Inside Badsender: What tools do you need to develop a decentralized marketing agency?

Many of us have started an entrepreneurial adventure. But after a certain point, email is not enough. If you don't want your project management, your sales pipeline or your accounting to go haywire, you have to know how to surround yourself. Surround yourself with people, that's important, but also with tools that will allow you to gain in efficiency, organization and professionalism.

This is what we experienced a few months ago at Badsender.com. Going from two people to more than eight collaborators was a real challenge that we could not have succeeded without the help of precious tools. If we add the fact that we all work remotely, we immediately realize the importance of choosing the right tools.

Below, you will find the list of tools we have chosen. They are not necessarily all the best in their categories, they were sometimes selected in a few seconds (first found, first chosen) ... and it is not said that we will not migrate to other more powerful tools if we feel the choice. But today, they suit us (and make us live). Beyond the names that are mentioned, it is mainly the functions that you should keep in mind!

Skype.com : Between coffee machine and meeting room

The role of the coffee machine is often decisive in a company. It is sometimes where the ideas that will create your products of tomorrow are developed. Our coffee machine is Skype. What could be more natural when it is the most widespread tool to communicate instantly on the web.

So obviously, there are other solutions on the market that look more "professional". But you will always come back to Skype at some point if you need to communicate with the outside world as well.

Pipedrive.com : Sales management and "micro" CRM

I will probably remember the first "Sales Meeting" of Badsender for the rest of my life. An event that meant that our sales pipeline was getting full enough that I no longer knew all the projects in development.

Pipedrive is about deals, linked to contacts, linked to companies. These deals progress (by drag and drop) through various stages that you have previously configured yourself. I have tested several sales support solutions, and clearly, I have always come back to Pipedrive.

Toggl.com : Time sheets, everywhere!

At Badsender, we have chosen to offer a maximum of our services "by the minute" in order to propose services with the fairest price possible. Moreover, most of our collaborators also have other projects on the side, and it is the occasion to remunerate them with the time spent on the projects.

With Toggl, we don't just have a timetracking tool, but we can track the time spent on each project, on each customer. Define a different hourly price for each project, send reports to our customers, track the company's sales.marketing agency... and much more besides.

Koalaboox.com : Billing and financial management

Accounting is not your favorite thing to do, and anyway it's your accountant's job! But if you can simplify his work and allow you to have an efficient follow-up of your estimates, payments, expense reports, margins, ... then why not!

This is the role of Koalaboox (a Belgian solution, which is good, the head office of Badsender is in Brussels) which will automatically check our bank account to verify if we have been paid and reconcile the payment of supplier invoices. The platform also gives us access to a dashboard allowing us to follow the agency's performance.

Office365.com Email, calendar, note taking, Office suite, conference calls, ...

Well, okay. In mid-2015, for a startup, we should have gone with Google Apps For Work. But we made a different choice for one simple reason, the Office license included in the subscription price alone justifies going with Microsoft.

And even if I sometimes regret the simplicity of the collaboration possible in Google Drive, Office365 is gradually being equipped with features that make it stand out. For example, did you know that Lync (which recently became Skype for business) allows you to create conference calls (with international phone numbers) directly from Outlook? It may seem basic to you, but in the same vein, Office365 is full of very interesting features.

Trello.com : Project management, without the need for an aircraft carrier

Trello is a table in which you can define lists that contain cards. You can move these cards from list to list, assign them a person in charge, a date, a category (which can be used to manage priorities), ... You can create your cards by sending a simple email to a predefined address, and even the attachments will be added to it.

If the tool can quickly become (forgive the expression) messy, it is incredibly flexible. Whatever your production or project management processes are, it is always possible to enter them into Trello. Moreover, many tools offer plugins for Trello, such as Toggl which allows you to trigger timetracking directly from a Trello card.

Dropbox.com : What else ?

I must admit that I would have preferred to use OneDrive which is included in our Office365 subscriptions and which allows a very efficient integration with the different Microsoft tools. Unfortunately, for the moment, OneDrive for Business is very, very bad on the Mac, which prevents us from using it.

Anyway, even before considering OneDrive, we were already on Dropbox since the beginning of the adventure (we have now switched to the business version). This allows us to share all the production files which are thus shared with all the collaborators of Badsender working on the same projects.

WordPress You have an agency and you don't have a website/blog?

Do I really need to explain why? As we are not a web agency (we do exclusively eCRM and email marketing), we didn't really need to prove our expertise by developing the most complex site on the latest framework... so we went for the most efficient solution (at least for our needs).

Gravity Form : Lead generation

Once again, we chose the most efficient, and the most connected! Whether it's for our white papers on the blog or for our contact requests on the agency's website, Gravity is used. But I won't say more, it's the last tool on this list that will reveal the power of the ecosystem we've created.

Zapier.com : The one who links all the others (or almost)

It is, by far, the most important brick in all these tools. Although we are not yet using Zapier at 100% of its possibilities, it already fulfills an essential role. Indeed, all the leads generated via Gravity Form (white papers and spontaneous contacts) are transmitted to Zapier which will automatically open a deal in Pipedrive and register the email address to our newsletter if we have collected an optin. Until recently, for each new subscription to the newsletter I automatically generated a contact request in LinkedIn, but it seems that it does not work as well as before.

In the future, as almost all the tools we use are compatible with Zapier (except Koalaboox and Skype), we will more than likely extend its use. For example for creating events in the Office365 calendar based on tasks defined in Pipedrive or creating a folder in Dropbox and a new client in Toggl when a new project is sold.

What about you? What tools do you use?