Here's four tips for business owners who are buying business
software and wanting some help making sure you make a good
decision.
Hi, there, my name is Pete Moriarty, and for over 10 years,
we've helped literally 1000s of business owners all over the
world help get their technology, right. And if you're new to our
channel, welcome, we have an amazing growth roadmap, which
helps businesses no matter what stage of business you're at, in
your technology strategy, right, so you can grow a more
successful business. Now, I love helping small business owners,
we're based in Australia, we have customers all over the
world in both our audience and our consulting businesses as
well. And we help businesses make great choices around
technology. And we tend to spend most of our time helping with
Google workspace and the add ons and ecosystem around the Google
workspace kind of setup. But for us, many business owners will
come to us and ask for, hey, how do I choose the best CRM
software? Or how do I choose the best online meeting software? Or
how do I choose the best social media marketing software, or the
best email marketing software? And there are literally 1000s,
if not 10s, of 1000s of options that small business owners need
to think about? And so before we get started on actually, you
know, running down the road of like, what are the features? And
what are the benefits of any piece of software. But we need
to get started and get clear on what is the goal, it's very easy
for business owners to get into the arena of bright shiny object
syndrome, where you know, you're seeing ads on something like
Instagram, and you're jumping onto software there because it's
exciting, or a friend recommend something to you. Or maybe you
go to a seminar or a webinar, and they say, Hey, this is the
latest and greatest tool that everybody should be using. And
everyone tends to jump on it. Now, as entrepreneurs, our core
skill is that we're good at adapting to change. And we're
good at starting things. But we're not always great at
finishing things early. And so what tends to happen is we can
sign up for a lot of different apps and services, but not
necessarily actually finished, or fully implement them. And
what tends to happen for small business owners is quite often
you go and sign up to a bunch of trials and sign up to a bunch of
different applications. And then you end up just having a ping,
ping, ping, ping, ping your credit card, without you
remembering. And so we want to avoid that subscription,
overwhelm, we want to avoid starting things or not finishing
them. And we do that by first being very clear about our goal,
before we sign up to a piece of software. So what is the goal?
What do we want to achieve? What is the actual, you know, the
execution that we need? What is this going to help us solve for
the business, not just for my excitement? But what is this
going to help me solve for the business? After we've done that
our next step is going to be to scope out a process flow. And
you might think, Oh, my God, Pete, now you're getting boring
with the spreadsheets and you're getting bogged down in the
flowcharts? No, no, trust me on this, we're going to scope out a
process flow, because this is very, very important to choosing
the right kind of software, once you know the business process
that you're looking to solve and maybe that business processes
launching a marketing campaign, or, you know, creating a webinar
funnel, or maybe it's hiring a new employee, or maybe it's
delivering a project building a house or you know, creating a
widget, if you're a design business, any of those is going
to have a set of steps in that and we've got other videos on
how to systemize your business. Well, basically creating and
scoping out a process flow is going to help you understand
what are the things that need to happen in this business that
this technology tool can support to happen. And importantly, when
you have a technology tool, it needs to wrap around and meet
and manage your business processes, not the other way
around. So we're not going to shift our business to match the
technology tool. Ideally, we want to technology tool that's
going to fit in with our business process. So once we've
got that mapped out in a process, then we're going to
have an idea of what requirements we might have. And
so step number three is to create our requirements map.
Now, the requirements map is typically a spreadsheet, it's a
list of features a list of things that this piece of
technology needs to do. And I've got a dedicated video just on
you know, what are the requirements? And how can you
identify those requirements? And how can you actually make great
choices once you've got a list of different pieces of software
that you're interested in evaluating. But for now, we're
just gonna start with that requirements map. What are all
the different requirements after we've gone through our process
flow, and we're gonna list them out on a spreadsheet, in the
columns there. And then we've got them all listed and ready to
go to go to our evaluation stage. And you got it. Step
number four is the evaluation stage. This is where we try
before we buy. Great idea that now we can just punch in
unfortunately have to punch in a credit card in the most cases,
but punch in a credit card. Get started on a 30 day trial for
new pieces of software and start seeing whether or not this is
going to work in your business. Now, it may be a better use of
your time to delegate this to someone else on your team, or to
work with a consultancy like our company it genius to help you
evaluate different pieces of technology, but there's no
hurdle in trying before you buy, as long as you make sure you
remember to cancel any of those accounts
so they don't automatically rebuild. And that's a great task
to either give to a team member if you're not so great at
remembering things or putting it in your calendar or to do lists
to remind yourself to cancel that subscription. try before
you buy thank God for the SAS revolution of service Software
as a Service, because that means that we can typically try most
apps without having to commit to massive amounts of capital
expenditure. So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you like
these tips, leave us a comment down below and let us know if
these were useful. Otherwise, I'd love to see you in the next
video, hit that subscribe button. If you'd like to see
more, give us a thumbs up if you'd like that content. And if
you're a business owner who is new to the channel, please go
ahead and check out our other videos in our playlists. Because
we've got certain playlists for every different level of
business you're at right now giving you as much support as we
can with your technology strategy. Now if you're an
existing user of Google workspace, we have a pretty
phenomenal transfer in offer that is for free, and the link
is down below. And you get access to our support team as
well as a free account chat. And you also get access to our
Google Classroom, which gives you a library of training videos
for you and your team to help you get the most out of your
Google investment. Now one of those courses is our inbox zero
course which has helped literally 10s of 1000s of
customers get their inboxes down to zero every single day using
Gmail. If you're interested in that jump on the link below and
you can get access super quickly just by filling out a form and
we'll see you on the other side. Till next time. Catch you in the
next video.