From: bizjournals.com

Let’s face it: Business is tough. You need every tip, trick and tool to be successful and have a leg up on the competition.

I’ve been in business for 20 years, and in those years, I’ve found some good tools, great tools and bad tools.

Today, I’m going to share a few that I’m using myself and that I regularly recommend to other executives.

Some of these tools are well-kept secrets — or at least, they were.

1. Scheduling meetings is easy

My pet peeve is going back and forth between two or more very busy people, trying to book a meeting. I. Hate. It.

That’s why I love ScheduleOnce. It saves me so much time and headache by offering my calendar’s open time slots just the way I want it. I use this tool several times a day.

Speaking of meetings, if you’re setting up group meetings, vyte.inis the tool. Group meetings are like group text messages: not very popular. And if you’re going to do it, this is the way I recommend it! Invitees vote on meeting times and locations, so you can easily find the best options.

2. Stop making your job harder than it needs to be

Google Docs, Google Drive, Google for Work or whatever they’re calling it this week offers affordable online collaboration and document management tools.

How can you even stand to email files back and forth and then manage multiple editions from multiple users and all those revisions? Just as you’re in the middle of updating a file, someone else chimes in with their revisions, disrupting yours and your flow. Oh! I hate(d) that.

It’s (nearly) 2016! Are you still faxing, too? Come on! Get with it! Use Google Docs, Google Drive and Google Work. You’ll be much more productive. Heck, you’ll even be more popular and better liked! I promise.

Google Docs is amazing. We love it. With our team working together all over the U.S., we need a collaborative cloud solution like this. You can make real-time updates in collaboration with clients and colleagues, look over revisions history, make suggestions and comments and so much more. And it’s always available and backed up in the cloud. No more, “I left that file on my home computer.”

3. Work on your inbound marketing

If you’re not doing inbound marketing, you’re missing the boat! In fact, it might be time for a new marketing partner.

We love HubSpot. It’s great to have all your web marketing tools in one simple yet powerful platform for one price.

However, HubSpot isn’t cheap. (HubSpot, would you please lower your professional package cost by $300 per month and also include 1,000 more contacts and A/B testing within the professional package? Oh, and why don’t partners get one free account? Seriously. That’s one reason why we aren’t yet HubSpot Partners.)

4. Invest in online customer review management software

Customer reviews influence purchasing decisions, and now they are impacting search-engine results. Small businesses need the same tools that large companies use. ReviewMaster collects, manages, improves and promotes your company’s online customers reviews.

5. Turn printouts into PDFs on the go

Scan-to-email killed the fax machine like video killed the radio star. Now, scanning and emailing agreements and documents from your smartphone is killing the office scanner.

I like to print agreements and review them on the go. Genius Scaneasily and neatly saves and emails your paperwork as PDFs, using your phone camera. It often looks as good as the office scanner without the office and scanner expense. Love it!

6. Put electronic signatures and analytics to good use

In the mobile age, electronic signatures are the best. Thanks to powerful tools like PandaDoc, you can create custom proposals and agreements in the cloud and send them from the cloud to clients, vendors and employees for electronic signatures.

The software alerts us when recipients view and sign agreements as well as how long the parties spent reviewing which pages and sections. We now save, revise and sign all of our master agreement templates — client agreements, employment agreements, vendor agreements, mutual non-disclosure agreements, etc. — in one portal! No need for busy clients to print and sign. Let them sign on the go!

7. Collecting past-due invoices from clients used to be a real pain

We’ve found that InvoiceSherpa’s automated payment reminders help us get quicker payment from slow-paying clients. It plugs into our existing accounting software and enables us to send custom payment reminders to our clients.

As an added bonus, it charges our clients late fees and credit card processing fees, too. Our accounting system never allowed that — until now!

Because of the custom “payment due soon” and “payment past due” reminders, our account receivables aging went from an average of 12 days to an average of three days within two months! This system trained our slowest-paying clients to start paying early from the first “invoice due soon” custom reminders. I highly recommend it!

I hope these productivity tools help you as much as they’ve helped me, my team, and the executives I exchange tips with.