Top 10 Best Web Apps For Online Consulting (Increase Productivity/Sales)
Do you have your own consultancy? Do you need help running your online consultancy firm?. Then you probably need web apps for online consulting.
Having an online consultancy requires completing a varied basket of tasks. Whether it’s management, business consulting, or coaching, it is not without its share of challenges. At times, you might feel the need to be a superhero to overcome such challenges. Instead, you can make use of the up-and-coming, must-have business web apps for online consulting.
These web app tools help you stay at the peak of your game and keep growing your consulting business. Consulting is all about knowledge, but most importantly, it’s about the way you communicate your experience and beliefs to the other person.
You can increase the effectiveness of your online consulting by using different types of apps. They will support you in tasks like increasing the number of leads you can handle at once and organizing a pipeline of potential clients. The apps also help communicate and manage your time on a particular project or monitor opinions about your brand online.
Types of Web Apps for Online Consulting
When we talk about effectiveness in managing advisory or online consulting, we mean:
CRM Apps
- A proper CRM system to manage your leads in one place. A system that would help and support you in your everyday tasks without distracting you.
Time Tracking Apps
- A time tracking app that would track time spent on projects and handle hourly customer billing with ease. In consulting businesses, the three most common business models include – Hourly rate, monthly retainer, and success fee.
Email Marketing
- A professional email marketing app that helps to remind your customers of your presence. Emails can create valuable personal touches on a scale that many channels lack.
Project Management Apps
- A project management app to manage and structure your projects. It becomes easy when you are operating in a large team or managing several clients at a time.
Brand monitoring
- A brand monitoring web app that monitors the reputation of your brand online. In today’s online environment, it is essential to handle any crisis quickly and stop your brand from getting affected.
Numerous tools can help you in the process of running your consulting business. We have curated a list of the top web apps for online consulting, addressing challenges that professionals like you have to face.
Sales and Customer Relations Apps
At the core of any business is the relationship with customers, and it is no different with online consulting. How you get your projects and grow them is essential for building your trustworthiness with your clients. To achieve this, you will need the right app in your hands that can help you streamline your processes and help you perform better.
1. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is one of the most popular CRM solutions out there. It provides the data from your sales process in a highly visual manner. It helps your sales process get more efficient and transparent. The visual sales pipeline allows you to organize and input information about leads and customers easily.
Pipedrive web app also integrates with email, which makes it easy to deploy. The software also uses various automation features that save your time and effort. Project progress, calls, and emails are automatically tracked in Pipedrive. What’s more, the CRM software provides you with sales forecasting and sales reporting features. It comes with built-in reminders and can sync with Google Calendar. The bottom line is that Pipedrive helps you turn your online consulting into an efficient, well-oiled machine.
Pricing:
- Silver plan at $14/month
- Gold plan at $28/month
- Platinum plan at $56/month
2. Proposify
Proposify might as well be one of the essential apps for online consultants. The software offers you an easy and stylish application for creating your business proposals. The app has several readymade yet customizable templates that you can use for creating professional proposals.
Apart from making your everyday documents look beautiful, Proposify also provides you with an online signature tool. With the help of the signature tool, your customers can sign contracts with a few clicks, making the contract signing process flawless and faster. If you are working with a team, you can share the contract with the entire organization, thus collaborating the way Proposify intends to.
Additionally, the software comfortably integrates with the most popular CRM platforms, invoicing systems, and project management.
Pricing:
- Individuals: $25/month
- Small business: $75/month
- Big business: On-demand pricing
3. Teamgate
Teamgate is one of the most innovative sales CRMs available that includes a series of valuable integrations with Zendesk, Mailchimp, Quickbooks, Zapier, and many others. The software provides simplicity and customization to grow your consulting business organically. The biggest strength of Teamgate is its user-friendly interface and customer service and support.
Pricing:
- Starter plan: $9/month
- Professional plan: $22/month
- Enterprise plan: 65/month
4. Followup.cc
Followup.cc offers two solutions – one for personal CRM and another for email. The Followup Personal CRM makes business relationship management more effortless. It replaces address books and spreadsheets, so you never lose an important contact. You can store all your contacts within your Gmail account and even add notes to individual profiles.
Followup email helps you not miss a single mail of importance in your mailbox. When an email arrives, you can set a reminder, and Followup.cc will deliver it without hassles. It also helps you with real-time notifications, informing you when the receiver opens the mail. Besides emails, Followup.cc also sets reminders about websites and social media profiles.
Pricing:
- Followup for email: $18 for the starter package
- Salesforce edition: $40/month
- Followup Personal CRM: $23/month
Time Management and Productivity Apps
Time is very precious to all. Whether you are running an independent consultancy or a large team, you will have to manage time. Skillfully fitting numerous responsibilities into the limited hours of the day is an art. With the right software, time, management, and productivity can become a science.
Time-based web apps support you by optimizing your workflow, saving time, and achieving a higher level of productivity.
5. Hubstaff
Hubstaff. The greatest challenge that most consultants from all sectors face is handling multiple tasks daily with equal attention. One of the best productivity apps that can help you with your daily activities by taking a handful of your recurring activities off the plate is Hubstaff.
The software offers easy online tracking for you and your team. With its help, you can be assured that the monthly timesheets will be done even before you think of them. Hubstaff offers robust mobile time tracking and easy reporting with GPS location and a suite of business features.
It also saves you time and effort by providing features such as online invoicing, automatic payroll based on time tracking, and optimized scheduling. You can take care of the project budgeting right inside the platform. Hubstaff also helps integrate with other work tools for a smoother workflow.
Pricing:
- Free for one user.
- Basic plan: $5/user/month
- Premium plan: $10/user/month
6. Evernote
Evernote is one of the best note-taking apps in the market. The software not only offers you a blank page to write all the minutes of your meeting, but you also get a central place for storing and handling your project’s tasks and pertinent files. This makes Evernote great at helping you to keep your consulting and coaching work efficient and organized.
Some software features include web clippers, templates, PDF and handwriting search, document scanning, note syncing, and tags. It seamlessly integrates with other platforms to make your workflow easy.
Pricing:
- Basic plan: Free
- Premium plan: $8/month
- Business plan: $16/user/month
7. Xero
Xero is one of the best web apps for small consulting businesses. It is accounting software that will save you lots of money and time. The most crucial feature of Xero is the handling of invoices with online payment options. Xero connects with your bank, and the transactions are processed daily.
Apart from bank payments, it also helps with bank reconciliation, checking invoices, and bills against your bank statements. Xero also allows you to track inventory if needed, and you can also record, manage, and claim business expenses. The app offers extra features like payment processing, reporting, quoting, purchase orders, handling multiple currencies, file storage, and sales tax handling.
Pricing:
- Early plan: $9/month
- Growing plan: $30/month
- Extended plan: $60/month
8. Focus Booster
Focus Booster. This software is based on the Pomodoro productivity and time-saving technique. Its goal is to help you develop better working habits and stay on top of all your tasks. With Focus Booster, you can overcome daily distractions by working in sprints of a fixed length that you can monitor with a timer.
You can use Focus Booster instead of using a phone timer or constantly checking your watch in your online consulting sessions. Simply turn on the Focus Booster timer at the beginning of a session.
Pricing:
- Free plan: 20 Promodoro sessions per month
- Individual plan: $2.99/month
- Professional plan: $4.99/month
Branding and Marketing Apps
Irrespective of the size of the business, everyone has to continuously invest in branding and marketing to keep growing their relationship with customers. The below-mentioned tools can contribute to reaching out to potential customers and boosting relationships with existing ones.
9. Brand24
Brand24 helps you to understand what and when people are commenting about your brand online. It provides you with a feed containing your brand’s mention, sentiment analysis, metrics in the form of a discussion volume chart, and mention analytics. The software gives you the influence score of participants in the conversation, making it easier to identify which customer to engage with.
With the help of Brand24 tool analytics, you can immediately spot problems with your brand image and take suitable action before they grow out of proportion. You can easily export all the collected data into PDFs and other types of files for easy reporting.
Pricing:
- Personal Plus plan: $49/month
- Professional Premium plan: $99/month
- Professional Max pan: $399/month
- All plans come with a 14-day free trial.
10. GetResponse
GetResponse is a comprehensive online marketing platform that can be of great use to your consulting firm. With the help of GetResponse, you can plan your email marketing campaigns, and the software assists you in growing your email lists and optimizing engagement.
This software also helps you create landing pages. You can connect these pages with your email campaigns if needed. There are many features that can come in handy in your consulting company. GetResponse has a webinar creation tool that allows you to communicate with your audience. The platform provides you with marketing automation tools that simplify tasks such as planning and handling customer queries.
Pricing:
- Email plan: $14/month
- Pro plan: $45/month
- There are Max and Enterprise plans for larger companies.
