Twenty-seven years ago, Michael Dell launched Dell with $1,000 and a streamlined sales and manufacturing model that revolutionized the PC industry. Sticking with this playbook, Dell achieved similar success in the server market, once again disrupting the status quo. However, times changed, and Dell started to look like a one-trick pony. As Michael Dell himself acknowledged at last week’s Dell’...
Tag: Small Business
Is There a Method to Social Media Madness?
By Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials SMB adoption of social media for sales, marketing, product development and customer service is on the rise – but how are SMBs tracking, analyzing and measuring the success of their social media endeavors? In our joint SMB Group/CRM Essentials “2011 Small and Medium Business Social Business Study,” we su...
Intuit and Salesforce Partner Up: Who’s the Big Winner?
Last week, Intuit and Salesforce.com announced that they would partner to integrate Intuit QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online small business accounting software with Salesforce’s small business CRM editions (Contact Manager, Group and Professional). Under the terms of the deal, Intuit will resell a pre-integrated version of the Salesforce CRM application via Intuit’s App Center (as well as Intui...
Changing Customer Service Channels: The Gap Between Social Media Haves and Have Nots
Co-authored by: Laurie McCabe and Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials How quickly is social media catching on as an engagement channel for SMB customer service and support? It depends on who you ...
Social Business: Why Having a Plan Matters
Co-authored by: Laurie McCabe and Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials Good plans shape good decisions. That's why good planning helps to make elusive dreams come true. Lester R. Bittel, The Nine Master Keys of Management This seems to be especially true when it comes t...
Salesforce’s Dimdim Acquisition–Adding to a String of Collaboration Pearls
The SMB Group has followed (and used!) Dimdim, which has provided innovative, easy to use Web conferencing services in a freemium model with very liberal terms of use, for a couple of years. In January, Salesforce.com acquired Dimdim for $31 million. Immediately afte...
HubSpot: From Breakthrough to Breakout
I’ve been very impressed by HubSpot, which helps small and medium businesses (SMBs) optimize and streamline their inbound marketing programs (see my 2009 interview with HubSpot Marketing VP Mike Volpe) for a while now. Looks like others are impressed too—as evidenced by HubSpot’s announceme...
What Are Integrated Payment Solutions and Why Should You Care?
(Originally published January 30, 2011 in Small Business Computing) What are Integrated Payments Solutions? Integrated payment solutions are tools that your business can use to integrate accounting, customer relationship manag...
SMB Group Top Ten 2011 SMB Technology Predictions
Here are the SMB Group’s Top 10 SMB Technology Predictions for 2011! A more detailed description of each follows below. 1. Mobile Commerce Lifts Off 2. SMBs Demand that Vendors Bring Order to Social Media Chaos
Zoho Support: Big Business Customer Service for Small Business Budgets
Zoho, one of the pioneers in cloud computing solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs), has added a new customer support management application to its line up of 20-plus cloud-based collaboration, communication, business and office productivity solutions. Zoho Support helps streamline the process to create, capture, process and manage support tickets. Z...