Top 10 Tools Successful CEO’s Couldn’t Live Without

Like flying first class can make your 14-hour flight more comfortable, finding the right tool for a business process you are already executing can reduce friction, save you time, and increase revenueThe challenge is the world is a very noisy place, especially when it comes to creating the next greatest app, tool or SaaS product. So what’s the best way to find the best tools for busy entrepreneurs?

Simple, ask successful entrepreneurs.

Which is exactly what my friend Nathan Latka does on his highly popular podcast The Top. Where he claims the record of having the fastest business podcast to hit over 1 million downloads. So I reached out to him. He shared his findings after interviewing over 600+ CEO’s ranging from startups to companies valued at over $1-billion dollars. 

Top 10 Tools for Successful CEO’s

Even with thousands of business related online tools and hundreds more being launched monthly, he kept hearing these ten tools mentioned over and over again.

Klipfolio

Andrew Yates is the CEO of Artesian, which helps companies get better data on current and prospective customers and leads. The company just passed $700,000 in monthly recurring revenue and has raised $40-Million dollars. Andrew uses tools like Geckoboard and Klipfolio to create analytics dashboards covering things like conversion rates on their website, Google Analytics visualization and social media marketing traffic.

Self Moleskin Journal

Andrew Kemendo is the CEO of Pair3d.com, a tool that lets you visually place furniture in your home so you can plan colors, style, and looks before you buy. He uses journals like the Best Self moleskin journal on a daily basis to keep notes and track tasks.

Acuity Scheduling

Chad Rubin launched his company Skubana 18 months ago, breaking the $1-million sales mark in the first 12 months. The tool helps eCommerce brands streamline their orders, inventory, and analytics. Chad uses Acuity Scheduling to plan meetings with customers and prospects. Acuity lets you block off chunks of time you are free, and then lets you share a link for anyone to schedule. Helps avoid back and forth via email to pick times and helps busy CEO’s batch meetings to reduce switching energy loss between tasks.

HotJar

Chuck Sillari runs a $5.5 million dollar burger business and just got into monthly burger subscriptions at BurgaBox.com. He uses HotJar to track website visitors movements and button clicks to try and increase his conversion rate and average cart value. HotJar also lets you see website heatmaps and scrolling patterns.

The Top Inbox

Matt Schwartz is an executive recruiter at his company MJsearch.com. In 2015, he did over $1.1-million dollars connecting talent with new companies. This task involves a lot of emailing and followup, which he uses TheTopInbox.com for. Like most entrepreneurs, Matt works over the weekend, but doesn’t want to send emails and bug people so he uses TheTopInbox.com to schedule them to send Monday at 6am when people are more likely to open and reply. He also uses the open tracking features of The Top Inbox so he can tell when people open his emails.

Pipedrive

Olivier Magnan-Saurin runs Fidzup, which just raised $3.7-million dollars and helps 2,500 retail locations track in store visits from advertising spend. His team of 25 usees Pipedrive as their CRM to track, manage, and onboard new potential leads and customers. His team loves the ability to track deals with easy to see color coordinated labels.

Slack

Nathan Putnam runs an agency called Monumetric, which has quickly scaled to 41 employees, breaking $6-million dollars in 2015 revenue. His team uses Slack channels to communicate about which publishers and advertisers contracts are going well, or which need work. He’s found Slack easier to use than traditional email and also likes how fast it is to add new employees since he’s almost doubling year on year.

aHrefs

Yahya Mokhtarzada is a YC graduate building his fintech startup, Truebill. Truebill helps you track all of your subscription payments and quickly cancel what you don’t need. He uses aHrefs to track what keywords his competitors are ranking for and what sites are driving his competitors the most traffic. His team can then build plans to go over lucrative traffic dialed in to specific keywords, influencers, and websites.

MindMeister

Brad Costanzo has built his own high margin consulting company doing $600,000  in 2015 and enjoying the freedom to do what he wants. He’s now launched a company with his wife called Stiletto Coffee. In each of these businesses, he uses MeisterTask, a product of Mind Meister, to manage his daily tasks in a straightforward mobile app. A timer will track the time you spend on each task which makes it easy to analyze how productive you were daily or weekly.

Insightly

Sean Howell runs Hornet, a gay dating application which sells advertising to hundreds of clients. Sean uses the Insightly CRM to manage which companies he has pitched advertising to, which have shown interest, and which customers have closed. It’s working. Hornet has passed $7-million dollars in annual revenues.

Like a library full of unread books, these tools won’t help if you don’t use them. No single tool will help you achieve all of your goals. However, getting a behind the scenes look into which tools these startup CEO’s are using should give you a head start in driving that month over month growth you’re looking for!

Pick a tool now and get started.

Don’t forget to connect with me on Twitter @askdennisbrown or to visit my blog at www.AskDennisBrown.com

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