We’re often asked, “How do you guys at ShipMonk keep track of everything? Warehouse operations and software development is one thing, and marketing and sales is a whole nother—how do you do all that?”
Well, just like every craftsman building something great, we have a stack of tech tools and software to help us build our business. Picture our tech stack as a big, fat, juicy double-decker bacon cheeseburger.
Asana (our Indispensable Top Bun)
Asana is our top bun because it guarantees that everything stays in place. It also gives us a handle on any and all tasks that need to be completed within the organization. Each department has a team and a set of projects, and each team needs to keep track of all the various tasks and who exactly is responsible for each one. Usually, that means drafting endless emails and constantly following up with people to get things done…except it doesn’t work that way at ShipMonk. Instead, it’s all in Asana. And the best part? It’s free!
Grow (Onion Slices)
Grow is one of those tools that isn’t required, but just like onion, it’s nice to have. Instead of spending copious amounts of time and energy (and some crying) pulling monthly and quarterly reports from each platform individually, Grow has a real-time scoreboard that lets us access any data we need at any given moment. That way we don’t have to wait until the end of a campaign or period to improve our efforts.
Freshdesk (the Nutritious Tomato)
Freshdesk is our tomato because it has a load of “vitamins” that are good for our business. Everything from live chat to support tickets, we run all of our customer support through Freshdesk.
Gusto (the Lovely Green Lettuce)
Gusto has been beyond great when it comes to managing payroll. And since money is, well, green—naturally, we made Gusto the lettuce!
Autopilot (the Bodacious Bacon)
Autopilot is the bacon on our burger because it’s just plain awesome. I’m probably a little biased since I’m a marketer, but with the combination of Autopilot’s simple user interface, Salesforce integration, and its price—in my opinion, that makes it a must-have in every marketer’s toolbox. We run leads through nurturing journeys, send out customer updates, and even onboard our customers—all through Autopilot. It’s an amazing tool that strengthened our marketing automation capabilities almost from the minute we got it!
G Suite (Grilled Patty #1)
G Suite is the first of our patties because we house a ton of information on the Drive, send emails through Gmail, schedule meetings on Calendar, and use Hangouts for our onboarding sessions.
Salesforce (the Big Cheese)
Most of you have probably used or at least heard of Salesforce. It definitely is the big cheese in the CRM software category, so we finally made the switch. Salesforce can be a little pricey, and its customer support isn’t the greatest. But the level of integrations between Salesforce and our other tools is crucial to scaling our business and managing the number of leads we work on a daily basis.
ShipMonk Software (Super Patty #2)
All these other tools—from Top Bun Asana to Salesforce Cheese—really are great and all of them are totally helpful in running our business. But none of them would be any good without the software that runs our operations. When we first began offering fulfillment services, we used a 3rd party software, but after months of struggling with a sub-par SaaS that didn’t meet our needs, we decided to build our own. We launched ShipMonk’s inventory management software in January of 2016 and haven’t looked back. We’re also constantly optimizing and improving our software to fit the needs of our customers, and we’ll be launching the inventory management software as a stand-alone SaaS in 2017.
Slack (our Rock Bottom Bun)
What more can we say about Slack other than we giphy/love it! Not only is it fun to use, but it is the communication channel that each and every one of our team members relies on for company updates, reminders, and daily communication. Communication is key to any business which is why Slack is the foundation of our ShipMonk burger. Another key benefit is Slack’s integration with Autopilot and Asana to help streamline our juicy cheeseburger tech stack.
Other tools (the Deliciously Crisp Side of Fries)
Just like every good cheeseburger meal is even better with a side of fries, we include tech fries as part of our ShipMonk burger meal.
Here are a few of our favorites:
