10 Tools Your Startup Needs To Use

This post was originally posted on TechinAsia.com, a leading Southeast technology media property. The post can be found here – 10 startup tools you need for CRM, communication, and documentation

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At PayrollHero we are big believers in knowledge sharing. From pair programming to private online forums for open discussions about our business to sharing online, we believe that transparency and leaving artifacts behind is the best way to succeed. So in keeping with that, I thought I would share the 10 tools that we are using today at PayrollHero.

Communication:
HipChat – We use HipChat as our water cooler. We have multiple rooms setup so that we can keep the conversations on topic. From Business Development to Developers to Customer Service, each department of our business has a room to chat in. Plus, with the iOS app and alerts, our team can stay up to speed with the progress of the business. One of the neat things about HipChat is that you can integrate with other tools so that they update the HipChat rooms. For example, in our Developers room, it is common to see messages from Bugsnag, GitHub, CodeClimate and many others. In the Customer Service room Zendesk and Intercom contacts show up. It is a great way to keep on top of your business and the different departments.

Google Hangouts – Every morning at 7:37am PHT and 3:37pm PDT most of our team gathers for our standup meeting. Because we are situated in two locations, we do our daily standup meeting via Google Hangouts. Hangouts are stable, reliable and free enabling us to keep both offices in constant contact with each other. Outside of our standup meetings Google Hangouts are commonly used for department meetings, client support calls and sales calls.

Skype -Everyone should know Skype, but we use it quite a bit as some Google products have trouble in China. Skype enables our client happiness team to speak with clients, share their screens and demo the platform. Our business development team uses it for webinars as well as sales calls. Overall it is a reliable platform that helps us grow our business.

AsanaAsana is a task tracking system built for web and mobile designed to reduce email clutter within a workplace.  We use it for tracking our engineering tasks, onboarding tasks and any group projects that we are working on.

Zopim – We switched over from SnapEngage to Zopim for the live chat on all of our marketing sites recently. We made the switch based on features and pricing and found that Zopim had all the features we needed at a lower cost that what we were paying before. (Zendesk just purchased Zopim)

CRM:
PipelineDeals – We moved over to PipelineDeals (from Highrise) recently as we were looking for a change in how we managed our leads, deals, contacts and clients. PipelineDeals is a great platform for B2B businesses that want an easy to use, slick interface that does not require tons of setup time. PipelineDeals plays nicely with our MailChimp account and our team instantly loved it. Plus their customer support has been quick and helpful. (Watch for PipelineDeals pushing more into Southeast Asia)

Intercom.io -I really like Intercom and how it lets us communicate not only with our clients who require support, but all of our clients. It gives us an in-depth dashboard to all activity on our platform and makes it really easy to communicate with our clients. Their automated, action trigged messages are really helpful and have changed the way we support our clients.

Zendesk.comZendesk is where we manage client support requests and tickets from Intercom that require more time to resolve. We used to use Zendesk alone, but added Intercom for its complete client view and the two platforms work nicely for our client happiness team. (My guess is that Zendesk is going to either do buy Intercom or replicate some of their features in the near future. Time will tell.)

Documentation:

Google Drive – Our whole world lives in Google Drive. We store our financials, employee docs, communal spreadsheets/documents, photos, videos, memos plus much more. It is a quick and easy way to keep everything in the cloud and searchable at a moments notice.

Expensify – Expensify is how we track all receipts that need to be reimbursed. We use the iOS app to take photos of the receipt, quickly document the details around the receipt and it stores it for quick reporting.

Bonus Tools – We are also playing with a couple tools to test how they workout within our world. They include Peak (see what people are working on), DropCam (to take a peek into each office) and Ghost (for release notes, trying instead of WordPress).

Doing Things That Don’t Scale

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Kalibrr CEO Paul Rivera at the e27 Echelon Conference

When Paul Rivera, the CEO of Kalibrr was in Silicon Valley as part of Y Combinator he and I were chatting about how it was going.  One of the things he mentioned was that Paul Graham suggested that all of the startups do things that don’t scale. Since then, Paul Graham has written an essay on why he wants startups to “do things that don’t scale” and Jason Fried has recently followed it up with his own thoughts on his blog.

I wanted to take a moment to talk about how we have been doing things at PayrollHero. Many of the internal functions we have been completing have been manual out of choice, but some simply because we just did not have enough resources to automate them at this time – or better yet, we have our resources working on other higher priority tasks.

As with any startup, decisions must be made on what to do, what not to do, what to automate and what to do manually.

At PayrollHero, much of the business development and client happiness (read: customer service) departments tasks are completed manually.  We do this out of choice so that we can stay hyper focused on the customer’s needs, likes, dislikes, issues, questions, etc.

Business Development
For business development most of our leads come in through online marketing but we funnel all of those leads into a web form that drops the details into my email.  We do this for a few reasons;

– We wanted to make that we were paying close attention to every lead that came in.  I email back and forth with each of them to ensure that they are the right fit for PayrollHero.  As a startup, we end up saying no, more than we say yes. It is very hard to do, but we have found that focusing on a specific niche enables us to deliver a fantastic product for that tight niche.  This will slowly loosen up as we continue to expand the platform.

We do use some automation, leads are added to our Highrise and MailChimp accounts, there is also a quick auto-responder that is sent out from the Wufoo form that directs the lead to our YouTube page as well as answers a few commonly asked questions. That auto-responder ensures that the lead knows we have received the inquiry and provides them with some details of questions we know they will ask when we start emailing back and forth with them. (we know thanks to our one on one calls that we conduct)

– As we worked over the last year to understand the onboarding process of new clients we found that handling all leads that were coming in manually, was the best way to understand not only what they were looking for, but how they currently handled their time, attendance, scheduling and payroll, what their pain points were and what part of our offering caught their attention.

– For leads that are qualified, and interested in taking the next step we do a Skype or Google Hangout call to run through how the platform works.  We have recently begun using YouTube to showcase the walkthrough that we would normally do with the client. Sometimes both are needed but we are ready now to start documenting the individual features of the platform as we start to ramp up.  Our YouTube videos are also embed into our Zendesk knowledge-base so that leads/clients can not only read about how certain features work but watch as well.

Zendesk's Nick Franklin (Head of Sales SE Asia) and Michael Hansen (VP) at the PayrollHero offices for the Zendesk bootcamp in our "think tank"

Zendesk’s Nick Franklin (Head of Sales SE Asia) and Michael Hansen (VP) at the PayrollHero offices for the Zendesk bootcamp in our “think tank”

– We also do in-person bootcamps as well as online webinars to educate leads/clients on how PayrollHero works.  Webinars are much more scalable than bootcamps but both have been effective tools in growing our client base. We have been working closely with Zendesk’s head of Southeast Asia Business Development and done a few events with them across the region.

There is much more to the business development side of the business but these are some examples of how we handle things manually.  We will automate the systems we have in place in short order, but doing them manually from the start has provided us with much needed feedback and direction for where to take PayrollHero.

Client Happiness Team
For our client happiness team we onboard new clients manually in almost every way.  Our focus has been to understand what the process is with new clients and constantly tweaking it so that we can continually improve.

We use Asana to create tasks for all new clients that need to be onboarded and have a task template that gets added so we know what still needs to be done.  This task template includes items like adding employees (we do the heavy lifting to get the employees in), setting up, customizing for how the client handles things like earlies, lates, overtime, undertime, etc. As you can image, every client does things differently when it comes to the internal workings of their business. We work to understand their unique setup and tweak our platform so that it best suites them.

One of the best pieces of advice that we ever got was from Daniel Debow who said that no matter what, make the system as flexible as possible as no matter how similar some clients seem, they will still do things very differently from each other.  This initial feedback was why we built fully customizable system permissions, thresholds and much more.

But, just because we do many things manually now, does not mean that this is always the plan.  As we continue to grow we continue to automate certain functions of our sales and onboarding process.  In a few months we will move from being mostly manual to mostly automated and we will apply the learnings we have had from the last year and a bit to automating our systems.

If you are interested in PayrollHero, feel free to reach out as we would be pleased to chat further about your needs.

If you are in business development or customer service, let us know in the comments what tools you use within your business.  We are always interested to learn more.

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