Starting a business can be an exciting thing to do for many reasons including the promise of financial liberty, creation of opportunity and a shift in social status among others. While these benefits are enticing enough to attract entrepreneurs to invest in a business, the act of starting a new business or running an existing one requires a lot of work. From recruitment and employee management to finance and marketing, many areas in business operation will undoubtedly end the dream of an entrepreneur before it germinates. Coupled with growing competition and the impatience of customers to give a business time to fix itself, businesses are on edge to be robust, efficient and up-to-date with the changing customer needs. As a friend of businesses, especially, those owned and run by young entrepreneurs, 360 Ideas has constantly been on the lookout and providing support to businesses in whatever way possible beyond marketing and advertising. That is why today’s article provides six key categories of tools that small business owners need to stay in the game in 2025 and the next few years. These are tools that will help business owners, company employees and management members to effectively manage their daily operations from finance and marketing to productivity and customer support. If you are still reading it means you are interested. So, without much ado, let’s cut straight to the cheese and eat what we got today.
Communication and Collaboration Tools
Communication is a vital tool for businesses and we cannot understate the essence of collaboration even among smaller teams. Communication and collaboration tools enable teams to engage and manage work tasks effectively. Finding the right tools will reduce the stress of using redundant communication channels or collaborative tools which slow down productivity. What are the communication and collaboration tools small business owners need?
Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive, Meet, Calendar etc): a comprehensive suite of tools for communication (email), document collaboration, cloud storage, video conferencing and scheduling among others. These are free tools though Drive has a limit of 15 GB in the free version.
Microsoft 365 (Teams, Outlook, VivaEngage, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive): a full suite of communication and collaboration tools offering storage, document collaboration, video conferencing, email communication and note-taking functions.
Slack: very popular for organizational communication offering real-time messaging, organized channels and file sharing, fostering seamless internal collaboration.
Productivity and Task Management
Productivity and task management tools are laser-focused on improving the efficiency and productivity of teams or individuals. These tools offer that help you to organize, prioritize, manage and monitor tasks. They provide task creation, assignment and organization, deadline setting and reminders, task prioritization and tracking and task visualization and reporting capabilities. These tools include:
Todoist: as the name suggests, Todoist is a To-Do list app that enables individuals and teams to organize their to-do lists. It enables task creation, assignment and prioritization, enabling users to keep track of their tasks in an organized way.
Asana: one of the leading work management tools, Asana offers teams the ability to manage projects and tasks. With its detailed task management features, teams can create, organize, assign and track the progress of tasks; increasing productivity and efficiency.
Google Calendar: a time management and task scheduling application, Google Calendar is free to use and has been useful in helping individuals and businesses schedule their tasks and events. While it does not come with comprehensive features such as other task management tools, it offers a simple way to schedule tasks and events, invite people to events and even enable booking options.
Notion: a tool that provides note-taking, task management and project planning. On its website, it prominently states the three key things it does: Write, Plan and Collaborate. It offers both free and paid versions.
Monday.com: this is a tool that enables teams to organize workflows, track projects and collaborate effectively. With Monday Work Management, you can execute hiring and recruitment, brand and marketing, project and task management and even creative design duties.
Marketing and Sales
Marketing and sales are the two things that determine the faith of an organization, especially, one set out with a profit-making goal. Marketing and sales tools enable businesses to automate and analyze sales and marketing efforts, helping improve the process. They are packed with features that enable sales engagement, marketing automation, sales intelligence, content marketing and analytics and reporting duties. They help increase customer experience, increased sales and revenue, data analysis and efficiency. While these sales and marketing tools can further be grouped into many categories, we won’t focus on that today. The sales and marketing tools relevant to small business owners include:
Google Business Profile: while this may not look fancy, it is a very essential tool that many small business owners ignore. With Google Business Profile, businesses get an online presence and help local businesses to be seen by the right people. It appears both on search and maps, providing valuable information to customers searching for your services or products.
Buffer: with many businesses embracing the digital world, managing the many platforms is a difficulty, especially for small teams. Buffer offers businesses the ability to manage their social media posts by allowing generate content ideas, schedule and post to multiple channels and as well view the analytics from their social media activities. It offers a free version that allows one user account to schedule up to 10 posts on one channel as well as AI tools to create and repurpose content.
Kaspr: when it comes to prospecting, many struggle but with Kaspr, business owners can enhance their sales and marketing efforts. Marketed as an all-in-one prospecting tool, Kaspr enables users to get accurate contact data of their prospects on LinkedIn. It has integration with aircall, Zapier, Zoho and HubSpot enabling you to turn the contacts into valuable leads. Kaspr is available for free but with limited features. The paid version offers more features but for beginners, you may test with the free version to see if you want to use it. It is tailored for solopreneurs but if you want to use it for a team, you may use its sister application, Cognism.
LinkedIn: while you may have just thought LinkedIn is only a social media platform, it is deeper than that. As a professional networking platform, LinkedIn offers you a street where you can meet serious people or like-minded individuals. From business executives to job seekers, LinkedIn offers you a place to do many things. You can create a compelling brand profile, share valuable insights and you will attract quality followers who you can then nurture into leads and gradually pull them through your sales funnel.
Meta Business Suite: Facebook, Messenger and Instagram won’t go away anytime soon and you are likely not to find any competitor that can knock this family of apps off the top. With that in mind, Meta Business Suite, the tool created by Meta, the parent company of Facebook will enable you to unify your sales and marketing efforts on the platforms. From creating, posting and scheduling content to reviewing analytics and creating adverts, Meta Business Suite offers you so much power for free. Instead of trying other options that may require you to pay at some point, Meta Business Suite is forever free and you can use it to effectively plan and execute your social media marketing efforts on Facebook and Instagram.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management tools enable businesses to manage customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. The aim is to help businesses offer a seamless customer experience, increase engagement and promote efficiency.
HubSpot: HubSpot has many tools and one of them is its CRM tool. With the HubSpot Smart CRM tool, businesses can access contract management, contact scoring and workflows and custom API integrations. These tools enable businesses to unify customer data, teams and tech stack on one platform. HubSpot CRM comes with all paid HubSpot tools but you can also use the free tools available in HubSpot Smart CRM.
Attio: Attio is another CRM tool out there that small business owners can use. While it may not have a known presence like the industry’s big names, Attio offers a simple user interface and easy set-up process. It also allows migration from other CRM tools and offers a free package for those who do not have the budget to go premium. Many of Attio’s users have claimed that the tool is ridiculously better than some of the big names. Attio also markets itself as the next-generation CRM tool leveraging its AI-powered features to create a seamless process for business.
Agile CRM: talk of packed free CRM tools and you can’t leave Agile CRM out. Starting with 10 users for its free version, Agile CRM allows you to manage up to 1,000 contacts and companies, lead scoring, custom data tracks, unlimited deals, tasks and documents and appointment and scheduling.
EngageBay: Just like Agile CRM above, EngageBay also offers loads of features for free. With a free account, you can manage 250 contacts, email marketing, autoresponders, email broadcast, sequences, lead grabbers, landing pages, CRM helpdesk and live chat. Marketing itself as the CRM tool for small businesses, EngageBay promises to help users close deals quickly.
Finance Management
Well, this list of tools should be at the top. However, its appearance at the bottom does not make it least or downplays its essence in the lives of small businesses. Financial management tools enable businesses to track, analyze and manage their finances. From budgeting and expense tracking to accounting, invoicing and payroll management, these tools are the lifeline of a company’s financial sanity. They help eliminate mistakes and keep your financial records clean and simple.
Wave: one of the popular accounting tools among small businesses, Wave lets small business owners create invoices, accept online payments and make accounting easy—all in one place. With a clean dashboard, Wave enables businesses to track their cash flow and manage invoicing and payroll among other essential accounting services. It also enables businesses to receive payment securely online. Wave offers a free version that allows businesses to create unlimited estimates, invoices, bills and bookkeeping records as well as manage cash flow and customers in one dashboard and accept payment online.
Zoho Books: this is an industry leader in accounting and financial management. Despite its reputation, Zoho Books offers a very large number of features for free creating invoices, quotes, expenses and journals to sales receipts and mileage tracking, Zoho Books provides the right tools to power every small business. With Zoho Books, businesses can also accept online payments, manage credits and refunds, enable a self-service customer portal and automate payment reminders. Additionally, it offers bank reconciliation, the setting up of recurring invoices, the creation of profit and loss statements, balance sheets and 50 other reports, managing tax rates and tax groups and generating tax summary reports.
Paystack: Paystack is a payment gateway provider developed to power small businesses especially those in Africa. It provides the capability for African businesses to be paid by anyone from anywhere in the world. With Paystack, businesses in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Cote d’Ivoire, Rwanda and Kenya can receive payment for their services in their local currencies. You can also opt to receive payment in international currencies such as the United States dollar by providing your company registration details including a company registration and bank account. Additionally, Paystack allows customers to pay you in multiple ways including bank account, bank transfer, card, POS, mobile money, USSD, Apple Pay and Visa QR.
Websites and E-Commerce
Websites are essential for every business in this digital age and e-commerce will continue to boom as long as the internet is alive which it will be. So having access to the right tools to help you leverage the power of websites and e-commerce to drive your business goals is essential. We recently published an article on why you need a website for your business if you have read it already, this segment will guide you to take the next step. But if you haven’t, you can go back to check it later after this. So, what are the website and e-commerce tools relevant to small businesses?
WordPress: the world’s largest and most popular content management system (CMS) is WordPress and it is so for a very. Apart from being free, WordPress has a large ecosystem of free and paid plugins, themes and templates. Most of the themes come with pre-built templates which allow users to build websites of any kind in hours. As a small business owner, paying for a developer to build your business or e-Commerce website from scratch may be expensive but if you opt for WordPress, you can easily overcome the issue of cost. At least 43% of all websites globally are built using WordPress, meaning about 521 million websites are built on WordPress. Use can use it with WooCommerce to launch your online shop in hours.
Shopify: Shopify is a WooCommerce alternative for building online shops. It is an e-commerce platform that helps businesses to create online stores. The platform’s offers include payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools. It also enables you to promote and sell products on Instagram, TikTok, Google, and other channels. Unlike WordPress, Shopify is not free but has a free trial option that allows you to test the platform.
Joomla: this is another free and open-source CMS that small businesses can leverage to build their online presence. Joomla can be used to build websites for small businesses and large corporations, online magazines, newspapers, e-commerce and online reservations websites. It also can be used to build websites for non-profit organizations, schools, churches or personal portfolios. It also has an extensive ecosystem ensuring you will always have up-to-date features.
Wix: Wix is another CMS that enables you to build a website using drag and drop. With over 900 ready-made templates, you can quickly deploy your Wix website in minutes. If you are building an e-commerce website, you can process and accept payment using the integrations provided by Wix. But apart from its website development features, Wix also offers a design feature which can be used to create stunning graphics including logos.
If you have read till this point, we believe we provided enough value which is why you stayed through to the finish. We hope that this list of tools will help you supercharge entrepreneurship and power your business goals. We know this is not an exclusive list but it wasn’t intended to be. We do more articles in areas that are relevant to people like you. So, if you are a regular reader, rest assured we will release more important articles for you. However, if this was your first or you only came here because a Google or Bing search led you here, we hope it won’t be your last as we have so many informational articles scheduled for publication. Meanwhile, you can explore some of our previous articles including how to create an effective digital marketing strategy and why your business needs a website.
