What to Look for in Cloud CRMs (Video)

SMB Group Co-founder & Partner Laurie McCabe explains how SMBs can find the right cloud CRM for them and use it as a springboard for growth in this clip from CRM Evolution 2018.

See more clips from CRM evolution in the CRM evolution Conference video portal. Learn more about CRM evolution here. 

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Laurie McCabe: How the heck are you gonna take advantage of the new technologies that are coming down the pike that obviously your competitors are going to take advantage of? We work very closely with a couple of the SMB vendors, Intuit for instance. I love to use Intuit as an example because it's truly a small business--20 and under employees is what they target. Their goal is to automagically--and they use that word--embed things like AI and machine learning into the app. They're not even telling these customers, but you can opt to have your expenses auto-categorized or get your information via Alexa: Who is my best customer? What's the trend in product x?

Putting in the conversational interfaces, putting in AI, putting in the machine learning, and I feel like it's us in our personal life with Siri or Alexa. We're using AI and machine learning every day just to answer questions like: What's the best way for me to get to the airport? Whatever question you want to ask. What are the best new shows on Netflix?

We don't think about it. We just use it, and we just get benefit from it. I think a lot of vendors that are in this small and medium business space are really planning and working on putting more and more of that in.

When you're looking at your alternatives for CRM or really any core business solutions, you definitely need the functionality that you want, but your small or medium business probably can only absorb so much at one time. Make sure that the vendor has something that you can do X now and do Y next year and in six months do Z or whatever.

Make sure that they have an open API. Most of the cloud vendors have open APIs, and the big ones have big partner ecosystems with a lot of apps that can easily be added. The ones that have a vision of how they’re embedding these technologies so that you won't have to bolt them on. Over time, it'll be, hopefully, as easy to use as our consumer devices are.

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