Working from home can sound like a dream for many people. You get to enjoy more time in your house, you cut out the commute, and you get to see much more of your family.

But the flip side has some not-so-dreamy realities, especially for parents having to balance work and childcare: a difficulty to focus; having to juggle work with looking after children and, in some cases, homeschooling them; blurry lines between work time and personal time, and kids lobbying for your undivided attention when you need to GSD.

A customer walks up to your store. What’s the first thing you do?

Ask them what they need? Show them a few choices that are trending? Let them check the store out before reaching out to them?

Email newsletters are a powerhouse in marketing for solopreneurs and major corporations alike.

Both types of businesses have to work hard crafting and sending newsletters that work for their audience and their brand.

Cloud-based business applications offer brilliant, flexible, and affordable solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. They have their own structure, business model, benefits, and challenges, including contact management.

We asked David Anderson, LionDesk Founder and CEO, about the impact of these platforms on the growth of SMBs and the importance of keeping different tools aligned. This is what he told us.

Which apps are you using to power your marketing operations?

Most teams collect and use data in their CRM as well as several marketing apps, such as an email marketing tool and automation software.

The amount of data in the world is growing exponentially. By the time you finish reading this page, 90 million texts will be sent and received. 350,000 Instagram posts will be uploaded. 1.2 million Skype calls will be made. 21 million GB of traffic will be received on the internet.

Proper contact management is essential to keep your business productive and organized. But while technology offers countless solutions to effectively manage contacts at scale, without good processes your contacts can get messy very quickly.