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Here’s what you definitely shouldn’t do the next time you’re stuck in traffic on your way to work: calculate just how much time you spend commuting to and from the office.

Seriously, don’t do it. The realization that you spend weeks of your life behind the wheel (or choice of public transport) could just be enough to ruin the rest of your day.

But what if your commute didn’t automatically have to be the worst part of your day? The people at job search website Adzuna put together an infographic that claims to have the answers — backed by science — to a happier commute. Check out the tips below.

If you’re growing a company, chances are you’re challenged with choosing the right tools to help you grow.

Both at HubSpot and at other businesses I’ve helped advise, I’ve seen marketing and sales teams experiment with all sorts of different tools they’ve hoped would drive growth. Some of these tools did help the team grow. Others slowed growth down or blocked it altogether. At HubSpot, we’ve seen opportunities to build new growth tools for marketing and sales teams and we’ve worked hard to fill those gaps.

One of the most important lessons I’ve taken away from growing businesses is that most growth problems come not from ideas, but from execution. You might have a growth-driven team, a great vision, and the dedication to achieve your lofty goals. But having those things isn’t enough to actually grow.

To execute on your strategy, you’re going to need a powerful set of tools that leverage every stage of the customer experience, from the first point of contact, through the sales and marketing process, and over the lifetime of the customer.

The foundation of a strong growth stack starts with the following:

• A CRM system that serves as the foundation for all the other growth tools you’re using, which is where all of your customer data is stored.
• A marketing platform to attract the right people, convert them as leads, and communicate with them through the purchase process and once they’re a customer.
• A sales platform that helps your sales team identify the right people, connect with them, and close them as customers.

Some companies are in the position to implement a growth stack right off the bat and then enhance and customize it with the right collection of integrated tools. Others need to start with free tools and build to a full growth stack over time. (Note: There is a free version of the HubSpot Growth Stack.)

For those companies just getting started, here is my shortlist of the best free growth tools for modern businesses. The list comprises a blend of free HubSpot tools and those from other companies that we’ve used and recommend.

The 11 Free Growth Tools I Recommend

A Free CRM

1) HubSpot CRM

You can’t build a skyscraper without a solid foundation. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool) is just that — it acts as the base layer of growth where all your business functions’ information is organized and can be easily analyzed. In all honesty, it’s impossible to grow and scale your business without a CRM.

Your CRM is the software that sits at the core of your digital system. It tracks every interaction your sales team has, stores all your marketing leads and customer data, and improves communication across your organization. The more you grow, the more important this becomes.

The problem is, most traditional CRM systems are hard to implement and use — especially for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with limited time and resources. Sales teams have trouble adopting them internally, and you can bet that doesn’t help your business grow whatsoever. If you’re looking for a clean and intuitive CRM that’ll make your sales reps more efficient — regardless of their experience levels — I’m very proud of the free CRM our team at HubSpot has built.

Free Growth Tools for Marketing

2) Trello

I’m a big fan of visualizing progress. Growth teams tend to have a lot of ideas, a lot of projects, and a lot of experiments going on at the same time. We’ve found Trello to be the best tool for tracking that progress. Each idea, project, and experiment can live on its own card, which teams can use to take notes, assign tasks, set due dates, and so on.

Here’s a real example: Our VP of Marketing Kieran Flanagan uses it to track, from start to finish, all the experiments his growth team runs. What’s especially remarkable is that his team members are located in various parts of the US and Europe, but with Trello they’re able to stay organized and effective, and make a big impact on business growth.

3) Hotjar Heat Maps & Visitor Recordings

Data beats intuition. You can’t really know what your audience wants without getting inside the heads of the people who already regularly visit your site to find out why they visit your site, and Hotjar’s tools are perfect for just that.

These guys are on the cutting edge of helping people figure out what drives people to different parts of their website. They’re making it possible for people to build and grow their website in a way that actually resonates with people. We actually just launched an integration with Hotjar that shows Hotjar poll responses in HubSpot users’ contact timelines.

The Heat Maps and Visitor Recordings are my favorite parts of the tool, though, and here’s why: They visualize what people are doing when they get to your site by showing clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior. This is so important for a business because each of these actions shows what people do and care about on your site. It’ll also help you find the biggest opportunities for improvement and testing. (And you should always be testing.)

Image Credit: Hotjar

4) Google Keyword Planner

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to growing traffic, which is a big driver of business growth in the online age. Simply put, you need to do it, and you need to do it well. If you want more people to find you on Google, you’ll need a keyword tool to help you prioritize which keywords to focus on.

There are a few good keyword tools out there, but Google Keyword Planner is a great starting point for narrowing down the right keywords, gauging competition around each one, and learning how many people are searching for them.

5) GrowthBot

Bots are pretty freaking cool, and there’s business value to them too — they can make simple processes more efficient, giving your team time back in your day and helping you intelligently answer questions around your business. I could not be more excited about bots. That’s why I spent a lot of time this year building a chatbot for growth professionals called GrowthBot. I originally started building it because I wanted it myself, but others have told me they find it helpful, too.

So how does it work? By connecting to a variety of marketing systems (like HubSpot, Google Analytics, and more), GrowthBot is able to give you more convenient access to information you already otherwise have, and give you access to information you didn’t know you had. In the first case, you could ask it the question, “How was organic traffic last month?” and it’ll tell you. In the second case, you might ask it, “Which public SaaS companies are using HubSpot?” or “Which PPC keywords is uber.com buying?” and it’ll spit back the answer in just a few seconds.

6) HubSpot Marketing Free’s Lead Flows

A big mistake I see growing marketing teams making is spending all their time driving traffic to their website, but not turning that traffic into leads. Problem is, if you’re not learning about the people who are showing interest in your business, you’re leaving critical lead and sales numbers on the table.

To help you take a page that gets a good amount of traffic and turn that traffic into leads, some really smart folks created a feature within HubSpot’s new free marketing tool called Lead Flows. Lead Flows are unobtrusive widgets — pop-ups, dropdown banners, slide-ins — that you can add to any of your website pages. Best part is that they involve no technical setup or coding whatsoever, so you can set them up in minutes (seriously, minutes) without having to make changes to your existing site. Let us know what you think of Lead Flows on Product Hunt.

7) Buffer

There’s a lot you can do with social without spending any money. Social media is an amplifier. It takes time, but if you build a following, it is a great way to take that awesome content you’re producing and spreading it further and wider.

For social media marketing on all the major networks, Buffer is a great place to start. It connects your business’ Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+ accounts in a single platform and lets you share text, links, photos, and videos, either immediately or to schedule for later.

Image Credit: Buffer

8) Canva

Tools that make creating visual content easier are important for growth, especially for a business with limited design resources. Being able to create great images in a short amount of time will help make your website, your emails, your social media posts, and every other marketing asset more engaging and attractive to your audience. Simply put, better visuals = more engagement = more traffic = business growth.

Canva makes it easy and fast for people who aren’t designers by trade (like me, as my team knows well) to create visual content quickly.

Image Credit: Entrepreneur’s Organization

Free Growth Tools for Sales

9) join.me Free Conference Calls & Screen Sharing

The easier you make it for your sales team to interact with leads and prospects, the better they’ll be at closing customers, which you most definitely need if you want to grow your business. join.me isn’t software — all your reps have to do to start a call is open up the desktop or mobile app or log in online.

There are a lot of meetings tools out there, but this one is one of the fastest, most reliable, most intuitive, and easiest to use. And if you use HubSpot’s free CRM, you can start a join.me meeting directly from your contact timeline.

Image Credit: join.me

10) HubSpot Sales Templates

Your sales reps are probably wasting a lot of time writing the same emails over, and over, and over again. There’s a lot of value in streamlining the emailing process while still making sure sales reps are sending high-quality emails. If your sales reps can get their hands on personalized email templates, that’ll save hundreds of hours over the long term. Templates, a feature of HubSpot Sales, lets you access personalized email templates for free from within your inbox.

What makes this tool particularly powerful for sales teams is that you can build a shared library of templates everyone can use. You can also aggregate data on how often emails with certain templates get opened or clicked, which helps you hone in on the approaches worth sharing.

11) HubSpot Sales Email Open Tracking & Notifications

This is one of my favorite email tools, not just for sales teams, but for personal use. It sends instant desktop notifications when the emails you send get opened. You’ll see who opened the email, at what time, on which device, and where they were located when they opened it. If you want to look at all your notifications, or all your notifications on a specific email, then you can view the full history in a stream.

This list of free tools is a starting point for those looking to grow from startup into sustainable. Down the road, you’ll want to integrate your growth tools together into a true growth stack. For those looking to take the next step, we’ve mapped out our version of a complete growth stack over on Product Hunt. Take a look and let our engineers know what you think.

Twitter remains a keystone of any social media strategy. Used well, it can help your organization understand how potential members are finding content that interests them and attract the right kind of followers to your account.

To whet your appetite a bit, here’s some examples we love.

Nonprofits Who Rock at Twitter

1) The Stroke Association

The first thing you’ll notice on the Stroke Association’s Twitter page is that it’s making great use of its hero image space. It includes a moving image there, as most nonprofits do. But it also includes a clear mission statement and call-to-action (CTA). This group isn’t letting a bit of Twitter real estate go to waste.

The stream itself has a great mix of educational resources about stroke treatments, personal stories, and compelling CTAs to participate in their action campaigns. 

2) National Forests Foundation

Well, it’s the National Forests Foundation – so they’re primed to have a steady stream of gorgeous pics and videos. A rough guestimate says about 90% of their posts include an image. The foundation also retweets images tweeted out by other forest associations, which is always a good way to share the Twitter love.

They use their pinned post to keep a donation CTA front and center. The foundation includes other CTAs in the stream, like a CTA to sign up for its newsletter. Yet they keep the number of CTA tweets low relative to the volume of their travel and educational tweets. 

Ten Things That Might Surprise You About Elk https://t.co/HA7oMfTul2 http://pic.twitter.com/QRxXmiJ4Q9

— National Forest Fdn. (@NationalForests)
October 25, 2016

3) American Heart Association

The AHA does user generated content (UGC) really well. It’s created a branded hashtag (#LifeIsWhy), that it promotes right in its Twitter bio along with a CTA for people to share their stories. It also runs more focused UGC campaigns, such as partnering with the American Stroke Association to post a variety of different “fill in the blank” tweets. 

It also actively participates with related organizations on Twitter to encourage and share UGC, like retweeting questions and answers for a heart healthy foodie Twitter chat. 

Fill in the blank below and then develop your own stroke hero story at https://t.co/3YBx2Pctyp #WSD16 http://pic.twitter.com/hMIyjaeRXK

— American Heart Assoc (@American_Heart)
October 24, 2016

4) National Education Association

The NEA stream includes a wide variety of CTAs promoting webinars on one of its signature issues. Each CTA tweet is different with its own unique visual and copy, which is a great way to heavily promote an action or campaign without the organization’s stream lacking visual interest or coming off as singularly promotional. 

Teacher Evaluation 101: Tips for a Successful Classroom Observation Webinar TONIGHT 7 PM ET https://t.co/NriJ50wSNY #ntchat

— NEA (@NEAToday)
October 27, 2016

5) Nonprofit Quarterly

As a native publisher of content, virtually every tweet on NPQ’s stream is a link back to its own website. Yet it does an effective job of sharing its own content without coming off as self-promotional. It helps that the content in the magazine is squarely focused on the issues that interest its target market.

How can a nonprofit make a bad media situation worse? By not following a crisis #communications plan https://t.co/6Nm84vGjYp

— Nonprofit Quarterly (@npquarterly)
October 28, 2016

6) Charity:Water

With 1.51 million followers, this organization has to be doing a lot right. Its Twitter stream is filled with strong, perfectly sized images of the people they help with Tweets sharing a bit about each one’s story. The organization also makes good use of relevant hashtags created by others to share its message and support its cause, like with the #GlobalHandwashingDay hashtag.

Charity:Water also uses Twitter’s Alert system to send out emergency or other time-sensitive information to people who sign up to receive them. Twitter has a number of tools groups can use to extend their Twitter account’s purpose and influence. This organization doesn’t overlook them.

7) NOAA’s Ocean Service

This organization is also making good use of Twitter’s range of tools. It got creative with Twitter surveys and uses them to post ocean-related trivia questions instead. It also uses hashtags well, like tweeting out gorgeous ocean images each #TravelTuesday and promoting its own #OceanFactFriday.

Actually, this is just one of the NOAA’s (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) Twitter accounts. NOAA set up different Twitter accounts for different sub-departments and areas of focus, such as Clean Coasts, Fisheries, and using sharing technology and best practices to protect coastlines. This is an effective way to gain followers with a specific interest who may not want to follow a more general interest account. The Ocean Service Twitter account does a great job of retweeting its sibling accounts and provide the more generalized experience for those who do want it.

Naturally occurring oil seeps are the largest source of oil entering the world ocean! Details: https://t.co/IY5rigtrfX #OceanFactFriday http://pic.twitter.com/AzHebpAmFw

— NOAA’s Ocean Service (@noaaocean)
October 21, 2016

8) Code.org

This organization, dedicated to encouraging the study of computer sciences for everyone, is also one of the few we saw taking advantage of a using pinned tweet. Instead of a donation CTA, its pinned tweet shares a short video that introduces the group, its mission, and its team.

Its stream offers many people and organizations thanks for their contributions to Code’s mission. It also shares a lot of content from others showing how coding and technology continue to advance and improve our world. Sharing other people’s content is a requisite for being a good Twitizen, and Code does it well by staying on point.

We started with the Hour of Code, but a lot has changed. Meet our team and see the impact of our first 3 years! https://t.co/dYPKrEBmNY

— Code.org (@codeorg)
September 8, 2016

9) Pencils of Promise

Most Twitter users have gotten the “use images” memo. Some still do it better than others, and we’ve shared some create accounts here that use quality, optimized images exceptionally well. Pencils of Promise has a good, image-rich stream, including using auto-run video (without automatic audio, thank you very much!) and GIFs.

To stand out in a world of Twitter visuals, the organization makes generous use of uncommon emojis. While the pencil emoji is its favorite, for obvious reasons, it also gets creative with emoji streams that bring attention to and reinforce its tweets. 

We’re promoting gender equality by providing education for all. Because let’s face it. Who runs the world? 🙋 #DayoftheGirl http://pic.twitter.com/DR8OebZgf6

— Pencils of Promise (@PencilsOfPromis)
October 11, 2016

10) Dallas Museum of Art

The DMA has a good mix of Twitter stream content, from promoting events, sharing photos of kids having fun at museum workshops, and sharing fun content about artists. All great stuff for a museum.

Where this Twitter account really shines is how well it’s integrating its other digital properties into its Twitter account. It’s Twitter profile photo is actually a branded Snapchat logo, and it includes its Snapchat handle in its Twitter bio. The DMA’s Twitter hero image is dedicated to promoting the museum’s mobile app.

It’s Your Turn

Hope these accounts offered some inspiration for creative ways you can boost your own organization’s Twitter profile. You’ll find some more ideas and checklists on how to get more followers and market insight from Twitter in this 3-piece kit we developed with Twitter.