2 Simple Business Tools for Creative Entrepreneurs
We all know that it’s not easy at the beginning of the entrepreneurship journey when you work from B to B to find email addresses. It could be a very long wasting-time process. One of the pieces of advice I saw, at the time I hadn’t discovered the tool yet, is that you take the company name, so @companyname.com, then you go on LinkedIn, type the company, see who work there, look for the right person according to the position and then add the name, and keep trying until it’s the right address.
Like, firstname@companyname.com or name.firstname@companyname.com. I did it when I had no good resources and I can tell you that it’s really exhausting. Plus, when you go on websites to verify the emails, sometimes it says that the email address doesn’t exist but the person actually receives the email or the opposite. It says that the email address exists but when you send the email, it comes back to you saying that the email address doesn’t exist. Imagine if you want to reach out to 20 companies or more per day, you can end up giving up. Plus, when you reach out to companies, wouldn't it be great if you could see if they opened your emails, when, and how many times ? Here are 2 great tools that have been timesavers in my business and I hope that they will be for you too.
1 - Apollo
Apollo is a comprehensive sales intelligence platform with solutions to support prospecting, engagement, and revenue generation. Apollo helps sellers and marketers find more potential clients, connect with contacts, and develop a cutting-edge go-to-market plan.
Over 220M contacts and 30M organizations with reliable and accurate data are included in Apollo's B2B Database. To efficiently scale outbound activities and sequences, teams use Apollo's Engagement Suite. Finally, use Apollo's Intelligence Engine to elevate all of your go-to-market procedures by providing recommendations and closing-oriented insights.
Even though you are not really into high-level marketing and sales, you can use it. This website is made for you if you are a creative such as a photographer like me, a make-up artist, a stylist, an ad agency, or a magazine that would like to reach out to brands or find partners. This is also made for brands that would, for example, love to collaborate with other brands for a specific project. Stop wasting your time right now and start using Apollo ! I recommended this website to some people in my network and they really like it.
Apollo features:
I personally use the free plan because this is good enough for me. Using this platform has really been a life changer and I am sure that it could be for you too.
So in the free plan, you can:
- Manage all your tasks from one place called the Cockpit
- Search for targeted people or companies using filters
- Improve your workflow by creating sequences (only two for the free plan) and email templates
- Send 250 emails per day
- You get the LinkedIn extensions meaning that you can still get emails from people while being on their profile
- HubSpot and Salesforce integration
- Zapier Integration
- 1 user
- 100 email credits per month
Now if you are a big agency with a sale department, choosing a paid plan starting from $49 per month could be the best solution for your business because you have unlimited email credits, you can have access to phone numbers, export CSV files, create unlimited sequences, get updates when a prospect or client changes position or company, and so much more. Here is the detail:
Monthly plan:
Yearly plan :
There are no cons to using this platform for me except that you might not find email addresses of small businesses. Also, Apollo’s customer service is great, they answer very quickly. Make sure when looking for email addresses, to verify on Linkedin if the person is still working in the company. Sometimes, the information is not updated on Apollo because you will still see that the person is still working there while he or she has left for several months or even years. The link to the person’s LinkedIn page is under the person’s name.
If you search for specific people, go directly on the People section. You can use many filters that will help you find the right person. See the details in the image below, on the left :
As listed above, Apollo has many features and it’s up to you to experiment and test the tool. You can start using it for free and see later if you want to upgrade depending on your needs and your business growth.
2 - Streak
Another useful tool I also use is Streak. This has also been a game changer in my workflow too ! When sending emails, we all want to know whether the other we send the email to, opens it. It helps me to know when I can follow up. Well, with Streak, you will be able to know when your prospect or client opens the email you sent, the city and the country your email was opened, and how many times, and do so many things. So let’s dive in a bit.
Streak will help you stay organized, track leads inside Gmail, and manage your sales and projects. Let’s jump into the features.
- Create Pipelines to keep clarity in your workflow and set a reminder for tasks and follow-ups
- Send merge emails meaning you can send one email to many people at the same time
- See when your email has been opened and how many times
- Create email templates
- Set the time when you want the email to be sent
- If you are a team, you will be able to see, for example, who sent the last email
- Import CSV file
By the way, I wouldn’t recommend merging emails, even if it can save you some time. You really want to create a unique and sincere connexion with the person you are sending your email to and personalize your message, rather than focusing on the quantity. Plus, the person is more likely to take the time to reply to you and even engage in a conversation. However, this doesn’t have to prevent you from creating mail templates that will serve you as a base.
I won’t show you from my email box because I want to keep it confidential. I hope you will understand. But this is a tool that I discovered, like Apollo, just by searching for a mail tracker on Google a few months after I started my business. You will see on their website they show everything very well, everything is detailed.
As a solopreneur and a fashion and beauty photographer, I noticed that photographers or other creatives don’t discuss the technical tools we can use concerning sales management.
You can use Streak totally for free and forever, however, the free plan is limited to email tracking, 500 contacts in the pipelines, and 50 merge email per day, which is more than enough for me. But if you want to have more features like link tracking, meaning Streak track when people are clicking on your links in the mail you send or more CRM contact in your database, their paid plans start at $15 per month (per user) if you choose the yearly plan.
Monthly plan:
Yealry plan:
Those are very simple tools you can add to your workflow. As you can see, the tools you can use don’t have to be too technical and complicated but enough useful to make your business easier and clearer as it grows. I hope this article brought value to your business !
