Author: Franz Malten Buemann

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley,” wrote Scottish poet Robert Burns. Even the finest, most well-thought-out plans sometimes have to be set aside for reasons outside of your control.
During times of uncertainty, one of the most important traits for any business to have is flexibility.
With a willingness to adjust plans, divert from the original strategy, and make small or large pivots, your business can be more resilient during stormy weather.
If your business is facing uncertainty and the road ahead is unclear, here’s how to add more flexibility to your plans, projects, and strategy to help you get through it.

How to Make Your Business Flexible During Uncertainty
Accept what you need to postpone or change.
If the landscape your business exists in has suddenly changed, you will need to make changes inside your organization, too. That’s especially the case if you need to tighten budgets and make sure it’s spent in the places with the highest return.
Take a look at all of the projects in your pipeline and assess what really needs to be prioritized right now, what can be postponed, and what can be discarded.
Encourage each department in your business to ask:

Is now the best time for the projects we are focusing on?
Should we adjust our content and communications to deliver the most value to our audience?
Is our budget in the right place, or do we need to change allocations?
Would team members offer the most value working on different priorities?
What pivots should we be making?

If your business is experiencing higher levels of churn or lower profits, you may also need to reassess some goals during times of prosperity or at least adjust expectations.
Identify where your focus is most valuable.
After you have reassessed the projects that your business is working on, it’s time to look at your own to-do list.
Ask yourself: where can I add the most value with an hour, a day, a week, or a month of focus?
Even if you can’t forecast the future, you can think about what’s the most valuable way to spend your time right now. Make sure your agenda is aligned with the tasks that matter most instead of the busy work that’s landed on your desk.
Maintain transparency with your team.
When your business or industry is going through some turbulence, it’s more crucial than ever to maintain strong communication with your team.
To sustain the trust that’s essential for a focused and happy team, make sure that leadership is honest and transparent about where your business stands right now, key goals for the upcoming period, and what the current challenges are.
A transparent and engaged team is essential for a resilient business that can endure times of change.
Embrace different working styles.
Building a resilient and flexible business requires a willingness to do things differently than you have done before. You may need to embrace new ways of working instead of stubbornly saying “but this is how we’ve always done things.”
This can include adapting to different working styles, such as remote work — which might even be a necessity to a lot of businesses. To help your team adapt to remote work, think about team-wide policies you can introduce to encourage better focus, well-being, and productivity.
These can include:

Introducing remote-friendly apps for video calls
Adopting a company-wide communication tool such as Slack
Scheduling remote meetings to catch up with your team and share information
Encouraging team members to focus on their mental health and well-being

Reinforce the foundations.
If your business is less busy with new leads and projects, it’s a good time to focus on strengthening the foundations so you’re in the best position when things start to pick up again.
Look at the important tasks that are often overlooked, for example, improving contact management processes or introducing automated workflows to make your team more efficient.
You could also use this as a time to look at your tech stack and identify weaknesses and areas for improvement.
Some questions to help optimize your tech stack include:

Which apps are we paying for that don’t add value?
Could certain apps be replaced by free tools?
Do we have any overlapping tools?
Where are there opportunities to integrate data between apps to increase productivity?

Facing times of uncertainty is challenging for any business, but the right amount of flexibility and resilience can help your organization weather the storm.

You’ve decided to become a freelancer. You’re the boss of your own time, your business, and the projects you choose to work on. There’s a lot going on, from finding new clients to managing your workload. The truth is… you kind of have to do everything, especially when you’re just starting out.
To maximize your chances of success, one of your first decisions as a freelancer is how to manage your processes – especially your invoices, accounting, clients, and projects.
To find, retain, and receive glowing reviews from clients, you need an efficient and scalable way to stay on top of invoicing, accounting, time tracking, and client management. Otherwise, it’s all too easy to neglect the billable tasks that build your business and always be playing catch-up.
After a lot of testing, here’s our pick of the best freelancer apps to manage your business and prime your freelance career for max results.

7 Best Apps for Freelancers in 2021
1. FreeAgent

FreeAgent is a popular, all-around accounting tool that tracks your time, manages projects, sends invoices, and preps your tax return. It’s especially powerful for freelancers and small businesses in the UK.
Although FreeAgent’s user experience is a bit more old-school than some of the other apps for freelancers in this post, it works remarkably well in a huge range of use cases.
If you’re paid in multiple currencies and use an app like TransferWise to receive and convert money, FreeAgent provides an easy way to streamline accounting. It’s simple to invoice clients in the right currency, then record payments in that currency and instantly convert to your home currency, too.
As FreeAgent connects to many popular banks, it’s easy to automatically add expenses made on a business card. Or, you can import a CSV of bulk expenses.
On the FreeAgent dashboard, there’s a quick overview of all of your freelance business’s key metrics at a glance:

FreeAgent has separate websites for the UK, the US, and the rest of the world to give you the most relevant information. For FreeAgent users in the UK, you can use the software to prepare your Self Assessment forms and view a handy timeline of your tax estimates at any time of year.
FreeAgent could be the best freelancer software for you if:

You’re based in the UK and want built-in Self Assessment and tax timelines
You get paid in several currencies

2. Xero

Xero is one of the most popular accounting systems on the market, offering freelancers a higher-end solution to manage their pipeline and accounts.
Along with QuickBooks, Xero is one of the most popular accounting tools on the market. It’s extremely user-friendly, beautifully designed, and is perfect for freelancers planning to scale up their business in the next few years. You can just switch to the next plan whenever you’re ready for more power from Xero.
Xero is laser-focused on saving you time as a freelancer – connecting directly to your bank, creating and following up with invoices at speed, and integrating with your favorite business apps. With Xero’s Hubdoc data capture and automatic entry tool, you can cut paperwork clutter and save even more time.
As a freelancer, you can choose between Xero’s three plans: Early ($9/month), Growing ($30/month), and Established ($60/month). However, we recommend the most expensive of those three tiers – the Established plan – as this is the only plan that includes multi-currency, time tracking, and project cost tracking features. 

Xero is also valuable for freelancers with a growing retail business. The accounting platform seamlessly connects with leading ecommerce apps for point of sale transactions (such as Square), inventory (such as CIN7), as well as payment systems like Stripe and PayPal.
Xero could be the best freelancer software for you if:

You want strong native integrations with your other favorite apps
You want instant bank reconciliation for transactions
You want retail app integrations
You have an accountant who is a Xero partner

3. QuickBooks Self-Employed

QuickBooks is the market leader in accounting software and a great fit for many small businesses, although freelancers can find it hard to find the perfect plan.
If I ask you to name an accounting software, there’s a high chance QuickBooks will spring to mind. With QuickBooks Self-Employed, freelancers can access a lighter plan than the most popular cloud-based product (QuickBooks Online) offers.
However, QuickBooks Self-Employed has its limitations. Although you can send and track simple invoices, track mileage, and separate business and personal expenses, there’s limited scope for customization and no time tracking functionality in this plan. For this, you’ll need to choose a QuickBooks Online plan for small businesses instead.

Once you choose a QuickBooks plan, your freelance business is in a great position to scale: you can switch plans and products as and when you need to.
QuickBooks is also one of your best choices if you want a wide range of integrations and a comprehensive feature set.
QuickBooks could be the best freelancer software for you if:

You’re planning on scaling your freelance business in the next few years or becoming an agency
You want strong native integrations with your other favorite apps
You want instant bank reconciliation
You have an accountant who is a QuickBooks partner

4. Cushion

Designed to give freelancers a clearer view of their workload and availability, Cushion improves cash flow while offering strong invoicing and time tracking features.
Cushion promises “Peace of mind for freelancers,” providing beautiful UX and unique features to help you avoid taking on too much work. It’s easy to visualize future workload, earnings, expenses, and invoices, so freelancers can anticipate their financial situation ahead of time.

Where Cushion shines is as an app for freelancers to stay on top of their workload, improve cash flow, and find valuable balance. It’s also easy to track time and invoice clients with the app.

However, you’ll need to use another app to manage core accounting needs such as compiling expenses and income for the tax year. Cushion handily integrates with FreeAgent, FreshBooks, and Xero to enable this.
Cushion could be the best freelancer software for you if:

You don’t need comprehensive accounting software right now, or you have another system that syncs with Cushion (FreshBooks, FreeAgent, or Xero)
Your goal is to have a clearer view of your workload and avoid taking on too much work

5. FreshBooks

As a powerful all-in-one small solution for business accounting and invoicing, FreshBooks is a simple but mighty software choice for freelancers and entrepreneurs.
FreshBooks has a great all-around feature set while still being simple to use. For the $15/month Lite plan, you get unlimited customized invoices, expenses, time tracking, estimates, online card payments, and bank transfers. You also get insightful Tax Time reports.
With the Plus plan (from $25/month), you can add more automation to your freelance business, such as with scheduled late payment reminders, recurring invoices, and late fees. You can also access client retainers. The Premium plan is for growing businesses that need to manage up to 500 clients.

FreshBooks could be the best freelancer software for you if:

You need time tracking functionality at a low price point
You want unlimited invoices, estimates and card payments
You prioritize simplicity and ease of use

6. AND.CO

AND.CO is a powerful all-in-one tool for freelancers to manage and grow their business. The platform was acquired by Fiverr in 2018.
AND.CO is an excellent fit for freelancers who are just getting started. Self-titled as “the one app to run your freelance business or studio,” over 300,000 businesses use AND.CO to send proposals, invoice clients, get paid, and manage their time, expenses, and tasks.
Once dubbed “free forever,” AND.CO changed tack and introduced paid plans after being acquired by Fiverr in 2018. You can still get started with its free plan, but this only supports one active client – which isn’t going to cut it for most freelance businesses.
For $18/month, you can manage unlimited clients, remove AND.CO branding, edit contracts, and pay 2.9% + 30 cents for online payments. You can also connect up to six bank accounts to keep track of when invoices have been paid.

AND.CO neatly integrates with your other favorite freelance apps, including Mailchimp, Spotify, and Stripe.
Extra tip: For extra value from AND.CO whether you’re a customer or not, listen to The Six Figure Freelancer audio course for free. AND.CO opens up the mic to top professionals who share their formulas for success in starting, growing, and maintaining six-figure freelance careers.
AND.CO could be the best freelancer software for you if:

You want to manage unlimited clients
You don’t need advanced accounting features
You want a simple user-experience

7. Wave Accounting

Financial software that offers freelancers the most value at the lowest price point – you require exactly zero budget to get started.
Wave is a very popular tool for freelancers for good reason – it’s free. The financial software for entrepreneurs offers the core accounting, invoicing and receipt scanning features you need to make running your freelance business a breeze. You can pay-per-use for access to online payments if required.
Here’s a glimpse of the Wave integration with Stripe to track cash flow, profit and loss, and overdue invoices:

Wave could be the best freelancer software for you if:

You have a limited budget and are looking for a free app to manage your freelance business
Your focus is on invoicing, basic accounting, and receipt scanning
You don’t need to track mileage, time, or inventory

Want to streamline your processes even more? A two-way data sync solution keeps data flowing freely to the right places in your small business, from your freelance management tool to your email marketing provider and CRM.

Old email addresses, duplicate contacts, misspelled names… these are the bane of your marketing and sales efforts.
After all, your CRM and marketing tools are only as strong as the data you’ve got in them. If you have poor-quality data in your databases, you’re setting up to fail in your sales and marketing initiatives. Your customer data is the most valuable asset your organization has, so it’s important to ensure it’s serving your business’ bottom line as much as possible.
A solid data quality strategy will not only save you hours of janitorial work, but it makes sure your data is trustworthy – which means that any insights you gain from this data are much more accurate and useful for your business.
So, to help you figure out how to have the best possible contact data in your business databases, we’ve put together four tips to clean up your data.
How to Clean Up Your Company’s Data
1. Get rid of duplicate contacts.
Duplicates are usually caused by two things: inconsistent data entry and multiple channels that capture contact information. There are tools to help you remove duplicate data. For instance, if you work with Google Contacts, you can merge your contacts and detect duplicates for free.
If you’ve never done a de-duplication, you might have to manually scan and edit your contacts. This step will take some time, but if you implement company-wide data entry standards and make a commitment to quality data, you will only have to do this once.
Here are some tips that can help with de-duplication:

Use a de-duplicator such as Dedupley.
Use data validation tools that help you to determine the validity of your data, such as email verification tools. Experian Data Quality has some powerful validation programs that allow you to check emails, addresses, and telephone numbers in bulk.
To avoid having duplicate contacts across different applications, keep your core tools in sync to eliminate the need for entering the same data into different tools.

2. Verify new data.
Implement a company-wide system to make sure all new and updated data is correctly entered into the central database. For example, you can make sure that your team always fills in certain contact fields (such as name, phone number, and email) in your CRM using the same format. You can also make certain fields mandatory when creating a contact record so that the required information is always there.
You can also set up a contact sync between your CRM and other tools. If the data is only entered in your CRM and it’s automatically synced with your other tools, you can make sure all applications have the same information, thus reducing the likelihood of data entry errors.
3. Keep your data fresh.
All databases degrade – some estimate that 30% of CRM data becomes outdated each year. This is due to many factors, including people changing email addresses, getting new phone numbers, leaving organizations, changing job titles, and many others.
It’s best to keep your data fresh by implementing a few tactics. You can do this by using parsing tools, which scan all incoming emails and updates contact information as it comes to hand.
So, if a contact gets a job with a different company, for example, your central database will be instantly updated. It’s also a good idea to delete all email addresses that have bounced or opted out — this kind of information can most likely be found in your email marketing tool. Not only is this good practice for keeping your data fresh, but it also helps keep you out of spam folders.
4. Implement consistent data entry.
All these measures are pointless if you don’t get everyone on your team behind them. Ensure that all employees are aware of company-wide data entry standards. For instance, make sure they all know which information fields to fill in when creating a contact record, how to check for duplicates before creating a new contact, and that everyone is entering data on the correct apps.
By following these simple tactics, you can make sure you have a much cleaner and more organized contacts database. Don’t forget to bidirectionally sync the data between your key business applications: it minimizes manual data entry and ensures you’re always looking at the most up-to-date, accurate contact information in all your tools.

With the technological developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution impacting how we all live, work, and relate to one another, a rapid pace of change is happening across all businesses.
This is doubly true in uncertain times, where organizations in every industry are faced with a sudden need to switch to working styles and make their business more resilient and flexible.
It’s a good time to ask how your business can organize its key processes to deliver the best experience for both your employees and your customers.

With the optimal blend of people, processes, and technology, you can make your organization adaptable to change and in the best position to grow and thrive.
With that in mind, here are seven organization tips for businesses to help you continue on the right track. We’ve also included relevant goals for each tip, so you can measure your success over time.
7 Organization Tips for Growing Businesses
1. Cut the tech bloat.
Goal: Streamline your business tech stack to help your team get the job done most effectively.
Technology can boost your business’s organization, productivity, and collaboration. However, there is such a thing as too many tools – otherwise known as tech bloat.
When an organization uses far more apps and tools than it needs, it can quickly experience problems from excessive complexity, distractions, and security concerns.
If this sounds familiar, it’s time to assess, prune, and optimize your business’s tech stack.
To keep your technology ecosystem under control and reap the benefits that cloud apps can offer, establish a consistent set of processes using the apps and functions you need to get the job done.
Set the groundwork so employees don’t end up trying to juggle a hundred different things at once on too many apps.
2. Build a culture that rewards focus.
Goal: Instead of expecting constant communication and collaboration from every team member when they’re at their desk, carve out time for every employee to focus on where they deliver the most value.
Staying organized depends on your ability to avoid distractions – which isn’t always easy in organizations that have a culture of constant interruption disguised as collaboration.
Common daily time wasters include: using business tools that are too complex or a bad fit for the job; distractions on social media; and manual data entry on multiple different systems that don’t work well together.
Let’s also not forget about the so-called notification fatigue caused by being bombarded by irrelevant notifications and emails every day.
Here are some of the best ways to get rid of the time-wasters in your business:

Use carefully selected cloud-based tools that everyone in your company knows how to use.
Build an integrated technology ecosystem that maximizes efficiency.
Establish company-wide processes that minimize unnecessary business meetings.
Encourage team members to block out distractions for set periods of focused time.

The most organized businesses are those that realize that they don’t have to do things the way they always have.
What processes and assumptions can you rethink to make your business more organized and productive?
3. Migrate to the cloud.
Goal: Identify business practices that are still managed via outdated systems or tools, and plan out how you’ll replace them with cloud-based workflows and apps.
Almost every business is using some form of cloud technology, even if it’s nothing more than web-based email. But there’s a lot more to the cloud than many businesses realize.
Whether it’s customer relationship management (CRM), data storage, or business automation delivered through the web, almost any digital workload can be migrated to the cloud.
With SaaS tools – or cloud-based apps with a subscription model – your business can escape the physical limitations of desktop computers and enable employees to take their work with them wherever they are.
Continue to bring your business further into the cloud and minimize the back and forth that comes with outdated computing environments.
4. Embrace different work styles.
Goal: Create a plan to future-proof your business by embracing different working styles, such as remote working or flexible hours.
From agile startups to enterprises driven by digital transformation, many organizations are already embracing the advantages of different working styles — including enhanced productivity, reduced office costs, and access to more diverse talent.
But even if your organization is far from ready to enjoy all the benefits of remote work and flexible hours, making it a long-term priority will help you future-proof your business and make it easier to adapt.
If you’re looking to enable more remote working in your business, here are some tips to make the transition as seamless as possible:

Pivot your company policies to cater to remote work best practices.
Strengthen team communication and collaboration with cloud-based apps such as Slack.
Reduce your reliance on in-person meetings by introducing video call apps.
Adjust your tech stack to focus on cloud-based apps that your team can use anywhere.

5. Focus on smaller goals.
Goal: Look at company-wide, departmental, and individual-level goals to ensure that they are broken down into actionable steps.
It’s hard for your business to stay organized if you set lofty goals that are both intimidating and difficult to focus on.
In every department and job role, determine the most likely way that your team will reach your key targets before breaking them down into actionable next steps.
With smaller and easily measured milestones, your team will be in the best position to stay focused and avoid burnout and confusion.
6. Go paperless.
Goal: Identify what’s causing the piles of paper in your organization and create processes to minimize this.
Paper is a common source of disarray in many offices, but a largely avoidable one. If you don’t already have a digital filing system, then it’s time to build one.
Here are some of the best ways to help your business go paperless:

Attach notes and files to customer records digitally in your CRM.
Use team apps like Google Drive to collaborate on team projects.
Take document signing online with apps such as DocuSign.

The more you reduce your reliance on paper, the faster your business will modernize, and the easier it will become to organize your workflows.
Established businesses may have a harder time since they often have huge amounts of information in printed documents or on physical digital media.
Start by scanning and digitizing everything and uploading it to a document management system. That’s a lot more organized than having reams of documents and paper receipts piled up around the office!
7. Automate workflows.
Goal: Identify what’s needlessly consuming time in your organization and determine how you can use automated workflows to free up more time to focus on what matters.
If there’s one thing that kills productivity above all others, it’s cumbersome manual processes that eat up time and leave workflows open to human error.
Manually importing or exporting data between your email marketing software and CRM might not sound like a big deal at first, until you realize you have to do the same thing with lots of other apps and databases. Eventually, the challenges of scale make it practically impossible.
Sage advice holds that anything which can be automated should be automated. You could get started by automating:

Lead scoring for new contacts in your database
Sales nurturing email workflows
Backup and syncing routines between apps
Customer care processes, such as alerting account managers of support tickets or carrying out NPS surveys
Enriching data between apps with two-way integrations, such as between your CRM and email platform

The goal should be to unify your technology systems and processes into a cohesive environment in which everyone on your team has access to accurate and current information in real-time, no matter where they’re physically located.
With the right tools and data at hand, everyone on your team can stay organized without getting bogged down in repetitive manual tasks or spending hours trying to track down that one key document.
When there’s so much going on in your business, staying organized isn’t easy. But by streamlining your core processes and looking towards the future, you can meet the challenges of scale and put your business in the best position to thrive in the years ahead.

As a small business or startup, you’ve got a lot on your to-do list: increasing awareness of your brand, converting leads into customers, and supporting customers post-sale. And, of course, there’s all the admin behind the scenes.
A big part of that is contact management.
To enable your small business to grow successfully and sustainably, you need to have a strong contact management strategy in place. But what does this mean, and how can you get it right?
What is contact management?
Contact management is how you look after all of the contact data in your business, including contacts’ details, communication preferences, sales history, and customer interactions with your company. It enables every team in your organization to have the information they need to stay productive and have the context they need to deliver personalized interactions.
Your contacts may include:

Leads (or people who are in your pipeline but haven’t bought from you yet)
Current and previous customers

A contact management strategy is implemented with CRM software that stores all of your small business’s contact data in one centralized place.
Although contact management is traditionally the realm of salespeople, CRM has evolved rapidly in recent years. Now many all-in-one CRM platforms offer advanced features for marketing and customer service teams to store and manage their own interactions, remove information silos and boost collaboration with sales.
An all-in-one CRM, or a CRM that’s strongly integrated with your other apps, is a particularly good solution for managing and streamlining the entire customer journey as you:

Attract and collect new marketing leads
Nurture those leads toward being sales-ready
Convert leads into paying customers
Carry out onboarding services and provide ongoing support
Offer upgrades and added value

Advantages of Strong Contact Management
Contact management impacts far more than sales. When you get it right, the benefits echo throughout your small business as every role has more data and insights at its fingertips. It also enriches every aspect of the customer journey.
With good contact management processes, you can:

Enrich your customer experiences with data-driven insights and automation
Spend less time on admin and free up time for what matters most
Maximize conversions by delivering the right messages at the right time

Contact management is something that your business will always do, but most small businesses have a lot of room for improvement to maximize their efficiency in this area.
Keep reading for our tips on getting the highest impact from contact management in your small business.
Six Contact Management Best Practices
Here’s our guide to using contact management strategies to drive growth and reduce the headaches for your business, both now and further down the line.
1. Keep your contact data clean.
Smooth contact management starts with clean data. You can’t deliver an excellent customer experience if you have incorrect or contradictory data about your customers, nor can you have smooth business operations and reporting inside your company.
Although you can reduce the amount of bad data that enters your database by adjusting your lead generation forms and introducing clear processes for your team to follow, you can’t avoid all of it. That’s why every business needs regular data clean-ups. You could schedule this every quarter, for example.
As part of a data clean up, take time to remove:

Duplicate contacts
Incorrect or outdated contact data, such as emails that have hard-bounced
Contacts that don’t want to hear from you anymore

Data clean-ups don’t have to be entirely manual. There’s a lot that you can automate. For instance, many CRMs and email marketing tools highlight duplicates so you can merge or delete them. 
Your email marketing software will also help you identify emails with hard bounces, alongside groups of unsubscribed contacts. Once you’re sure you can clean up this data, you can delete them from the app.
2. Choose the right CRM.
As part of a strong contact management strategy, your CRM should be at the heart of your business. It’s the software where you store all of your key contact data as well as interactions with every customer and lead.
This makes your CRM one of the most important apps to get right in your business. Take the time to research different CRMs and find the right fit for your industry, business size, sales and marketing strategy, and goals.
As your business grows, your CRM needs to grow with it. This might mean upgrading your plan, adjusting your strategy, or even switching tools as you scale.
3. Centralize your contact data.
The best contact management strategies include a centralized database that stores all contacts in one place. This will generally be your CRM, which is another reason why it’s important to follow step 2 and choose the right one!
By having a centralized contact database, you can:

Find all of the key insights you need in one app
Make it easy for other teams to find data, without needing to have login details and training for lots of tools they don’t need to use
Break down information silos between departments

To start centralizing your data, identify the main apps in your stack that are collecting contact data. You can then sync this data with your CRM.
4. Automatically sync contact data between your apps.
Remember: for the most effective contact management results in your small business, you can’t let the contact databases in your apps be isolated from one another.
Your CRM, marketing apps, sales stack, and all of the other tools in your business deliver the best results when they are connected as part of an integrated ecosystem. The best way to achieve this is with data syncing.
After creating a centralized contact database, your next step is to sync relevant data from it to your individual apps.
5. Collect data that enriches your insights.
By syncing contact data between your apps, you can automatically enrich the insights you have at your fingertips.
If you collect geographic or content consumption data in your CRM, you could sync this with your email marketing platform and use it to segment subscribers into more accurate mailing lists.
6. Use good judgment with your contact data.
All businesses big and small need to pay attention to data protection regulations. However, this goes beyond playing by the rules and ticking boxes.
Be a brand that your prospects and customers can trust with their data. Protect the information they give you and respect their privacy. This might not have an easily measurable ROI, but having customers that trust your brand will always have an impact.

Despite huge investments in data, you might be surprised to learn that most executives don’t trust their company’s data. It might be that they’re skeptical of the data they’re using, or simply don’t know how to interpret the information at hand.
In fact, Havard Business Review reported that 90% of business leaders believe data literacy is crucial for company success. However, only 25% of employees feel confident when working with their organization’s data. 
The stats shout loud and clear that if you struggle to trust your business data, you’re absolutely not alone. However, this doesn’t make it any less important to fix it.
Untrustworthy data has repercussions across your entire organization. You run the risk of:

Pivoting strategies based on incorrect assumptions
Lacking a clear picture of business performance and ROI
Delivering poor customer experiences
Reducing job satisfaction for your team because of manual tasks and frustrations
Being hesitant to share important insights across the team

Instead, every business’s goal should be data integrity. Data integrity refers to the quality and reliability of your business data, including how precise, consistent, timely, and well-preserved that data is.
With high data integrity, your business can also benefit from the surge in opportunities that big data brings.
Here’s our guide to what to do when you can’t trust your reporting data. Learn how to turn things around long-term, so your data spend isn’t spoilt by leaky processes and frameworks.
How to Make Your Data More Trustworthy
It might sound obvious, but if your business has been wrangling with unreliable data for some time, to create a different outcome you need to do things differently.
Fixing untrustworthy data requires changes to your organization’s:

Processes
Mindset
Skillset

Let’s explore the best ways to make your data more trustworthy so you can benefit from accurate and timely analytics that pave the way for informed decisions.
1. Go back to the basics.
To make your data more trustworthy, let’s go back to the very beginning. Imagine you’re starting your database entirely from scratch with a clean slate. Now answer these questions:

What data do you need to collect?
What format do you need to collect it in?
What data don’t you need?
What’s the clutter or noise you would like to avoid?
How do you need to integrate your apps?

You can use these valuable insights to inform:

New processes for data collection, management, and integration
What to clean up and prune from your database
How to educate your team and increase data literacy in your organization

Once you’re clear on what needs to happen, start creating an action plan to put it into place and make your data more trustworthy.
2. Follow the data trail back to the source.
Whenever you’re faced with unreliable data, follow the trail back to the source. Where did the inaccurate data originate?
This includes looking at form fields and checking for consistent and standardized data collection. It also means making sure that Google Analytics tags are set up correctly, or that your SQL scripts for your business intelligence platform are flawless.
If this stretches your tech knowledge, perhaps because the person who implemented your systems has left the company, consider bringing in a data specialist to help you out. You could also get their help simplifying your data processes so it’s more manageable in-house going forward.
3. Tick the boxes for data best practice
No matter the industry or company size, there are some best practices that every company should follow for trustworthy data. These include:

Consistency – Maintain the same format across systems by using consistent and standardized fields and collection processes. When you integrate your apps, use customizable field mapping to ensure that the right data is synced to the right places.
Completeness – For each piece of data, you need to know the full picture. A few examples are the source of your marketing leads, sales history for your customers, or conversion path for new deals. Is your data complete?
Centralized and enriched data – Rather than having fragmented and incomplete data spread across several systems, maintain one centralized database with the most up-to-date and trustworthy information. This can be your CRM for your customer data, and a system like Chartio or Supermetrics for your company performance data. Create two-way integrations between your centralized database and connected apps to enrich your data everywhere.
Access control – Set permissions and policies that ensure only the right people see certain data. This is about balancing accessibility and transparency with security.
Validation – 28% of customer and prospect data is suspected to be inaccurate in some way, according to Experian. For accurate data, you need a method for checking and validating it. This can include automated processes for checking for anomalies and missing fields, backed up by some manual checks.
Real-time updates – For the best results from your data, it needs to be up-to-date. Look for real-time updates when choosing a business intelligence system and a data integration solution.
Quality sources – Make sure you know where all of your data is coming from and that you can guarantee its integrity. Maintaining a neat and tidy database that you know you can trust beats having highly advanced data sets that you struggle to make sense of or control.
Cleanliness – Considering B2B data decays at a rate of 2% per year, your database needs frequent clean-ups. It’s important to freshen up your data by removing duplicates, inaccuracies, and other data that’s turned from value into clutter.
Security and protection – Maintaining high security is crucial for data protection regulations such as GDPR in Europe, but it’s also just a basic principle for being a trustworthy brand. It’s also absolutely crucial if you want valuable data at your fingertips (and only yours).
Integrations – Over 80% of business operations leaders say data integrations are important for day-to-day operations at their organization. Data integrations reduce data silos and make data more accessible to everyone at your company, so employees don’t have to track down other coworkers to find specific information stored in their department’s database.

4. Document processes.
One common trap that organizations fall into is relying on one person to set up and manage their data processes. When that person leaves the organization, chaos is often unleashed.
You can avoid this by creating clearly documented processes that are stored in your company wiki, Google Drive, or a tool like Notion. And remember: overly complicated processes might end up doing you more harm than good. The simpler your processes, the better.
5. Simplify everything.
Complexity is often the root of bad data you can’t trust. For complex data analytics to work successfully, you need the time, resources, and knowledge to back it up.
For most organizations, it’s more effective to keep your data and reporting as simple as possible instead.
Simplifying your data means:

Only collecting the data you need
Organizing data consistently and in standardized formats
Avoiding complicated workflows and systems
Reducing your reporting dashboards
Avoiding multiple systems for the same job
Creating documentation that’s clear and easy to understand
Amending processes so anyone can quickly understand them

To make your data the most trustworthy, ask yourself: where can you simplify your data collection, management, and integration processes?
6. Keep the sunk cost fallacy in mind.
You’ve invested a lot of money, you have complex systems in place… and you don’t want to throw that away. So instead of starting afresh, you build on top of what you have – and hope it will cover up what’s underneath.
Investopedia describes the sunk cost fallacy, or the sunk cost trap, as “a tendency for people to irrationally follow through on an activity that is not meeting their expectations. This is because of the time and/or money they have already invested.”
This is all too common when it comes to business data and analytics.
If you keep building on unsound foundations, it will come back to bite you. Begin by understanding exactly what you’re dealing with and the problems at hand. Bring in a second opinion here if you need it. Then, make as unbiased a decision as possible about what you need to do to increase data integrity.
Over the long term, it might be easiest to go back to the drawing board, create a much more straightforward and accurate strategy, and trash what you had in place before.
7. Communicate with stakeholders.
While concerns over untrustworthy data are often valid, sometimes you or your organization’s stakeholders still don’t trust your data when everything is sound.
If this is the case, clear communication is your way forward. Explain why your business analytics data is trustworthy and how it’s set up to ensure reliability. Answer questions to help stakeholders understand how data is collected, managed, and integrated between your apps. Also, encourage concerns to be voiced so that you can explore their validity or irrelevance together.

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The most important resource that eCommerce companies can have is customer data. Those that own more than one brand have unique insights into customer behavior across brands. Customer Data Platform is perfect for a comprehensive understanding of customer profiles using diverse data. Here’s a quick guide on how to get started.

 

When content marketing strategists build customer profiles and buyer personas, they often dream of having a glimpse of their customer behavior in relations with competitors to complement their information to gain a new perspective. Companies that have more than one store or more than one brand under their umbrella have a unique opportunity to look beyond the constraints of a rigid single relationship. What they don’t always know, however, is that the data they have can be easily pieced together and processed to make use of it.

 

In 2020, startup Mine verified that most people’s data was held by 350 companies, although the top 5% of Mine’s users with the largest digital footprints discovered that an average of 2,834 companies had access to their data (MarTech Series). Unfortunately, nearly 36% of companies are not using all the data they have, and 47% are only planning to implement a data analytics tool in the future (Datamation). This is partly due to a lack of analytical skills, partly due to a lack of the right software that helps fuse this wibbly-wobbly ball of data into a single profile. So with the growing popularity of digital channels, 73% of companies say that intuitive and versatile Customer Data Platforms that help combine diverse data from numerous sources will be critical to their customer experience efforts (Segment).

 

How CDP works

Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a software that helps collect and unify a variety of first- and zero-party data from different sources. CDPs enable marketers and analysts to handle customer information and comply with privacy policies. And at the same time, they don’t diminish the quality of multichannel data personalization. On the contrary, they significantly increase its quality. It’ s because the platforms use identity recognition technology. It enables marketers and advertisers to unify zero- and first-party data in the areas of user identity and the devices they use both online and offline.

[Free eBook] Read more about CDP and zero- and first-party data >>

So if you’re managing several stores, you can start planning to comprehensively use all your data to improve User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX).

 

What data can be collected with a CDP?

Before you start collecting data, make sure you have implemented monitoring code in all your stores.

Learn how to implement SALESmanago monitoring code >>

Once the code is working properly in all stores, you can get down to collecting information. Here’s what types of data you can collect using the CDP platform.

Behavioral data – its collection stems from the module of identifying and monitoring the behavior of online contacts. This is one of the basic functions of CDP.

Transactional data – this data is available thanks to SALESmanago Marketing Automation integration with CDP and ERP systems.

Timeline – in other words, a chronological history of contacts, interactions and marketing and sales activities with a particular person.

Course of marketing and sales campaigns – precise information about which campaigns a given contact participates in and at what stage they are.

Customer communication flow – this is a list of all e-mails, Web Push notifications, SMS messages, VMS messages and phone calls that a particular contact has received.

Device Fingerprint – this feature allows you to track contacts even if they delete cookies.

Segmentation data – information about which segments a person has been automatically classified into based on behaviors monitored by the brand.

Any information from external sources – if you integrate SALESmanago with external systems and databases, CDP will also collect information from these sources.

Data entered manually by the sales department and Call Center – there is also space on the contact cards for notes made by people working with customers and clients. They can also manually enable certain features from within the contact card.

Contact scoring and its growth dynamics – for each customer-company interaction the system awards a fixed number of scoring points and also provides an analysis of their growth rate over time.

Product preferences – for each contact, the system tracks information about the browsed products and groups them by category, brand, price and color.

AI predictions – predictions are a separate category of data. They allow, according to the contact’s transaction history, to predict when they will buy something again, when there is a risk of churn and what communication channel to use to achieve the highest conversion.

 

Comprehensive profile, or how to understand customer’s profile across brands

Based on the data collected, the CDP platform creates extensive profiles for each contact. If you have data from one service, then the profile will correspond to how the user behaves in contact with one brand. If you feed the database with streams from 2 or more services, you have a chance to create more extensive and more realistic profiling. Comprehensive profiles, i.e., user profiles created on the basis of behaviors on 2 or more services, give insight into behaviors outside of the separate internet bubble limited by the monitoring of behaviors within a single platform.

Comprehensive profiles can be modeled using data such as:

purchase RFM,
price ranges,
activity on services/apps,
categories/subcategories that a person is interested in,
declarative data, including demographic data,
location data,
predictions.

To better visualize the difference, think about how much you can learn about a person by spending time with them in different places and situations. How much more do you know about your partner than the person you play chess with once a week?

 

What activities can be done with the Comprehensive profile?

From the modeling data, we can create automatically managed (via rules/Workflow) funnels. These seemingly simple marketing tools are extremely useful. They allow you to track transitions between campaign stages and effectively work to achieve micro-conversions. This approach will help you select groups of contacts according to their activity in one and all services. By observing trends you can easily identify groups of people who are:

Very active on 2 or more sites,
Very active on one site and not very active on the others,
Not very active on any site.

Depending on your needs, you can use this knowledge to reward active contacts, engage those who are less active but still promising, and run win-back campaigns to those who are inactive or dormant across all services.

Additionally, knowledge of the trends among certain audiences can be translated into creating groups of like-minded contacts so that you can reach a wider demographic with your message.

Pro Tip: Use RFM analytics to see which groups are your best consumers and shoppers. Create custom audiences based on these groups to attract more like-minded people and increase in-store revenue.

 

Examples of rewarding activities

If you want to fortify the relationship with people who are good customers in several stores, think of interesting ways to reward their engagement. A lot depends on your imagination. We just give you some inspirations:

discount for your next purchase,
access to exclusive products from preferred categories in pre-order,
additional points in the loyalty program,
invitation to CSR activities carried out by brands (e.g. cleaning the local forest, planting trees, helping at Christmas Eve parties for the people in need)
an invitation to activities that impact brands (e.g. research, crowdsourcing, etc.).

A lot will depend on the prospect’s buying motivation. Therefore, the better you have an understanding of the habits and behaviors of your best customers and clients, the better you can tailor the bonus to the individual.

 

Examples of incentive activities

People who are very active in one service and less active in the others still might jump to the group of the best customers. It’s worth implementing for them actions based on preferences from the store where they are most active. When it comes to encouraging micro-conversions and conversions you have a very wide field of possibilities. Here are some examples of stimulating actions that can be performed using the CDP system:

on-page campaigns,
PPC Google Ads/Facebook campaigns based on Custom Audiences,
informative omnichannel campaigns about the website where there is no activity,
gradually engaging the user with Lead Nurturing campaigns, which after gaining interest can be changed to the product recommendation process based on the data collected from another service,
rewarding the user for their activity in store X with discount vouchers to store Y.

The CDP platform is irreplaceable for combining data from different sources. Advanced user profiles (comprehensive profiles) help to understand individual users’ behaviour on different sites and, in addition, to target activities aimed at activating them on different platforms.

 

Examples of win-back activities

There are also individuals who are not active in any of the services. There are different factors that can cause this. Sometimes it happens that a person goes to a store, buys once and forgets about it. Sometimes the offer does not meet their expectations. And sometimes they click on an ad by accident and immediately bounce out of the service. The good news is that at least in some cases you can still fight for customers. What can be done? Here are some ideas:

a survey to find out why they don’t buy,
SMS campaign with code for free delivery,
time limited promotion,
dynamic Web Push notification with recommendations based on completed purchases,
email with cross-brand recommendations,
a campaign using AI predictions to choose the optimal communication channel to send a shopping discount.

Not every dormant contact will become active again. That doesn’t change the fact that a win-back campaign greatly increases the chance of reactivating such a person, or getting them interested in your offer from other sites you manage. One of our clients, Domfan, improved conversion rates by as much as 33% through effective sales close and implementation of a win-back program for inactive contacts.

Read the free case study of Domfan about the effects of implementing SALESmanago >>

 

A few words in conclusion

Customers smoothly navigate between stores not only in shopping malls, but also online. Monitoring behaviour on several platforms that you manage can have a very positive impact on the overall performance of your campaigns. If you skillfully combine data from different services, you can gain a unique insight into customer behaviour in relations with other brands. The CDP software helps you unify and organise this data and, from one place, run consistent campaigns that will move individual contacts towards micro-conversions and conversions across different sites.

If you would like to try out SALESmanago’s CDP capabilities in this area, please consult with your account manager.

Piecing together a project timeline template usually involves a Google Doc and mediocre formatting skills. Then comes assigning tasks to teammates and promising to hit the agreed-upon delivery date. But a few weeks go by, and the timeline falls apart. Higher priorities pop up, and deadlines slip past without much progress.
Projects can fail for many reasons: a lack of support from leadership, unforeseen budget cuts, or overpromising outcomes. In fact, poor project management is more common than you think – only 55% of projects are completed on time.
But creating a timeline where everyone involved knows what they’re working on and when it’s due can help ensure your project doesn’t creep past its original deadline. It’s essential for keeping projects (and the people completing them) on track.

To make sure your next project stays on schedule, we’ll cover how to set up a project timeline, the best templates to use, and a handful of examples to inspire your future scheduling.
Why Create a Project Timeline?
Time management is one of the top skills employers look for in candidates. Missed deadlines and rushed projects can set entire teams (and companies) behind schedule.
A structured project timeline offers more than brownie points from your boss. It can also:

Bring leadership and structure to a project
Outline what is being delivered, by when
Share who is responsible for each task and sets expectations for the scope, quality, and delivery of work
Show how the project outcome contributes to company goals
Decrease risk by accounting for any changes to the project scope, budget, deliverables, or deadlines.

Ultimately, a project timeline makes it easier and more efficient to manage a project. But it’s important to match the timeline structure to the project scope. Planning an editorial calendar for the quarter may take more time and effort than creating a marketing video for an upcoming product launch.
That’s where the right template comes in.
Project Timeline Example
Without the right project timeline template, organizing a project can be a lot of manual work — not to mention the formatting mess once multiple people get their hands on it.
The ideal timeline brings direction to a project, yet is easily adaptable when changes arise. Here’s a look at a project timeline for opening a new company office.

You can create a project timeline for any process that relies on a schedule (almost everything these days), like onboarding employees, handling a crisis, or planning social media campaigns. All you need to know is how to outline the steps of a project and the tasks required to complete each phase.
Let’s get into the details.
How to Create a Project Timeline
Crafting the perfect project timeline takes strategy, organizational skills, and a whole lot of collaboration. You need buy-in from supporters and clear directives for everyone involved.
To get started, follow this step-by-step guide to set up a structured timeline — no matter your job, industry, or management level.
1. Write a project brief.
A project brief communicates how you will approach a project. It includes details on the goals, deliverables, timeline, tasks, process, people involved, and resources needed to take a project from start to finish.
Asana outlined the steps to create a simple, yet effective, project brief. You can use this free project plan template to outline the project’s goals, roles and responsibilities, schedule, deliverables, budget, and more. It’s a great starting point for any planning process.

Or if you need a more comprehensive overview that includes key messaging and distribution processes, a creative brief may be the right fit for your project.
2. List all tasks and action items.
Every task involved in achieving a project’s objectives needs to go into the project timeline. After creating the brief, make a list of these tasks. You can start with large tasks and break them down into smaller to-dos.
Let’s say you’re responsible for creating a marketing video to launch your company’s newest product. Your list may include the following:

Establish project leads from each department
Set project budget
Find a video production company
Layout the video storyboard
Choose main features for video
Write video script
Capture video content
Add in sound and background music
Add animations and graphics
Edit video
Write announcement copy
Craft marketing campaign
Create clips for social sharing
Get video and marketing assets approved

Once you have the major milestones down, break down each task into smaller pieces. For example, choosing a video production company involves:

Research video production companies
Curate a list of production companies
Get quotes from each production company
Compare quotes and narrow down options
Meet with the selected companies
Choose a production company
Finalize the contract

3. Connect dependencies.
In a project, certain tasks can’t be started until another is complete. These tasks are called dependencies. For example, a video can’t be filmed until the storyboard is finalized. And the storyboard can’t be finalized until the video theme is chosen.
Mapping out dependencies helps you solidify the order of each task and decide who’s responsible for what. Everyone will know what part of the project they’re working on, which tasks must be completed before their own, and who to contact for the deliverables they need.
Here’s a look at how dependencies can play out in a project timeline.

Image Source
In the example, you can see that hiring a caterer has to happen before finalizing the lunch menu. But other tasks, like finding a DJ and deciding on an event theme, can happen at the same time. So as you map out each task, you’ll have to see which steps can overlap and which need to wait for others.
4. Estimate the time it will take to complete each task.
Once you figure out the sequence of tasks, you need to figure out how much time each will take. Estimate as best you can. That way, it’ll be easier to create the project roadmap and understand the project’s overall time frame.
As you go, make sure to consider the other projects and priorities your team has going on. A designer may be able to come up with a rough draft of video animations in one week, but if they’re wrapping up another project, they may not be able to start on yours for another two weeks.
Being mindful of your team’s time will make it easier to put together a reasonable, reliable timeline.
5. Create the project timeline.
Build your timeline by organizing your tasks from the first to the final step. Make any necessary adjustments to the task times, add milestones, and solidify the deadline. If your team works with project management software, organize the timeline and tasks so it’s ready to share after the project kickoff meeting.
You can save time during this step by using one of the project timeline templates below. It’s simple to customize each and avoid the extra work of creating your own from scratch.
6. Share the timeline with the project team.
Whew, your timeline is complete! Now, you have to share it with stakeholders. This includes everyone who is involved in the project. You’ve already listed these people out in your brief (during step one), so it’s time to share your clear path forward for the project with them.
It’s a good idea to hold a project kickoff meeting with both stakeholders and individual contributors so everyone starts on the same page. You can communicate the project goals, deliverables, roles, and deadlines — without going into an overwhelming amount of detail. From there, you’ll want to schedule time with the project’s immediate contributors to chat specifics and answer any questions before the work begins.
Need help visualizing the entire project? It can help to include a timeline graphic like the one below to give everyone a sense of the overall time frame. You can add or remove steps, depending on the complexity of your project.

Image Source
7. Adapt as you go.
Remember how just over half of projects are finished on time? Roadblocks and setbacks are inevitable in every project. So if your team runs into a delay, you’ll have to understand the impact and adjust the timeline if necessary.
While it’s possible to make up for delays without changing the final deadline, it’s your job as the project owner to update stakeholders on the project’s progress. Reporting a minor issue (like a coworker being out sick for a few days) isn’t always necessary to higher-ups. But if it’s a major roadblock that requires an extreme adjustment to the timeline (like a core contributor leaving the team), you have to communicate a new timeline to stakeholders.
Change is part of every company, so don’t panic if you have to adjust your timeline. It’s better to be transparent about the scope of work and timeline than keep people in the dark until the deadline hits. The earlier you adjust to change, the easier it will be to get back on track.
Project Timeline Examples
Visualizing a project makes it simple to understand what needs to happen from start to finish. Whether you need a template for a product launch or campaign meeting, these well-designed project timeline templates are perfect for your next planning session.
Employee Onboarding Timeline

Product Launch Timeline

Crisis Response Project Timeline

Historical Timeline

Task Project Timeline

Meeting Project Timeline

Need as many templates as you can get? Download all of these project timelines (and more) for free. With the right timelines in hand, it’s easy to keep everyone up to date and informed. Now all you have to do is make sure your projects stay on schedule. Good luck!