Inefficient business operations are huge productivity killers. Plus, slow workflows, especially in critical aspects of your operations, can cause you to miss your targets, lose customers, and, in turn, money. The good news is, you can easily address these hurdles by using the right SaaS tools. In this guide, we’ll cover some of the best ways SaaS tools can help you optimize your workflows to make your overall business operations more efficient. But first…
What are Saas Tools?
Software as a Service (SaaS) products are apps or platforms hosted by central providers. A SaaS platform is different from regular software applications. Instead of downloading or installing a copy of the software, you can access it on a web or mobile browser. You pay a monthly (or annual) fee to use the software, and the SaaS company handles the updates based on your needs. Many SaaS tools are designed for specific industries and functions, including marketing, customer service, ecommerce platforms, project management, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps. Some of these SaaS platforms include Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, Asana, Slack, BigCommerce, Freshdesk, etc. Adopting SaaS tools into your current systems offers many benefits, especially when used along with your time management strategies for more productive work. For instance, you won’t need to run and install the apps in your data centers or computers. This reduces the expenses (and time required), maintenance and provisioning, and hardware acquisition, including software support and licensing.
How Using SaaS Tools can Optimize Your Workflows
SaaS tools can help streamline your workflows, optimize your business operations, boost your performance, and improve your results. Some of the ways various SaaS platforms can help you achieve these include the following.
1. Provides cloud based solutions
Tools that require you to visit your physical office to use it can drain your time, energy, and resources. For example, if you run an equipment rental company, performing inspections without cloud-based tools would mean using manual, paper-based processes. Your staff would need to perform inspections wherever your physical office is located, which can eat up your productive hours and resources. However, with a cloud-based SaaS solution, your staff can conduct equipment inspections anywhere, whether on a project site or other locations. One such solution is Record360. Record360’s mobile app includes an online checklist and electronic equipment inspection form that your staff can easily accomplish within minutes from any location with any compatible, internet-connected device. Your employees can go through the checklist, fill out the inspection form, attach documentation such as damages captures through images and videos, and get the record signed off.
2. Makes team collaboration easier
Failing to work together efficiently can lead to poor performance, slow workflows, and ultimately, unproductive business operations. SaaS tools can help you address these issues by allowing your team members across your company to work together seamlessly. For instance, top-of-the-line team project management tools such as monday.com offer essential and even advanced features to help you oversee your projects and tasks efficiently from start to finish. You can create and share project boards with members, assign tasks owners, prioritize jobs, add tags, and other useful features to help your teams seamlessly view, organize, track, and accomplish projects.
Reliable project management software reduces the long, time-consuming back and forth that usually comes with working together as a team. Sharing documents also becomes a breeze since you can have a centralized location for all project files and documents. This allows for quick and easy access, so your team works seamlessly, streamlining your project and task workflows.
3. Automates critical aspects of business operations
Adopting automation is one of the best ways to speed up accomplishing tedious tasks and making your business operations more efficient. Time-consuming tasks such as email marketing and lead generation (among others) become more efficient with the right SaaS solution with automation features. For instance, Mailchimp’s email marketing automation feature lets you create personalized, automated workflows. You can set up triggers to automatically deliver your marketing emails based on specific user actions and how they interact with your business as they move through the customer journey. The platform also offers a Send Time Optimization feature that uses data science to determine when your customers are most likely to engage. You can also schedule your campaigns, and the platform automatically sends your emails at those optimum times, speeding up a huge part of your email marketing processes. Automation helps eliminate bottlenecks in your processes and does the heavy lifting for you, letting you work more efficiently and optimizing your business operations. Streamline repetitive, time-sucking tasks for smoother workflows. Leverage SaaS tools with powerful automation features, from survey apps to reliable customer service automation software.
4. Speeds up your content creation
Creating quality content often takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you don’t have skilled and experienced graphic designers in your team. This adds to inefficiencies in your business operations on top of other factors such as marketing strategies that slow your business down. If you’re a small business, startup, or have a limited marketing budget, an excellent SaaS graphic design tool you can use is Canva. Canva offers a vast templates library designed for many content types and industries to help you simplify and speed up creating your promotional and marketing content. It has editing tools and functionalities, customizable templates, and you can add icons, stock images, video clips, vectors, or upload your own media. Canva’s numerous design templates and tools make it quick and easy to create your marketing content, from social media banners and promotional videos to infographics and posters. With a SaaS graphic design tool, creating professional-looking, stunning content for your website and other marketing channels can be fast and easy, even if you don’t have graphic design skills or experience.
5. Simplifies managing your ecommerce store
Operating an online store can be challenging since it involves handling many aspects to ensure it runs smoothly. Handling tasks such as managing your inventory (on top of other parts of your business operations) can be a laborious and time-consuming process, especially when you do it manually. The good news is, ecommerce solutions such as Shopify can help streamline managing your ecommerce store. Shopify has all the essential features you need to help you run your online business seamlessly, from marketing to product inventory. If you’re running a dropshipping business, you can link your Shopify store to Oberlo to streamline finding products to sell. You can find products from suppliers on AliExpress. Oberlo lets you add all the product information to an import list, such as the description, images, available variations, and other marketing materials. Edit the information accordingly, and with one click, all the product details get imported to your Shopify store. This eliminates copying and pasting product details from suppliers to your online shop. Plus, you won’t need to check for your suppliers’ stock availability manually. Oberlo automatically updates your product information on Shopify based on actual available stock information from suppliers. This way, you avoid running out of items since you’re always updated on available stocks from suppliers, and you don’t run the risk of accidentally overselling items that are not in stock. A reliable ecommerce platform allows you to manage and operate your business more efficiently.
6. Improves your data security
Most SaaS tools offer essential security features to keep all the data you share with the software safe. For instance, many SaaS tools use cloud-secure systems, controls, procedures, and policies that work together to protect the system’s data and infrastructure. To further improve this protection, implementing cloud security posture management (CSPM) ensures continuous monitoring and enforcement of cloud security best practices, keeping your data and applications secure in the cloud. End-users can configure these security measures to support regulatory compliance, protect could data and customer privacy, and set authentication rules for user and device access. Essentially, you can configure your SaaS tool’s cloud security measures to suit your exact business needs, from filtering traffic to authenticating access. Knowing your data is safe will give you the peace of mind to run your business efficiently. Plus, SaaS tools that can protect your data helps mitigate security risks. These also reduce the chances of cyberattacks that can seriously hurt your operations or at the very least, hinder smooth business operations. While SaaS tools can give you the critical data protection your business needs, it never hurts to take extra precautions. Implement additional security measures to secure your business-critical data and keep them intact. Let’s say you created an app that you can integrate into the current SaaS tool you use. One of the best ways to add an extra layer of protection to your app codes and data is to run regular automated backups. Doing so helps keep your app data and codes secure and intact and prevents errors or bugs that can cause your app to stop working properly or even impact your SaaS tool’s functionality. Use Backrightup for your Azure DevOps backup. The flexible service lets you run automated backups of all your codes, data, repositories, work items, and more. This saves you from running manual, time-consuming backups that can be open to errors, oversight, and malicious attacks, which can cause you to lose your data.Leverage the Power of SaaS Tools for Better Efficiency
Running efficient business operations can do wonders for your company’s profitability. After all, the more seamlessly your business runs, the better equipped you and your team are to reach your targets, gain customers, work together efficiently, and make money. Determine your existing process hiccups and gaps and know the best tools to use to streamline your workflows. Doing so sets your business on the path to long-term growth and success. At Growth Hackers, we help startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs succeed by designing for them online business personalized content filled with growth hacking techniques. If you think that a bit of extra help might be necessary to help you grow your business, contact Growth Hackers and we will start to help you from today.
Marc Sullivan
I live and breathe writing. I write about marketing, business, sports, cybersecurity, or just about anything and everything under the sun.
