Worried About Remote Team Productivity? We Used These Tools to Scale To 50,000 Users Remotely
We worked as a remote team for 4 years. These are the tools we used to work from our home offices and scale our startup from 0 to 50,000 users.
We didn’t set out to build a remote team. I just so happened that when my business partner and I met, back in 2016, we lived six hours apart.
I had just created the first version of Proposeful, our proposal management and automation software. My partner had shut down his previous startup and was looking for a new project. I was great (*ahem*) at development and marketing, he was great at talking to clients and users.
Although we didn’t have similar postal codes, we had something much more important: a good fit. Considering how many companies fail because of fights among founders, I’d pick a good co-founder over a local co-founder any day.
We’re all grown up now and decided to give having an office a go. However, we learned a about remote work in these past 4 years and the tools we used were a huge part of what made us productive and successful.
#1. Proposeful (for sending online proposals)
Meeting clients in person can be a problem for a remote team since sometimes you don’t have the structure to bring them into the office or the time to spend on clients visits.
However, some salespeople don’t like not being able to present proposals personally since they can’t see how clients react and answer their questions.
Proposeful solves that problem. It lets you quickly create beautiful proposals and shows you exactly how long clients spent on each part of them.
Proposals on Proposeful are tracked so your team knows who is viewing proposals and how often they open it. That’s particularly useful for improving remote teams productivity since every sales person can see recent activities on documents and know when to follow-up on leads.
Also it’s perfect for collaborating on documents and sharing proposal templates across the team so your designers can actually do the things you pay them to do instead of spending their days helping salespeople with their proposals.
Clients can also accept proposals by email in just a few seconds, so you never have to meet clients in person or physically sign contracts.
Your team can start creating online proposals and selling remotely with Proposeful for U$ 6 per month.
#2. Vocus (for set-and-forget follow ups)
Working from home gives you more freedom in terms of how you organize your tasks.
That great but it also usually means a higher risk that you might end up forgetting to contact leads, clients or providers.
Vocus was our secret weapon for effective emails. Most emails are not answered at first and require some follow-ups. Vocus lets you schedule up to 7 follow-ups for your email messages.
What we love about Vocus is that you can schedule follow-ups for any message, you don’t need to follow a pre-programmed sequence like in Hubspot Sales. Just type your follow-ups and let Vocus annoy your target until they respond.
You start powering-up your emails with Vocus for U$ 10/month.
#3. Trello (for keeping track of tasks)
I’ve been using Trello for years.
Recently it was crashing and freezing frequently and I thought to myself “OH MY GOD TRELLO WHAT IS UP YOU USED TO BE PERFECT”.
Then I realized I had been using it daily since 2016 to control my to-do. My “Done!” column had nearly 10,000 cards. Maaaaaaybe that’s the issue?
Then I archived all of them. And Trello was working perfectly again. Yay Trello! 💜
Trello is a very useful Kanban board where you can control any sort of workflow. Here’s what my main one looks like:
I organize cards according to what is a priority for the day, the week, the month or not an priority at all. We have other boards shared across the team to manage blog posts, product features and several other tasks. Boards can be organized any way you want.
It’s like the wall at the office were you stick post-its and argue about how long tasks should really take. Except is in the cloud and you can use it from your home office.
You can start managing anything with Trello for free. (I’ve recommended so many people to Trello they stopped giving me free stuff so that’s not even a referral link)
#4. Hubspot CRM so (we knew who was handling each client)
Sales communication can be a pain when everyone is working from home on their own schedules.
Our first leads were managed in Trello. However, when reached a certain size, we started tripping over each other.
It was hard to track who was working which leads, when was the last time someone had reached out to a lead and even if someone had scheduled Vocus follow-ups and was waiting for a reply.
We frequently would call leads only to find out they were already working with someone else on the team. So we had to do what grown-up companies do and use a CRM.
Hubspot is perhaps the most well established CRM for SMBs and Startups. Their CRM is free (that’s how they hook so when your company actually has money you’ll pay them) so it’s a no-brainer.
We set our Pipelines on Hubspot, integrated it to our emails so every message was registered on our deals. We now knew who was responsible for each deal and could easily now every interaction that had happened between the team and the lead.
It’s not so easy to get used to reporting everything on a CRM but after your remote team gets the hang of it you’ll be even more productive than if you were sharing an office.
You can start managing leads with Hubspot CRM for free.
#5. Whereby (to jump on calls and screen-share with your team instantly)
Although we were talking on our phones everyday, sometimes we needed to see each other to better communicate ideas or share our screens and test features together.
Whereby has been our best remote work friend for real time cooperation. With Whereby you can register for a special link that works like a conference room that’s always online and ready to use.
Just share this link with your team members and every time someone needs a quick meeting they can just jump on Whereby. It’s also perfect for scheduling calls with clients and product demonstrations since it doesn’t require installing any browser extensions or even signing up.
You can create your own virtual conference room with Whereby for free.
The Secret for Remote Teams’ Productivity: Communication
What all these tools have in common is they help remote teams communicate better and share information.
Achieving success for a home-office based company is just a matter of having the right tools and processes in place to help information flow across the entire team so there are no bottle-necks.
Working from home also allows employees to enjoy more freedom and spend less time and money commuting. It’s a great strategy for any company to have such tools in place so team members can choose to work from home when they need or prefer to.
I hope you find these tools useful and they help your remote team increase its productivity. If you did, let me know in the comments below.
Thank you for reading!
