While it's tempting to paint the "SMB market" with one broad-brush stroke, the term actually represents very fragmented terrain. You can slice ...
Category: SMB
Sage’s Rebranding: More than a Name Change
Love it or hate it, the first results of Sage North America’s brand transformation strategy have started rolling out in North America. Sage North America CEO Pascal Houilon announced the rebranding initiative last year, which aims to strengthen Sage’s brand--especially in North America (link to last years blog). The initiative is designed to address the fact that while many ind...
Making Small Business a Bigger Business: Intuit’s Acquisition of Demandforce
Intuit announced last week that it was acquiring Demandforce, which provides an integrated suite of Web-based social media and marketing tools for small businesses, for $423.5 million in cash. Demandforce automates many of the intern...
Dell 2.0: A Progress Report from Dell’s 2012 Annual Analyst Conference
I’ve been tracking and writing about Dell since the late 1990s, when Dell was riding high on its success in essentially reinventing the PC and x86 markets with its direct and efficient supply chain model. Over the years, I have watched Dell go through several fits and starts as it struggled to move past its traditional hardware and product-centric comfort zone. Fast forward to...
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
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 asked more than 750 SMB (small busine...
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
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.
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...
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 success metrics in a quantifiable way. The p...