By Romi Mahajan, Investor and Marketer
Yes, you read the title correctly. My idea is simple: In a technology-drenched world in which more than ninety percent of “solutions” I see appear to be in search of a problem, I decided to examine what technologies are designed to deal with a person like me. If they can lick that problem, they must be worth their salt.
In my professional life, while I am good at a few things, I’m terrible at many more. As such, I find myself wasting considerable time and depleting a fair amount of energy on matters I should be managing deftly. Technology helps me through this.
Five tech solutions that help me get through the business day and allow those I work with to tolerate me:
1. As a marketer, I spend corporate money on a variety of marketing activations and I travel a lot. In addition, I have a variety of clients. Given this, managing expenses in a timely manner is not-trivial. Here, I rely on Zact to create efficiency, offer spending guardrails, and keep me on track. From the perspective of my clients, they are able to see expenditures in real-time and to reconcile expenses in a matter of minutes not days.
2. With copious travel, plans often change. Changing plans create a wake in one’s entire life and add stress. When the changes also cause one to lose money, the stress is compounded. Here, I am thankful for the airline and hotel apps that allow for quick changes, airline and hotel policies that anticipate changes and forego charges, and meld with someone like me whose plans inevitably (and I am sure annoyingly) change constantly. While this could be considered “consumer technology,” the fact is that most of the changes stem from business issues.
3. In my work with startups, quick “ideation” is key to success. The normal process of scheduling meetings doesn’t work for real-time agility. Here, I find that Slack makes a big difference. I can communicate when an idea is hot and we can take action –or decide to ignore- on the spot. There are numerous ways to improve Slack, but it certainly meets the needs of someone like me who likes to surface and resolve issues and ideas quickly.
4. As someone who works with a variety of customers across industries, my mind can get addled and streams of work jumbled-if I am not careful. As such, a variety of CRM solutions make my life much easier. My clients don’t have to fire me for idiotic mistakes. The ones I would like to call out here are Hubspot, Pepper, and Microsoft Dynamics. I’m sure there are many good ones, but these ones, I’m familiar with.
5. With complexity in customer types and types of business services comes complexity in invoicing and payments. Good accounting is timely, accurate, and ethical. On both sides. For this, I must thank Venmo and Zelle for the ease of payments. I am fine with paper checks too, to be honest, but anyone who deals with complexity knows, closing the loop is great. In many cases with both Venmo and Zelle, I invoice and get paid within a few hours, thereby closing the loop and allowing me to move on to something else.
This list is peculiar to me and my way of work. I’d love to hear the thoughts of other Express Computer readers. What are your favorite business technologies?
