You may have found yourself with a bit more time on your hands at the moment, and started to think about the platforms you use. Your website, CRM (customer relationship manager), email sender et cetera.
We’ve done a bit of thinking about these over the years, and have some recommendations for getting started. The following suite is what we suggest to people starting out a thought leader’s practice. It’s enough to get you going, won’t cost you an arm and a leg, and most importantly you don’t need to spend 3 months doing the research yourself. Thanks to Mike and Nick for putting this together.
(Note we don’t earn any affiliate commissions or anything else for making these recommendations – this is just what we think.)
Website
Squarespace – US$16/month
Your website will be one of your customers’ main touch-points. It’s important that your website is easy to build and modify, easy for customers to use, works well on mobile and doesn’t require much, if any, maintenance.
Video Hosting
Vimeo – AU$55/month
If you need to have videos on your website or anywhere else online, you’ll need to host them on a dedicated video hosting platform.
YouTube seems an obvious choice because it's ubiquitous and free, but your video might have ads in it, and at the end of your video your customer might be shown your competitors’ videos, even though it’s on your own website.
With a Vimeo subscription you can brand the embedded player, and control what is displayed when the video ends.
CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)
Solve 360 – US$25/month
Solve 360 is a relatively simple CRM to use, with a nice interface. (A CRM helps you manage your customers’ data and support your sales and communication processes.) You can try Solve for free for 15 days and then it is $25 per month. Solve integrates well with Mailchimp .
EDM (Electronic Direct Mail) Service
Mailchimp – US$10/month
This is what you’ll use to create and send bulk emails, like blogs or newsletters. We recommend Mailchimp which starts at US$10/month. You can easily create emails from the designed templates provided, apply your basic branding, and get sending. Mailchimp integrates with Solve 360 well so you can send emails to users based off their tags in Solve 360.
Password Manager
1Password – US$3/month
A password manager is something you don't appreciate you need until after your life gets upended because you haven’t been using one. It is a tool, available on desktop, tablet and phone, which allows you to have strong, unique passwords for every site and service you use, easily accessible on all the devices that you use. If one of the sites you use inevitably gets hacked all your other passwords remain secure, so you won’t spend days playing whack-a-mole with hackers trying to access your email, bank accounts, mobile phone service, etc.
These are the basics. We’ve got our black belt recommendations too … and you can see it all at https://thoughtleaders.com.au/techsuite. Please share if you find this useful.
