By SMB Group’s Kelly Teal, Contributing Analyst, and Laurie McCabe, Co-founder If you’ve watched “Mrs. Davis” or joked that the world feels a little Skynet-esque, you aren’t alone in wondering about the real-life implications and repercussions of artificial intelligence. The sudden surge of AI tools in 2023 has generated (pun intended) a lot of buzz […]
Category: Business Solutions
HubSpot’s AI Vision: Transforming Customer Connections
HubSpot’s Inbound 2023 conference was held last week in Boston. Like seemingly every other tech event this year, the theme of Inbound was AI — specifically, how businesses can use AI to better connect to and engage with their customers. In this blog, I delve into HubSpot’s AI strategy and offerings, as discussed in the […]
Unlocking Small Business Success with CRM: Zoho’s 2023 State of Customer Operations for U.S. Small Businesses Report
For small businesses, success often hinges on the ability to juggle numerous tasks and wear multiple hats. From managing day-to-day operations to nurturing customer relationships, every aspect of a small business counts. How the business manages these operations and the solutions they choose to use to help with the process, also contribute towards this success. […]
Using AI to Improve Customer Service for Business Growth
by Guest Contributor Maryia Fokina, Digital PR & Content Specialist at Tidio In the modern era marked by rapid technological advancements, AI is a truly transformative force that can help businesses scale. While the concept of integrating AI might still seem foreign to some business owners, the benefits are immense. One of the areas where AI […]
Salesforce Starter: Simplifying the Path to CRM
Salesforce Starter is Salesforce’s new solution designed to help businesses more easily try, buy, and get value from Salesforce’s CRM solutions. While the first iteration of Salesforce Starter has been available since August 2022, the Summer release, announced on August 2, adds new marketing capabilities to the solution—and makes Starter a much more formidable contender […]
Sustainability Matters: ESG Trends and Strategies for Small and Medium Businesses
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies and programs are now common practice for most large, publicly traded corporations. Despite recent efforts to politicize ESG, these companies are staying the course — and for good reason: The ranks of socially conscious customers, employees, and investors are on the rise—and these stakeholders want to do business with […]
Zoho Expands Its Ambitions On Multiple Fronts
After a four-year hiatus due to COVID-19, Zoho’s Zoholics event was back in Austin, TX the first week of May, featuring an analyst track that I attended. The dominant takeaway is that Zoho, which already sells more than 60 business applications in 160-plus countries, is expanding on multiple fronts. The company is doubling down in […]
From Skateboards to Farm Equipment: How Shark Wheel Is Reinventing the Wheel and Its Financial Processes
By SMB Group’s Kelly Teal, Contributing Analyst, and Laurie McCabe, Co-founder It’s not every day that someone quite literally reinvents the wheel. But that’s just what David Patrick and Zack Fleishman did about 10 years ago. Now, after a decade of prototyping, testing, and strategizing, their efforts are paying off. Their company, Shark Wheel, has […]
New Report Reveals How Key Trends and Challenges are Impacting Financial Management
What are the key trends and challenges that SMB financial professionals are facing, and how are they impacting business and financial management practices? These are the questions we explore in this new report, 2023 State of Finance Automation: SMB Financial Management Insights & Trends. The insights in the report are based on BILL’s State of […]
Dell’s New APEX Managed Device Service: A Game Changer for SMBs
Finding, hiring, and retaining quality IT people is a struggle for many small and medium businesses (SMBs) with 1 to 499 employees. The situation is most severe at the low end. In businesses with fewer than 20 employees, 47% say that they have no formal IT support, and 22% report that non-IT staff look after […]