Google Chrome is undoubtedly the most popular browser right now. With the huge user base, The Chrome Web Store has also started mimicking Apple’s App Store: inflated and difficult to navigate. However, the secret to business productivity for your business lies right in the Chrome store, i.e., the extensions, which are basically plugins that add functionality to your browser. In this list, we’ve covered some of the most popular extensions with a variety of features—accounting and collaboration to password management, lead generation and more.
Rapportive for building strong connections
This Chrome extension is available in two versions, “Lite” for free LinkedIn members and “Premium” for LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscribers. The free edition will allow you to do the folliowing:
- See the LinkedIn profile data for your contacts directly in your Gmail, and use that knowledge when you reach out next time
- Mention icebreakers, including shared connections, experiences, and interests, to build rapport with your contacts
- Hover over any email address anywhere in your message to quickly view their profile to stay informed on the vital details of the contact
ConvergeHub for easy prospecting
This nifty extension allows you to leverage social media for lead generation. It essentially captures contacts from the major social media channels including: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and more. You can import them into your database with one click for easy prospecting.
DocuSign for digital signature
It remove the complexity of signing and distributing PDFs. With DocuSign, there’s no need to print out documents, sign them by hand, scan and upload them, distribute to your customers or employees, and have the process start all over again. You can electronically sign documents and PDFs right from Gmail, Google Drive, or the Chrome browser.
SlickPie for simplified accounting
It offers a simplified way for small businesses to get their accounting setup. Send invoices, accept payments and manage all your bills in one place and keep everything ready for taxation.
Black Menu for quick Google services
As a business owner, you might spend most your time online simply looking up customer locations, local businesses, directions, emails, and so on. This plugin helps you search for that information all in one place. With Black Menu, you can quickly use Google’s services without leaving the page you’re already on. Hover over the Black Menu Chrome extension and get a drop-down list of the Google tool that you’d like to use to find information—Google Search, Google+, Google Maps, Google Translate, Gmail, YouTube, Google News, and more.
TeamPassword for managing passwords for the team
This is highly useful for managing passwords in a small business and collaborative environment — primarily because of the fact that there are certain tools and services that are used by multiple team members. TeamPassword offers shared logins and lockout preventions that keep everyone active with anytime access.
Pablo for easy social media promotions
This handy tool has been developed by Buffer – a leading social media management software. Pablo is a powerful tool for creating images to share on social networks, and it can be quite useful for your marketing team to grab your followers’ attention more effectively than a text-based post. The app is great for laying out text, logos and other graphics in correctly-sized images for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest posts. It’s easy to align various elements on top of the canvas and comes with a pool of 600,000 reusable background images.
Page Monitor for tracking changes on pages
RSS readers are useful to get updates from the blogs you follow, but if you need real-time alerts for when a page is updated, Page Monitor is what you need. This extension allows you add any page to a list that it’ll constantly monitor for changes, and will notify you with a ding to let you know when it spots something.
You can track things like stocks and exchange rates, product launches, sales, even your competitor’s site. What’s especially useful is the extension’s export feature, which can be shared with you team members.
Remote Desktop for location-agnostic access
While Google Drive enables connectivity to all your documents, sometime we need to access files that are actually located on our computer. Chrome allows this with Remote Desktop. When you’re out of the office and desperately need a file or document to keep working, use Remote Desktop to connect to your computer through your web browser—from any location.
Hunter for effective outreach
This is is quite valuable for marketers, PR professionals, sales manager and business owners, as reaching out to industry leaders, potential partners, or news reporters is a constant struggle. We scour the internet to grab their email, pitch our business, and cross the fingers that the mail will land in their inbox with a hopeful positive response.
Hunter is one of the best email finder tools, it takes the pain out of the first step of outreach by easily finding email addresses from anywhere on the web. With just one click on any website, Hunter shows any email address that’s ever been associated with a website.
Bonus add-ons
Pocket for saving stories to read later
If you’ve come across an interesting article, but just don’t have the time to read it right away, you can use this plugin to read later. Just click the button on your toolbar or hit Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+S and the page you’re browsing will be added to your reading queue, which will be available on both Pocket’s web app or mobile apps.
Once you start saving articles on Pocket, you should also install TimeToRead; It adds a tag that describes how many minutes each article will take to read.
Refind for rediscovering your important online resources
There are tons of tools for bookmarking pages, but it might become cumbersome to find them afterwards. That’s what Refind solves. Apart from saving your bookmarks in the cloud, it also highlights these pages when they appear in your Google search results, making it a lot easier to discover articles and resources you’ve come across in the past.
