Technologies are used in every single company or organisation around the globe for business owners, employers and employees to scale out their operations.
Not only are they used in work, but also in everyday life – I’m sure you’ve probably used one without even realising the full extent of what it does, because that’s exactly what has happened to us at KKC.
As a team, we sat down and listed the technologies that we use to run Kiki Kirby Coaching + Consultancy and were surprised to find out that we actually use at least 13 different ones. Dubsado, Kartra, Paypal, Zoom and Hubspot are just some of the technologies that we use, some of which are very well known and others are more sector specific.
To make it easier for you to understand here is a list of 5 typical technologies that we use and what we use them for:
CRM or Customer Relationship Manager – it allows you to store your contacts or leads to create a data base of consumers or customers. From this you could send automated emails such as newsletters or highlight and identify the correct people to sell to. (Dubsado, Hubspot, Kartra)
Email – a tool that the majority of us use and have access to, to communicate with each other. It’s easily accessible and you can send them free of charge from all around the world, when you are connected to the internet. (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo)
Financial apps – These are used for accounting, which covers all of your earnings and expenditures. (Pay Pall, Xero)
Creativity – These types of technologies are used to create things such as social media content, banners, quotes, business cards etc. They are usually free and have in-application purchases to enhance your experience. (Photoshop, Canva)
Content wiring/storage – This is where you can write all of your content, notes, ideas ect in one place and store it to use in the future. You typically use these tools to plan your social media, articles and any external communication, which is common across a lot of businesses. (Evernote, iPhone notes, Google docs, Word)
These technologies contribute to building a path to cater to the needs of a growing business, however what we sometimes fail to remember is that these technologies are ever changing and so are the needs of our business. This could mean that we aren’t using a particular technology to its fullest capacity or that the technology has become outdated for the purpose in which we originally started using it.
Some of these technologies can be quite costly and some of them are free, however regardless of the initial purchase price, these technologies all cost us somehow. You might be questioning my previous sentence, because you and I both know that some technologies are in fact free but despite this, you still have to spend out on training your staff, the maintenance costs or upgrading at some point – most of which has a price tag attached to it.
So why do we use them?
To save money – Probably one of the most important reasons why we use these technologies is to save money. Even though there might be a cost to use it in the first place, these technologies allow us to save money in the long run.
Communication – We can use these technologies to communicate with not only each other but also our consumers/customers. Communication can be in many forms such as email, sales, marketing which all require different tools, techniques and technologies.
Speed – These technologies allow us to speed up a lot of different aspects of our business including social media posting, mass-marking emails, payments etc. It requires less human resource and increases the output – so it’s a no brainer.
To track attendance/timing – Using technology to track our time is essential to running a business as it means we can work out costs per project, how effective our staff are, what our daily schedule looks like, who is doing what at certain times etc. It’s the backbone of most businesses and it is important that this is an essential part.
Quality – We want our customers/consumers to have the highest quality so whether that’s having a personalised email, high quality webinar, updated website information or seamless payment process, we use technology to ensure this is right. Again, I’m sure many other businesses feel this way and this is a huge contributing factor to using technology within business.
After we complied our list of over 13+ different technologies we thought it was best to narrow some of these down and just have KKC operating from fewer – Less is More!
It became apparent that some of our technologies that we were paying for now actually do the same things and therefore by emailing the different providers and working out which one was best for us, we have not only saved ourselves money but we have managed to minimise our list to under 10.