DBS’ Top Five Vendors

Our vendors are great.  They help us stay on top of all the administrative tasks that keep a small business humming along – accounting, social media management, and more.  Our vendors are so great in fact that we wanted to take some time to tell you about them.  We don’t believe in outsourcing work overseas so you’ll notice that all our vendors are located in the United States and Canada.  Just to give fair warning there are a couple affiliate links in this page; however, these are all companies that we really enjoy working with (and write checks to every month ourselves) so if you’re looking to accelerate your business we highly recommend checking these guys out.

Accounting – GetTheBee.com

Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

GetTheBee is an online invoicing and bookkeeping suite geared specifically towards small businesses that are services-related.  Of course it offers time and expense tracking, but it also generates invoices which you can link to your PayPal account to enable your customers to send you online payments.  There is a generous set of reporting options that can show your business’ financial health at a glance and the software will also produce end-of-year tax documents for your accountant, which he or she will love.  Aside from all the wonderful features, GetTheBee is delightfully easy to use, the support is excellent, and more and more features are added all the time.  Lastly, GetTheBee donates a portion of their proceeds to save the bees.  Too good to be true?  Nope.  It’s free for three clients or less and just $14/mo. for unlimited clients.

Web Hosting – GreenGeeks.com

Multiple sites across USA and Canada

First off, these guys are really, really serious about having as small an environmental impact as possible.  Considering how much energy is required to power and cool a data center that’s quite a feat.  To offset this impact, GreenGeeks purchases wind energy credits to account for 3x the power they consume to put more clean energy back into the grid than they take out.  According to their website they also have “potluck” lunches and dinners in their office because fast food produces too much waste in packaging and production.

Aside from their environmental conscience, they provide outstanding service with a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24x7x365 live technical support included with every hosting package.  Packages begin at $5 per month for a basic CPanel account; however, the GreenGeeks “basic hosting” accounts including unlimited everything: e-mail accounts, space, domains, bandwidth, MySQL tables, etc.  If you’re looking for something more robust there are also Reseller hosting packages with starting at $20 per month for WHM and 10 of the afore-mentioned “basic” accounts or you can buy virtual private servers starting as low as $40 per month.

Social Media Management – HootSuite.com

Vancouver, Canada

HootSuite is one of the “Big Three” social media management platforms along with TweetDeck (just purchased by Twitter) and Seesmic.  It was the first to allow for pre-scheduled updates to social networks which is the main reason we initially chose HootSuite over other tools, but it has since grown and added many more features.  It now integrates with multiple social services including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, WordPress, FourSquare, and more.  It has its own URL shortening services, ht.ly/ht.li and ow.ly/ow.li, which provide click through statistics and with the case of ht.ly/ht.li a social media sharing bar that allows your readers to share your content more easily.

For larger companies, HootSuite really shines by enabling assignment of social media interactions to individual agents or departments within your organization for follow-up, a key functionality for integrating social media into your customer service strategy.  Additionally, for multi-member social media teams, there is an approval capability to prevent more junior members of a team from sending inappropriate tweets like this one.

A standard HootSuite plan is free but only allows a handful of social networks and two RSS feeds (read: blogs).  Upgrade to a HootSuite Pro plan for only $6 per month and gain unlimited social networks and feeds as well as additional analytic insights.

Twitter Follower Management – SocialOomph.com

Canada

When we first started using Twitter, we took pride in responding to every new follower, personally thanking them for following us and telling them not to hesitate to send any technology questions our way.  We also used to individually vet followers to make sure we didn’t “follow-back” any spammers or obviously uninteresting accounts.  Unfortunately, we quickly realized this was not a scalable solution so we started looking for a way to streamline the process.

We found SocialOomph.  Not only does it enable automatic following of people who start following you, but you can also vet these “follow-backs” by specifying conditions that will prevent an automatic follow-back, such as absence of a custom profile picture, recent account creation, follower/friend ratio, and more.  Once a new follower has been successfully vetted you can also configure an automatic welcome Direct Message to be sent as well.

The free version of SocialOomph includes popular social media features such as pre-scheduled tweets, keyword tracking, and Twitter Direct Message inbox cleanup.  The professional version ($30/mo) includes integration of Facebook and other social networks, social update via e-mail, a Twitter SPAM blocker, and TONS of other handy features.  As previously stated we use HootSuite for our social media management but SocialOomph’s auto follow-back and Twitter follower vetting is well worth the $4.

 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – SalesForce.com

Canada

One of the biggest advantages a small business has over its larger competitors is service.  After all, when you’re going on a sales call you’re selling yourself just as much as you’re selling the company.  In many instances you are the company!  The question now is how to keep track of all your various customer relationships, including potential customers?

The answer is SalesForce.com, a suite of web-based tools that can track your customers from initial lead all the way through to account maintenance and customer service.  It can capture leads from your website, track sales deals, and allow you to view your business’ sales pipeline and growth at a glance.  It integrates cleanly with the Google Applications suite, allowing you to send email or start GChat conversations from right within the SalesForce.com interface.  For more functionality SalesForce.com can integrate with Jigsaw prospecting tool, Google AdWords, Radian6 social media monitoring,  and more.

SalesForce.com is sold as “Software as a Service” (SaaS), meaning online only.  With no servers or hardware to buy, it is accessible from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.  While the SalesForce.com customer list includes such giants as Dell, Starbucks, and the American Red Cross, you can use the basic Contact Manager for only $5/user/month, and Group Edition for only $25/user/month.