Category: SMB strategy

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 th...

Cisco OnPlus: IT Infrastructure Advisory and Management Services Solution For Small Businesses

--by Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group Last month, Cisco introduced a new IT Infrastructure advisory and management service solution designed for VARs to provide to small businesses with less than 100 employees. Delivered via Cisco’s value-added reseller (VAR) channel, Cisco OnPlus enables VARs to offload the mundane, time-consuming tasks of managing a network environmen...

Slideshow: Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions for 2012

Each year, the SMB Group offers its Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions. In 2011, we created a slideshow version. Due to popular demand, we've created a slideshow version of our 2012 predictions, which are summarized below. Economic Anxiety Low...

Take the Poll: Is Salesforce.com becoming too complex for your SMB?

In the post, Is Salesforce Outgrowing SMBs? I discussed Salesforce.com's new social enterprise vision, and questioned how it will work for SMBs. If you are part of a small or medium business, I'd like your thoughts! [polldaddy poll=5484341]

Sage Summit 2011: Tackling the Sage NA Branding Challenge

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Sage Summit 2011, Sage’s first combination partner and customer event. I’ve been attending Sage partner, customer and analyst events for several years, observing and commenting on its ongoing attempts to unify it’s corporate brand across multiple small and medium business (SMB) solutions. Earlier this year, following Sue Swenson’s retirement, Pascal Houillon to...

Seven Daily Inspirations from Dell’s Women Entrepreneur Network Event

Entrepreneurs are a rare breed. Although start-up activity has been on the upswing, just 0.34 of the adults in the U.S. for example (or 340 out of 100,000) started a new business each month in 2009, according to the Kaufman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. Women entrepreneurs are even more exceptional, accounting for just 29% of all U.S. businesses, as indicated in a recent American Express s...

SAP Business One: Big Business Capabilities on a Small Business Budget

SAP has forged its corporate identity in the large enterprise space, serving the likes of Coca Cola and Dow Chemical. But, while attending SAP's Sapphire user event last week, I had the opportunity to meet with Andreas Wolfinger, Global Head of Solution Management and Product Management for SAP Business One, and Jennifer Schulze, Director SME Solutions Marketing (who I interviewed in this

Social Media: How Does Your Small Business Stack Up?

Social media offers small businesses an inexpensive, relatively friction-free way to accomplish different business functions, from generating new leads to getting input for new product development. Consequently, it's not surprising that small businesses are rapidly moving to take advantage of it. How far along the social media curve is your business compared to your peers? We’ve picked some ke...