AIP Podcast EP 82 - AI-Powered CRM for Growing Businesses with SmartDesk

This episode's guest, Craig Poulton, Co-Founder and CEO of SmartDesk, joins host Anne to explore how AI is transforming customer relationship management for small and medium-sized businesses. Craig shares the journey behind building an all-in-one CRM platform designed to give SMBs enterprise-level capabilities without the enterprise-level cost, bringing together sales, marketing, customer service, and automation in a single solution. He discusses why AI should enhance—not replace—human relationships, offering practical insights into using predictive analytics, intelligent automation, and AI-powered workflows to help businesses generate more leads, close more deals, and better serve their customers. Plus, Craig shares his vision for the future of AI-powered CRM and explains how SmartDesk is making advanced business technology more accessible for growing organizations. Tune in to discover how AI can help SMBs compete smarter, streamline operations, and build stronger customer relationships.

The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of AI Partnerships, a Railtown Technologies company.

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Website: www.smartdeskcx.com
LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/company/smartdeskcrm/

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The AIP Podcast is hosted by Anne Cheng, on behalf of the AI Partnerships, a Railtown company

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What if your small business could have the same customer relationship, firepower as a Fortune 500 company without the Fortune 500 price tag? Today's guest has spent over two decades making that a reality. Craig Poulton, founder of SmartDust CRM, joins us to talk about how AI is quietly revolutionizing the way SMBs attract leads, close deals, and keep customers for life. If you've ever wondered whether AI in your CRM is hype or genuine game changer, this one's for you. Welcome back to the AIP podcast, the show where we get into the minds of builders, founders, and business leaders who are putting artificial intelligence to work in the real world. Now I'm your host, Ann Ching, on behalf of the AI Partnerships Core. And if you're new here, this is the place to learn how AI is giving businesses a genuine competitive edge and how the next generation of technology is being democratized for companies of every shape and size. Today's episode is one I've been really looking forward to. My guest is Craig Poulton, the founder behind Smart Desk CRM, a platform that's on a mission to give SMBs access to enterprise grade CRM tools. Without that enterprise grade price tag, now Craig brings more than two decades of digital growth experience to the table. He started out hand coding websites back in the early days of the internet and has spent the years since building, advising, and leading companies at an intersection of sales, marketing, and technology. With SmartDisc, he's created an all-in-one cloud-based CRM platform that integrates lead generation, marketing automation, VOYP, and omni-channel customer services. And now AI into a single system designed for the way the modern SMP actually works. Craig, welcome to the AIP podcast.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Thank you. Thank you. It's very good to be here with you.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Craig, let's dive right in. You've been in the digital space for over 20 years, from hand coding these websites to founding a CRM platform used by businesses across the market. Can you take us back to the beginning? That's you know, that backstory. What was the problem that you kept seeing that ultimately led you to building Smart Desk?

SPEAKER_01 2:49

Sure. Well, yes, it's definitely gonna date myself here. But uh yes, it was the 90s where I took an interest in web design. Um I think we're at HTML 4, was the actual official level, maybe when I got into it. But um I took a liking to it. I had a propensity for it, I think. Um and I was pretty good with a graphic design program. So when I started mixing some graphic design elements with HTML, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of building some websites. And one thing led to another. I started a company, started a web design company really in the early days, before WordPress, before HubSpot, um, just at the cusp of like Salesforce coming online as well. Um, but there really were no tools for companies and for customers to kind of make this process easy. So they hi had to hire, excuse me, they had to hire companies to get this done for them. Um, and we were, of course, one of those companies. But as technology came into the fold uh and we were in the web space, customers just expected us to have a knowledge of all of these things. Oh, you're a web, you know, company. Um, I want WordPress, I want Joomla, I want Drupal, and whatever other flavors of uh website management applications were online at the time. We actually started building a software application um more as just something to help us control some of the activities we wanted to do, but it never really got that far. But that was the first impetus of the idea of creating Smart Desk is instead of trying to make multiple applications work and multiple plugins work together, you know, why not build something that would just be a cohesive unit for companies to use? Um, and that's what ended up coming, you know, down the road many years later, uh, when I formed Smart Desk, because initially I was part of, I started another company, like I said, a web design company. We weren't really building technology. We were just too busy with the service component of the company at the time. Um, but that was the seed that kind of gave me the idea of building something that didn't have to have us jumping around from application to application.

SPEAKER_00 4:57

That's great. You know, that's long been this gap between CRM tools that the big enterprises can afford and what's realistically accessible to small businesses. Where does smart desk sit in that landscape and how do you actually close that gap without cutting corners on capability?

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yeah, we really didn't want to. And yeah, I don't know if it was the best approach of trying to go to market with, you know, a four or five software in one solution, but you know, that's what we did because we had built all these different types of solutions for customers. So we thought, okay, let's put it all together, which was going to include your basic CRM, you know, your sales, pipelines, and workflows, a customer service component, and a website. We've always had the ability to build a website into our into our CRM solution. Um, so we went to market thinking that these are the core things that customers would would need to have. Every company needs a website. Why have it in multiple places when you can have it in one location? Your landing pages, all your sub pages, and things like that. So we started building an application that would encompass all those things. And since then, it's expanded to a number of other modules and features that have made this process, I think, even easier for companies to choose us over other applications, which we'll probably get into a little bit more detail after. But um, it really was the core solutions that we wanted to, features that we wanted to have for our customers. Um, like integrated features like um integrated telephone calling, integrated email blasting. So you don't have to have a MailChimp account or a constant contact account. That's built in. You don't have to bring in a Ring Central or a Twilio account. It's natively built into the application, right? We've built a lead management tool in SmartDesk. So you don't have to have an Apollo or a Zoom Info account, right? These are very small business-friendly tools that they all need, but it gets too complicated when you have to do the integration yourself, or it gets too costly when you have to hire a company to make it all work together. So we're really trying to do a turnkey feature solution within the application for our customers.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

That's great. You know, um, this is the AIP podcast. So AI is part of our um bread and butter. Now, AI is being bolted onto almost every single platform right now, sometimes meaningfully and sometimes less so. Now, how is Smart Desk actually using AI? Are we talking smarter automation, predictive lead scoring, conversational agents, and really how do you make sure it adds genuine value rather than just noise?

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Yeah. Well, we're using AI in two levels. So we're using it obviously for the speed of development, which a lot of companies are doing. So we are able to offer our customers now um a very advanced set of features because of AI. So they're not our customers are not getting a scaled-down version of a CRM application now because of you know this new technology. And as we're you know, using it, we're also adding it into the application so our customers can benefit from it. But we're not going all in, you know, we're introducing elements. So philosophically, you know, certain things that I don't like when AI does certain things, I do not like it when AI tries to uh replace a human being. So we're not building automated, you know, calling bots and answering services either until the technology gets accepted and it's understood, and there's a um a universal acceptance of okay, I'm calling, I know I'm gonna be speaking to a bot, we'll build those things in there. I certainly don't want any of our customers using that technology to spam or solicit companies with an automated bot trying to be a human or pretending to be, because I've gotten those phone calls and uh they're off-putting the instant you realize that you know it's not a person on the other end of the line. Um, but we're using it in you know, places that I think our customers would benefit the most. So, you know, you know, you're drafting an email, you're creating a campaign, any content ideas, um, predictive uh lead scoring, predictive um workflow analysis. So, you know, if you're going through a work through workflow process, what stage do you need to get to before you have a 60% likelihood to close the deal? So that's all calculated using AI. So you don't have to either manually enter those numbers, you can just let the system kind of tell you and give you your forecasting a lot more accurately. Um, and we're gonna be adding in more AI, some sentiment analysis. We've been playing with some um some overviews of some actions that the sales reps or customer service people should take based on the communications that are coming through. Um, there's a lot of ideas like that that we're working on and implementing, of course.

SPEAKER_00 9:53

That's great. Now that that's important. So now let's look at the CRM market a little bit more broadly, right? We've got Salesforce, we've got the hub spots of the world, and a lot of wealth resource incumbents. So, where do you see Smart Desk in five years and what does the AI-powered CRM landscape look like for SMBs that will be tomorrow's, you know, big companies as we head deeper into this decade?

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Yep. Well, Salesforce and HubSpot, since they're the big guys in the industry, they're they're obviously incredible companies and offer a lot of value to their customers. Salesforce is clearly an enterprise solution and should be used as an enterprise solution and not a small to medium-sized business CRM solution. The costs and the complexities get out of hand a little too quickly. HubSpot's become very similar to Salesforce in that area. Um, you can start off at a reasonable price and feel like you're getting good value, but you're gonna realize quickly as you're growing a company that you need, you know, the professional marketing package and you need the higher sales packages. And you know, your hundreds of dollars a month has now turned into thousands of dollars a month pretty quick. Um, and you invest in something, you tend to want to stick with it, and it's very difficult to abandon that process. So, you know, for us, we really did build it as a small to medium-sized, you know, tool. I think this is where HubSpot started and kind of abandoned that market a little bit. We fit really well in that niche just because we're a very easy-to-use CRM turnkey with a lot of features, and like you said so eloquently in the intro, it's enterprise level features at entry-level pricing. Um, and that's what we've aimed to be. So, in five years from now, you know, we're we're looking to kind of still be in that space, especially with how quickly AI can add function and features. Very tempting to maybe become an enterprise solution because the capability exists, but that's not our goal. Our goal is to service um the small to medium-sized business at an affordable rate. We're working more and more with not-for-profits and associations because of some of the features that we've built into the application. And there'll be more and more AI automation to make the process a lot easier to get started with our solution as we continue to develop. But you know, in the next five years, it's going to be very interesting to see how some of the things develop in the marketplace, right? I mean, uh six months ago, we weren't really um developing with AI. It was too much of an interference with what we were doing. Like we'd have to correct things. It was creating components and controllers, or we didn't want it to in the code. But yeah, we really found a rhythm in the last four to six months, and um, it's completely changed how we're advancing the company. Next six months or six years, it's really hard to predict, but I like the direction things are going. You know, I know AI is disrupting a lot of companies, a lot of organizations, and a lot of people are scared. Um, you know, and I certain companies are going to benefit uh from either using it or benefiting from its capabilities. And for us, it's you know, we're an aggregator of data and solutions. So we can take a lot of even our customers' ideas and build them into our software so that they could be more efficient as they as they grow. So yeah, the next five years look pretty exciting.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yeah, I'm I'm excited hearing this. And well, Craig, we're unfortunately out of time, but this has been a really genuinely um insightful conversation, and I loved how human-centric this conversation was. So thank you so much for joining us on the AIP podcast. And if today's episode sparked something for you, whether it's a question about your own AI strategy or a business challenge that you're wrestling with, I'd love to hear from you. Find us at aipartnershipscorp.com or connect with us on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and hit subscribe so you never miss any conversation ever. We'll see you the next time on the AIP podcast where AI meets the real world of business. This is your host, Ann Ching, on behalf of the AI Partnerships Corps, signing off.