The SMB Group and CRM Essentials recently completed the 2011 SMB Collaboration and Communications Study. We asked more than 800 SMB (small business is 1-99 employees; medium business is 100-999 employees) decision-makers and influencers how they collaborate, what t...
Tag: SMB
Smarter Commerce for the Midmarket: An Interview with IBM’s Ron Kline
Here’s an edited transcript of the podcast series that Brent Leary of CRM Essentials and Sanjeev Aggarwal, of SMB Group recorded with Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s midmarket division, about IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions for SMBs. If you’d like to listen to the recorded podcast series, select below. [soundcloud url="https://a...
My Love-Hate Relationship With Twitter
If you're in the IT industry, tweeting has probably become a regular part of your day, like brushing your teeth. I know it has for me, as an industry...
Are You Ready? Transforming Your Business for the Smarter Customer
—by Laurie McCabe, SMB Group 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 secon...
The Bank of IBM: Open for Small and Medium Businesses
SMBs comprise nearly 65 percent of global GDP, account for more than 90 percent of all businesses, and employ over 90 percent of the world’s workforce. As such, SMB growth is crucial to the global economic recovery. But, as anyone that’s every run a small business knows, lack of financing often gets in the way of business growth. In fact, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) indicates t...
Key Themes from SAP TechEd 2011–How Do They Relate to SMBs?
As the name implies, SAP TechEd offers technical education, such as hands-on workshops, deep-dive lectures and sessions with SAP technical experts about all things SAP. That said, TechEd isn't for everyone, and it’s no wonder that most of the 6,500+ attendees at SAP TechEd 2011, held the week of September 12 in Las Vegas, were SAP partners and technology specialists from the vendor’s large ente...
Is Salesforce.com Outgrowing SMBs?
Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is a great visionary with a big appetite for change. From packaged software to the cloud, from CRM to platform-as-a-service, he's painted a color by number picture for businesses to emulate. But does his latest work, “the social enterprise" come with an easy enough guide for small businesses to paint it? The Paint-by-Numbers Social Enterprise Be...
6 Tips to Maximize Twitter Event Hashtags
Originally published in Small Business Computing, 8-29-11. Recently, a client asked me for some tips about how to get the maximum mileage out of Twitter event hashtags. Creating Twitter hashtags for your business events is a great way to mul...
The Impact of HP’s New Direction—An SMB Market Perspective
--by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group After HP’s announcement that it would ditch it’s new Touchpad and put WebOS in mothballs, rumors leaked about it's intentions to spin-off or sell it’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) PC business and acquire information management software vendor Autonomy for $10.2B. Combined, these moves confirm HP’s CEO, Leo Apotheker’s strategy to get ...
Recap of Joint Social Business Webinar with Radian6 and CRM Essentials
Today I had the pleasure of joining David Alston from Radian6 and the legendary Brent Leary of CRM Essentials for a webinar live from CRM Evolution. We had a lively conversation about some of the key social business findings that the SMB Group and CRM Essentials uncovered in the 2011 SMB Social Business Study, which Radian6 helped to sponsor. If you missed it, you can replay the