Tool Recommendations by Brenda Ster
Finding the right tool can mean the difference between unbridled chaos and unlocked potentialGet the tools you need most for your business.
Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links, meaning I may receive a small commission if you click on a link and purchase something I have recommended. Please read my full disclosure policy for more details.
Customer Management
17Hats – Amazing web-based application that will help manage leads, contracts, invoicing and financial tracking. If you've ever received an invoice or service contract from us, this is the system that did it.
Airtable – This is a database that functions like a spreadsheet application. It is user-friendly and quite handy for organizing contacts, projects, affiliate links, calendar and more! It also integrates beautifully with Zapier, giving you countless ways to automate data capture.
AWeber – Delivering eye catching, engaging emails for your small business has never been easier! With AWeber's easy to use Smart Designer tool – you can create beautiful email templates, customized to your business and branding in seconds! Get up to 500 subscribers for FREE, and then save 10% on the PRO plan with our exclusive Suite partnership. Use our link and code SS10OFF for our exclusive pricing!
Black Belt Bots – Are you ready to join the chatbot revolution? Chat bots are leading edge technology that allows you to cultivate and maintain relationships with your customers and prospects right in their Facebook Messenger inbox. Black Belt Bots provides the training, templates, and other tools you need to build your bot in no time.
ConvertKit – Great for building your email list and nurturing customers through your sales funnels. Create professional looking emails, organize subscribers by tags and segments, create auto-sequences, triggers and more. ConvertKit is a great program for those looking to build an intermediate to advanced email marketing system.
Sqweee is a virtual venue designed by direct sellers for direct sellers, offering a whole new way to sell your company's products through online events without worrying about the dreaded Facebook jail. “Sqweeevents” are a series of posts, graphics, and videos, just like the social media events you may already be used to holding through a different platform. To get a 25% discount off the first 6 months of a monthly plan or 10% discount off the first year of an annual plan, join here, then enter SassySuite as who referred you.
Wufoo – Create a contact form, and link to it from anywhere. Give your peeps and easy and consistent way to reach you.
Graphic Design
Canva – One of the premier graphic design programs for beginners and experts alike. Sign up for their free plan or invest in their Pro plan for more features.
Creative Market – If you're looking for amazing creative design assets, from photos to fonts to themes to templates, look no further. We use assets from Creative Market in our graphics all the time!
Design Wizard – Upload your fonts, logos and photos to create professional looking design assets. This design software offers both free and paid versions allowing you to create custom graphics quickly and with ease.
Doodly – This is super fun software if you're interested in making your own videos of doodling on a whiteboard (or chalkboard or glassboard). We love whiteboards. Now we can play with them online. For a limited time, you can get this program for a special one-time payment offer! Regularly priced at $480/year, get Doodly today for only $67!
Fiverr – $5 for a quick outsourced service? Yes please! It was a Fiverr dude who made our training video intro for $5. Yes really.
Fonts.com – This is a great site for paid font content that will make your designs look authentic to you! One of our brand fonts came from here.
The Hungry JPEG – One of the best premium graphic design resources out there. They also offer weekly bundles at a flash sale price of over 90% off!
Luckstock.com – Royalty free music. This is where we got the amazeballs tune that plays in our training video intro.
Pixabay – Free and unrestricted images, for any personal or commercial use. We often use these for our social media images.
PixTeller – Easy to use design and animation tool where you can create graphics, GIFs, videos and more for all of your social marketing needs.
Office Administration
AppSumo – Want deals on administration, tools for your website, graphics, and more? Check out the perpetual deal site that Team Suite knows and loves. Highly recommend if you are into lifetime offers and deals! Click here to shop and join AppSumo and get exclusive member deals!
Asana – Cloud-based project management application. Easy to use and manage tasks, schedules, and files across the team.
Evernote – Best app ever for note taking, and just about anything else you want to do on the web. You heard it here first.
Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) – If you actively use Google's many applications, this professional version is a good resource for your business. Host your emails on Google's super reliable server and run all of your business applications through Google: email through Gmail, calendar, note-taking in Keep, file storage and sharing in Drive. We use Google Workspace for all of our daily activities! Click this link to start your 14-day free trial. If you like it, email us to receive your personal promotion code to get 10% off your first year of Google Workspace.*
Nifty – Want another project management tool to be able to use to help keep track of your tasks, projects, parties, and more? Try Nifty! We think it's pretty nifty ourselves. 😉
PayPal – Accept payments for all your ecommerce you'll be doing.
Ship.com (Formerly Zensales) – Dedicated to simplifying shipping for direct sales consultants and independent business owners, allows their users to compare and buy shipping labels easily and offers the lowest industry rates. Ship.com integration with PayPal, Square and multiple direct sales companies allows the user to automatically import orders, easily access customer information, and quickly create shipping labels.
Square – Accept credit card payments on your mobile device. Use this link and get $1000 in free processing in your first 180 days.
Zapier – This is a super awesome all-purpose automation tool. Want to automatically import mailing list subscribers to your database? Send new subscribers a personal email or coupon code? Zapier integrates hundreds of apps to save you time.
Zoom – Video chat technology. Free for up to 50 people, for 40 minutes. Perfect for leaders and teams! And reasonable packages if you need more than 40 minute sessions. This is a must-have for anyone who communicates with teams, customers, hostesses, or prospects.
Personal Development
KhanAcademy.com – Free online training, on nearly any subject.
LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com) – LinkedIn Learning is a leading online learning program that helps anyone learn business, software, technology and creative skills. They offer various membership levels.
Udemy – A huge online learning marketplace, where anyone can submit their own courses, and you can find free and paid video courses on nearly any subject.
Recommended Reading
Big Magic – Elizabeth Gilbert
Bossy Pants – Tina Fey
Building a Story Brand: Clarify your Message so Customers will Listen – Donald Miller
Developing the Leaders Around You: How to Help Others Reach their Full Potential – John C. Maxwell
#GirlBoss – Sophia Amoruso
Grit – The Power of Passion and Perseverance – Angela Duckworth
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World – Gary Vaynerchuck
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead – Sheryl Sandberg
Success Unwrapped – Direct Sellers A-Z Event Guide – Shannon Ferraby
The 5-Second Rule – Mel Robbins
The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users – Guy Kawasaki
The Barefoot Executive – Carrie Wilkerson
The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level – Gay Hendricks
The Power of 5 for Network Marketing – John Maxwell
The Secret– Rhonda Byrne
Year of Yes – How to Dance it Out, Stand in the Sun, and Be Your Own Person – Shonda Rhimes
Yes, Please – Amy Poehler
You are a Badass – Jen Sincero
Live Streaming
AirPods – We use these for impromptu live videos.
Be.Live TV – Want to up your livestreaming game? Effectively engage your audience with Be.Live's professional livestreaming service! It's easy to use and they offer a 14-day FREE trial!
Blue Yeti USB Mic – Powerful microphone extraordinaire. If we sound good, this is why.
Lighting Kit – We only look good during webinars and training videos because lighting (and mascara) makes me pretty. This is a good option for inexpensive soft box stand lighting.
Power DeWise Lavalier MIc – We use this mic for all of our formal videos. Great for high quality audio.
Ring Light – Great for when you're recording videos, taking selfies, livestreaming… this is the right light that many of our Socialites use and recommend.
ScreenFlow – A Mac-based tool that allows you to record and edit anything happening on your screen, with advanced video and audio. And if you don't have a Mac, clearly you should go buy one immediately.
StreamYard – Another livestream (or record to post later) application we use in the Suite. Up your livestreaming game with this service. Click HERE to get a $10 credit off of your subscription purchase.
Time Management
Acuity Scheduling – This is our online scheduling program. Easy to set up, use, and accept appointments from your customers and team members on your available schedule. Plus, it integrates with a whole bunch of tools and apps – payments, invoicing, CRM, email management, and 250 more.
Website Management
Leadpages – Leadpages is a fantastically versatile marketing tool, that can be used for many things within or stand-alone from your main website, such as webinar registration pages, opt in pages and lead magnets, mini course hosting, or thank you pages.
SassySuite Web Services – If you need a domain, hosting, Managed WordPress, etc., we can hook you up! If you need a site, we have it. Looking to create a basic domain redirect? Check out this blog post for step-by-step instructions.
Shopify – Shopify offers an easy-to-use shop setup that will get you up and running in just a few minutes plus plenty of integrations to build as robust an experience as you want.
WordPress – One of the most common website frameworks out there with plenty of documentation to help even the beginningest beginner get set up with their own website, store, and blog.
Yoast SEO – One of the most popular SEO programs available. Super easy to manage your key words and meta descriptions. Get found, sister!
* Google Workspace promotional codes must be applied when you enter your billing information. Be sure to request your code during your Google Workspace trial period to apply your 10% off discount.
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Social Content Management
The 3Ps of Social Content – Not sure what to post when or where? You need more than just a good caption on a pretty picture when it comes to expanding your warm market and keeping your clients engaged on social media. Check out our FREE e-book The 3P's of Social Content to learn why you need a dynamic content strategy to attract new clients and keep your community engaged.
Cinchshare – Simply the easiest and fastest social media scheduling app allowing you to manage all of your social media and facebook parties in one place. Click here and enjoy an extended 30-day free trial (over two weeks more than their standard trial) when you use promo code CSSocialFREE.
HelloWoofy – One of the most powerful social media marketing platforms ever to connect with your customers and grow your audience seamlessly. Manage your social media marketing with data science. For a limited time, you can get this great social media management and time management tool for and get your price locked in at $99/year for life!
ScreenPal (formerly Screencast-O-Matic) – Free and so easy to use: this is a great program for anyone who wishes to make a fast and easy screencast that can be uploaded online. It does not offer editing functionality, but it's awesome for quick jobs; compatible with Mac and PC.
ScreenFlow – A Mac-based tool that allows you to record and edit anything happening on your screen, with advanced video and audio. And if you don't have a Mac, clearly you should go buy one immediately.
Scribe – Don’t have time to create step-by-step instructions for your team or customers? Let Scribe do it for you! This tool is great for demonstrating how to navigate your website or back office. Just walk through the steps and Scribe documents them for you.
Scribie – Automate the process of transcribing your audio or video files – on the cheap! We use this service to convert our podcasts into blog posts. Hello time saver!
Taplink – A fantastic way to manage your Instagram Links and take #LINKINBIO to another level. Embed videos, link out to blog posts, take orders and online payments, and more with this easy to use, easy to customize micro-landing page for Instagram. Talk about an easy way to sell in IG. You can check out an example by clicking HERE. Use these coupon codes for 10% off discount code (10offtaplink) or a 7-day free trial (taplinkfreetrial) and click HERE to sign up today!
Tap.Bio – A great way to build a series of cards, each one with a unique focus, to help guide your audience where you want them to go. Use our link to save 10% on the Gold package!
Vimeo Pro – With Vimeo you can protect your video content behind private links and domain gateways. Add customizations to your video player – brand it in your colors, add a call-to-action to the end of your videos, and much more.
Wave.Video – Create branded video content that will build your audience and drive your business forward. Super easy to use and complete with a broad selection of free video clips, images, audio files and more. Get started for FREE and then save 10% when you upgrade to any paid plan.
WooBox – Want to add nifty tabs to your Facebook fan page? This is the site to do it.