-sell offerings, reminder notifications, and more.
They offer a range of different annual pricing packages ranging from $159-$329/year.
8. Slack
Slack isn’t just for internal teams — you can use it with clients too. Slack is a great tool that you can use to add an additional level of support for your clients. You can create private channels to communicate directly with your clients offering them a premium level of support. This kind of direct support can be used as an upsell or selling point for your services.
Slack has a free plan available, and the Pro plan starts at $6.67/month.
9. Zapier
Zapier allows you to create easy automations. Zapier moves info between your web apps automatically — like from your forms on your site to your email automation tool — so you can redirect your time saved into your business, helping it grow.
Zapier has a free plan offering your 100 tasks/month. The Starter plan is priced at $19/month billed annually.
There’s my list, but hopefully, you’ve found at least one tool you think could add value to your business. If there are any tools you think I missed, let me know in the comments. And head’s up we believe in all of these tools and use them so a few of the links are affiliate links so if you sign up we make a couple of bucks.
If you liked this post, check out our Ultimate Guide to Scaling a Fractional CMO Business.
