The PivotDesk Stacklist

We leverage a series of integrations between Google Analytics and our custom admin tool to evaluate our digital business activity, including: 1) The success of our marketing tactics in driving new traffic to the site; and 2) The success of our product in converting new traffic to paying customers. Setup for Google Analytics is complex but the data is all encompassing. For a faster setup and somewhat higher-level look at the same data, we use Heap.

Setup for Google Analytics is complex but the data is all encompassing. For a faster setup and somewhat higher-level look at the same data, we use Heap.

We’ve set up an integration between Salesforce and our admin tool to track and analyze our sales funnel. Here, we look at trends around: 1) Lead generation; 2) Lead qualification; 3) Sales funnel: 4) Close business (closed lost and closed won).

Salesforce is our home base for logging all of our interactions with prospects, customers and churned customers.

Slack is consistently a great app, especially for a company with teams across geographies. It’s been a real life-saver for us. We integrate a lot of tools into it (Salesforce, Twitter, social feed, proprietary backend systems), and it’s our first stop for all internal information. I’d say it has significantly reduced the amount of emailing we do internally.

We currently use Google Hangouts for video conferencing, but the quality is low so we’re researching affordable alternatives.

We use Unbounce to set up landing pages where a lot of our free content lives. The tool allows us to customize optimized templates to match our brand and message so we don’t have to involve engineering in the process.

Content is useless without a promotional strategy. We use BuzzSumo to identify influencers that may be able to help us with distribution, as well as to contour our content to topics our audience is interested in.

We were with Braintree, then with Balanced, and then Balanced went out of business. We’ve been happy with Stripe’s functionality, however their customer service has proven to be a real issue for us.

We’ve had a great experience with Zendesk for our support tickets. The main benefit is that it allows us to share tickets and customer information easily between people and departments.

For us, email marketing is key. It gives us the ability to reach prospects and customers to provide value, develop relationships and convert business. When it comes to email, we’ve done our best to keep costs low and our return high. We leverage Customer.io and AWeber to facilitate our campaigns: We use AWeber for prospect campaigns. It’s very low cost and simple to set up. As prospects subscribe for our blog series, “Been There, Done That,” RSVP for in-person events like “Breakfast without the BS” and register for online webinars like “How to train your broker,” they get added to lists in AWeber. AWeber then triggers communications to deliver the content each contact has requested (new blog posts, event location/time, links to access webinar recordings etc). Setting up these types of auto-responses in AWeber means we give our contacts exactly what they’ve asked for, when they ask for it and we have the option to continue delivering value to those contacts over time.

For us, email marketing is key. It gives us the ability to reach prospects and customers to provide value, develop relationships and convert business. When it comes to email, we’ve done our best to keep costs low and our return high. We leverage Customer.io and AWeber to facilitate our campaigns: We use Customer.io for user campaigns, and one of its main benefits is its detailed list segmentation. Customer.io gives us the ability to keep communications timely and personalized. It allows us to segment our users based on actions they take in real time so that we can trigger hyper-relevant content. With this tool, we communicate with people who have created accounts, are paying customers and/or are past customers.

Everyone seems to have their opinion on the best solution here. Previously, we’ve used Evernote and Dropbox, but we are transitioning to Google Drive. We have multiple people contributing to documents from multiple locations, and Google Drive has proven to give us the best experience for collaboration.

We use QuickBooks Online. Our part-time CFO takes care of that for us.

We use TriNet; however, at our stage, we don’t have a core focus on optimizing our HR processes. We’re capable of handling HR somewhat manually and TriNet is a good complement to that work.

We don’t typically hire for a lot of roles at once. When we do hire, we start first with our personal networks to dig up referrals. At the same time, we list our openings on AngelList and LinkedIn.

We recently launched a profile on The Muse, but it’s too soon to understand the impact it may have.

We don’t typically hire for a lot of roles at once. When we do hire, we start first with our personal networks to dig up referrals. At the same time, we list our openings on AngelList and LinkedIn.

FullContact is a great, consistent database of all of your contacts that you can leverage across teams. It’s integrated with Google Apps and integrates data across the platform. We use it for internal employees and partners, not direct customer data.

Yes, it’s true. We drink our own Kool-Aid. Rather than working from coffee shops or home offices, our remote employees get all the benefits of working in a team environment in the PivotDesk city that needs them. Our NYC sales team, for example, works in the offices of SkillShare. Seperately, we offset the cost of a large HQ space in Boulder by hosting PivotDesk guest companies in our excess space.

What’s not to love about on-demand alcohol delivery? We love to host in-office happy hours using the service. And when we want to share the fun with our remote team, we can easily order and send over a bottle of whiskey or wine. Drizly makes it really easy to schedule office happy hours without taking someone off their normal responsibilities.

We love this keyless office access app--instead of having to give office keys to everyone, our team can unlock the door from their phone. The tool is extremely customizable, so we all feel secure about our equipment and personal safety.

This is a great tool for allowing our employees to view vesting schedules in real time. It helps make everyone feel invested in the success of our business in a major way. Our team really likes getting updates as their options vest.

We love playing background music in the office, and Festify allows our remote team to experience the same musical vibe as our HQ. We use Festify to build and share office playlists collaboratively, and it really builds a feeling of camaraderie. It’s easy to add songs from Spotify, and you can vote your favorite songs up the playlist.

We’ve moved off of official PM tools because we weren’t using them consistently. Additionally, we weren’t able to find a single tool that applied to all departments. Instead, each department works off of a sprint system. The length of each sprint is dependent on the department, but most are about two weeks. Marketing and sales-related teams leverage a Google Sheet to manage each sprint, while engineering adds Pivotal Tracker to the mix. Both scenarios are successful in holding individual contributors accountable, as well as moving the department as a whole toward its goals.

We’ve moved off of official PM tools because we weren’t using them consistently. Additionally, we weren’t able to find a single tool that applied to all departments. Instead, each department works off of a sprint system. The length of each sprint is dependent on the department, but most are about two weeks. Marketing and sales-related teams leverage a Google Sheet to manage each sprint, while engineering adds Pivotal Tracker to the mix. Both scenarios are successful in holding individual contributors accountable, as well as moving the department as a whole toward its goals.

We use Buffer to schedule and manage social postings. We view marketing promotions on a rolling 30-day calendar. With Buffer, we can create the posts at the start of the month to support our promotions and schedule them to go out over time.