9 SaaS productivity tools to streamline your next project

SaaS Tools

Vendr | Simplify your procurement process with our intuitive SaaS platform
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Vendr Team
Published on
September 23, 2021
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The right tools make every job easier to accomplish. This is especially true for go-to-market (GTM) teams operating a business in the new, hybrid world of work. Whether together or apart, your teams need ways to keep in touch, track tasks and deadlines, talk out thorny problems, and get answers to urgent questions. Thus, distributed teams need a full-stack approach to make the most of virtual collaboration and organization. 

Fortunately, with the rise of remote and hybrid work, the SaaS market has risen to the occasion. Companies have access to plentiful options, all focused on keeping your teams operating at peak productivity whether they share a physical space or a virtual one.

Here are nine of our favorite productivity tools that make work better, faster, and more impactful.

Looking to compare productivity and note-taking apps of all types? Get first-hand reviews on Capiche.

1. Atlassian - trending in Vendr

Trending in Vendr

Need an all-encompassing solution for project management? The Atlassian family of products keeps everyone informed, organized, and productive. This enterprise-class suite of development and collaboration tools founded in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, makes it easy to plan, track, and deploy your projects and initiatives. 

     
  • For teams working in a development environment, Jira helps plan projects and sprints, track and remedy issues, schedule deployments, and fully document the development cycle. 
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  • When you need to organize and visualize your workload, Trello boards offer a flexible, cloud-based solution for organizing your team’s plans and projects. This Kanban-style tool boasts the ability to go “from idea to action in seconds.” 
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  • If you need answers to your questions, there’s nothing more powerful than a remote-friendly, shared source of truth. Confluence allows teams to share information about projects, breaking down the data silos that can slow progress. The tool also acts as a workspace to organize and build company culture through communication.

2. Miro

Trending in Vendr

Sometimes you just need to gather around the whiteboard and hash something out. Remote work and capacity restrictions have made this time-honored ritual slightly more difficult. Fortunately, Miro is here to bring whiteboarding into the virtual world.

This powerful platform allows teams to collaborate with seamless visual tools for planning, brainstorming, and visualizing workflows or projects. The tool allows up to 100 users to edit and collaborate in real-time: adding information, uploading videos, or pulling together assets to present to the team. Additional members can participate through view-only or comment-only permission settings. 

The tool offers users everything but the squeaky marker, with advanced features such as timers, commenting, sticky notes, video chat, voting, and a full list of integrations. For anyone not able to participate in real-time, Miro offers screen-recording so you can share a replay of the session. 

Miro might have met the moment in early 2020, but the product has actually been around for some time. Andrey Khusid and Oleg Shardin founded the company, then called RealtimeBoard, in 2011. They rebranded in 2019. 

3. Monday.com

Trending in Vendr

When you have team members distributed across the country or across the globe, solid project management takes on an extra level of importance. What’s more, the cookie-cutter approach often doesn’t work for the problems these teams are attempting to solve. A flexible, powerful management platform allows your teams to work asynchronously with full confidence, and gives managers full visibility into milestones, scope changes, and timelines.

Monday.com is just the tool for the job. Roy Mann, Eran Kampf, and Eran Zinman founded Monday.com in 2012 to meet the market need for more flexible options. 

While there are many PM options out there, Monday.com stands out for its modular approach and extreme flexibility. Monday allows teams to design projects and workflows in the way that makes the most sense for them. It can be used across any industry and for any business case. This robust, versatile platform allows all of your departments to streamline and simplify their most important projects.

4. Airtable

Trending in Vendr

We know that finance and procurement love a good spreadsheet. But there are limitations to the old-school, software-based spreadsheet tools available. For distributed teams working on complex problems, you need something more powerful.

Airtable, founded in 2015 by Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas takes the best features of your favorite spreadsheet and marries it with a powerful, cloud-based platform that turns the humble spreadsheet into a collaboration powerhouse.

Airtable supports multiple users and advanced features that allow you to parse and conceptualize your data in new and useful ways. Its customization features allow you to push the boundaries of what spreadsheets can do for your planning and implementation tasks. This flexibility and accessibility make it ideal for teams working remotely.

5. ClickUp

Organizing work is a multifaceted process. Project management, task management, visualization, and communication are all important aspects of the total effort. 

With ClickUp, founded in 2017 by Alex Yurkowski and Zeb Evans, all your most important productivity management tools come together in one versatile, powerful platform. Users can get a heads-up view of everything from docs and spreadsheets to timelines and mind-mapping.

The platform is AI-enabled and acts as a proactive planning tool. Through your email inbox, ClickUp can help you anticipate the most important tasks for the day and adjust your lists and views accordingly. The platform also integrates with a variety of other popular apps and programs, allowing teams to easily integrate data streams and other necessary components into their workflows automatically. 

6. Calendly 

Anyone who’s tried to schedule meetings or discovery calls asynchronously can tell you the value of a great scheduling platform. Ease-of-use can be the difference between landing the call or losing the contact entirely. Calendly makes getting together easier and quicker. Founder Tope Awotona developed Calendly in 2010 with the vision of eliminating the back-and-forth frustrations of call scheduling.

Using a simple yet powerful platform, users can create booking types for any business need, easily coordinate schedules, and deliver event invitations and reminders to all attendees over a variety of channels. Calendly’s smart, dynamic platform handles all of the sticky details of booking time between time zones. Daylight savings mixups are no match for this simple yet powerful solution. The tool offers a free version for simple booking or a paid version for more booking multiple types of meetups.

7. Vidyard

In the modern sales and marketing world, video is the essential method of connecting with your prospects and customers. Therefore, having a powerful video platform is vital to your GTM strategy. Vidyard empowers your teams to reach out to your audience in a personalized and powerful way, with guaranteed performance. This different approach to video is the brainchild of ​​Michael Litt and Devon Galloway, who wanted to offer users a better experience when trying to utilize video at work. In 2010, the pair started Redwoods Media, later to become Vidyard in its current form. 

With the help of the platform, Vidyard users can create one-to-one personalized videos, or lead live, interactive webinars and masterminds. You can also offer live or pre-recorded demos and host support videos and helpful information that allows end-users to make the most of the products and services they use. 

8. Grammarly

Everyone needs a good editor. Grammarly, a free grammar and writing plug-in, helps you bring your best work to the page with helpful suggestions, advanced grammatical analysis, and tips to strengthen your message. Yup – the tool will remind you when to go back and add that Oxford comma back in (sensitive subject, we know). 

Founders Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider developed the app in 2009 to help people everywhere improve their communication with the help of technology.

Grammarly’s premium features offer even more suggestions and syntactical tips. It’s like having a great editor built right into your browser, tightening up your writing while saving hours of valuable time. Grammarly works on some of the most popular word processing and document programs including MS Word, Mac OS, and Google Docs, allowing you to do your best work within the programs you use every day. 

9. Loom

Not every issue needs a meeting. But sometimes, email or Slack alone can’t convey the full message. Loom helps you create and share the right amount of information with visual support, quickly and easily.

Founded in 2015 by Vinay Hiremath and Joe Thomas, the easy screen-capture, upload, and linking capabilities of Loom allow you to record your screen and add in a personalized video to provide more context to whoever you're communicating with.

Not only does this approach save time for everyone – it connects with your recipient in a way that standard video and email messages can’t. Loom is perfect for clarifying questions for prospects, informing customers in need of support, or even working out business issues within your teams (without resorting to a full Zoom meeting). 

What does your business need to succeed?

Go-to-market spans across teams, departments, and often, locations. To keep everyone on track – whether together or apart – these nine tools help everyone stay on the same page and maintain productivity.

Looking to add one of these to your current tech stack? Get in touch and we'll help you come up with the most efficient way to buy.

Vendr Team
Vendr's team of SaaS and negotiation experts provide their curated insights into the latest trends in software, tool capabilities, and modern procurement strategies.

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