11 essential tools for your startup’s digital-first workplace

Whether you’re operating in a physical space, fully online or somewhere in between, the pandemic likely forced you to change how you run your business—from how you interact with customers to how your employees collaborate.

Many businesses looked to new technologies to weather the change. According to a recent Salesforce report, 71% of growing small businesses say they survived the pandemic because of digital tools.

While new software can help move your business forward, ensuring employees are actively using them is another story. Streamlining your tools in one place can help drive engagement, allowing your team to access its everyday tools where it’s already working throughout the day.

Our team partners with innovators across the industry to build integrations that bring your people and software together in Slack. Starting today, we’ve extended those partnerships to make the tools themselves more affordable too.

Read on to learn about our partners, their limited-time offers and how integrating them with Slack will help your team get a little more done each day.

Productivity essentials for a work-from-anywhere world

Too often, we’re forced to spend time figuring out how to do work instead of just getting it done. Here are a few of our favorite productivity tools that can simplify everyday tasks or coordination so you can focus on the actual work. These tools also integrate seamlessly in Slack, helping reduce context switching and streamline your process.

Connect everyday work with your knowledge base using Notion

Notion brings in-progress projects and your knowledge together. This way, all the context your team needs—meeting notes, wikis, project and OKR trackers, and more—is in one convenient place.

Notion’s intuitive user experience makes it easy to drag and drop components and customize how you work, whether you need a Gantt chart, Kanban setup or a simple table. The Notion team and community have built hundreds of templates to help you jump-start your next project.

Promotion: Get 20% off a Notion Team Plan for 12 months. Eligible for companies with 200 employees or less. Learn more.

 

Bring interactivity to team collaboration with Miro whiteboards

Spontaneity and creativity come naturally when people are working together in person. Capturing either remotely is another story.

With Miro, your team has all the tools to re-create that energy online, from hosting interactive brainstorms to mapping complex ideas, running retrospectives and more. Equipped with an infinite canvas for creation, robust set of meeting facilitation tools, hundreds of pre-built templates for workflows and meetings, and a powerful integration with Slack, you can ensure time spent with your team is engaging, purposeful and moves work forward.

Promotion: Get 3 months free of Miro Team and Business plans, or 20% off an Enterprise plan. Learn more.

 

Spark discussion from anywhere, anytime with Loom videos

As organizations explore more flexibility to support a work-from-anywhere world, they’re also facing an unintended side effect: Workers feel like they always have to be “on.” To combat this, teams are embracing asynchronous work—allowing people to work when and where they’ll be most productive without the expectation of an immediate response.

Loom is the video communication platform designed for asynchronous work. Use it to record quick videos of your screen and camera and instantly share them in your other tools, Slack included! Instead of relying on scheduled meetings or long emails to stay aligned, Loom videos help you narrate ideas with more context and clarity in a fraction of the time. Whether you need to present a new idea, share feedback or provide a status update, you can quickly bring your ideas to life in Loom.

Promotion: Get 30% off a Loom Business plan. Learn more.

 

Coordinate work across teams with Asana

According to Asana’s 2021 ​​Anatomy of Work Index, knowledge workers spend 60% of their time on “work about work”—not the strategic or skilled work they were hired to do, but tedious tasks like chasing down updates or approvals.

Asana, a work management platform, eases “work about work” by orchestrating collaboration across your team. With a single tool to manage tasks, deadlines, status updates and more, you don’t have to shuffle between spreadsheets and email to keep projects on course. Asana can track and manage everything—from executing marketing campaigns to managing feedback and more.

Promotion: Get 30% off eligible Asana Business plans for the first 12 months. Learn more.

 

Automate repetitive tasks with Zapier

If you’ve ever wished you had an extra pair of hands to help get work done, workflow automation is for you. Zapier specializes in just that. It connects your favorite tools, like Slack, Gmail or Mailchimp, into workflows that automatically handle repetitive tasks for you.

In Slack, discussions often lead to action items. With Zapier, you can send a Slack message to your to-do list in Asana or Trello so those tasks don’t fall through the cracks. Or say you’re sick of manually checking to see if you have new responses to a survey. Use Zapier to build a workflow that automatically sends you a Slack notification whenever a new survey response comes in.

Thousands of apps connect with Zapier, so there are time-saving automations for just about any type of business.

Promotion: Get 100 tasks with Zapier for free per month. Learn more.

 

Best-in-class tools to empower every department and role

No matter what role you’re in, using the latest technology for your specialized function can help you find new, better ways to approach your day-to-day work. Read on for the best-in-class tools for every role, from sales and customer support to engineering and finance.

Build and manage your customer relationships with Salesforce

Whether you’re a brick-and-mortar business, an e-commerce company or a hybrid of the two, one thing remains true: Your success relies on making and keeping customers happy. Salesforce is the leading platform for managing and growing customer relationships. You can store and manage all of your customer information, including their contact info, communication history, purchase history and more.

Use Salesforce to see all of your customer data and interactions in a single place, give your sales team the data it needs to close new deals and monitor the health of your customers and nurture those relationships through automation. For example, you might schedule a promotional email about an upcoming holiday sale.

Promotion: Get 50% off a Salesforce Essentials annual plan. Learn more.

 

Speed up contract lifecycles with DocuSign eSignature

DocuSign eSignature is the world’s leading way to provide and collect electronic signatures for contracts, offer letters, nondisclosure agreements and more. By sending and signing documents digitally, people save time and effort: Eighty percent of all successful eSignature transactions are completed in less than 24 hours and 44% within 15 minutes.

Promotion: Start a 30-day free trial and get 15% off select DocuSign eSignature plans. Subject to applicable terms and conditions. Learn more.

 

Build faster and reduce overhead with AWS for Startups

Establishing any business is hard. Establishing a technology-driven business with mobile or web apps carries added responsibility: maintaining an online presence that’s secure, manageable and cost-efficient.

With Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short, you’ll have access to more than 200 cloud computing services that reduce your technology overhead so you can get started faster and focus on developing your core product or service, not managing the complexities of infrastructure. AWS takes care of owning, maintaining and securing physical data centers or servers that keep your apps running. You pay as you go, so you have the flexibility to experiment with different technologies without upfront costs or long-term commitments.

Promotion: Join AWS Activate and get $1,000 in AWS credits. Learn more.

 

Spend smarter with Brex’s all-in-one finance solution

Software has fundamentally improved nearly every aspect of modern business: Marketers can run sophisticated, automated campaigns; engineers can get an app running in days instead of months; customer support teams can resolve tickets at record speed. When it comes to financial systems, however, traditional banks haven’t evolved enough to provide businesses with the technology they need to manage their finances smartly and efficiently.

Upgrade your company’s finances with a Brex business account and corporate card. With your deposits, payments, credit cards, expense management and accounting in one place, it’s refreshingly easy to manage your money and control how it’s spent.

Promotion: Get 25,000 Brex points after spending your first $1,000 with a Brex card. Learn more.

 

Uplevel your design with Canva

The right visual presence has the ability to elevate your business, bringing a new level of polish and professionalism to your digital or physical content. But it’s not always possible to hire a designer or put in hours of Photoshop training yourself, especially for a lean business.

Design amateurs and experts alike bridge this gap with Canva. Use it to quickly create engaging visual content, like a colorful social media post or a company presentation, or even to edit videos. With thousands of professionally designed templates, it’s easy to get inspired and use Canva’s simple drag-and-drop feature to customize your design.

Promotion: Unlock 60 free days of Canva Pro, giving you access to premium design tools and content. Learn more.

 

Nurture your customers with ActiveCampaign

A cohesive experience across sales, marketing and customer support is essential to creating lasting customer relationships. As you grow to hundreds and thousands of customers, delivering that experience quickly gets complex.

ActiveCampaign uses automation to orchestrate a cohesive customer experience across all channels, including email, Slack, Shopify, Salesforce and more. For example, you could design a workflow in minutes to send a special promotional offer 24 hours after each contact opens your previous marketing email. These workflows continually nurture your customer relationships, keeping your business top of mind and getting you one step closer to your next sale.

Promotion: Get 20% off your first year when signing up for an ActiveCampaign annual Plus plan or above. Learn more.

 

This is just a sampling of the tools your team can use to ease its way into a remote or hybrid workplace. Be sure to explore the Slack App Directory for all the integrations you can use to help your team members streamline work and work better together, wherever they are.