Top Customer-Facing Mobile Apps for SMBs Today–and the Trajectory for Tomorrow

How are SMBs using mobile solutions to interact with their customers, suppliers and partners? What are top mobile apps that SMBs offer for their external customers, partners and supplier to use? Just as important, what mobile applications are they planning to deploy?
We found out in our recently completed SMB Group 2012 SMB Mobile Solutions Study, [...]

The Yin and Yang of Mobile Applications For SMBs

What are SMBs top business challenges, and how well do mobile solutions help them meet these challenges? Interestingly, that depends on whether you’re asking them about the benefits of having their employees use internal mobile apps, or the value of offering mobile apps and mobile-friendly web sites for external customers, partners and suppliers to use.
We [...]

YouDazzle: Where Cloud Collaboration Meets Network Marketing

In SMB Group studies, small business decision-makers consistently put colleagues, friends and family at or near the top of the list as key sources for advice when it comes to selecting technology solutions for their businesses (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Who SMBs Turn to for Guidance About Technology Solutions

So when start-up YouDazzle CEO and co-founder [...]

Intuit: From Products to Services, Applications to Platform

Last week I had the opportunity to attend Intuit’s Innovation Gallery Walk in NYC. Intuit uses the Gallery Walk to showcase new solutions that it is bringing to market as well as ones that are still in R&D.
This year’s Gallery Walk featured simulated storefronts and back offices to help demonstrate how Intuit’s solutions work for [...]

IBM Smarter Commerce for Midsize Businesses – Future Trends

To help companies understand IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today’s customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the final post in the series.
Empowered customers are [...]

IBM Smarter Commerce for Midsize Businesses – Future Trends

—by Laurie McCabe, SMB Group, in partnership with Brent Leary, CRM Essentials  
To help companies understand IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today’s customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. [...]

Swimming with the Smarter Customer: The Speedo International Story

—by Laurie McCabe, SMB Group, in partnership with Brent Leary, CRM Essentials

Recently, Brent Leary and I had the opportunity to talk with Gareth Beer, Ecommerce Manager for Speedo International and learn about how Speedo International is applying smarter commerce philosophies and solutions to better serve its customers. We think Beer’s insights about Speedo’s experience in [...]

What Can We Learn From This Year’s Holiday Season?

—by Brent Leary, CRM Essentials
In conjunction with IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today’s customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the fourth post in the series.

Christmas [...]

More than a Name Change: IBM Rebrands LotusLive as IBM SmartCloud for Social Business

Attending Lotusphere (or any other big vendor event) is kind of like getting soaked with a fire hose. So instead of providing overall highlights (here’s a 60-second video that does this quite well, FYI), I’m dialing the nozzle to focus on LotusLive news at Lotusphere 2012, and my perspective on it relative to the SMB [...]

Closing the Business Intelligence Gap for Small Businesses

Most small and medium businesses (SMBs) can relate to Albert Einstein’s famous quote that  “Information is not knowledge.”  Many SMBs have plenty of data, but find it challenging to get the insights from it that they need to run their businesses more effectively and efficiently.
Businesses have always needed the ability to track and measure critical [...]