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REACH OR MISS remarkably successful entrepreneur & influencers recommend

The surprising most highly recommended tools’ list
for customer approach, marketing & sales

Every week during the 1st year of my REACH OR MISS podcast I talked with a successful entrepreneur or opinion leader about Customer focus, Marketing and Sell for entrepreneurs, and among other questions I asked them to recommend the ONE tool they use and recommend the most for customers approach, Marketing and sells.

These are the tools they chose:

The Tool

Who Recommended

Why This Tool ?

E-mail

Michael Stelzner

Even though I run a company and conference that are called Social Media Examiner and Marketing World, I think the technology which is the best is e-mail. So many businesses are building their “house” on rented lands – social platforms, and suddenly those platforms change the rules and we no longer are able to reach the audience we want to reach.

Tomas Laurinavicius

So no tools for the very beginning – obviously email and social media are still tools, so you should use them, but later on, you should work by what fits your business best;

Nevo Alva

I work in Europe, Japan and China. One thing you have to understand is the business channel as fast as possible. In China it’s “WeChat” this is the way they do business, for Alibaba it is “DingTalk” in Japan it is “Line” and in Europe they use email/sms.

Joe Pulizzi

The number one marketing tool is still email. I would absolutely focus on subscribers on email.

Chris Brogan

If you forced me to the wall, the answer will be email. Because it’s the most flexible and still the most predominant of all the tools, email marketing, email newsletter and correspondence is the best way to make customers really feel connected.

HubSpot

Dan Knowlton

There is one tool that really sticks out, that had a huge impact on our business, and that is HubSpot. When we started to get more businesses, we needed a way to better manage ourselves and better manage our relations with our customers; we made a research and chose HubSpot. Since then, it completely changed our business for the better.

Samuel Pavin

HobSpot is good for startups to start from the beginning and pay quite a reasonable price.

Erik Huberman

For us, HubSpot is the best tool, because it has a combination of automation and marketing, as well as the CRM side that is simple enough.

Andy Yang

We just transitioned to HubSpot we found that it really helps us understand our out-bound marketing and it has been relatively effective for us.

Marcus Sherridan

the tool Marcus believe in most for to medium size businesses. The ultimate sales and marketing tool

LinkedIn

Carla Johnson

LinkedIn – for me, it would definitely be LinkedIn. It gives you so many opportunities to do so many things that entrepreneurs don’t think about. For me, it’s the best place to ask people questions and test new ideas.

Martin Hiesboeck

My most effective marketing tool is LinkedIn and I actively use it. It’s a really good marketing tool for b2b in Taiwan. Facebook is strong but it mostly used like an entertainment tool after work while LinkedIn is considered to be a tool for work.

Amos Talmor

I mostly use LinkedIn. I have more than 10000 connections, and this is the best business tool; I get a lot ion very important information and relations through it.

Guy Kawasaki

I would highly recommend is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is for your personal branding, for your personal awareness and for your personal professional development. As a person if you don’t participate in LinkedIn you don’t exist in the world.

Infusionsoft

Adam Urbanski

I can only recommend the tools that I use. We use InfusionSoft, which is a CRM tool, and it’s kind of old fashioned but it’s so effective.

Jeff Bullas

I use Infusionsoft; it’s a little bit of a legacy system. There are some new emerging tools that I believe could challenge Infusionsoft, like HubSpot, which is more for small to medium businesses.

Kate Erickson

automate your small business sales and marketing, while combining your CRM, email marketing, lead capture and e-commerce in one place.

Evernote

Madalyn Sklar

Evernote – For me, it’s like a file coming from my brain. I’m really big with post-it notes. They are all over. I must write every idea that comes to my mind

Mike Allton

I love tools. I have a list of 60+ recommended tools on my site. There is one tool that for me, it’s the tool that I use every day, and this is Evernote. It’s a cloud base note taking tool and you can create notebooks with many notes. So, I have a notebook for any subject.

Acuity Scheduling

Gavin Zuchlinski

When we do our customer research interviews, we use Acuity combined automatically with Go to Meeting, and that enables us to have many interviews, which leads to even better understanding of what our customers need and that ends in more customers, more loyalty, and more success.

Nicole Holland

The tool that supports me in running my life the most called Acuity Scheduling. I’m a huge fan of this tool. It’s like my robot receptionist.

The List

Elizabeth Scherle

I would like to say to entrepreneurs, if you’re just starting out, be careful with the tools, because most of the time you don’t need them yet, but the one thing we always did use was subscribe to contact list like “The List” which we use now. But you must know your exact customers’ base first. It gives you a good starting point to know people that you should be pitching.

Twitter

Vladimer Botsvadze

Any business must talk with their customers on Twitter. This is where the conversation is happening. Twitter is like a cocktail party… There are no barriers. Everyone can join the conversation.

Josh Elledge

I’m a huge fan of Twitter for Public Relations it will save you a lot of money. You have to figure out having a “make friend button” with any one on the planet; Opinion leaders, journalists etc. if you invest a little effort on building your presence you will be able to connect with anyone.

Slack

Elizabeth Scherle

We also use Slack today, we have 70 people and we found it useful for us, but I think that those who are starting out don’t need tools at the beginning. Also, for our kind of product, I believe you need a strong referral program.

Alex Baker

I’ve been using Nudge, from Toronto that uses sales automation and suppose to tell you where your prospects and customers have been mentioned, and I use another company, which called Accompany, based in Palo Alto, which helps you to prepare for your meetings and consolidate information about who you’re meeting with. We started to use Slack and Pitchbook.

Nudge

Alex Baker

Accompany

Alex Baker

Trello

Alex Baker

Pitchbook

Alex Baker

TweetDeck

Christoph Trappe

There are two tools I want to recommend (I don’t have any financial relationships with them). Tools that allows you to listen to your customers, and there are great tools for that. The two tools I want to recommend are TweetDeck or Hootsuite. They work very well.

Hootsuite

Christoph Trappe

Medium

Marc Hemeon

For us. there was a huge power for writing long form content on Medium.  I’ve tried email marketing, I tried content marketing on Instagram, and nothing was more powerful for us than the content we wrote on Medium. For example, I wrote an article called How To Not Suck At Design. I tried to write a very simple guide and it was a great success and brought us a lot of customers. Or another article: How to Make a Logo in five minutes for free. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands read it. That was my most successful article ever.

Google Alerts

Christoph Trappe

Also Google Alerts to have an alert for your name or company name. Email marketing isn’t dead! I like Salesloft where you can push content to people automatically. To create the conversion.

Salesloft

Christoph Trappe

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Jack Kosakowski

I think that if you are a startup or entrepreneur, and you need to identify who are the people you are going to build relationships with, who are the people you need to get into a sales conversation with, and you need to build that targeted list, so a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Lead IQ will do the work. Sales Navigator will help you identify and find all the right target accounts and where are the people you need to do business with, and then when you have the targeted list, use inside tool like Lead IQ that gives you the email addresses, validates the data and then allows you to make the call.

Lead IQ

Jack Kosakowski

Capsule CRM

Samuel Pavin

I tend to stick to the basics and not the new shiny tools. The one tool that startups should use from their first day of approaching the market is a CRM (Customers Relation Management). I’m talking about collecting all the information about their customers from the first step. You need this information on board and ready from the beginning.

Oracle Cloud

Samuel Pavin

If I have to recommend a specific tool I use and like: it’s available on the web and the mobile phone, and it has a good interaction with social media, which was for me a great advantage, Oracle has a customer experience CRM which is a good tool, although I’m afraid the money might be a barrier.

Zapier

Jonathan Aufray

Zapier, this is a tool for automation. A great tool to automate different platforms together.

TypeForm

Jonathan Aufray

This is a very easy way to create a questionnaire if you want to get feedback from your customers.

Facebook Live

Milana Leshinsky

One of my favourite tools out of Facebook Live, which I really love because it allows you to emotionally connect with people.

ZOOM

Milana Leshinsky

Zoom is a little different from Facebook Live. It also allows you to have video trainings, visual calls. I use Zoom to brainstorm with people. We used it to connect for idea sharing through a phone line, but we couldn’t see each other. So, as the facilitator I can see people’s expression.

Amazon Audible

Adam Urbanski

And on the personal side, I would recommend things like Amazon Audible where you can listen to books, make things so much easier. The way I run my business is trying to keep it as simple as possible, it’s not about looking what to do with the new technology, but about actually find the most efficient elegant tools that will help you achieve your goals.

AgoraPulse

Ian Anderson Gray

I would like to recommend the tool I use for social media management, called, Agorapulse. A social media management tool is a tool that enables posting content, it gives reports and it helps you to engage with your customers. There are a lot of tools for managing social media, the reason I love Agorapulse is because it enables me to go through all my mentions and notifications on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, besides posting to all the networks (including LinkedIn).

Zoho CRM

Richard Chowning

When I started Africa Mentor, I had to track everything and I needed a CRM software, and I use ZOHO because they have a whole series of tools on their software that are integrated on one platform and I use it every single day.

UpContent

Richard Chowning

UpContent this is a curation tool. I’ve chosen to use a lot of social media to become known. I have more than 16000 followers on Twitter, 4000 on LinkedIn and Facebook, and I need to be knowledgeable about Africa and about entrepreneurship and publish content beyond what I write. UpContent enables me to find a lot of relevant content to publish on social media.

PayPal

Corey Poirier

As I said while talking about my failure, I believe cash flow is a big thing and a lot of entrepreneurs are starting early today, so they must get paid fast. I think PayPal is the most important tool that will allow any entrepreneur get his money fast in order to enable a good cash flow.

iTunes

Corey Poirier

Another technology that will help you grow as an entrepreneur is podcast platforms. I believe any entrepreneur must feed their mind constantly and the best way to do it is through podcasts that allow you do so on the go. iTunes and Stitcher are the best or at least the most popular podcast platforms. No matter which platform you use, it allows you to feed your mind with excellent podcasts.

Stitcher

Corey Poirier

Leanstack

Christoph Dahn

I use a tool from Eshmara called Leanstack, it’s for finding the leverage and the roadblocks.

Shopify

Christoph Dahn

There are several recommended tools, for the eCommerce site, there is Shopify; I think it’s the best tool for smaller brands.

LiveChatInc

John Nemo

One other great tool that helped me close more sales than anything else is called LiveChatInc. It’s a software app you can put at the corner of your website or any page, and it’s a little icon with my smiling face that offers people (the option) to connect with me, live. It’s a little live chat app that connects across all my devices and all my computers, so when someone lands on my landing page, I get an alert that I have a visitor on this page, and it gives me all the information about this visitor and I can have a chat with the prospect one on one in real time. It can also be perfect for customer service or for a virtual assistant. It costs around $30 a month and it’s worth its weight in gold for sales and customers’ service.

LinMailPro

John Nemo

When it comes to LinkedIn, one of my favorite tools is a third party tool called LinMailPro. What it does is it automates your invitation and your messaging in LinkedIn.

ConvertKit

Marc Guberti

One of my favorite tools is ConvertKit, which basically allows you to build your email list and they can do segments, so you can directly contact customers, you can use the emailing sequences to inform your customers about different offers that you have that they haven’t taken action on, you can build up customers’ loyalty by sending out more emails that ask them to take an active role. For instance, sending them an email saying I’m thinking about creating a training course, what are your ideas, which idea do you want me to develop a training course on etc.

Marketo

Jeff Bullas

Marketing automation is the only way you can really scale a brand globally. And the tools aren’t expensive any more. For enterprises, you got tools like Marketo.

Foursquare

Tom Charman

We use Foursquare. If you want to really engage with your customers to build things like Gosquared, so people can reach out to you and talk to you during chat messages and actually talk to you straight away, that’s a good way of making sure you’re constantly engaged with your customers.

GoSquared

Tom Charman

We use Gosquared in our website. It’s a simple chat box when someone comes to the site we ask them if there anything we can help them with and when they speak to the chat box we get an immediate message, so people can immediately talk to us.

ClickFunnels

Daniel Gefen

I would actually say click funnels right now. For me, this is one of the best marketing tools you can use today. You get people into a funnel because most people don’t buy first time, and you’ll be surprised how many companies make most of their money on the up sale. There is so much more that you are leaving behind because you don’t up sell. And Click Funnels is one of the best platforms to do that.

Visualead

Nevo Alva

Visualead started 6 years ago; it deals in the connection between offline and Online. I’m most passionate looking at the future of offline to online as I see it.

Gygo

Nevo Alva

The idea is that you use your smartphone to scan objects in the real world; it’s good for e-commerce.

ScheduleOnce

John Lee Dumas

I want to talk about ScheduleOnce, it’s a scheduling calendar tool that I use and I think it is incredible for customer approach, because I truly believe we should be having as many, “one on one” conversations with our customers and potential customers. “One on one” conversations are not scalable or leverageable, but if we want to gain information that is scalable and leverageable we need to do things that don’t scale like “one on one” conversations with our customers. That one piece of information or knowledge can change everything. ScheduleOnce allow me to connect with my customers in a meaningful and powerful way.

Canva

Guy Kawasaki

Professionally I’m most passionate about Canva. Canva is democratizing design trying to enable everyone to make great designs very easily.

UpendPR

Josh Elledge

Spend less than 500$ on PR.

SavingsAngel

Josh Elledge

A way to cut our grocery expenses is by taking advantage of incentives from manufactures and retailers’ coupons and sales.

SimilarWeb

Shaul Olmert

I make very intensive use of it. It’s an Israeli enterprise software company that created the market leading set of tools in order to measure performance. You can find there the kind of business insights you can generate. I believe anyone should learn everything they can of the way their market operates. It’s a must have to businesses.

Inbound

Marcus Sherridan

Their conference is excellent

Salesforce

Russell Rothstein

?Salesforce is in the heart of everything we do.

Microsoft Excel

Aman Advani

There are some conceptions that you need to use a really fancy piece of software that will do all the work for you and that these tools would solve your problems. Excel is a blank spreadsheet when you open it, so it’s an opportunity for you to organize your data into actionable insights. We still today use a lot of Excel and I think it’s the best option for a customers’ insights tool.

Cup of Coffee

Jeremiah Gardner

A cup of coffee! Honestly, the most powerful tool in your toolbox is a cup of coffee with your customer. You can’t automate relationship with the audience. Every audience is different. Until we learn and experiment, we don’t know how to build our marketing engine. We have to take what we learned with our empathy and from experiments and build the marketing execution piece by piece.

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