The first tool we can’t live without is a password manager.
We choose to use Lastpass because it’s excellent for sharing across users, and it’s insanely simple. If your like us and have ever struggled to remember a password, or wondered where you saved that sticky note with a password you need to check out Lastpass.
For us as insurance brokers we have a lot of website logins, at least one for every insurance company and sometimes multiple for each company.
Lastpass doesn’t give us a total count but we easily have over 100 logins saved. This saved us from our old system of a shared excel spreadsheet which was never fully update.
Did I mention Lastpass has a great free plan? Most people won’t even need the paid option, however even if you do it’s only $12 a year! Pretty sure anyone can afford that to avoid the headache of forgetting and resetting passwords.
The second tool we can’t live with out is a CRM or customer relationship manager. 
Sadly until recently we relied on our agency management system what a mistake that was. A dedicated CRM allowed us to follow up better and close more sales.
Who doesn’t want more closed sales? Because we wanted a sales focused CRM we choose Pipedrive. Their are lots of Customer Relationship Management tools out there, we checked out a bunch. But for us Pipedrive was the winner. Super simple to use and works across our various devices including smart phones.
In my opinion Pipedrive is a salesmans dream tool, however if you are looking for less sales focused a different option might be better for you.
IF you don’t have a single database of your clients and customers you are missing out. Having detailed notes on when you last spoke and what the next steps are is HUGE. No more sticky notes with bits and pieces of information or clogging your inbox (like we used to do) with follow ups and notes. All the sales and or customer data lives in the CRM.
In the short time we have been using pipedrive we have closed extra deals to more than cover the price of the software for the entire year for the entire office.
PS it’s only $12 a month per user for the base plan which is probably enough for most small businesses.
The third tool we couldn’t live without is Business email. 
Now everyone has email, but a business email system has a few more bells and whistles to say the least. We choose Office365 as our total solution for both documents, cloud storage and email. Bottom line if your business is still using an @aol.com or similar email it’s time for an upgrade.
We see tons of clients that have their own website but still use @gmail.com or worse @aol.com email address.
IF you have your own domain their is no reason not to have your own business email service. Choose Office365, mainly because the number of emails we send and receive each day is NUTS, so we needed the outlook desktop app to help with the heavy lifting. In addition to great business class email O365 includes OneDrive which we use as a cloud file storage place. Which is great for sharing documents or contracts etc… really anything that multiple people might need to access.
Having business class email gives you better control over users and your email address no need to for XYZCompany1234@****.com when its your domain and your service you can get the exact email address you want.
For a simpler option Google has a really great package with GSuite, it’s very similar but uses the gmail web app which is very familiar to tons of people, and included GoogleDrive which is also pretty similar to onedrive for file sharing. We used Gsuite for the last 7 years but switched to Office365 mainly for the outlook app as gmail does not sync or play nice with outlook.
Regardless of which you choose, either of these setups will run $5 to $10 per month per user depending on exactly which plan level you go with.
The fourth tool we couldn’t live with out is a PDF editor / reader. 
We use a program called FoxitPDF, it’s night and day from the program installed on most computers Adobe PDF. Imagine FoxitPDF as the faster and more useful version of Adobe.
IF you use a computer you have most likely used PDF’s and at some point wanted to edit or change something on that pdf… Not to hate on the folks at Adobe, but Adobe reader won’t let you do much to edit a pdf. Plus it is super slow and buggy but it’s installed on 99% of computers by default.
However their are other options, FoxitPDF provides greater functionality, it’s much faster and it’s 100% free. We use it daily to type on PDF’s for all the supplemental insurance applications we complete. But the possibilities are really endless for this great simple software.
The fifth and final tool is an E-signature provider.
Having the ability to legally send documents for signature without the need for a scanner or worse a fax machine is nothing short of life changing!
If you are still printing out documents to sign and send back you are doing it all wrong! We choose SignNow which provides a cost effective way to request and sign documents that are legally binding, all without printing. We save countless hours and TREES with SignNow every month.
SignNow is another very reasonable tool, at only $5 user per month it’s totally worth it.
Bottom Line
If you are not using the latest technology to streamline your business someone else might pass you by. Competition is cutthroat. None of the tools discussed offered GRBM any sort of discount, and none of the links provide any sort of affiliate income to us.
My hope is you can use some of these tools to make your business run smoother.
PS if you have input on a tool we should be using or an alternative to one of the tools mentioned please get in touch I’d love to hear from you.
