One on One Interviews: Recent Episodes
Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
We're looking back at 2022 on this final episode of Small Biz in :15 for the year. Check out the highlights from business experts who chatted with us in the first 7 months of our show. During that time, we learned about some amazing business tips, advice and how you can stay abreast of changing trends. We're positive that entrepreneurs and solopreneurs can take away some priceless business gems from the interviews and use them to elevate their small businesses in the year 2023 and beyond.
In this episode of Small Biz in :15, Executive Editor Shawn Hessinger talks with Jim Kukral and they discuss ways small business owners can better market their companies, brands, products and services to reach more people.
Are you looking for ways to create the perfect lead magnet to collect more clients and customers?
In this episode, Annie P. Ruggles Founder of the Non-Sleazy Sales Academy (tongue firmly in cheek on that one) shares tips with us for creating a lead magnet that will help you attract more leads and close more deals.
Don’t miss this inspirational overview of how to create a lead, magnet, prospects won't be able to resist, and what all it has to do with King Arthur and Merlin, for a fun twist.
Rieva Lesonsky joins host Shawn Hessinger of Small Business Trends to discuss the latest retail trends, including how to understand Millennial and Gen Z shopping habits.
James Clift discusses how to use artificial intelligence to build a small business website in this latest episode of Small Biz in :15.
On this latest episode of Small Biz in :15, host Shawn Hessinger talks with Monique Johnson to discuss the topic of hybrid events, those held both in-person and virtually, for small businesses.
A little over a year ago I spoke with Bryan Catanzaro of Nvidia about some of the interesting technology they were developing in the areas of graphical AI, voice synthesis and conversational/speech AI. Bryan shared a vision of the future of what things like machine learning and deep learning could do to impact the way we experience the world around us. And while some of the things like AI creating things like art and music and human sounding voices get a lot of attention, there are some more practical examples of AI already being used to help create better customer experiences when we need help with a product or service.
With a year going by I was curious to hear how things are progressing in these areas, and I was fortunate to speak via LinkedIn Live with Erik Pounds, Sr. Director of Enterprise Computing and Data Science at Nvidia, around the direction things like conversational and speech AI have moved in since l last spoke with Bryan.
If you are interested in buying a franchise, you might be surprised to discover that ones like Dunkin', and McDonald's probably aren't the opportunities that potential franchise owners should be looking at.
In this latest episode of Small Biz in :15, The Franchise King Joel Libava sits down with us in this episode to tell us about the latest franchise trends and what you should look for in a franchise opportunity.
Ecommerce expert John “ColderIce” Lawson and I recently transitioned our Watching Amazon show/podcast into Pass the Mic. The new name doesn’t mean we’ve grown tired of, well, watching Amazon, as we still plan to do plenty of that with all the things the company is into. But by rebranding it as PTM it allows us to broaden the topics and companies we can dive into, and of course TikTok is a great example of that.
In fact, there have been a few recent reports of TikTok potentially following in Amazon’s footsteps by building out their own fulfillment centers and capabilities in order to support the growing digital commerce of creators using their video platform. And though there haven’t been any formal announcements that this is happening, it got us to thinking if TikTok could really pull this off. And if they did what would be the potential impact for creators and small retailers trying to reach the billion-plus monthly visitors to the platform. Or why would TikTok fare better than Shopify who tried to build their fulfillment capabilities only to fail fast.
John and I went round and round on this one, as the thought of the fastest growing video platform taking on such a huge infrastructure project is intriguing. And we probably came away with more questions than answers.
If you need curated content for your business, you may think about doing it alone, especially if you're a good writer. However, this may not be the best course of action. Instead, it may be best to hire a professional copywriter. They can help you create compelling, engaging content that will help you attract more customers and grow your business.
In today's Small Biz in: 15 video, David Leonhardt, President of THGM Writing Services, explains why hiring a copywriter is often a better idea than trying to go it alone. Other highlights of the video include the benefits of hiring a copywriter, how to hire a copywriter and how to convey your message to them once you do.
Chris Hurn joins Shawn Hessinger to discuss how rising interest rates could affect small business loans now and in the future.
As the year has gone on I’ve been dipping my toes back into the industry conference scene more and more. And while I’m gearing up for my first trip to Vegas in three years for Oracle CloudWorld, Hurricane Ian kept me from getting there a couple of weeks ago for Oracle NetSuite’s SuiteWorld conference. SuiteWorld is a conference I’ve attended a number of times over the years, and with it being physically back I was looking forward to sitting down with company founder and Oracle EVP Evan Goldberg face-to-face for a conversation, instead of virtually for the past two years. But I was appreciative that even during this year’s event, Evan made time for another virtual conversation on LinkedIn Live, as I was really curious about his perspective on the current economic uncertainties of the economy – and what it means for the 32,000 small and midsize enterprises using his company’s platform to run their businesses on.
In the latest edition of Small Biz in :15, we discuss the impact of higher gas prices on small businesses and how to deal with them.
This week marks the 31st year of celebrating Customer Service Week, an international celebration of the importance of customer service and of the people who serve and support customers on a daily basis.
Many companies are participating in the spirit of the week’s salute to customer service workers with a look towards improving the service experience from both the customer and the employee perspective. Pegasystems, a leading customer engagement platform vendor, is hosting a free webinar on the trends driving the future of customer service, with the results of a survey on the same topic coming later in the week.
Fortuné Alexander, Senior Director, Product Marketing for Customer Service and Sales Automation at Pega, recently shared a few of the upcoming findings from the report in a recent LinkedIn Live conversation, and talks about why the future of service isn’t about replacing humans, but humans leveraging AI and automation for better service experiences, and to be more human with each other when the need arises.
Are you in the repair business? If so, you'll want to check out this Small Biz in: 15 episode, where we discuss Right to Repair and how it impacts small businesses, especially when it comes to the electronics repair business.
The U.S. House Committee on Small Business recently held a hearing on the right to repair and what it means for entrepreneurs. Gay Gordon-Byrne, Executive Director of the Digital Right to Repair Coalition, testified at the hearing and spent some time with us explaining the right to repair and its impact on small businesses.
Other highlights include explaining the right to resell (if you can't fix it, you can't sell it), how people in the repair business need to be very aware of what they can't do under copyright law and more.
The One-on-One series here at Small Business Trends was an idea I had that I shared with SBT publisher Anita Campbell, and she was gracious enough to allow me to give it a whirl. And the first conversation I had for the series was with Jon Ferrara, who is the cofounder of Goldmine (which he sold back near the turn of the century) and more recently the founder of Nimble. Well, that initial conversation took place twelve years ago this month, and to mark the occasion I recently caught up with The Right Reverend (my nickname for Jon) for a LinkedIn Live conversation (as part of a back-to-back show with TechCrunch enterprise reporter Ron Miller) to talk about the state of CRM, and why he’s still as passionate today about the industry he co-founded back in 1989 as he was back then.
Are you aware that Amazon offers last-mile services through delivery service partners? They do. And if you are thinking about a small business opportunity in this fascinating logistics niche, you'll want to check out this episode where Brent Leary, the Managing Partner at CRM Essentials, talks to Small Business Trends about his amazing visit to an Amazon delivery station in the Atlanta metro area and the important role small businesses play in Amazon's last mile.
This week I’m headed off to Dreamforce, Salesforce’s huge annual user conference, for the first time in three years. Before the pandemic shut everything down, 170,000 people attended Dreamforce in 2019. And while the conference took a few baby steps the last couple of years with very limited amounts of people attending the event in San Francisco, many more people experienced it virtually on Salesforce+, the streaming platform Salesforce created when all their physical events had to be canceled. But this week the conference is back with a significant number of folks expected to attend. And even though estimates are floating around of at least 30,000 people will be at the physical event, there may be four times that number if not more who will attend virtually.
My CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I had the opportunity to speak with Colin Fleming, Salesforce EVP of Global Brand Marketing, who is leading the Salesforce+ effort. We spoke with him two days after the streaming service was announced last year, and we wanted to hear what role Salesforce+ was going to play in this year’s Dreamforce now that it’s opening back up with a big attendance number expected. Colin also shares how the last year of Salesforce+ has led to a transformational change in how he sees events being designed, as well as the impact these changes will have of traditional B2B marketing initiatives.
Next week Salesforce’s big industry event, Dreamforce, is back in full force for the first time since the pandemic. It’s the 20th anniversary of the first Dreamforce, and they’re expecting about 150,000 folks to descend on San Francisco, which is not that far off from where it left off in 2019.
As I get ready to head out west for Dreamforce, I recently had the opportunity to speak with Salesforce’s Chief Equality Officer Lori Castillo-Martinez. Salesforce has been a leader in the area of diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI), taking up a number of initiatives sparked by the George Floyd murder. Over the past two years I spoke with then- Salesforce Chief Procurement Officer Craig Cuffie on a few occasions (in 2020 and 2021) to discuss the company’s efforts to increase the participation of underrepresented minorities in employment, leadership, supplier participation and venture capital investment. And Lori joined me to discuss the company’s continuing efforts in this area, and to share why she feels the future of work is not only being transformed by virtual technologies, but also by integrating DEI deeper into the core of how the business operates – and how it measures success.
Vibhav Vankayala, Product Marketing, Zoho Corporation and Dilip Nagarjaran, product manager of Zoho CRM discuss some of the surprising things a small business owner can do with CRM software.
The topic of this conversation is one that is common to any business looking to implement a tool to optimize their operations. What to avoid when deploying said technology, which in this case is Customer relationship management (CRM).
CRM software is an excellent tool for elevating your small business to new heights. But what's it all about?
Recently, Small Biz in: 15 on Location traveled to Austin, Texas for Zoho Day 2022 to speak to the experts there and learn more about how customer relationship management (CRM) software can help small businesses reach the next level.
Dilip Nagarjaran, product manager of Zoho CRM, discusses what CRM does and why your business needs it.
Then, Vibhav Vankayala, head of product marketing for Zoho CRM, speaks with us about how CRM helps your business manage customers while you scale.
So, if you are a small business owner who wants to save time and money while your list of customers grows, you won’t want to miss this special edition of SBT in:15.
Are you looking for a way to grow your business? Heat maps are a great way to track how people are interacting with your website or physical store. Recently, Small Biz in :15 On Location, traveled to Austin, Texas, for ZohoDay 2022. In this episode, Shawn Hessinger, the Chief Editor of Small Biz Trends talks with Zoho Corporation Product Manager Naresh Kumar to find out more about how heat maps and other software marketing tools can be used to grow your business.
Recently, Small Biz in :15 On Location talked with several industry leaders about what to look for in CRM software. Expert guests who weighed in on the topic and gave their insights include:
• Felena Hansen, founder of Hera Hub Co-working Space and Accelerator for Women, • Corey Reid, Senior Director of Marketing for Counter Culture Coffee & Specialty Roaster, and • Akshay Bama of Global Supply Acquisition, and Akhil Pippala, Associate Project Manager, for India-based car sharing service ZoomCar.
If you are a small to medium business and want to learn more about CRM systems and how to choose the right one for your type of industry, be sure to catch this episode.
Are you an entrepreneur, or even a solopreneur, wanting to effectively manage your business's social presence without a lot of hassle and expense? If so, you'll want to catch this latest Small Biz in: 15 On Location, where we travel to Austin, Texas for Zoho Day 2022 to talk to Praval Singh.
In this episode, Praval, the Zoho Vice President of Marketing and Customer Experience, sits down with Shawn Hessinger, the Chief Editor of Small Biz Trends, to discuss the ins and outs of managing your small business's social presence through Zoho Social.
Highlights of the interview include:
• What Zoho Social is and how it can help your small business. • How automation allows small business owners to spread their social presence. • How social listening platforms can flip negative customer feedback into “aha moments.” • Other features in Zoho Social that improve social media impact. • How to get started with the right tools.
Small businesses are always looking for ways to save money and become more efficient. One way they can do this is through all-in-one software solutions.
Recently, Small Biz in 15: On Location, traveled to Austin, Texas for Zoho Day 2022 and interviewed Zoho Senior Evangelist Taylor Backman about the benefits all-in-one software solutions bring to small businesses, including cost and time savings.
During the interview, you'll find out helpful information, such as:
• How using one software solution as opposed to several different solutions can be a huge advantage. • Some examples of systems that you might have in an all-in-one solution that you would want to integrate. • How all-in-one solutions can be less costly than going everywhere and paying different prices for different software. • The savings you can reap beyond just the price tag on the all-in-one software. • The cost savings that an all-in-one software platform can bring when it eliminates redundancy in business processes.
It's important to focus on business instead of technology. So, be sure to tune in to learn how you can use an all-in-one software solution to do that and other things to help elevate your small business.
Inflation is a huge problem right now. The cost of goods and services is going up, making it harder and harder for businesses to get by. Why is inflation so high right now? Anything from the Ukraine War to a strong demand laying waste to supply is behind the surge. What’s a small business owner to do? In this special episode of SmallBiz in :15 On Location, we interview business expert, Chandrashekar LSP, Senior Evangelist of the Zoho Corporation, to discuss how you can battle inflation with your business.
As a small business owner in the technical sector, have you ever heard of no-code and low-code apps? Or maybe you already well-versed in them and want to dig deeper into finding out how they can help your business? Maybe you want to know about getting started with implementation of the right one for your needs? What then?
This week in a special episode of Small Biz: in 15 On Location, Small Biz Trends travels to Austin, Texas for Zoho Day 2022 and talks to Zoho Product Manager Tejas Gadhia to get the answer to those questions and more.
Highlights of the interview include Tejas discussing the difference between low-code and no-code solutions and how to use low-code automation to improve your workflow.
Other insightful business questions that Tejas Gadhia sheds light on during the episode include:
-When we say no code and low code, what are we really saying? -How easy is it to build an app with a low code or no code solution? -Is there a benefit to low-code or no-code if you're going to have to hire a developer due to the time constraints small business owners face?
Small business techies won't want to miss this episode. We'll see you there!
I’ve known angel investor, advisor and entrepreneur Larry Augustin since his days as CEO of SugarCRM, and have had him as part of this series a couple times (2011 and 2016). SugarCRM grew from $10M in annual revenue and a $15M loss to $100M in revenue and $7.5M in EBITDA. Accel-KKR acquired SugarCRM in August 2018. And after nearly a decade as Sugar’s CEO, Larry spent a couple of years at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as vice president responsible for their applications services businesses – including their contact center offerings.
Currently Larry is focusing on angel investing and advising a number tech startups. And with his varied experiences and background, my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I were excited to catch up with Larry for a long overdue LinkedIn Live conversation.
Stoyan Kenderov discusses how a small business can survive a recession in this latest episode of Small Biz in :15 by the team from Small Business Trends.
A recent report on the future of marketing commissioned by customer engagement platform provider Pegasystems found that more than half (51%) of marketing leaders felt that investment in MarTech could increase revenues by 10% to 40% over the next five years. On the other hand, 59%. also admit that they haven’t been allocated enough budget to deliver truly effective. digital transformation.
The study was full of interesting datapoints and insights about what marketers think will be important to them being able to do their jobs going forward, and I was able to ask a few questions of my own during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation with Tara DeZao, Director of Product Marketing, AdTech and MarTech at Pega.
Tara goes over some of the main findings of the survey, and also provides her take on what the implications are as MADTech (marketing and advertising technology) itself transforms customer expectations and demands for how companies communicate with them going forward – whether that by via text, email, in the Metaverse or anything else hurtling in our direction at accelerating speeds.
Sadly, there was a time when small business owners might have shied away from hiring neurodiverse employees, concerned they couldn't complete tasks or fit in with the team. But those days are over, says Anita Murphy, CEO of One Bridge Center, a company specializing in training these individuals for the workforce of the 21st century. In this latest episode of SmallBiz in: 15, Anita Murphy sits down with Shawn Hessinger, the Executive Editor for Small Business Trends to discuss the major misconceptions that employers have about neurodiverse employees and the many reasons why it’s a good idea to hire them. Other key points Anita Murphy discusses in the video center around successful neurodiverse worker case studies and how small businesses can go about placing these individuals within their organization.
Right before last week’s Prime Day (which accounted for roughly $12B in sales over two days), Amazon announced a new training initiative aimed at helping people with the right mix of experience and skill start their own delivery business. The Road to Ownership (RTO) program is an extension of Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner (DSP) program they started in 2018, that has allowed Amazon to grow and work with a network of local small businesses to get more Amazon packages delivered within their own ecosystem.
To learn more about the program, During a recent LinkedIn Live conversation I had the opportunity to speak with Karena Scoggin, Senior Program Manager for the Amazon RTO Program. Also joining us in the conversation is Marvin Edgar, a recent graduate of the initial RTO cohort, to share his experience with the program and how it led him to pull up stakes from Florida to start his new delivery business in New Mexico.
Between Boomers seeking to cash in and fears of inflation and recession, more small businesses are expected to go up for sale. But how do you get the money to buy one of them? One excellent option, says Chris Hurn, Founder/CEO of Fountainhead Commercial Capital, is a loan backed by the US Small Business Administration (SBA). In this latest episode of SmallBiz in: 15 Chris Hurn sits down with Shawn Hessinger, the Executive Editor for Small Business Trends to discuss this topic in depth. Other key points Chris Hurn discusses in the video are the steps small business owners can take if they’ve found a business they want to acquire and want to finance through the SBA. This includes the requirements and documents you’ll need to put together to qualify. You can catch up to Chris Hurn at https://www.fountainheadcc.com/ if you need more information after watching this episode.
If you are wondering what is a chamber of commerce and if it can help your business, this latest episode of SmallBiz in: 15 is one you won’t want to miss.
Here, former Chamber Executive and Co-founder of Save Your Town Deb Brown sits down with Shawn Hessinger, the Executive Editor for Small Business Trends to discuss this topic in depth.
Highlights of the interview What is a Chamber of Commerce? include: • Benefits your local chamber can bring your small business • When you should join more than one chamber • If you should consider starting your own chamber of commerce
Deb Brown also explains why asking how a chamber can help your business may not be the right question to ask and what is a better question to ask instead.
You can catch up with Deb Brown at https://saveyour.town/ if you need more information after watching this episode.
Are you thinking about opening a small business in a small town but aren’t sure there are enough customers to support it? If so, you’ll want to check out this latest episode where Patrick Palmer, Business Owner of the Computer Guy, discusses how to have a successful small business in a town of 5,000 people or less.
In this video episode, Patrick gives you tips on how to plant your flag in the ground and become the local expert in your niche. Plus, he discusses how to use your successful small town business as a launching pad for new subdivisions and examples of surprising up-and-coming creative niches that really deliver.
You can catch up to Patrick Palmer at https://thecomputerguy.bz/ if you need more information after watching this episode.
If there’s one thing for sure, the only constant is change. That’s never more true than in the business world where changes like tech and shifts in customer’s tastes threaten your small business’s very survival. Why then, does it take many of us small business so long to make the changes needed?
Here to demystify why that is and let you know how to actually make the changes you already know you need to make is Barry Moltz, Business Expert and Author of Change Masters.
Just call Barry Moltz the Small Business Expert at www.barrymoltz.com if you need more information after watching this episode.
As of next year, Google Analytics as we know it will be disappearing forever.
In its place will be Google Analytics 4, or GA4, for short. Meanwhile, don’t panic, says Anil Batra, Managing Partner of Optizent, and Shawn Hessinger, the Executive Editor for Small Biz Trends. In this episode, they sit down together to discuss what GA4 is, the main differences between it and previous versions (including expanded event tracking that enriches your data for better analysis) and other important takeaways.
For more from Anil Batra and Optizent, visit https://www.optizent.com/
While COVID restrictions may be lifting, the virtual events that became popular during the pandemic aren’t going anywhere, says Monique Johnson, Founder of LIVE Video Lab and The M.O.V.E Experience. In this video interview with Shawn Hessinger of Small Biz Trends, she discusses how small business owners can use this trend to their advantage. By watching, you can find out more about how virtual events have evolved, their benefits and how small businesses can use them as a business strategy to level the playing field against larger players. For more from Monique Johnson, visit LIVE Video Lab at: https://livevideolab.com/home/
Join Kristin Ostrander of Mommy Income and Shawn Hessinger of Small Biz Trends to get the lowdown on how FBA works, how sellers can get started, how much it costs on average to start up and more. Kristin also goes into the different business models people are using (e.g., retail arbitrage, your own private brand and wholesale)
Are you a business owner that feels you are going alone most of the time? Your work time and personal time is valuable, so no one needs to inform you that it is essential to find a way to balance things out. And then there is the aspect of finding time to grow your business. What to do?
If this sounds like you, maybe it’s time to rethink getting a virtual assistant.
Join Shawn Hessinger of Small Business Trends and Andrew Cohen of Work Better Now to find out if a virtual assistant can be the solution to your overextended workload.
Andrew answers questions in the video, such as what is a virtual assistant? What does a virtual assistant do? What kind of businesses need them? Is a VA worth it to my business? And where and how you can find a virtual assistant.
Alan Trefler of Pega – Current Climate Makes You Focus on Efficiency, but Not at Cost of Engagement by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
If you are a professional that sat at home during the pandemic dreaming of starting a small business online, this video is for you. In it, Pamela Wilson of pamelawilson.com lends her expertise on how to use marketing research and the four stages of the iterative process to build an online business that helps sell your knowledge and products globally.
Earlier this year I partnered with Oracle on a survey of over two thousand US-based consumers to learn more about who they trust between social media influencers and brands in learning about products and services, understanding out how to get the most out of them once the purchase has been made, and how they’d like to handle things when they needed help with a product or service. And while there were a number of interesting findings that were surfaced from the survey, one of the overarching findings was that close to forty percent of those surveyed trusted influencers over brands. But a deeper look into those numbers found that Millennials and Gen Zers surveyed were approximately 2.4X more likely to say they trust influencers than Baby Boomers were.
To dig in and discuss some of the numbers and what they might mean going forward, I recently had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Jeff Wartgow, Vice President of Product Management for Oracle. Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.
If you are a business owner that gets less than flattering reviews about your company, you may participate in manipulating or suppressing reviews. For instance, you don’t ask unhappy people to leave a review but ask happy customers to leave one. Additionally, you may also be tempted to buy or incentivize reviews, thinking these tactics will make the problem go away. However, is that savvy business practices or does it make the problem worse? And—is there a better way to go about responding to negative online business reviews? Shawn Hessinger, the Executive Editor for Small Business Trends, sits down with Mike Blumenthal, the co-founder and analyst at Near Media, to answer those questions and more. In this episode, they discuss new federal guidelines and how you should respond to negative reviews.
There’s a lot of announcements coming out this week with this being National Small Business Week. And a number of them came from Meta, including things like:
• Native Ad Creation: Businesses can now leverage native ad creation in WhatsApp Business App and no longer need to switch apps to complete them • Quote Request on Instagram. People can now request a quote from select businesses on Instagram, following a questionnaire that appears before starting a conversation. • Marketing Messages in MBS: Meta is testing a new capability that will allow businesses to send promotional message campaigns via Messenger to customers who opt in • Unified Inbox Coming to WhatsApp: Meta is also testing the integration of WhatsApp to Inbox in Meta Business Suite, with the goal of making it easier for businesses to save time by managing their conversations with customers across Meta apps in one place and allowing multiple people at the business to manage messages from the same WhatsApp number on multiple devices
To get some additional insight into some of these announcements, I had a LinkedIn Live conversation earlier this week with Rich Rao, Vice President of Small Business for Meta.
COVID-19 has affected small businesses in several significant ways. In the premiere episode of Small Biz in :15, Small Business Trends Executive Editor Shawn Hessinger and Ivana Taylor, of DIY Marketers, look at two comprehensive surveys from small business owners: one from before and one from after the pandemic conducted by Small Biz Trend’s sister site, BizSugar.com and the important findings that came from them.
If you’re in business today – and even if you aren’t – you can’t go too long without hearing, reading or talking about customer experience, and more broadly the experience economy. That wasn’t always the case. In fact it wasn’t until Joe Pine and his co-author James Gilmore introduced us all to the term experience economy in a 1998 article, then authored the seminal book The Experience Economy a year later. And things in business really haven’t been the same since.
Recently my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I had the pleasure of having Joe Pine join us for a LinkedIn Live conversation on how the ideas put forth in the book have evolved over time, and how companies have done putting those principals in the book into action – especially over the past few turbulent years.
I first met Girish “G” Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of customer engagement platform Freshworks, nearly a nine years ago at CRM Magazine’s annual industry event Evolution. Soon after I had him on as a guest of this series to discuss why he thought it was important for CEOs to regularly spend some time taking customer support calls, in order to stay in touch with their needs. At the time the company had only been around for a couple of years and was definitely a small business with not that many employees.
The last time I spoke with G was before the pandemic at Freshwork’s user conference, Refresh. But a lot has happened for the company since then, including having thousands of employees and being publicly listed on NASDAQ just last fall. So I was very happy to have an opportunity to have a LinkedIn Live conversation recently to get his thoughts on how things have changed for him and the company now that they’ve been public for over six months.
Inspiration and education. They’re the keys to modern marketing, according to Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing for HubSpot. And while some businesses are pretty good with the educational component, most tech/SaaS companies come up short on the inspirational side. That’s just one of the gems Kieran dropped on me and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg on a recent episode.
With HubSpot’s pioneering role in inbound marketing, we’ve been watching closely as they continuing blazing a path in content marketing with their HubSpot Podcast Network, and the recent launch of their Creators Program. So we were glad to spend a few good minutes with Kieran to learn more about the evolution of their content strategy, why he feels data is killing marketing, why YouTube is ready to disrupt podcasting, why newsletters and blogs are still a growing part of their strategy, and more.
Jeremy Epstein, cryptoeconomist and one of the leading experts on digital currencies, is my go-to person when I need to really understand where we are with these technologies. When I last had a LinkedIn Live almost three years ago, I asked him where we are and he said we were in the very early stages. So with all that has happened in the years since we last spoke (like NFTs, Web3, oh yeah and that pandemic thing) I needed an update from him. And fortunately I caught up with Jeremy recently to see where we are now, and also to get his take on some of these newer technologies and how they are shaping the digital currency landscape.
All I can say is if you have even the slightest interest in this area, do yourself a favor and check this one out.
In a recent conversation with Molly Sullivan, VP of Brand, Content, and Creative at Pegasystems, she said that before people buy products and services they first buy into ideas. And in order for them to want to buy from you, you have to have the kind of ideas that make them want to buy what you’re selling. And one way, a good way, for them to buy into your ideas is to be an effective storyteller that can share a compelling theme or narrative in a way that makes people not only listen, but also be a meaningful partner in charting the path they go on with you.
Having a meaningful narrative and being able to share it in a way that connects and enlists your target audience in developing that narrative is becoming incredibly important in building a community around your business. And being able to tell/share that grand story in a comprehensive and compelling way calls for a strategy that uses a variety of formats, channels, apps and any other way necessary to get connect your ideas to the right folks.
A person who has been helping companies tell stories, from Walt Disney movies (like Pirates of the Caribbean), 20th Century Fox (James Cameron's Avatar), Showtime (Dexter), Microsoft (Halo) and even Coca-Cola, is transmedia storyteller expert Jeff Gomez, who is also CEO of Starlight Runner Entertainment. I recently had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Jeff to learn more about what transmedia storytelling is, who it can work for, and how companies of any size can leverage it to more meaningfully connect with an audience.
Everyday more of us livestreaming, using things like Zoom, Streamyard and Restream among other platforms. But that doesn't mean asynchronous video is a thing of the past. I recently spoke with Michael Litt, cofounder and CEO video platform Vidyard, to understand the importance of asynchronous video and why you might need to put to use more than ever, especially within your sales process.
Over fifteen years ago I hosted a weekly radio show here in Atlanta called Technology for Business Sake. One of my earliest guests was Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of this online storage company Box.com. I remember having a fun conversation with him as we talked about a number of things, from entrepreneurship to what Box did to whatever came to mind back then. I even remember thinking why would anybody want to store their data files in the cloud…. Yeah, I have to admit to thinking that. But I know I wasn’t the only one!
Anyways, as great as that conversation was, and as successful as I watched Aaron and Box become from afar (Box is now publicly traded and has move way past just providing online storage to become a collaborative platform used by thousands of businesses), we haven’t talked once since our initial conversation on my old radio show 14+ years ago. It goes without saying a lot has happened since then, and I was so glad to have caught up with Aaron recently for a LinkedIn Live conversation to talk about a number of different items, including how the future of work is being shaped by everything from the Internet, the metaverse and other recently emerging technologies.
Anybody who has checked out this weekly series probably knows I have a kind of infatuation with voice technology and conversational AI. I really look forward to the day where I can use natural language instead of typing, clicking and swiping for more of my interactions. Which is why I’m always on the lookout for progressions, evolutions and transformations that may be leading to a day when that may be getting closer to happening.
One of the areas where you’re seeing lots of interesting stuff going on in the area of voice tech is customer experience. And one way to improve that experience, particularly when you’re in need for assistance, is to have great interactions with a customer service agent who knows how to help you and can do it efficiently.
Earlier this week Pegasystems, a leading customer engagement platform, announced two new products, Voice AI and Messaging AI, that is looking to provide customer service agents with their own “co-pilot” to assist them in realtime as they help customers looking for immediate help. And I was able to speak with Sabrina Atienza, director of product management at Pega, to share her thoughts on how voice and messaging AI can help human agents provide a better experience for customers in need and turn them into brand ambassadors for the company.
There were a few eye-catching numbers that had Amazon's stock blasting off after their earnings report was published. But two other things grabbed my attention the most. For the first time that I can remember, Amazon reported making $31 billion last year from their advertising platform, which is a pretty huge number for a company that hasn’t really been known for being in that business compared to Facebook and Google. But with numbers like that, it may not be long before advertising surpasses AWS as the biggest driver of operational profit.
The last thing that caught just about everybody’s attention was the other piece of news that came out of the earnings announcement – the price increase for Amazon Prime membership going from $119 to $139 a year. So with all this news coming out, my Watching Amazon show co-host John Lawson and I gave our take on what all of this added up to, and how we thought it would be received by consumers and sellers on the platform. And if there is anything on the horizon that could disrupt Amazon’s dominance in digital commerce.
Data is seemingly coming from every interaction, from every direction, from a growing number of channels, while using a growing number of devices… and it’s coming nonstop. This presents a great opportunity for companies to understand what customers and prospects need and what at levels unimaginable only a few short years ago. And while that’s sounds great, trying to pull all that data together in order to make the best use of the information coming from all that data is no easy task. In fact it’s incredibly difficult unless because most of the system businesses have been using over the years weren’t meant to specifically handle that task. Which is why Customer Data Platforms (CDP) were created and have grown of great importance over the last six years or so. But over those years there has been some apprehension and confusion about where CDPs fit and how they compare with other applications organizations depend on like CRM.
But it feels like some of that confusion and apprehension over what CDP is and what it does has been dissipating at an accelerated pace over the last year or so, as more interactions go digital. And to get more insight into the current state of CDP and how it’s being used in businesses today, I recently spoke with David Raab, founder and CEO of The CDP Institute, and to all in the industry the preeminent thought leader on the subject.
My CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I introduced a new segment on the show we call Venerableness. It’s all about having conversations with folks that for decades have “been there, done that”, and are continuing to do it at the highest levels in the tech industry. And we were really glad to have two folks who completely fit that description to kick this off:
• Steve Gillmor – One of the forefathers of podcasting founding one of the first two podcasts in history with The Gillmor Gang (which is still going strong and I’m proud to be a member of) and currently serves as Head of Technical Media Strategy for Salesforce. • Michael Moaz – Former Distinguished Analyst for Gartner and current Senior Vice President of Innovation Strategy for Salesforce
Consumers have never been more in need of the combination of more empathy from vendors to go with the products and services they need to adapt their lives to the situations they’ve been hit with. However, technology has also given them the opportunity to be more selective in choosing companies that not only show they understand their needs, but also can communicate to them and act on that understanding in a way that makes them feel valuable. But how well are marketers, in particular, doing communicating with customers and prospects today?
I recently spoke with Shoel Perelman, Vice President of Product for 1:1 Customer Engagement of Pegasystems, a leading customer engagement platform provider, to get his take on how marketers have evolved their engagement methods and interaction approach over the past few years.
Slack, a messaging platform recently acquired by Salesforce and used by millions of people to collaborate with customers, partners and fellow employees, recently held their annual Frontiers user conference. And having a chance to check out the virtual event there were a number of interesting themes that resonated with me, but the most important is how different the way we work and collaborate has and will continue to change as we (hopefully) move closer to a post-pandemic world. And to dig in deeper on that theme my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I recently had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Brad Mattick, SVP of Slack Marketing at Salesforce.
Last week BizSugar held its first ever SmallBizFluence event, with experts sharing their knowledge and expertise on building successful online small businesses. And as part of the conference I had the pleasure of moderating a “fireside chat” with Claire O’Donnell, who leads the Selling Partner Communities and Small Business Empowerment organizations for Amazon.
Claire shared a number of ways Amazon is looking to assist small business sellers to increase their ability to sell more and grow their businesses while using the Amazon platform, especially during uncertain times live we’ve been facing the past couple of years.
There are many uncertainties small businesses are facing heading into this year’s holiday season. But one thing is very certain; consumers want to shop locally and with small businesses. That’s according to the results of a recently released report from Intuit’s QuickBooks Commerce small business shopping report.
To learn more about the insights coming from the report, and how they may impact the holiday shopping season, I recently had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Shilpa Reddy, VP and GM of Quickbooks Commerce at Intuit.
Amazon recently held its Accelerate event which focuses on helping sellers using Amazon’s platform with new programs and services to help them build relationships with customers and increase their sales and profitability. And I had the opportunity to speak with Dave Nadel, Amazon’s Director, Selling Partner Trust, to learn more about how the new tools and services announced during the event will help SMB sellers move to the next level selling on Amazon.
About this time every year I look forward to heading to Oracle NetSuite’s annual user conference, SuiteWorld, and speaking with its EVP and founder Evan Goldberg. But for the second year in the row we had to do our conversation virtually. And just like last year’s conversation, this year finds sellers trying to navigate a holiday season under a pandemic, we’re still doing that but with an even different situation with a worldwide logistics situation adding even more to the equation.
Like many of you I have a bunch of Google alerts set up on certain topics, with one of them being TikTok. I’m not even on really on TikTok, but I began tracking it a while back because all of the hype surrounding it, and then when a friend of mine told me about how his son had only been on it a couple months – doing a few videos making different things out of boxes - had over 60K followers - I got even more curious, which is why I did a conversation with him for this series not that long ago. By the way he’s now over 70K followers….
But then last month I got a series of Google alerts about something I hadn’t seen coming – that TikTok had surpassed YouTube in viewer time per user. And that really grabbed my attention, as I watch a bunch of YouTube videos for a variety of reasons. And with my interest growing in understanding the draw TikTok was having, my CRM Playaz co-host introduced me to, without a doubt, the most thorough and insightful series of posts on TikTok that is out on the web. And after reading them we both wanted to speak to their author, consumer and entertainment technology expert Eugene Wei, to dig in a bit more on what TikTok is doing and how they’re different than the other major social networking platforms.
Many of you who are into gaming or serious video editing know NVIDIA as creators of the leading graphics processing technology on the market. But NVIDIA is also a leader in the areas of artificial intelligence and deep learning; specifically in how these technologies can improve how we experience graphics, text and video synthesis, and conversational AI.
Some of their work was showcased in a series of videos they’ve put together called I AM AI which are a compelling look at what is (and what will be) available to us to improve how we experience the world – and each other. And recently I had the opportunity to have a LinkedIn Live conversation with Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President, Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, to hear more about their work with AI to reimagine how we experience sights and sounds.
Before he became the President of the NHL’s San Jose Sharks, Jonathan Becher was one of the premiere marketing executives in the technology industry. And it’s safe to say he brought the visionary approach he developed at companies like SAP with him to the Sharks – which has paid off during the past 18 months as the pandemic disrupted the traditional fan experience.
Becher and the Sharks have been one of the more innovative teams in all of sports, which is why my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I were excited to catch up with Becher via LinkedIn Live to see what he and the Sharks have been up to, how they’ve been exploring ways to create more aligned fan experiences to the current situation with the pandemic, how lessons learned during the pandemic are being implemented in preparation for life after Covid, and to get his perspective on where he sees the puck going – so to speak – with how fans will experience content in the coming years, including how they become collaborators and creators with their favorite sports franchises.
Before the pandemic I was going to about 30 physical events a year. During the pandemic I haven’t gone to any, but I’ve gone to way more events virtually. And I can honestly say that in either form, events leave a lot to be desired. But at least physical events allowed you to actually see and be around people, which made up for some of the shortcomings of those events.
Jon Reed, ERP industry thought leader and co-founder of Diginomica, probably goes to more events than I do, along with putting on his own events. He’s been rating events for years, which is why I recently spent A Few Good Minutes with Jon to get his take on the current state of events, and what we should expect as things begin opening up.
The term content creator has gained a lot of attention lately, as companies need to constantly churn out attractive content in order to grab and hold the attention of the folks they’re looking to do business with long enough to turn views into revenue. But the traditional role content has played in the business model has changed significantly in the last couple of years, especially the last eighteen months with the pandemic.
During a recent episode of The CRM Playaz with my co-host Paul Greenberg, we spoke with two executives with Contentful, a leading content platform for digital-first businesses. Dina Apostolou - Vice President of Product Marketing, and Nicole France – Chief Evangelist, share with us how the role of content has evolved into a much more central role in the business, going beyond lead generation and SEO to helping to tell the complete story of the organization.
In a recent episode of Watching Amazon I got into a debate with my co-host John Lawson on whether a 1% conversion rate is considered to be a successful outcome. I’m not a marketer, so I’m thinking failing 99% of the time doesn’t sound all that great to me. I mean getting a hit in baseball 3 out of ten times can get you in the Hall of Fame, but 30% is a far cry from one percent. But, since this was a livestream convo, John was getting a lot of support from marketing technology expert and thought leader (and also my buddy) Anand Thaker, in saying that one percent can indeed be a successful outcome.
When it comes to AI and machine learning and big data, there’s really no person I like learning from and talking with than Dr. Michael Wu, recognized industry expert and Chief AI Strategist for PROS, a provider of SaaS solutions optimizing shopping and selling experiences. And recently I had a great livestream conversation with him and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg where we took a deep dive into where we are with AI and how it is helping companies make it through the last 18 months.
Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation that touches on the role of ethics and inclusivity as more business interactions and transactions go digital – providing AI with the data it craves to predict and recommend things back to us.
I’ve been tracking the adoption of voice-first technology ever since I got my first Echo device around Thanksgiving of 2014 and started 20% of my sentences with “Alexa…”. And every so often I like to have guests join me for this series to see where things stand today with these devices, and how they’re being used. But I haven’t really focused on designing voice content before, which is why I was really excited to speak with Preston So. Preston is Senior Director, Product Strategy at Oracle, but more importantly for this conversation he is also author of the book, “Voice Content and Usability”.
Earlier this week Salesforce announced the launch of Salesforce+, their new streaming service focused on business content and programming. And seeing an enterprise software company launch what basically is an online broadcast network captured a lot of people’s attention, including yours truly and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg.
So we were really interested in learning more about what Salesforce+ is – and what it isn’t – and were fortunate enough to do a LinkedIn Live conversation with Colin Fleming, SVP of Global Brand Experiences, who’s heading up the Salesforce+ rollout.
James Brathwaite is a 17 year old rising high school senior in real life, but on TikTok he’s Jeb the Boxsmith. And in about ten weeks, he turned his love of building things out of boxes into over 60,000 followers on the platform. That wasn’t his plan, but the plan has now changed because of the success he found in such a short amount of time and only twelve videos he posted on the platform – with one of those videos capturing over 900,000 views….and counting.
Recently I spoke with Jeb and his father (my friend Jeff Brathwaite) to learn how his passion for building things led to immediate success he found on TikTok, and to see what lessons could be learned for folks who would like to leverage the platform to connect with the audience they want to build a relationship with.
I may have mentioned before that I was a college DJ during the time when hip-hop music came of age. And one of my favorite songs of the era was Sally, by Stetsasonic. And years after my college DJ years (but I’m still a DJ…virtually at least) I had the opportunity to moderate a tech panel at Georgia Tech, and one of the panelists was Glenn Bolton, aka Daddy-O… co-founder of Stetsasonic.
It was great hearing Daddy-O talk about technology and his experiences in business and the impact modern tech has had on the creation process. But at the time he hadn’t picked up the mic in a while. But a few years ago I started seeing videos of Daddy-O rapping again. And then I was on LinkedIn one morning and saw that he posted a sneak peek clip of Daddy-O and the whole Stetsasonic crew teasing a new song. The fact that they hadn’t made an album/DVD is about 30 years but still sounding great really stopped me in my tracks. And the fact that I saw this first on LinkedIn – and not YouTube – really stood out to me… that is after I came down from the excitement of seeing them all back together sounding and looking great after all these years!
Almost a year ago I had an opportunity to talk with Craig Cuffie, EVP and Chief Procurement Officer for Salesforce. It was just a few months after George Floyd was murdered, and about 4 months into the pandemic-induced shutdown. It was a heavy time. It still is a heavy time. Which is why I was so glad to speak with Craig again to see hear how the plans Salesforce had begun in response to the social unrest inspired by the George Floyd situation.
Those who know me, know I’m a big Los Angeles Rams fan. Even those who don’t know me, but watch any of the LinkedIn Live conversations I do for this series know that, as I where at least one piece of Rams gear on every one of the convos I’ve done.
Needless to say I have a problem. But I’m not alone in this, as rabid sports fans of all kinds go to Fanatics.com on a regular basis to spend even more money on whatever the latest piece of gear is. Which is why I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with Carolyne Truelove, Head of Global Fan Experience for Fanatics.
During a recent LinkedIn Live conversation, Carolyne shared why Fanatics talks in terms of fan experience instead of customer experience, why employees are called athletes and managers, and why she feels employee experience and corporate culture are directly connected to the experiences fans have with the company.
When Google announced at the beginning of the year they will be phasing out the use of third-party cookies in their Chrome browser it provoked a strong reaction in a couple of ways. Some saw it as a nod to improving customer data privacy, as cookies allow companies to track where you go on the web and create opportunities for marketers to “stalk” you with ads wherever you go. And marketers who worried about not being able to stalk you wherever you go on the web.
And it’s those dueling positions – customer privacy vs marketers need to market - that is proving difficult to phase out those cookies, as Google announced a nearly two year delay in their cookie phase-out plans last week. The delay seems to be brought on by a hesitancy of some websites and tech companies to implement the tech Google is experimenting with as a cookie replacement - based on the Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) approach. This is supposed to provide a level of abstracting individual user information by creating groups of people with similar browsing habits and placing them in cohorts. And advertisers would have access to cohort data, not individual browser data. But there have been enough concerns about this new approach to slowed the timeline down.
Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist for Zoho and a thought leader in the area of customer data privacy, joined me for a LinkedIn Live conversation on why he feels Google had to delay the cookie phase out, and why this may be more about protecting ads-centric business models and marketing, and less about protecting customer privacy.
I’ve been fascinated with voice speakers and voice assistant technologies since getting my first Amazon Echo device in November of 2014. But I had been using a voice assistant since 2011 with the introduction of Siri on my iPhone. And with 2021 marking the 10th anniversary of the voice assistant in our lives, I was very excited to have a LinkedIn Live conversation with Bret Kinsella, CEO and founder of Voicebot.ai, the leading source of information on voice technology on the web.
Bret shares his thoughts on the pandemic’s impact on voice adoption, why enterprise business application vendors have been slow to integrate voice-first tech into using their software, and what kinds of use cases are on the horizon that will get our attention sooner rather than later.
At the end of May Salesforce announced their latest quarterly revenues of $5.96B, estimating they are on track for annual revenues of $26B this fiscal year – adding up to a 22% year-over-year growth. OK this ends the CNBC segment of this post, but I wanted to point out the big numbers because these numbers came while Salesforce has also been growing and deepening their efforts with corporate diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI).
So revenues continue growing alongside efforts to make the entire Salesforce ecosystem more equal and inclusive do as well. Which is one of the key points that Minea Moore, Ecosystem Diversity & Inclusion Director for Salesforce, made clear during our LinkedIn Live conversation from earlier this week.
Yesterday Amazon announced the launch of their $150 million Black Business Accelerator Program, aimed at getting more black-owned businesses involved in selling on their platform. You can get the details at Sell.amazon.com/bba and also read a detailed article on the announcement published here yesterday.
To learn more about the initiative I spoke with Brandi Neloms, Manager at Amazon, during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation.
The last time I had spoken with Leyla was about 18 months ago after she left Salesforce and became a partner in Operator Collective, a VC firm founded by long-time tech executive Mallun Yen with the goal of broadening the pool of those participating in venture capital investment. In fact 90% of these limited partners (LPs) are women, and more than 40% of them are people of color.
I recently caught up with Leyla about why she co-founded BVI, the goals set for training black investors, and what the endgame was for this initiative. And just as I was setting this conversation up, I saw a glowing post from another good friend of mine, communications executive Letty Ledbetter, who was sharing her experiences going through the most recent BVI cohort while pointing out the role Leyla played in her becoming a part of the BVI family. So I was glad to have her join the conversation and share her perspective going through the program.
What is customer advocacy? What role does it plays in the organization? How is it different from marketing? And what's the importance of advocacy as part of a holistic customer experience?
It’s not often I have an opportunity to speak with two industries leaders together on an important topic like customer advocacy, but those were a few of the questions I asked Kalina Bryant, Global Head of Customer Advocacy for Asana, and Cynthia Hester, Director of Global Customer Programs for Google Cloud, recently during a great LinkedIn Live conversation.
I’ve known Scott Wilder for well fifteen years or so. And in that time (and even before that) he has led community building efforts at big tech brands like Adobe, Apple, Google, Intuit and Marketo. And now he's heading up HubSpot's engagement and community building efforts.
Earlier this week Scott and I had a LinkedIn Live conversation on how community building has evolved over the years, it’s role in digital transformation efforts, and how it will need to be done in a post-pandemic world in order to stay in tune with rapidly evolving customer needs and expectations.
I’ve been pretty interested in how subscription business models seemed to have held up pretty well during the pandemic, even allowing more traditional businesses to stay connected with customers who couldn’t venture out to their bricks and mortar locations. But now that we’re seeing the light at the end of tunnel and getting closer to life without masks and social distancing, I wanted to see if subscription models will be just as attractive in the post-pandemic economy we can’t wait to get to. So I was excited to speak with Katrina Gosek, VP of Sales Portfolio Products for Oracle, to get her perspective as subscription management is one of her portfolio focus areas.
There is no hotter technology out right now than virtual events platforms, with the pandemic accelerating their growth exponentially. Bevy is no exception as its virtual events platform is experiencing hyper growth right in line with the industry. But where Bevy is completely exceptional is how it has put diversity and inclusion at the core of the company's culture - as the company is closing in on 20% of its employee base being black, and with 60% of the participants in its recent $40M funding round also being black.
During a recent LinkedIn Live conversation I spoke with Bevy CEO and co-founder Derek Andersen about competing in the virtual events platform space and the role the Startup Grind – the local event driven startup community he founded in 2010 - played in shaping Bevy’s approach to building its virtual events platform. We also spend time discussing why he felt embarrassed a year ago when none of his 27 employees were black, and how that realization led him and his cofounder to build diversity and inclusion into all aspects of the business going forward, including seeking out black advisors and investors to participate in the company’s latest funding round. And to add additional perspective one of those angel investors participating the funding round, Salesforce VP of Trailhead Evangelism and Trailblazer Community Leah McGowan-Hare, joins us to share why she felt investing in Bevy was a “no-brainer”.
It’s been a couple of years since I caught up with Tyler Lessard, Chief Video Strategist for video platform Vidyard, to hear how B2B-focused organizations are utilizing videos in the sales and marketing efforts. So when I saw the company’s recent 2021 State of Video in Business study that was recently released, I had to do a LinkedIn Live convo with him to get his take on some of the key findings.
PegaWorld, the annual event put on by Pega, a leading customer engagement and process automation platform provider, will be taking place virtually on May 4th. And earlier this week my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I had the opportunity to hold a LinkedIn Live conversation with company founder and CEO Alan Trefler to talk about the event a lot more leading up to the event.
Actually, “a lot more” may be an understatement when it comes to speaking with Trefler as there are so many areas you can delve into with him. Not only is he still at the helm of the company he founded back in 1983, he’s having a lot of fun while also leading Pega to cross $1 billion in annual revenues for the first time last year. He credits a lot of Pega’s success to the lessons he learned working in the family’s restoration business – which will be celebrating its 100th year anniversary next year. He’s also a chess master and an accordion player.
So Paul and I covered a lot of bases in our time with Alan, and below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation. To hear the full discussion click on the embedded SoundCloud player.
Last week’s conversation with Katherine Kostereva of Creatio on how low-code/ no-code development platforms will be a huge factor in helping non-programmers to automate their own tasks and processes was eye opening for me. And I wanted to see how the message of the importance and relevance of the latest automation tools is being received by microbusinesses as well as self-employed folks – people who need the most help getting things done to stay afloat. Which is why it was great timing being able to follow my conversation with Katherine up with Jon Fasoli, VP and Segment Leader, Small Business and Self-employed, for Intuit.
During our LinkedIn Live conversation Jon shared with me how artificial intelligence and automation is helping even one-person bands spend more of their precious time on experimenting with new ways to connect with customers and prospects, and less time doing mundane activities. He also discusses how more digital interactions are feeding AI in platforms like Quickbooks that automatically provide insights into your business that lead to better decision making on how to best use the limited resources smaller businesses have at their disposal in order to make the most of tough situations like we’ve all faced over the past 15 months.
I spoke with Katherine Kostereva four years ago during her company’s user conference. Back then the company she founded was named bpm’online, but today the company is called Creatio and has recently raised $68 million to further build out their no-code low-code platform aimed at helping non-IT people use easy interfaces to automate business processes on their own.
Four years ago we spoke about how 80% of companies had not fully automated their important business processes and the impact that was having on productivity and efficiency. So I was eager to circle back around during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation with Katherine to see where things stand now and how the pandemic might have impacted things.
Thought leadership. Everybody is talking about it as a way to influence markets and consumer behavior - whether it’s aimed at individual or corporate consumers. It comes in a dizzying array of formats, channels and devices. It can be about trends, best practices or even tips and tricks. And businesses are trying to incorporate it into more opportunities to stay connected with customers and prospects over time to build long-lasting relationships with them. But many companies seem to be focusing their thought leadership efforts on their needs instead of delivering what’s important to the audience they want to connect with.
In a recent CRM Playaz episode, me and co-hosts Paul Greenberg and Nicole France spoke with Janelle Dieken and Ginger Conlon who are heading up thought leadership efforts for Genesys, a leading customer experience platform. Janelle, VP of Content and Thought Leadership, and Ginger, Thought Leadership Director, shared with us their views and approach to building thought leadership that first and foremost provides customers and prospects with content that delivers relevancy and authenticity in a way that leads to trust.
Branding and marketing are topics that will always be of interest to businesses of all sizes. And the importance of getting branding right is only growing, as it gets more difficult to get and keep people’s attention long enough to make a compelling case to them to give us a shot. But as positive that branding can be to help us capture the attention from those we want it from, if it’s done wrong it could end your chances of building that relationship before it even starts – especially if you believe your brand is all about a logo.
Recently I spoke with Shannel Wheeler, founder of Awesome Design Academy, about what it takes to pull off a successful branding/rebranding project, like the one she led for leading ABM (Account Based Marketing) platform Terminus. Below is a transcript from a portion of our conversation. Click the SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation. And let me give a special shoutout to martech expert Anand Thaker joining us for this discussion.
Last week personal finance app and website NerdWallet announced moving $2 million of NerdWallet capital to Self Help Credit Union – which serves low-income populations in Oakland, CA. The company is also partnering with the nonprofit association of community credit unions, Inclusiv, to scale up this effort nationally. Tim Chen, CEO and founder of NerdWallet, is hoping this will spark other companies to leverage the position credit unions have in local communities – many of which are in low-income and distressed areas hit hard by the pandemic – to pump much needed funding and capital directly into the hands that need it most.
I recently spoke with Tim via LinkedIn Live to get a bit more insight into why doing this now is important to NerdWallet, how the employees of the company were a driving forced behind the idea, how working with credit unions is a better fit for this effort than partnering with the big banks, and how helping underserved communities is also benefiting NerdWallet as well.
It was ten years ago last month that I first spoke with Tien Tzuo, founder and CEO of subscription management platform Zuora, about what he was calling the Subscription Economy. Back then people really didn’t know what it was all about as most of us were still buying things outright to own them. Five years later when I next spoke with Tien things had changed dramatically as most of us were subscribing to at least one of the things we used to buy outright, like music, movies, clothes and even cars.
With it being five years later, it was time to talk with Tien to get his reflections on the first decade of the Subscription Economy, how the pandemic impacted SE companies, and of course to get his take on what the next five years will look like as we enter the second decade of the Subscription Economy.
Small business already know about the shortcomings of the first go around of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Where “small businesses” like Ruth Chris’ Steakhouse was able to get $20 million or so, while other real small businesses looking for $5,000 to just stay afloat were turned away.
But with the new PPP round currently taking place, there’s renewed hope that companies left out of the first go around, especially black and brown businesses, will finally benefit from the program due to changes aimed it benefitting companies at the low end of the small business sector.
Nancy Santiago, Community Impact Lead for Ureeka, a startup founded that provides mentorship and guidance through their platform to help entrepreneurs’ get answers to their most pressing questions, joins me to share what small businesses need to know about applying for this round of PPP.
According to Mathew Sweezey, Director of Market Strategy for Salesforce and author of The Context Marketing Revolution, individuals become the largest creators of noise in the marketplace – surpassing brands - and will “remain the largest creators of noise until the end of time”. And what has happened since then and continues to happen at an accelerated rate is something you ignore at your own peril, as what worked in marketing yesterday might not work for you tomorrow. And even that might not work for you the day after that.
I had a great LinkedIn Live conversation with Sweezey to go over a few main themes he covers in the book, along with a few current topics that are already changing the marketing game from what it was in the very recent past.
Everything we do today creates data. From every click to every swipe. And when the pandemic forced us into sheltering in place, it also exponentially accelerated those clicks and swipes…and Zooms…and Uber Eats and Door Dash orders…. And you get the point. Many of the cash-based face-to-face transactions we’d make going into stores have turned into digital transactions and interactions. And all of this data can provide companies with important insights that can help guide companies during times of crisis into making the right calls on make-or-break decisions.
To get some real insight into how all the data coming from all these digital interactions can be (and is being) used to help small and midsize businesses during times of crisis like we have faced the last year, I recently had an informative LinkedIn Live conversation with Jay Upchurch; CIO of SAS, a leading analytics platform provider. We spoke at length on a number of issues, including how the role of data and analytics have changed during the pandemic, the opportunity presented by AI to help SMBs not only survive but also thrive in times of crisis like what we’re still facing a year into Covid-19, and more
The term “evangelist” has been thrown around a lot over the past couple of years. I’m not talking Jimmy Swaggart, TD Jakes or Joel Osteen. I’m talking about the evangelist role in terms of technology and business. But what does that mean and what do they really do?
Recently me and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg hosted a LinkedIn Live conversation with three of the leading CRM vendor evangelists to dig in a bit and find out what it really means to be an evangelist, what they do and how it differs from the perceptions out there for who evangelists are. Joining us were:
Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist for Salesforce Esteban Kolsky, Chief CX Evangelist for SAP Martin Schneider, Chief Evangelist and Head of Market Strategy for SugarCRM
I’ve been using streaming service Streamyard for the past year for doing my weekly LinkedIn Live conversations. And when they recently were acquired by virtual events platform Hopin, I started to think about what this combo could potentially mean for future of two technologies that have blown up since the beginning of the pandemic. Which is why I wanted to do a conversation with Keith Teare, a Silicon Valley based investor, advisor and mentor to a number of companies participating in these industries – including Millicast and Around.co. Keith is also a founding investor in TechCrunch. Lastly, Keith and I are members of the Gillmor Gang show that can be seen weekly on TechCrunch.
And during our conversation about the future of livestreaming and virtual events, something Keith said about using newsletters, podcasts, Clubhouse and other channels led to the topic of attention. And how all these disparate technologies and channels will eventually come together to create, for lack of a better way to put it, attention platforms that allow us to focus more on providing access to what we have to offer customers, instead of the individual content outputs that may briefly capture their attention. And the bigger question of how can we create business models that work for us based on how that attention can be converted into value exchanges we can generate revenue from.
I had a really interesting conversation on what Apple’s move (and Facebook’s response to it) could really mean for small businesses and the consumers they seek to engage with. Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist and a leading proponent of customer data privacy rights, and marketing technology expert and industry analyst Anand Thaker, joined me to discuss the issues at length on a recent LinkedIn Live conversation. Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation. To hear the full conversation check out the embedded SoundCloud player.
I first spoke with Rich Rao almost eight years ago when he was Director of Worldwide Sales and Operations for Google. And earlier this week I caught up with him for a LinkedIn Live conversation for the first time since then, but now Rich is Vice President, Small Business at Facebook.
Rich shared with me how Facebook is working to help small businesses transition to doing more business online, the role AI can play in helping these businesses more efficiently and effectively connect with potential new customers, and how they are incorporating Instagram and WhatsApp into an integrated approach to community building.
I known the HubSpot co-founders, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, since July of 2006. And from a cheap row seat I’ve watched them take the company public, and grow it from just them to close to 4000 employees. And even though I think I know the story pretty well, and have spoken with both of them throughout the years for this series – the last time being four years ago with Dharmesh at the companies Inbound conference – I always learn something new about what they’ve done and how they’ve done it. That continued earlier this week when I had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Dharmesh.
Now, Dharmesh doesn’t do a ton of these, so I was really glad he joined me and shared a number of things during our discussion. Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation, where he talks about the early days of building the company, why the partnership with Brian has been so long lasting and successful, and why a guy who describes himself as an introverted tech geek decided to write a culture code that has turned into, as he puts it, one of the greatest contributions to the company.
We’re full-throttle into the holiday shopping season having blown past Black Friday and Cyber Monday – which by the way broke the single day online US shopping record with $10.84B spent, according to Adobe Analytics.
But now that we’re closing in on the big day, and every minute counts towards making sure what you order makes it to where it needs to go in time for the big day, shoppers are turning to Old Faithful, aka Amazon.com, to make sure the magic happens. But a recent report on CNBC had me wondering if Amazon is ready. The title of the segment was “Amazon pushes holiday shoppers to pick up packages at stores amid potential delivery crunch.”
But doesn’t that go against the main reason we all turn to Amazon in the first place? The convenience of having our stuff sent to our homes is what got us hooked, and the belief that we’ll get that stuff when we need, is what kept us hooked. But if that’s not the case, if we have to go and pick it up to make sure we get it, does that make Amazon less attractive to turn to? Me and my Watching Amazon co-host John “ColderIce” Lawson had to toss it around a bit.
Recently I spoke with Keala Gaines, VP of Global Payment Services for eBay, to learn more about the impact modern payment technology is having on the customer experience, how having the payment tech on certain device types can help increase conversion opportunities, and how using the latest technology can also make things run more efficiently.
Earlier this week I spoke with Clark Twiddy, president Twiddy and Company, to hear how they used the SAS data analytics platform and Clark’s military background with intelligence to bring data science to his family-owned small business. And how that helped the company to “digitize their southern hospitality” and create new opportunities even in the heart of a pandemic that is crushing the travel and leisure industry at large.
I’ve known Mike Volpe for well over a decade, going back to his days as HubSpot’s first chief marketing officer. And I’ve spoken with him a few times over the years for the series, the last time being when he became the new CEO of Lola.com a little over two years ago. As a refresher, Lola.com is focused on making business travel easier for the travel manager and the traveler.
Being that business, it’s not surprising that the pandemic has had a major negative impact on Lola. But even that would be an understatement as the company lost 97% of its revenue when travel basically came to a screeching halt overnight at the beginning of the Covid-19 shutdown. 97%!
Knowing the industry that he was in, I remember checking in on Mike at the onset of the pandemic via email. He told me that I should check back in a couple of months because they were working on a plan. And roughly five months later, Lola just announced a new service offering called Lola Spend, that helps companies to track expenses and manage spending. And the new offering was actually in part a collaborative effort from the same Lola customers who stopped traveling.
The folks at Adobe recently put out their holiday season shopping forecast, based on one trillion visits to US retail websites. Yes, you read that right – one TRILLION visits to retail websites in the country. And some of the key predictions include:
• Online holiday spend will surpass $189B (up 33% YoY) • Black Fri: $10.3B (39% YoY); Cyber Mon $12.7B (35% YoY) • 42% of all online shopping done from smartphones (up 55%) • Small retailers ($10-$50M): +107% daily revenue boost for season • 26% of consumers say knowing the election outcome will impact their holiday spend*
These are just a few of the interesting data points in the forecast. And to get a little more insight into the numbers I spoke with Vivek Pandya, Adobe’s Senior Digital Insights Manager.
With the pandemic impacting so many aspects of our daily lives – both personally and professionally – I was curious to find out how it is effecting how things in the venture capital space. And last week I had the opportunity to speak with Scott Beechuk, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners. Norwest is a leading venture and growth equity investment firm managing more than $9.5 billion in capital, and Scott focuses on early- to late-stage investment opportunities in enterprise SaaS with a focus on companies building business applications taking advantage of human-assisted AI, advanced behavioral analytics, client-agnostic platforms and industry-specific solutions.
Scott shared how his experience as an entrepreneur and later at Salesforce as SVP in product management has helped shape his approach to being a VC, and how COVID-19 has impacted how he operates.
Late last month Salesforce introduced Digital 360, combining their Marketing, Commerce, and Experience Clouds with some new components to help companies accelerate their digital transformation efforts with respect to customer engagement. And earlier this week I had the pleasure of having a LinkedIn Live conversation with Adam Blitzer, EVP & GM, Digital for Salesforce, to talk about how the coronavirus is affecting digital transformation efforts and causing foundational changes to companies will need to engage customers and prospects long after the pandemic is over.
Throughout the most of this year during the pandemic I’ve had the opportunity to speak with executives at a number of technology companies serving the small business community. And while there are a number of themes that have recurred with many vendors and across the months we’ve been dealing with COVID-19, the ones that have resonated with me have been the descriptions for small businesses I’ve heard over and over again: innovative, creative, resilient and inspired. And during a recent conversation with Melissa Schneider, GoDaddy’s VP Global Marketing Operations & Product Marketing, she went even further in detailing a couple of real life examples of just how resilient and inspired small businesses have been in order to survive and succeed in the midst of the coronavirus.
Earlier this week Oracle Netsuite, a platform integrating front and back office business applications, announced a flurry of innovations to help their customers adjust and succeed in the current environment, and beyond. And before the announcement I was able to catch up with Evan Goldberg, Founder and EVP of Oracle Netsuite, to learn more about the new developments, as well as to get his take on how his customers are adjusting eight months into the pandemic.
Earlier this week I cohosted a unique livestream event, alongside Small Business Trends publisher Anita Campbell, with Zoho CEO and cofounder Sridhar Vembu and Chief Evangelist Raju Vagesna. It was unique because we spent the vast majority of the hour plus event talking about everything but what the company is mostly known for – cranking out 50+ business apps that 60 million people use on a daily basis. It was also unique because it was the first time in about a decade that Sridhar and Raju sat down together (virtually in this case with Sridar being in India and Raju in Austin, TX) for a conversation like this.
The end result of this discussion demands that another decade not pass before another one of these conversations take place. As bringing these two gentlemen together provided us a glimpse into what has made Zoho the success story it is, allowing us to go beyond the numbers to get a better understanding of the culture, strategy and heart of the company. In this hour long conversation they talk about why it’s important for Zoho to be an asset to the communities they operate in, the concept of familiarity capital, the ills of “consumeritus”, and why spiritual economics is just as important as traditional approach to economics – and maybe more so.
Heading into National Small Business Week T-Mobile launched new rate plans for small businesses with Microsoft 365 included, allowing customers access to Office apps, cloud services, device management and advanced security. To learn more about the offering and how T-Mobile is working with Microsoft to help SMBs succeed in these unprecedented times, I recently spoke with Mike Katz, Executive Vice President of T-Mobile for Business.
In addition to filling us in on the new offerings and the Microsoft partnership, Mike also shared how small businesses are using mobile and cloud technologies – and their own creativity and innovation – to transform their businesses to meet the changing needs of their customers. Mike also shares how 5G broadband wireless technology holds the promise of being a game changer to those businesses from a variety of perspectives.
The economic uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused businesses of all sizes to layoff valuable employees. And many of those businesses still need to get things done in order to survive the current state of affairs. Especially things related to maintaining relationships with current customers, on top of finding ways to bring on new ones. Which is why I was really interested in talking with Susan Marshall, founder and CEO of freelance marketplace Torchlite. Torchlite specializes in placing CRM professionals certified in Salesforce products and services. Salesforce is also Torchlite’s biggest investor.
During our LinkedIn Live conversation, Susan talks about how Torchlite differs from general freelancer marketplaces, what’s driving the growth of their marketplace, how the Torchlite model works from both freelancer and hiring business sides, how SMBs are tapping into the community of “flexperts”, and why they are so selective of who becomes a Torchlite freelancer.
Due to the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the protests that originally broke out in response to the killing of George Floyd captured on video, corporations have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to social justice causes, as well as to help struggling small businesses. Companies like Google, Facebook and Salesforce have committed grants and funds to increase entrepreneurial opportunities to people who traditionally have been shut out of billions of dollars represented by the top venture capital firms – Women, Black and Latinx entrepreneurs. And the company that Facebook and Salesforce chose to facilitate their SMB grant programs was Ureeka, a startup founded by Melissa Bradley, David Jakubowski and Rob Gatto, that provides mentorship and guidance through their platform to help their community membership of entrepreneurs’ get answers to their most pressing questions.
I recently had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Ureeka cofounder Melissa Bradley to learn more about Ureeka’s mission to help underrepresented entrepreneurs succeed, and her own recent experiences raising $8.6M in VC money. Below is an edited transcript from a portion of our conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.
As we head into the Labor Day holiday weekend, many companies are focused on having their employees return to the workplace to accelerate efforts to get business back on track. To help companies safely bring employees back, Salesforce and CVS Health are teaming up to integrate Salesforce's Work.com workplace management platform, which allows for wellness monitoring and manual contract tracing, with CVS' Return Ready offering, which offers tracking and insights on COVID-19 testing.
To learn more about the partnership and how it can make it easier for companies to bring employees back in ways that keep them safe while still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I recently spoke with Bill Patterson - Salesforce EVP/GM of CRM Applications, and Kelly Jones - Division Head, National Accounts Business Unit at CVS Health.
As impressive as the 44.5% increase sounds, it pales in comparison to seeing it in graphical form. And, as Marketplace Pulse points out, that’s the fastest increase in over two decades, pushing e-commerce share of total retail to 16.1%. And for even more drama, if you take out auto sales and bar/restaurant revenue, online sales accounted for 22% of overall retail sales. More than one out of every five dollars…now that is some serious drama.
Such rapid and dramatic changes in consumer behavior, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, is causing companies to react just as dramatically in order to stay connected with their customers. Which means the way they market and advertise is constantly changing, whether your selling to individual consumers or other businesses.
To dig into how these seismic changes are impacting ad and marketing technology usage by companies of all sizes, I recently held a LinkedIn Live conversation with Robin Bordoli, CEO NextRoll, a provider of data platform and account based marketing (ABM)and D2C (direct to consumer) technology. Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.
This week Adobe released a US-based study of one thousand currently employed people who usually work in an office setting to see how they are working during the COVID-19 pandemic. To dig in more to the study I had an opportunity to speak with Patrick Knight, Sr. Deliverability Consultant at Adobe, to get more takeaways and insights from the study.
Last week Microsoft made it known publicly that it was interested in acquiring a stake in TikTok, a wildly popular video sharing platform that has been in the news a lot lately. But the Microsoft news seemed to set off a bunch of reports that other companies were also interested, including Apple and Twitter.
In fact so many TikTok acquisition stories started cropping up my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I started exploring whether we should put a bid together… OK I was just kidding on that one. And yes, I didn’t need to say I was just kidding for you to know I was just kidding. But with all the TikTok acquisition talk going on, the Wall Street Journal published a report this week that found TikTok “skirted a privacy safeguard in Google’s Android operating system to collect unique identifiers from millions of mobile devices”.
Given this news and the obvious repercussions it has for data privacy, what does this say about the dedication to customer experience if any company decides to buy TikTok knowing all of this? It’s an internal conversation big companies are having. With 800 million active daily users TikTok is creating a level of stickiness and engagement most companies crave, but are the black hat tactics with user data allegedly being performed worth the potential legal issues? And more importantly is it worth losing the trust you’ve built up with your customer base?
Robotics Process Automation. RPA. It’s something that companies are expected to spend over $2.4 billion on by 2022, up from $689 in 2018 according to Gartner. But what exactly is it? And where does it fit in when it comes to helping companies with their digital transformation efforts? Big questions I was able to ask during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation I had with Francis Carden, Vice President of Digital Automation and Robotics for Pega – a leading customer engagement and process automation platform provider.
When the country initially shut down in March due to the COVID-19 outbreak, overnight many companies cut their marketing budgets and activities to zero. Many of those dollars and organizational efforts went to helping customers and communities deal with pandemic. And many of those efforts are still going on, and the impact of these efforts have been essential to helping people and small businesses make it through this difficult time. And another result of these efforts is to more meaningfully connect companies with their customers and surrounding communities, which has created the opportunity for these deeper relationships to be in place long after the pandemic has run its course.
It appears that companies may be learning that traditional marketing models that are more transactional in nature might be less effective in the Post Covid-19 world where relationships may matter more. And recently I had an interesting LinkedIn Live conversation with marketing technology (MarTech) industry expert Anand Thaker to get his take on how COVID may be changing how companies look at marketing, and what role technology will need to play in order for those Post Covid marketing efforts to be successful.
Shortly after the social protests broke out in response to the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, I had a the opportunity to do a LinkedIn Live conversation with Dr Kamau Bobb – Google’s Global Lead for Diversity Strategy & Research, and Senior Director of Georgia Tech’s Constellations Center for Equity in Computing – on if this moment in time has the opportunity to lead to structural change and more opportunities for blacks to participate in executive positions in tech companies, given they only fill 2.7% of those positions currently according to a recent post from The Information.
The conversation with Dr. Bobb was as real and honest a discussion I’ve had recently, and left me wanting to get some additional perspective from Craig Cuffie, Salesforce’s Chief Procurement Officer and one of those 2.7% of black tech executives. Salesforce has been a corporate leader in the areas of inclusion and diversity over the last several years, and Craig’s 30+ years working at the highest levels of a number of Fortune 500 companies provided me with unique insights that puts the current moment in perspective.
A recent Zoho-sponsored survey of 500 North America business from Beagle Research Group found • 66 percent find high satisfaction in the work they do. • Only 4 percent report that their job is chaotic and difficult to do well. • 69 percent agreed their job provides them with meaningful work they take pride in. • 68 percent of front-office employees and 75 percent of back-office employees said they felt a sense of purpose in their work. • These number are pretty positive generally speaking, but when you also factor in that the survey was fielded in the midst of Covid-19 they really are impressive. But the numbers took a significant dip when employees were asked about the technology they are provided at work:
• 51 percent of employees categorized these systems inadequate in keeping them aligned with company goals while working remote • 52 percent of those surveyed found their computing systems not conducive to their work, with that number growing to 56 percent at the small and medium enterprise level (businesses under 500 employees).
One of the key findings of the recent survey undertaken by the BizSugar mastermind community was that many small businesses focus heavily on DIY for things that have to get done outside of their area of expertise. Not only does that cost you precious time, a lack of expertise may cost you even in more in the long run. Which is why the BizSugar advisory board, along with a few members experienced in building virtual teams, recently got together for a LinkedIn Live discussion to share tips, tricks and hacks for putting together successful virtual teams to get things done for your business.
We covered a lot of ground in the hour long group conversation, from how to decide when to bring on virtual help, to tips for hiring virtual assistants, to what apps and sites to use to manage virtual workers.
Amazon maintained its position in the number one spot and saw its brand value increase 32%, or almost $100 billion, to $415.8 billion, according to the 15th annual Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking released earlier this week by advertising firm WPP and research firm Kantar. And they are smoking the competition, as #2 Apple is over $50 billion behind.
It’s easy to see that COVID-19 has been a big factor in this increase in value, as the size and speed of the shift to online shopping brought on by the virus caught everyone off guard. But even after a shaky period at the beginning of the crisis, Amazon seems to have weathered the storm and is operating at levels customers have grown accustomed to. And because the pandemic has accelerated the move to the world being even more digital, it has also positioned Amazon to be even more successful in a Post Covid world.
Covid-19 forced many of us to shelter-in-place, and caused us to do things like shop for groceries digitally. And while it took a pandemic for many of us to do that, now that we have done it, many will continue grocery shopping online long after the pandemic is over. Just as people who went into an office to work, might never do that again now that working from home has been great for many folks who never imagined doing it before Covid-19.
The pandemic has sped up the move to a digital-first economy. But there is more needed to be done before you can successfully transform your organizations to thrive in post Covid era. And earlier this week I talked about this during a LinkedIn Live conversation with Wilson Raj, Global Director of Customer Intelligence for analytics platform provider SAS.
Like everybody else I’m attending a bunch of virtual events that were originally supposed to be physical conferences. And, like everybody else, I’ve attended a number of really bad virtual events… because the organizers didn’t change the structure of their event to take advantage of what could be done in a virtual event world.
One company that did rebuild their physical event into a successful virtual conference was Pegasystems, a leading customer engagement and process automation platform. Having attended a number of physical PegaWorld events over the years, the changes to “virtualize” the conference were noticeable, and made it feel very much like it was built from the ground up for experiencing the conference differently than if you were sitting in a 10,000 seat auditorium at MGM in Vegas. And it worked.
My CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I had a chance to sit down (virtually) with Don Schuerman, Pega’s Chief Technology Officer and Master of Ceremony for PegaWorld, to hear from him how they were able to successfully go from physical to virtual. And also hear how some of the lessons learned from the experience are transferrable into broader digital transformation efforts companies of all sizes are beginning to undertake due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Covid-19 forced a lot of folks who were used to going into an office every day to work from home. And, while many of those folks will eventually go back into an office to work, a significant number of them won’t. And even those that do go back will return to a completely different environment and workplace experience than they left. So what does that mean for small business going forward as we try to survive during the pandemic and position ourselves for success once the crisis is behind us?
That was the topic of a LinkedIn Live conversation I had earlier this week with friend and small business analyst Laurie McCabe, and Mona Abou-Sayed, VP of Collaboration & Applications for Mitel; a global market leader in business communications. The discussion touched on a number ways the pandemic is fundamentally changing people, and how those behavioral changes is/will change business operations and customer engagement.
A specialty manufacturing company in business for a long time Geoff Webb, VP of Strategy for AI/analytics platform PROS, they went from doing roughly 10% of their orders through online digital e-commerce at the end of last year, to 80% of their business today. Geoff shared this with me and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg during our latest weekly show.
That stopped us in our tracks, but also led to a fascination conversation with lessons for businesses of all sizes to take in.
In 2016 I did my first presentation on Amazon Alexa and Echo, and at the time there were about 700 skills available. Today there are over 100K. And hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. So, since most of us are spending more time than ever in our houses, I wanted to catch up again with Dave Isbitski, Amazon’s Chief Evangelist for Alexa and Echo.
In a pretty extensive chat we had on LinkedIn Live recently, Dave shares some of the stories of how people are using Alexa/Echo and smart assistants in general during the Covid-19 pandemic, why he thinks voice technology is uniting generations, and how he sees voice playing a major role in the PC (Post Covid) era.
Over the past year and a half or so BizSugar.com, a sister site to Small Business Trends, has gone through a bit of a transformation. The site is dedicated helping small businesses understand how they can use integrated platforms and automated processes to grow and scale their businesses. Part of that effort was to create a mastermind community for sharing ideas, experiences and expertise. And in that relatively short amount of time, the BizSugar mastermind community has grown to over 18,000+ members.
I’m chair of the BizSugar advisory board and one of the activities we did earlier this year was a survey to better understand the current challenges facing small businesses. This took place before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country. And earlier this week a few members of the advisory board participated in a livestream conversation discussing some of the main takeaways from the survey of 585 small businesses folks. We also offer up a few solutions that may be able to help you address some of the major challenges small businesses are faced with.
Covid-19 has stretched the American healthcare system to its limits, and beyond. And things are changing in real-time in order to deal with a pandemic that has already cost more than 87,000 people their lives in a span of just over two months. And technology is at the heart of that change as IoT and mixed reality devices are enabling telemedicine to dramatically increase, and the manufacture of ventilators to ramp up to produce numbers in months that typically take several years to push out.
Microsoft has been involved in developing IoT and mixed reality technologies for years. And during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation with Rodney Clark, VP of IoT Devices and Mixed Reality for Microsoft, I had a chance to learn how these technologies are being used during the pandemic to help the healthcare system meet the needs of patients and caregivers fighting the virus. Rodney also gives us a glimpse of how IoT and mixed reality devices will change other industries well after the pandemic is over.
We found out today 20.5 million jobs were lost in April due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. And many of those jobs were people working at one of the nation’s 30 million plus small businesses. And, according to a recently released report by the SMB Group, Impact of COVID-19 on SMBs: Navigating a Path Forward, 43% of small businesses temporarily shut down due to the shelter-in-place orders many states put in place in response to the deadly outbreak.
But possibly the biggest unknown going forward might be just how many of those businesses will be able to open back up again, which SMB Group co-founder Laurie McCabe and I discussed earlier this week during a LinkedIn Live conversation. Laurie shares some of the key findings from the study, including how some small businesses are turning to certain technologies to help them not only survive, but also thrive even during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Meredith Schmidt, Salesforce EVP & GM for Essentials and SMB, recently joined me for a LinkedIn Live conversation to share how Salesforce is helping small businesses in these difficult times, what she’s hearing directly from small businesses during the pandemic, the importance of using technology in more creative ways to stay connected with customers, and the role Salesforce is looking to play to help small businesses to not only survive Covid-19 but position themselves to succeed once we get past the crisis.
With Congress passing a new $480 billion round of funding, including $310 billion for PPP, banks are about to get deluged with new submissions from small businesses in dire need of money to help them survive the economic shutdown caused by Covid-19 pandemic. And the crush of submissions during the first round of PPP funding brought many of the banks to a standstill as much of the processing of those applications were done manually.
In response to the current situation, Pegasystems - a leading platform provider for digital process automation, and business process management and CRM - developed the Crisis Small Business Lending app. The service is designed to help their banking customers speed up the PPP submission responses by automating different parts of the process. And earlier this week I had a chance to learn more about how automation could significantly speed up the PPP process by speaking with Marc Andrews, Vice President, Financial Services and Insurance Industry Market Leader for Pega.
Earlier this week I had the opportunity to do a LinkedIn Live conversation with Gary Specter, Vice President of Global Commercial Business at Adobe, to learn more about the program, and to hear his thoughts on how SMBs can better position themselves for what will likely end up being a much different business environment and set of customer expectations once the country opens back up for business.
The early days of applying for the the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has been tough, as millions of small businesses are trying to take advantage of the opportunity to get the funding they need to right out the economic shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the good news is some of those first to submit their applications are beginning to get their approval notifications back. In fact during this week’s convo with Corpnet CEO and frequent Small Business Trends contributor Nellie Akalp, as she was sharing the details of both the PPP and Economic Injury Disaster Relief Program(ECIDRP) opportunities, a small business friend of mine sent me a message saying he had just been approved. And as he was sharing the process he went through, Nellie got her approval notification.
So those early to apply for the program are beginning to hear back. But if you haven’t submitted your application you’ll probably want to get it in as soon as you can. And Nellie did a great job laying out the program, who’s eligible for it, and what you need to have ready before you apply. So if you want to learn more about these programs, below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation. But to see the whole conversation and hear all of Nellie’s tips and advice surrounding these programs watch the video or click on the embedded SoundCloud player below.
Having sat in on a million Zoom meetings, Skype meetings and Webex webinars, the mashme platform, called The Room of the Future, was a real eye opener to me. It was a more immersive experience which had you feeling like you were actually in the classroom. So, with more and more of us doing more work from home and online collaboration, I spoke with mashme CEO Victor Sanchez to hear more about universities are using this immersive experience to deliver a more collaborative digital learning environments, and how that may transfer into business environments.
John Taschek came to Salesforce coming up on 17 years ago and built what many feel is the model for analyst relations in the CRM industry. What’s ironic is he did that while not viewing it as being analyst relations, and while not following the industry practice of focusing solely on the big name firms like Gartner and Forrester. In fact, based on his past experiences as a tech media exec, he wanted to find the right voices to listen to regardless of whether they had a big brand after their name, and treated those he found the same way he treated those who did come from a big brand firm.
So we spent a few minutes with John (at the last conference I attended before the pandemic) learning more about why he decided to build the program the way he did, the role Marc Benioff played in letting him be “a CEO of one”, and why it was important to him to not limit his search for voices to the usual suspects; and to treat those other voices the same way as those coming from the big brands.
Last year I had a great conversation on what digital transformation means for small businesses with Joe Galvin, chief research officer for Vistage, a peer mentoring membership organization for CEOs, business owners and executives of small- to mid-size businesses with more than 22,000 members in 20 countries.
Vistage recently published a report based on a survey of their membership on how the coronavirus pandemic is effecting their confidence and impacting their business. So I was glad to spend a few minutes with Joe hear more about what he’s hearing from the Vistage community about how they’re operating during the pandemic, and how this experience may change the way they operate once we get past this trying time.
It’s times like these where we look for people and organizations we can trust. Where out-of-the-box thinking can really help make a scary/dangerous situation feel more manageable. And even though it appears like we’re going to be in a tough situation for the foreseeable future with the virus, this also is a moment that reveals who we are, and who we can trust when the chips are down. So me and my fellow CRM Playaz Paul Greenberg and Brian Solis decided to do an episode discussing some of the things we’ve seen people and companies in the CRM industry in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
With International Women’s Day coming up this weekend, I had the real pleasure last week of moderating a panel on inclusion and diversity during the inaugural Ambient Experience Summit held in Atlanta and organized by Constellation Research. It was a great event and I was proud to be the local host for the conference. But the highlight for me was the panel, which featured Jenn VandeZande, Editor-in-Chief of SAP’s thought leadership site, and Lately CEO and founder Kate Bradley Chernis who we just spoke with for the series. The conversation with Jenn and Kate was honest, open, blunt and eye-opening. And while quite a bit of it was sobering, we were also able to find some humor along the way. But the bottom line is that we still have a ways to go before some of the uncomfortable truths that were touched on can be turned into meaningful actions to change where things stand today. And I think Jenn, Kate and the Constellation team (Ray Wang, Nicole France, Liz Miller, Meghan O'Neill Ruona and Aubrey Coggins) for making this session a part of a great agenda. Thanks to Constellation also for making this video available for us to feature here in the series.
Frank Eliason, a pioneer in social customer care, shares his personal experiences working as an associate in one of the biggest Amazon Fulfillment Centers in the country.
Conversations are eating apps’ lunch. That was a statement made by Twilio founder and CEO Jeff Lawson at their annual user conference, Signal. That statement, along with a few others from his talk, stayed with me for a while, and eventually led to an article I wrote as part of a thought leadership series the company is currently featuring. While I was at the conference I had the pleasure of speaking with Dan Miller, founder and lead analyst of Opus Research. Dan is one of the pioneers in researching communications technology and how its used in the enterprise, particularly when it comes to the call center and how customer service.
Kate Bradley Chernis, Founder & CEO of Lately – a platform using Artificial Intelligence to instantly transform blogs, videos and podcasts into dozens of social posts – joined me yesterday in a LinkedIn Live conversation to talk about how AI and automation is allowing marketers not only get more out of their efforts, it’s tapping into and using insights that is leading to self-generated content with human empathy included.
Vembu shares his thoughts on how the company has developed over the past five years, how it is positioning itself as a technology company and not just a software company, why he feels the cloud should help provide dignity and opportunity to rural communities, and why Zoho is taking a hard stance against the industry practice of “surveilling” customer data.
Last week at a House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing on competition in the digital economy. You may have missed it because of that other hearing going on in Washington right now. During his testimony at the hearing, David Barnett, ceo of phone accessory maker PopSockets, accused Amazon of “bullying with a smile”, “strong-arming” and failing to remove fake products. And as a result the company looked to other options to sell its goods, but as you will see in this ep of Watching Amazon, doing digital commerce outside of Amazon is, well, tough. Even when you have a known brand like PopSockets has built.
And the relationships between Amazon and its shipping partners like FedEx and UPS are getting even more interesting as Amazon takes on more of its own shipping needs to get their customers stuff to them faster and faster. But one area that Amazon has not disrupted is when its partners ship them products that end up getting sold on the platform. UPS handles virtually all of that. But will Amazon take a swipe at that too?
Sangram shares where we are today with ABM, how it’s changed the relationship between sales and marketing, and how AI is impacting it. He also shares why he recently started a daily newsletter on LinkedIn called Becoming Intentional, and how in less than a month he’s been able to reach over five thousand people each day with his conversation-based observations.
Leyla shares what led her to become an investor and LP with Operator Collective, how this challenge compares to her road to becoming a senior executive at a company like Salesforce, and why she feels it’s important for more women and underrepresented minorities to get involved in the VC space.
When my Watching Amazon co-host John “ColderIce” Lawson and I recorded our latest episode, we were focused on the recent announcement Amazon made barring their third-party merchants from using FedEx ground service to deliver to Prime members, hinting that it thinks the service is too slow to get packages to their destinations in time for # Christmas. And while we got into the implications of that move for sellers on the platform, we touched on a prediction that Amazon could actually double their revenue by 2023 – which seems like an incredible feat if they can pull it off. But with this being the end of another decade – a decade in which Amazon seemingly dominated the headlines in a variety of ways – we had to discuss what we think was the most impactful “thing” the company was responsible for during the 2010s.
We had a chance to sit and talk with Paul Pedrazzi, SVP of Product for Salesforce’s SMB focused product, Essentials. We wanted to hear how Salesforce’s approach to the small business market is evolving, the commitment Essentials has from the executive team to provide SMBs with the products and services they need to succeed, and also hear how Essentials, which operates as its own business within Salesforce, is changing the look and feel of the company’s enterprise offerings – and even how the company engages customers overall.
My first guest in this convo series over nine years ago was Jon Ferrara, CEO and founder of Nimble. And before Nimble Jon cofounded Goldmine back in 1989. So Jon was literally at the start of the contact management/CRM game and has been involved with it for 30 years.
With it being on the eve of a new decade (and a new decade for CRM) I had the pleasure of speaking with Jon to get his take on the state of CRM, how it has evolved over the years, and is he surprised by how things have changed (and how they haven’t) over the three decades since he cofounded Goldmine.
I was able to chat for a few minutes with Michael Machado, Salesforce’s Senior Director of Product for Einstein Voice and Deep Learning. Michael got me up to speed with what’s new with Einstein Voice, what the feedback from customers has been so far, how voice technology will help people understand AI more, and what impact he sees voice technology will have on CRM adoption once people get their hands on it – or should I say get their voices on it.
Vala Afshar of Salesforce: My Job is all about Listening, Learning, Sharing and Storytelling by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Steve Reese, CIO of the Phoenix Suns, had an intriguing subject on how a conversation with the team trainer led to a sleep study that not only impacted the players, but all the employees in the organization – including him. So I huddled up with Steve for a deeper discussion on how more sleep changed his life personally, as well as changed the organization overall.
I was able to have a fireside chat (and I mean literally a fireside chat) with Dina Apostolou, Global Product Marketing Director of Worldwide Business Applications for Microsoft, this week at Constellation Research’s annual Connected Enterprise conference. Dina expanded on her thoughts on why AI can help SMBs get more out of CRM and Microsoft’s approach to bringing AI and CRM together. She also explains what mixed reality is and how the company is bringing it to their customer base to help improve the selling experience, while also improving workforce productivity. And she explains why she’s more of a talker than a texter.
Losing billions of dollars in market cap and personal wealth wasn’t the only tough news Amazon had to deal with this week. Two other nuggets that caught John Lawson and my attention as guys who Watch Amazon was third party sellers selling expired food items and “coaches” teaching people bad selling practices, causing Amazon to have to start suing people. So we devoted a couple segments to the impact bad sellers and rogue coaches are having on Amazon.
I had the opportunity to speak with Clate Mask about the two-year transformation his company InfusionSoft went through to become Keap. This was a conversation I was really looking forward to having known Clate and InfusionSoft for about twelve years, admiring what they have accomplished in that time, but having questions about what happened to the company while they were transitioning from InfusionSoft to Keap. And I really appreciated Clate taking time to answer questions that I had about the transition and how it was done.
Last week I attended Zoho’s Developer Conference in their Pleasanton CA office and had a chance to sit down with cofounder and CEO Sridhar Vembu for a wide ranging conversation. We tackled a variety of subjects, including what he feels is the most misunderstood thing about the company, why he continues to watch and model some of Zoho’s practices after companies like Amazon and Facebook, and the role their AI technology (Zia) has played in the accelerated adoption of their Zoho One platform – which in just over two years has gone from zero to 29,000 business customers; even how using Zoho Creator allowed a non-techie farmer to become a developer. But maybe the most intriguing thought he shares with us is why he’s interested in the capital generated by the company’s culture, more than financial valuations put on corporations.
We had the opportunity to sit down with SugarCRM co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Clint Oram, Chief Technology/Chief Product Officer Rich Green, and new CEO Craig Charlton to learn more about how the company is looking to transform itself from a CRM system into a customer experience platform.
One of the most interesting conversations I had during the Oracle OpenWorld was with Kellie Romack, Vice President of Digital HR and Strategic Planning for Hilton. Hilton was recently named the best place to work in the country, and during OpenWorld Kellie was part of a keynote session sharing why the company is gearing up to roll out Oracle’s new digital assistant technology to its workforce. And I had the pleasure of grabbing a few minutes of her time to ask her a few additional questions. And even though Hilton is a huge organization with locations all over the world, businesses of any size can learn from one of Kellie’s key themes – employees should have access to the same great tech as guests staying at their hotels do in order to create the best experiences they can for guests and themselves
Last month I had the opportunity to check out Twilio ’s annual user conference, Signal. Twilio, a platform that allows developers to build communications-enabled (voice, text, chat, email), shared a few stats that really caught my attention: • Twilio sends 50 billion emails a month on behalf of their customers • They send 200 million SMS messages a day • 53% of WhatsApp messages Twilio customers sent got a reply
With numbers like these it’s safe to say that Twilio has a pretty good pulse on how current and emerging communication channels are shaping customer engagement, experiences and journeys. And I had a chance to speak with Nico Acosta, Twilio’s Director of Product for AI/ML, to dig in a bit on what they’re seeing in terms of how voice, chat and other new channels are impacting the customer journey.
While checking out the Refresh19, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Freshworks’ CEO and founder Girish Mathrubootham. He discusses why he sees himself more as a support guy who became a CEO than as a CEO who does email support, why automation should never compromise customer experience, and why he’s willing to give employees the time and opportunity to “find themselves” and their role in the company. And he also talks about hosting a fireside chat with Shaquille O’Neal during the conference, which to me was the highlight of Refresh.
I recently caught up to Jeremy Epstein, and I mean literally caught up with him, as we recorded a conversation while he was walking in the forest near his home. So this was definitely a different kind of conversation, but a fun one in addition to being extremely informative and insightful. And we cover a lot of ground as Jeremy Epstein touches on the current state of blockchain development, how the number of tech startups has grown roughly 20X over the past couple of years, the industries being impacted the most, and his future prediction of how blockchain will disrupt CRM as we know it today.
Rick McCutcheon, CEO and founder of Full Contact Selling, is an expert on social selling, and is one of only 85 Microsoft Dynamic MVPs in the area of customer engagement. We discuss how AI and automation in CRM can benefit SMBs. And talk about how Microsoft Dynamics 365, CRM and other pieces of the Microsoft puzzle are coming together to create an integrated productivity/engagement platform.
Earlier this week it was reported that Facebook has been collecting audio from some voice chats on Messenger and paying contractors to listen to and transcribe it. The next day a Reuters report said Microsoft recently updated its privacy policy to let customers know that it had been collecting voice data (from Skype and Cortana) of its users with the help of employees and contractors. And in an email statement to Reuters a Microsoft spokesperson said they realized, “based on questions raised recently, that we could do a better job specifying that humans sometimes review this content.”
That got my CRM Playaz partner Paul Greenberg and I thinking about how all of these voice interactions are being used, what’s happening with this voice data without our knowledge, and what’s the right way for companies to engage customers as they leverage this growing treasure trove of data. And in particular how these two companies handled things this week.
Oracle recently conducted a study of 1,100 US consumers, and last week released a report of the findings called “One Size Doesn’t Fit All.” The report was done in partnership with and features analysis by Jeanne Bliss, a leading customer experience thought leader, author and founder of CustomerBLISS.
This week me and my Watching Amazon show co-host talked a couple of times about Amazon’s latest earnings report. And despite revenue going up 20% year over year, many financial analysts and pundits were disappointed that Bezos and Co. didn’t meet expectations, causing the stock price to take a sizable hit. So John and I dug in and spent a few minutes talking about the whether the short term impact of a huge investment in moving from 2-day free shipping to 1-day free shipping will be worth the short term hit on the latest earnings report. Then we get into an interesting story of how before Amazon opened up their cashier-less, AI-driven Go stores, Bezos did a walkthrough that changed the direction of the shopping experience. And possibly these two stories together help to illustrate why he’s the wealthiest man in the world, and why we’re just a couple of guys Watching Amazon….
Chris Poelma, President and GM of NCR’s Small Business unit, sat down with me this week to discuss the current crypto landscape, where Bitcoin fits in, and the potential impact Facebook’s Libra could have on the market. And more importantly, he shares his thoughts on what all of this could mean for actually transacting business and not just using crypto for speculative purposes.
I had the pleasure of hosting a fireside chat with two of the C-level executives of the Historical Basketball League (HBL) – CEO and cofounder Ricky Volante, and COO David West. David also played 15 years in the NBA and was a two-time champion with the Golden State Warriors. The chat was all about the HBL, a startup basketball league that is looking to provide college athletes with an alternative pathway to the NBA, is looking to disrupt and the NCAA’s stranglehold by paying athletes, giving them scholarships and allowing them to benefit financially on their own personal brands. It was such an interesting discussion that me and my CRM Playaz partner Paul Greenberg asked Ricky and David to join us for an episode so we can dig in a bit more why they decided to challenge an organization with the power and clout of the NCAA
If I had to pick one overarching theme from the 15 or so CRM industry events I’ve attended so far this year it would probably center around the crossroads of where automation and AI intersect. And during last month’s PegaWorld user conference I had a chance to speak with the founder and host of the very popular This Week in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence podcast Sam Charrington, who in just over three years has over five million show downloads.
Sam shares his thoughts on we are today with technologies like machine learning, AI and natural language processing, and how companies are just scratching the surface in putting these tools to work to improve all aspects of their businesses, but have to be implemented with the proper perspective. And he also addresses another theme that I heard addressed at multiple conference this year; how AI will eventually lead to AE, artificial empathy.
Vidyard, a leading video platform for business, recently released their annual Video in Business Benchmark Report and it is full of great information on how businesses are leveraging video to engage customers and prospects. The study found on average, 52% of viewers watch a video all the way through, regardless of the video’s length. But over two-thirds (68%) of viewers watch a video to the end if it’s less than 60 seconds, while only 25% will finish a video if it’s more than 20 minutes.
These are just a few of the many data points coming from the survey, and I recently spoke with Vidyard’s VP of Marketing Tyler Lessard who shared his perspective on some of the key findings from the report
Two years ago I had a chance to speak with Merijn te Booij, CMO of Genesys, a leading provider of omnichannel customer experience (CX) and contact center solutions in the cloud and on-premises. And last week I had another sit down with him during the company’s annual user conference; Xperience 2019. And with two years feeling like two decades in terms of technological developments, I was curious to get Merijin’s perspective on just how much has changed in the areas of AI, customer experience and conversational interfaces. But what really captured my attention is how he feels these technologies will impact our abilities to apply human empathy to interactions with customers to improve experiences for both consumers and employees. And on top of that, how he feels that AI will also lead to AE – artificial empathy – somewhere down the line.
So this one is a little different, but what do you expect when somehow Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols (along with The Clash, Fugazi and other Punk Rock bands) are used to potentially put us back on the right path to creating the kinds of experiences important to customers today. A path CX thought leader Adrian Swinscoe says many companies have strayed from as they seem to be favoring opulence at the expense of providing the essentials customers depend on – which he illustrates with his new book Punk CX.
It appears like we may have averted a tariff war with Mexico, even though it’s still a bit early to tell if that will really be the case. But there’s another tariff war that’s still in effect right now between the two biggest economies in the world – The USA and China. But are these the only two superpowers involved in this fight? Some say there’s actually a third superpower involved in this – Amazon. Now is Amazon really a superpower in the same way that these two countries are? Of course not. They can’t use executive orders to remove or increase tariffs the same way USA or China can. But, can Amazon impact the impact of these tariffs due to online retail omnipotence and the role they play with both third-party sellers and consumers? Well that’s what I put to my buddy and Watching Amazon co-host John Lawson.
Michael Wu Of PROS - AI Mimics Humans But Won't Take Your Place by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Last year I caught up with my buddy Joe Galvin, Chief Research Officer of Vistage, a business advisory and executive coaching organization with a membership of more than 22,000 business owners and executive leaders. Recently I was able to catch up with him again to talk about a phrase that continues to get a lot of attention – digital transformation. But, despite all the focus and discussion we see on digital transformation, it’s digital transition Joe sees that is taking place at SMBs, which can definitely have a positive impact on business operations but does not come close to the potential transformative impact modern tech can have if given the chance.
While at Magento Imagine last week I had the chance to speak to Brooks Robinson, CEO of Springbot, a marketing automation application built specifically for SMB e-commerce retailers. They’ve been serving this audience for seven years, and are a long time Magento partner. So I stopped by their booth at the conference to get Brooks’ take on what Adobe acquisition of Magento means to SMB retailers, what have been the biggest changes to ecommerce over the past couple of years, what relationship SMB sellers should have with Amazon, and what smaller ecommerce players should be on the lookout for in the not too distant future.
During Magento Imagine I had the opportunity to chat with Jason Woolsey, Adobe’s VP of Commerce, about the combination of commerce and content and how that is impacting online merchants – and more importantly the digital shopping experience. Jason also touches on some of the more notable announcements coming out of the conference and their potential impact on Magento merchants, including integrations with the Amazon Marketplace and Google Ads that allow merchants to manage their whole operation from within the Magento console. And finally Jason talks about the $9 billion opportunity to capitalize on converting on the growing mobile shopping transition taking place, and how progressive web apps can help with that.
I had an opportunity to talk with Colin Morris, Director of Product Management for Adobe about how things like smart speakers and voice assistants are potential game changers for how companies engage customers and prospects. But now I think it’s safe to drop “potential” from that statement as its clear the game is already changing. Colin shares just how much the game has changed, because many people out there might not know the magnitude of the change – and the magnitude of what’s to come in the not too distant future.
Earlier this week I chaired CRM Evolution, CRM Magazine’s annual industry conference. And as usual it was a great event with industry experts, thought leaders and vendor executives participating throughout the 3 days of the event. But the most surprising person I ran into at the conference was my supervisor at my very first professional job, Jay Duff. I hadn’t seen Jay in close to 22 years and had no idea he would be there. Back in the early 1990s we helped pharmaceutical sales reps use CRM to manage their territories, but today Jay works at Chick-fil-A leading some of their technology development around analytics, artificial intelligence and speech technology. So in addition to catching up some, Jay shared a few examples of how these technologies are helping the company improve the customer experience
Brian Solis’ new book Lifescale - How to Live a More Creative, Productive and Happy Life, is a departure from his previous books, including X: The Experience When Business Meets Design and What’s The Future of Business. Whereas these books were focused on the impact of modern technology on our business and professional lives, Lifescale looks at the impact that digital distraction is having on our personal lives and our ability to be who we really want to be.
As with those previous books, I had a chance to chat with Brian about Lifescale, why he decided to write this kind of book, what he learned about himself and how digital distraction impacted his life, and what people can do to put their lives back into more balance in order to be closer to their true selves.
I caught up with Ramon Ray at a recent conference to discuss his new book Celebrity CEO, understand what he means by the term Celebrity CEO, why he feels it’s critical for today’s small business folks to become one, and what it will take to be one.
As busy as he was during Zoholics19, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu made time for the Small Business Trends community to do an “ask me anything” session with myself and SBT publisher Anita Campbell. We covered a lot of ground with Sridhar thanks to the great questions sent in from the both the SBT and BizSugar communities
Meredith Schmidt, Executive Vice President & GM of Salesforce Essentials & SMB, joined me last week to share more about the change in how Salesforce Essentials is being positioned within the company, what will change, and how this will impact Salesforce’s SMB customers. She also touches on how new technologies like AI and voice interfaces are already beginning to affect small businesses.
Paul Greenberg and I were able to capture some of these nuggets in a conversation we had with Rob Tarkoff, Oracle’s EVP and GM of the Oracle CX business. Topics Rob touched on include the leading role data is playing in developing customers experiences, the role curiosity plays in delivering customer experiences, and who Rob believes is the most curious person (out of 140,000 employees worldwide) at Oracle is today. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
I spent some time with Ginger to discuss an intriguing question based on the upcoming 25th anniversary of the first digital display ads being run on websites – what has been the most significant moment in the 25 year history of digital marketing?
Ginger and I take a shot at answering that, but as you’ll see below it’s kind of hard to narrow it down to one moment or thing.
Oracle’s Netsuite division recently put out the Future of Retail report (free with registration) in partnership with Wakefield Research and The Retail Doctor. The global study of 1,200 consumers and 400 retail executives across the U.S., U.K. and Australia found a huge disconnect between what retailers think shoppers want, and what shoppers actually want. Major differences are found in areas spanning the overall retail environment, social media, personalization and the use of advanced technologies such as chatbots, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR).
Bob Phibbs, better known as The Retail Doctor, shared with me some of his more interesting takeaways from the study, and why the gap is so wide between retailers perception of what customers want, and customer expectations for experiences they want retailers to provide them.
To learn more about Zoho University me and my CRM Playaz partner Paul Greenberg had a chance to sit with Zoho’s Raju Vegesna to learn more about the program, how it fits with the company’s overall culture and philosophy, and how the program has led to Zoho hiring 1800 Zoho University graduates – equating to roughly a quarter of the company’s 7000+ employee base.
The inaugural Facebook 3.5 Degrees podcast features Bryan and Bradford Manning of Two Blind Brothers, who created their t-shirt business from the start to donate 100% of their profits to help to retinal research to try and cure blindness. This mission hits close to home for them, as they both our legally blind due to having Stargardt disease since they were very young.
Bryan and Bradford shared with me how they got started with the business, the central role their mission plays in it, and how by having philanthropy at the core of their business they’ve been able to raise over $300,000 dollars in the fight to find a cure for blindness – even as a startup.
Chris Halaschek, VP of IoT at Pindrop, a pioneering company in voice fraud prevention and authentication, invited me over to the company’s Atlanta-based headquarters to talk about where we are today with security for these kinds of devices, and what can be done to make it safer to use the popular devices to do more things.
Recently an article came discussed a situation where an Amazon customer was trying to post a review for the book she bought. But she kept getting notified that due to a rules violation she wouldn’t be able to do it. Well after the news about Facebook sharing information came out, it appeared that Amazon may have used the data to assume there was a “real” friendship that wouldn’t allow for an honest review of the book.
John Lawson and I discuss the implications of Amazon using Facebook data to determine who knows who and how that plays into protecting shoppers on the site. And what are the wider implications of big tech companies sharing data without telling the folks who’s data they’re sharing.
While many of you probably know who Grant Hill is, you might not have known that he went from playing on the court to being a co-owner of the Atlanta Hawks – also serving as Vice Chair of the organization. And last week I had the honor of hosting a conversation with Hill and Nzinga Shaw, the Hawks Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer, during the Diversity in Tech Summit held in conjunction with Salesforce’s World Tour Stop in Atlanta. The event was organized in partnership with The Atlanta Tribune – the Magazine.
Shaw, who is the first person to hold such a position in a professional team sport in the US, and Hill discussed a number of interesting around leadership, the benefits of inclusion and equality, and why diversity has to be part of the corporate culture in order for it work.
It was obvious that SAP CEO Bill McDermott was enthusiastic about the purchase of Qualtrics and referred to it as being a transformational moment for the company. Which got my buddy and CRM thought leader Paul Greenberg (aka the Godfather of CRM) fired up to discuss for our CRM Playaz video podcast. But while we focused on whether we felt McDermott was right about the deal being transformational, we went beyond that and started thinking about what does it really mean to be transformational in business today, and what are good examples out there to follow.
Genesys, a leader in omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, recently published their Consumer Insights Survey including responses from one thousand US adults. There are a bunch of interesting numbers coming out of the survey, including:
• 41% of respondents willing to pay up to 10% more for a better customer experience • 94% of consumers viewed their last customer experience as positive • 75% of consumers say humans provide the most effective customer service, but 76% still want the option to interact with companies via digital channels (webchat, social media, etc.) • Only 12.5% of respondents hate interacting with bots
Chris Connolly, VP of Product Marketing for Genesys, joins me to share some additional insights from the survey.
There are a growing number of signs pointing to a shakeup in how marketers are allocating their digital advertising budgets. Now to be sure Google and Facebook are still the top destinations for those ad dollars. But more and more you’re hearing about big brands beginning to switch as much as 50-60% of their budgets to Amazon.
With Amazon having a lot of momentum in the digital ads business, I had to pull in my Watching Amazon partner and ecommerce expert John “ColderIce” Lawson to talk about what he’s seeing in this area, how teens shopping is changing the digital ad spending equation, and what impact this shift might have on small businesses.
Adobe Intern Cedrick Ilo: Working on Having Alexa Read Your PDF Documents to You by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
It’s been fifteen years this month since Anita Campbell started Small Business Trends! So, after congratulating her on such a big accomplishment, I had to ask her about her journey transforming a personal blog into one of the most influential sites in providing advice to millions of small business owners and professionals each month.
Well, after the bomb Amazon dropped yesterday announcing an arsenal of Alexa-enabled devices – from microwaves, cars devices, wall clocks, outlet plugs, subwoofers – it’s easy to see we’re a quickly moving into a voice-first world. But the reason for all these new voice-enabled devices is because we kind of like talking to them, according to a recent study from Adobe called The State of Voice Assistants. Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights, shared some of the key finding from the study with me for this series.
I attended HubSpot’s INBOUND conference last week, where about 24,000 marketers descended on Boston for four days. While at the conference I had a chance to spend a few minutes with Jon Dick, HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, and pick his brain on a few of the hot topics currently facing marketers today
After years of being a very successful CMO, last month Mike Volpe was named CEO of Lola.com – a company focused on making business travel easier for the travel manager and the traveler. I caught with Mike at Lola’s headquarters in Boston to learn more about making the transition from CMO to CEO, how being a CMO helped him prepare for being a CEO, and to get his take on how leading a startup in today’s environment compares to what is was like building HubSpot up more than a decade ago.
I’ve spent part of the summer catching up with a few folks that I’ve talked with for this series in years past. And although it’s been less been less than a year and a half since I last spoke with Opus Research founder Dan Miller, in the fast-moving area of conversational interfaces like chatbots and voice assistants, that’s feels more like a lifetime.
Dan, whose company is gearing up for their Conversational Commerce Conference next month, coined the phrase “conversational commerce” in 2011. So I wanted to catch up to him to ask him where we are today with conversational commerce on the heels of the reportedly low voice shopping numbers for Alexa on the eve of the conference. I also got his take on what impact the Cortana-Alexa integration might have on adoption of voice assistants in business.
It’s been nearly three years since I had the pleasure of speaking with Dennis Mortensen, founder and CEO of X.ai — the service behind Amy and Andrew - autonomous AI assistants who schedule meetings. Since three years in tech is like 20 years in real life, and with smart/digital assistants being at the top of many hot technology lists, I wanted to get Dennis’ perspective on how things have changed since we last spoke and how he sees the intelligent agent landscape shaping up.
Back in June of this year Facebook pledged to train 1 million US business owners by 2020 and equip more people with the digital skills they need to compete in today’s workplace. To help them meet that goal, this week the company announced a partnership with the National Urban League (NUL) to offer free training in social media strategy and digital marketing at 13 NUL locations in the following cities: Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD; Chicago, IL; Cincinnati, OH; Cleveland, OH; Houston, TX; Jacksonville, FL; Kansas City, MO; Las Vegas, NV; Los Angeles, CA; New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; and Washington, D.C. Monique Dorsainvil, public policy manager for Facebook, filled us in on some of the details of the program, why it’s important for Facebook to pledge this commitment to train small business owners, and why working with organizations like the National Urban League will help them accomplish their goal.
Amazon Prime Day 2018 started with a whimper, a dog whimper, due to the site going down causing Amazon to post pages with pictures of dogs on them while they tried to get the site back up. But even with that inauspicious start ( and an estimated $99 million of lost business), PD ’18 was still the biggest selling day in Amazon history – estimated at $4.2 billion by Wedbush Securities Inc. analyst Michael Pachter. And, according to Amazon, small and midsize businesses sold over $1 billion dollars on the platform in the first 24 hours of the company holiday. While those are impressive numbers, my Watching Amazon co-host John Lawson and I dig in a bit deeper on what we thought of the results, and more to the point the lack of results Amazon has provided this time around.
, I was glad to speak with Tact.ai’s founder and CEO Chuck Ganapathi to hear his thoughts on these subjects. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear even more of the conversation check out the video below. You’ll notice in the video it’s just Chuck answering the questions. There was a little trouble on with my audio, but thankfully, and most importantly, Chuck looks and sounds great, so check it out!
In a conversation with Fred Studer, the company’s chief marketing officer, he explains why the company feels why a services-based business model is what needed to be successful today, and why they call themselves a customer-centric ERP company.
Business of all sizes spend a lot of time keeping track of what they spend and what they take in. And many have employees who travel to meet with customers and prospects in order to drum up business. And managing all of that is a tedious, but important task; and manually keeping track of all that could be costing you money.
I recently spoke with David Alexander, Vice President of Marketing and Market Development for SAP Concur, a leading provider of cloud-based integrated travel and expense management services and solutions. He shared how using an automated platform for managing travel and expense tasks can help small businesses not only be more productive, but also provides insight into how they’re spending money – which can help them save money in the end.
At last week’s Xerocon event I had the pleasure of meeting Steven Carse, who cofounded King of Pops with his brother. And what start as a natural ingredients popsicle company with a single cart in 2010 has turned into a company employing upwards of 250 people spread across eight cities in five states. Steven shared with me how being laid off from his corporate job led to him discovering his business opportunity, the importance of being involved in the community is key to understanding customers, and how an employee who brings his ukulele to work with him is a good fit for the company.
I caught up with Keri Gohman, President of Xero Americas, after her keynote at Xerocon 2018 yesterday right here in Atlanta. One of the themes of her presentation centered on how automation will free accountants from the time-consuming but important tasks of collecting and processing data, allowing them to focus more of their time on more valuable advisory services – services small businesses want them to provide. And artificial intelligence, coupled with automation, is providing accounting advisors insight into creating their own specialized niches that can provide additional opportunities for growing their businesses while providing their customers with more reasons to stay customers longer.
Usually my co-host for doing the Watching Amazon video podcast is my buddy John “ColderIce” Lawson, but with him out of the country, I was lucky to have my friend Jeff Brathwaite – web guru and Google Home/Assistant expert – join me. And it was perfect timing, as last week it was reported that Google outsold Amazon smart speaker device category for the first time ever in the first quarter of 2018…something I did not think would happen anytime soon let alone last quarter.
We talk about how Google is catching up to Amazon in the race for our homes, how a new way to measure the race might help Amazon stay in front for a while longer, and how Alexa’s recording (and emailing) of a private recording could be a game changer – for Amazon and the entire smart speaker category.
We caught up with Anand Thaker, who led the data research for this year’s landscape through his company IntelliPhi Anand shares with us some of his takeaways from this year’s landscape, including certain categories went away, and why some were added. And with the big news of the week being Adobe’s acquisition of ecommerce platform Magento, we had to ask him what that means for the whole marketing technology category. And does this mean that HubSpot should go after Shopify.
Earlier this week I attended Oracle Media Day, an event the company puts on for press and independent analysts to give them a glimpse at what the company is focused on currently. And as part of the day, live demos with hot technologies like augmented reality, drones and blockchain showcased new customer experiences that are right around the corner. But the one that caught my attention the most was a demo showing how an employee can use an Amazon Echo device integrated with Oracle’s HR application to ask Alexa how many vacation hours they have available, to request time off on a certain day, or even find out why there was extra money in their paycheck this period.
I caught up to the 2012 Olympic gold winner in the Women’s 100 meter Carmelita Jeter at BPM’Online’s user conference, Accelerate, in Boston. And her being the fastest woman alive having run the second fastest 100 meters ever in women’s history, that’s the only way I would’ve ever caught up to her…
After her conference keynote, I had the great pleasure of asking her a few questions about some of the obstacles she overcame in becoming the fastest woman alive, how the lessons of teamwork she learned as captain of the Olympic gold winning US women’s relay team apply to the business world, and how she was able to win a bronze medal while running on a leg with a torn quad muscle.
From time to time I include my Watching Amazon conversations with ecommerce expert John Lawson here when we touch on something that may hit home with the Small Business Trends community. And in the midst of Amazon’s recent killer quarter – being driven in part by its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division and the Echo device line with Alexa inside – people are adopting modern technology in more aspects of their personal and professional lives. But is this technology driving us to be lazy, or is it fueling our inherent laziness? And what role should modern tech play in how small businesses operate?
These are a few topics that grew out of our latest Watching Amazon episode. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To see the full conversation check out the video below, or click on the embedded SoundCloud player. And leave a comment below to tell us if you think technology is making us lazy or exposing our laziness – and how we should use it in our businesses.
The interest in blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies is growing rapidly. And Amazon’s announcement earlier this week of a new patent that may allow them to sell the identities of cryptocurrency users added even more fuel to the fire of interest. And this high level of interest was obvious at last week’s CRM Evolution conference, as Never Stop Marketing founder and blockchain expert Jeremy Epstein’s session - 'Blockchain and the CMO: The Next Era of Marketing' – was a real crowd pleaser. For those who weren’t able to attend Jeremy’s session you really missed out. Fortunately, me and my conference co-chair Paul Greenberg were able to record a conversation with Jeremy to get a taste for a few things he talked about during his session. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. And while it’s worth reading the transcript, watching the video definitely adds important perspective because of Jeremy’s passion for the subject. I mean the guy paces and lifts weights during our conversation because he’s so jacked about the subject. So do yourself a favor and check out the video if you can to not only be educated and informed, but also get a glimpse as to why we dubbed him The Blockchain Gangsta.
Before founding MKTG Insight, Ginger was editor-in-chief at publications like CRM and Direct Marketing News. And with her wealth of knowledge and experience, I wanted to get a preview of what she’ll be discussing at the conference. And I asked my co-chair, Paul Greenberg, to help me ask Ginger about one of the myths surrounding digital transformation, and also an example of a company doing digital transformation the right way, from a marketing perspective.
While I was there as an industry analyst to hear more about how the Salesforce platform is progressing and how they’re providing tools to make it easier for coders and non-coders to leverage the toolset, it was great to see a diverse group of people demonstrating and teaching the ten thousand registered attendees how to build all different kinds of apps. And even the inspirational stories were diverse, with my favorite being a fireside chat between Salesforce’s Chief Equality Officer Tony Prophey, and the extraordinary Betty Reid Soskin, the nation’s oldest park ranger at 96 years young!
With equality being so central to culture of Salesforce, I was glad to spend a few minutes talking with Molly Q. Ford, Senior Director of Global Equality for Salesforce. Molly shared with me why Salesforce has placed equality at the heart of the organization, the business impact it is already having on the company, and why it is important to the future of the organization when it comes to attracting millennials to the company.
A great deal of conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) focus on exciting, eye-catching aspects of the technology. But some of the most important and prevalent uses of it are the more mundane examples that are overlooked but helping millions of people everyday do routine tasks more effectively and efficiently.
David Parmenter, Director of Data and Engineering for Adobe Document Cloud, shares with me how AI’s more practical applications provide a number of helpful examples of its growing impact on both our personal and professional lives. David also offers up a few ideas of how small businesses can leverage the power of AI to add efficiencies and insights to their efforts.
Last year at Nextiva’s NextCon event, one of the featured presentation was from Lawrence Cole, the Head of Mid-Market, U.S. West for Google. It was such a good session that I’ve been wanting to have him join me for a conversation for this series ever since. And this week I was able to talk with him and get his take on a number themes around search, seo, conversation rate optimization and how machine learning is democratizing the availability of insights in all these areas.
I have the honor of co-chairing CRM Magazine’s annual event, CRM Evolution, alongside friend and leading independent CRM analyst Paul Greenberg. The conference takes place next month in Washington, DC, and features a host of influencers and thought leaders in areas like customer engagement, artificial intelligence, blockchain, conversational interfaces, and other key technologies and strategies. One of the keynoters of the conference is Brian Solis, whose talk is entitled Designing Customer Experiences that Matter to a New Generation of Accidental Narcissists. So, with a title like that, I had to ask Brian for a sneak peek of what he’ll be discussing. And I also asked Paul to join me in the conversation.
When many think about artificial intelligence (AI) today it’s usually centered around headline grabbing examples of it addressing the futuristic type issues and challenges. And because the media lens focuses on those “eye-catching” use cases, many small businesses don’t feel like AI is really something that they would benefit from. But, according to Jon Lee, founder and CEO of CRM platform ProsperWorks, AI can help businesses of all sizes make better, more timely decisions that can help create more successful outcomes. Lee shares how automating the data entry process not only frees up sales professionals from having to enter and maintain contact and account records, but also provides CRM apps with the data it needs to feed AI and uncover important relationship-building insights.
Subscription business models have been gaining traction over the last five years, particularly with small business startups. But what impact are technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning having on subscription business models? Stefan Pretty, CEO and founder of Subbly, an all-in-one subscription eCommerce solution, shares how he sees AI/machine learning shaping subscriptions, as well as how the combination of subscriptions and ecommerce are helping more entrepreneurs get off the ground.
iQor, a global provider of customer care and interactions, and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) solutions, released the results of their “Customer and Product Experience 360” survey focusing on early adopters of connected devices like smart refrigerators, thermostats and speakers. Autumn Braswell, iQor’s Chief Operating Officer, shares a few of the key findings of the survey, and how growing expectations for using connected devices are forcing companies to up their game and provide better customer experiences and journeys in order to keep them excited about the potential these devices have.
Ramon Ray chats with Michelle Weinstein, The Pitch Queen for his latest Smart Hustle Report.
Vistage, a business advisory and executive coaching organization designed exclusively for CEOs, business owners and key executives, boasts having a membership of more than 21,000 expert leaders. And each month they partner with The Wall Street Journal on a small business confidence index that covers a lot of ground on what’s on the minds of small and midsize businesses. Joe Galvin, Vistage’s Chief Research Officer, shares some of the key takeaways from the latest survey, including why theirs is so much optimism among small business owners, why they’re looking to add employees, why 2018 will be a year to increase investments in their businesses, and why there’s more to leadership than providing motivation and inspiration.
Small Business Trends Uli Nasibova chats with Ramon Ray for the latest Smart Hustle Report.
It’s been way too long since my last conversation with SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin for this series. But with artificial intelligence, smart speakers, blockchain and so many technologies capturing our collective attention, I was happy to catch up with Larry to ask him how CRM/customer engagement will be impacted by any or all of these areas. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the full interview check out the video or Soundcloud embedded player below
Small Business Trends Ramon Ray chats with Chad Corzine of The Urban Agriculture Company.
Mike Fauscette, G2 Crowd’s Chief Research Officers, shares with us how review sites like G2’s is changing the buying process for small businesses, why so many of the reviews are coming from small business users, and what kinds of applications/technologies small businesses are looking for information and guidance on.
I saw Leah McGowen-Hare speak at last year’s Salesforce TrailheaDX conference for developers focused on building apps on the Salesforce platform. And after seeing her captivate a conference center of thousands of developers with her knowledge of cloud development platforms and coding tools/environments, I was struck by a couple of things. I have gone to countless tech conferences over the past couple of decades, but I had never seen an African American woman deliver a keynote to a group of hardcore developers. And she had the whole crowd eating out of the palm of her hands with her mix of experience, knowledge and passion for coding and developers.
In addition to being Director in Tech and Product for Salesforce, she’s also director of Developer Evangelism. And after seeing her present again at the Salesforce Analyst Summit this week, I was anxious to ask her a few questions about her journey to being a developer evangelist, and what it would take to see more folks that look like her get into coding and developing apps in the cloud.
With this being the last Friday in 2017 we’re taking the week off from the usual weekly interview, but we’ll be back next Friday to kick off 2018. And speaking of 2018, my Watching Amazon partner John “ColderIce” Lawson and I wanted to see which company would give Amazon a run for their money in the year ahead. So we dedicated an episode to looking at the relationship Amazon has to companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, how those relationships have changed over the years, and which one of these companies is positioned to most effectively compete with Bezos & Co in ecommerce, cloud computing, conversational interfaces and anything else.
I caught up with Richard “Buzzy” Busby, Principal Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services, at Xerocon earlier this month to learn more about how traditional small businesses can use AWS to grow their businesses. Buzzy shares how a new product announce at AWS re:Invent, SageMaker, can help SMBs leverage the power of machine learning to find insights into important business areas. He also discusses how SMBs can get involved with using Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant to connect with customers, and how they can leverage AWS technology partners to get new business ideas quickly in action on the AWS platform.
One of the highlights of last week’s Xerocon event, put on by cloud accounting platform Xero, was meeting Marcus Lemonis of CNBC’s The Profit. And before he took the stage for his conference ending keynote, I had the pleasure of sitting down with him for a great conversation. Marcus shares how the impetus for the show was more social experiment than small business, how vulnerability is key to fixing people and business success, and how he won’t do business with someone, even as a customer, unless he knows that they understand their business.
Below is an edited transcript of my conversation with Drury during Xerocon. He shared with me why cloud-based accounting provides a great platform for AI, why he wants to help turn account advisors into growth consultants for small businesses, and why it’s important for small businesses to become global exporters in order to grow.
Linda Lee, Strategic Partnerships for Facebook Messenger, shared with me insights from the study, some examples of how small businesses are incorporating Messenger chat into their interactions with customers, and how marketers are engaging prospects in Messenger to acquire customers.
Small Business Trends Ramon Ray chats with the founder of Funky Fresh Spring Rolls TrueMan McGee.
Ramon Ray of Small Business Trends sits down with Brian Scudamore, the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK.
This edition of Smart Hustle Report is talking family business. So we went to an expert on the topic, Mitzi Perdue. Ramon Ray and Mitzi Perdue discuss passing a family business along to the next generation.
Ramon Ray with Small Business Trends speaks with Anne Marie Faiola on her career transformation and more.
Nicole Sult, Director of Customer Service for growth award winner Lippert Components, shared with me the role CRM, in particular Salesforce, played in the explosive growth the company has enjoyed over the past two years. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the full interview see the video and the embedded SoundCloud player below.
Last week at Dreamforce I had the great pleasure of receiving a guided tour of the Small Business Lodge by Eric Bensley, Senior Product Director of Marketing for Salesforce, and Rekha Srivatsan, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Salesforce. There were several hundreds of people sitting in on sessions, doing one-on-one sessions with Salesforce engineers, and watching demos of different Salesforce applications. To get even more of a flavor for what small business attendees were interested in learning about, I sat down with Eric Bensley right in the middle of all the activity in the lodge for a few minutes to find out.
As part of the Dreamforce event, Salesforce announced Salesforce Essentials, a new entry level platform for small businesses new to CRM, as well as a new partnership with Google, which sees two companies integrating their platforms for sharing important information to provide a fuller look at customer interactions taking place across their offerings.
Marie shared with me some details about the announcements, how Trailhead, Salesforce’s learning system, is integrated into Salesforce Essentials, will help small business customers get up to speed quick with using CRM, and some of the key takeaways from the SMB keynote which features stories from SMBs – including Stella & Dot, Kabbage, and Code.org.
Anand Thaker of IntelliPhi: MarTech Landscape Driven by AI, ABM, CX and CDP by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Small Business Trends correspondent Ramon Ray sits down with Rand Leeb-du Toit for the premiere of his series, The Smart Hustle Report.
The theme for Nextiva’s conference this year, NextCon, was customer experience. And Small Business Trends did a great job of covering the event. Do yourself a favor and check out the coverage, as there were a ton of great speakers, including Brian Solis, Les McKeown, and Google’s Lawrence Cole, as well as Nextiva founder and CEO Tomas Gorny.
I had the pleasure of speaking with business television personality and best-selling author Carol Roth, who focused her keynote session on customer loyalty, and idea she calls Customer Experience 3.0. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the full conversation click the embedded video or SoundCloud player below.
While there are over 150 million phone devices with digital assistants like Siri and Google Assistant, and quickly growing smart speaker devices with Amazon’s Alexa on board, there’s another device that dwarfs these numbers in comparison. While they are considered voice-first devices, there are over a half billion Windows 10 devices (including Xboxes) with Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, on board listening out for your questions and requests. And throw in pieces like Office 365, Bing and LinkedIn, Cortana has a lot of potential data and interactions to draw on in order to help people get things done in a much more efficient and contextually relevant manner – both for personal and business reasons.
Christi Olson, Microsoft’s Head of Evangelism for Search, discusses how this lineup of services and platforms is coming together using AI and conversational interfaces to transform how people work, as well as how they’ll engage with customers.
I focused a few of the last conversations on the growing importance of voice-first technologies that have us swiping/typing less and talking more to our devices. And as consumer adoption of devices like Amazon’s Echo and Google Home, among others, takes off, companies need to get serious about how this will impact customer engagement. And next year is the year to start figuring it out, according to Eric Bisceglia, VP of Go-to-Market for Voysis, a voice AI platform that enables voice driven natural language instruction, search, and discovery across mobile, web, and devices.
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the whole interview click on the embedded player below.
One of my favorite conferences of the year this week with Oracle Openworld, mainly because Oracle is a company that competes in a variety of business application categories. And they do have apps for the higher end of the SMB space. Unfortunately I was unable to attend this year, but very fortunate to speak with Suhas Uliyar, Oracle’s VP of Bots, AI and Mobile Strategy.
With artificial intelligence, bots and voice-first devices being three of the hottest topics today, I was glad Suhas took some time to share his thoughts on how customer engagement is being shaped in realtime by these technologies
It’s been almost four years since I spoke with Adobe’s Kevin Lindsay about how companies focus the overwhelming majority of their marketing resources on customer acquisition activities vs. customer retention. And during this week’s Inbound Conference put on by HubSpot, it appears that this is still the case, according to Des Traynor, cofounder and Chief Strategy Officer of Intercom, a messaging platform that helps businesses connect with customers.
Traynor’s session at Inbound on the importance of focusing marketing efforts more on retention is even more critical today than it was four years ago, as more products and services are bought via subscriptions – where companies have to deliver enough value each month to keep customers on board. And it’s that behavioral switch to subscribing vs outright purchasing which means retention takes on a whole new level of importance in your marketing efforts.
There is so much going on with Amazon these days I find myself watching them constantly and looking for lessons to take away from all the moves they’re making, from a customer engagement perspective. And I not alone in my non-stop watching, as my friend and ecommerce thought leader John Lawson is a big time Amazon watcher as well. So it was only natural for us to take are watching to a new level and do it together, which is what our video podcast Watching Amazon is all about.
According to a recent NPR/Edison Research study of smart speaker owners, 42% of people surveyed say it has become essential to their everyday lives, 47% say they use it more now than they did when they first got it, and 65% say they wouldn’t go back to life without them. And of all the folks who took this survey, 76% own the Amazon Echo.
Although I didn’t take the survey, you can count me in all these numbers, as ever since I bought my first Amazon Echo almost three years ago I’ve been fascinated by how it can do so many things by only asking Alexa. So I was more than excited to speak with Dave Isbitski, Amazon’s Chief Evangelist for Chief Evangelist, Alexa and Echo, to hear more about how the device came about, how the Echo/Alexa combo is impacting customer behaviors and expectations, and where he’s seeing voice-first technologies taking us in the future.
I was really glad that Jon Ferrara, founder of Nimble (and before that GoldMine), was able to join me for this week’s conversation. Because it was Jon who was my very first guest in this series those seven years ago.
We cover a lot of ground as we reminisce about the past, dig into what’s changed over the past seven years in the CRM space, and eventually look at what is coming down the pike. So this is a bit longer than usual. But hey, it’s not every day you hit a pretty cool milestone like this!
Justin shares how ALU is using marketing automation to scale their marketing efforts to reach their goal of creating three million entrepreneurs by 2060 by building 25 campuses throughout the continent. And by doing so changing a narrative of the continent to better represent the innovativeness and talent of the African youth.
Earlier this spring I had the absolute pleasure to moderate an all star panel on how artificial intelligence (AI) is and will impact customer engagement. The panel consisted of executives at some of the leading vendors in the CRM industry, including:
Marco Casalaina, vice president of products at Salesforce.com’s Einstein division Volker Hildebrand, Global Vice President at SAP Hybris Rajan Krishnan, Group Vice President of Applications Product Development at Oracle Michael Wu, Chief Scientist at Lithium Technologies Kishan Chetan, principal PM manager of Microsoft CRM Dynamics 365
Morgan Cornelius, Instagram’s community programs lead for SMBs, shared with me why businesses are turning to Instagram Stories, how they are using it to engage their audiences, and how they are able to measure the impact Stories is having on their engagement efforts.
Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing and blockchain expert, just published a really great free ebook on blockchain, titled The CMO Primer for the Block Chain World: How this Trust Machine Impacts Branding, Customer Experience, Advertising and Much More. Jeremy shared with me the crux of what blockchain is, why it’s important beyond bitcoin, and how it might change the way marketers operate and disrupt how businesses create effective customer experiences going forward.
Small Business Trends Publisher Anita Campbell led a great conversation on the benefits and challenges of running a subscription based business, from both a B2C and B2B perspective. Rohan Gilkes, owner of Wet Shave Club, and Sangram Vajre, cofounder and CMO of account-based marketing platform Terminus, share their experiences in growing subscription businesses. And together they cover a lot ground and provide some great insights that can help those considering this business model understand the what to do, and what to avoid.
Last month we posted a conversation with The Center for Generational Kinetics CEO Jason Dorsey discussing the research study they did with America’s SBDC, titled America’s Voice on Small Business.
To get additional perspective on the results and what they mean, I also spoke with Tee Rowe, CEO of America’s SBDC. Tee discusses how millennial entrepreneurs are different than their predecessors, and how those differences drive changes in the way organizations like America’s SBDC assist in helping them succeed.
FinancialForce, a leading provider of cloud-based apps like ERP, financial management, and professional services automation (PSA) built entirely on the Salesforce platform, recently held their annual user conference – Community Live. And a theme resonated throughout the three days I attended the event – speed is the currency in the new Services Economy.
One of the ways discussed at the conference for speeding up your company’s ability to deliver consistenly good experiences throughout sales/service processes is combine the power of CRM with professional services automation. Austin Rohr, Product Strategy Manager for FinancialForce’s PSA offering, shared with me where PSA fits into the sales and service mix, and why the combination of PSA and CRM can provide faster, more profitable outcomes that improves overall customer engagement.
Benedict, a member of Oracle Team USA, took a few minutes away from the race to share how the team is using an unbelievable amount of data they are able to collect during the race, along with video and pictures captured, to help change strategies in realtime to move the team forward. And while this is fascinating to see how modern tech is changing the race for The Cup, there are definite business lessons to take away. Plus, I get to bust out my cabana wear for the first time in a while. So I owe a big debt of gratitude to the folks at Oracle for inviting me down to see the races and learn more about technology’s role in the event.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Bullhorn founder and CEO Art Papas during the conference, where he shared his thoughts on why he feels all the AI talk is just that – talk, for now. He also shares why AI and voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa will play a major role in CRM in the not-too-distant future.
Last month America’s SBDC teamed up with research firm The Center for Generational Kinetics on an interesting study – America’s Voice on Small Business. You can check out infographics and download a copy of this free report here (no registration required).
Jason Dorsey, co-founder of the Center for Generational Kinetics and leading expert on researching millennials, shared with us some of the key findings of the survey, including what’s driving millennials into entrepreneurship, and how their journey is different from their parents and grandparents’ journey.
Bpm’online CEO and Founder Katherine Kostereva shared a few thoughts with me on why she believes stats like the ones above are still happening in 2017. And why artificial intelligence will be a catalyst for more companies to begin automating important processes in their businesses in order to compete today and into the future.
I attended my first Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual user conference, in 2004 where the attendance was right around 2,500 people. Last year’s Dreamforce over 150,000 registered to attend. It’s gone past a traditional user conference to one of the biggest business events of the year. And this year the company is launching their first annual Customer Trailblazer Awards, where winners not only get to attend Dreamforce for free, but they also will have the power of Salesforce’s marketing might to share their winning story of why they are business trailblazers.
Cynthia Hester, Director of Customer Advocacy for Salesforce, shares why Salesforce is starting this award, what the criteria is, who can participate, and how you can enter a submission. She also discusses how the contest will be judged and the other prizes the winners will receive.
John Oechsle, CEO of Swiftpage, shares how they transformed Act! from an off the shelf software app bought in stores, to a subscription-based cloud offering customers pay to use by the month; increasing it’s subscription customers by 140% and annual recurring revenue by 131% over the past year. And how that transformation has changed the way the company interacts with customers today, and how they’ll interact with them tomorrow.
Kickstagram cofounders Ronan Galvin and Casey Mathews developed a platform to help businesses automate engagement on Instagram. But according to the duo, it wasn’t until they started using InfusionSoft’s marketing automation platform that they were able simplify a complicated and time-consuming onboarding process that improved the customer experience. And within eight months Kickstagram achieved 5,000 more leads generated, a 282% increase in revenue and a 336% increase in customers.
Pam Dierks, VP of Dierks Farms, discussed not only how using InfusionSoft’s marketing automation platform enhanced their 137 year old farming businesses, but it created a path that allowed their sons to follow in their family’s tradition of cattle farming.
It’s 2017 and there are multiple surveys out there saying more than half of small businesses out there still don’t have a website. And, according to an upcoming survey from Leadpages, even many of those with websites don’t feel they need landing pages – pages optimized for converting site visitors into contacts and leads.
While on the exhibition floor at InfusionSoft’s ICON 17 event this week I had a chance to speak with Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins, Manager of Education Content for Leadpages. Bob shares why it’s more important than ever to have landing pages optimized for conversation. He also discusses why Google’s emphasis on speedy page load times will impact your landing page conversion rates.
Before most of us knew what a bot was, Dan Miller, lead analyst and founder of Opus Research, was already looking at the potential impact the nascent technology would have on customer service and engagement. Now that bots, intelligent digital assistants and other conversational interfaces are becoming daily parts of all our lives, businesses of all sizes are expected to invest close to $5 billion by 2021, according to a new report from Opus Research - Decision Makers’ Guide to Enterprise Intelligent Assistants; The Brave New World of Bots and Virtual Agents . Dan shares some of the key findings from the report, including what is driving the current bot/intelligent assistant craze, how businesses are approaching things, the role of “metabots”, and the role artificial intelligence/machine learning is playing (and will play) in bot adoption.
Recently I had the pleasure of moderating a panel of startup founders discussing the current state of entrepreneurship during Salesforce’s Small Business Basecamp event in Atlanta. And while the focus of the conversation was on entrepreneurship in Atlanta, the shared themes, experiences and advice offered up is great for anyone with an entrepreneurial dream regardless of where they live.
The panel included: • Rob Forman, cofounder and Head of Technology of Salesloft • Miguel Lloyd, founder of Lloyd Media Group • Brooks Robinson, cofounder and CEO of Springbot
At the recent small business basecamp hosted by Salesforce in Atlanta, the idea of arming small businesses with a community of resources was central in helping them deal with the ecosystem of challenges they are faced with. Salesforce Sr. Vice President of SMB Sales Mike Wolff, and Jamie Domenici, Vice President of SMB Marketing, shared with me why being involved in local small business communities is important to Salesforce. They also share why bringing the tech community (and understanding of the latest developments like artificial intelligence) to local businesses is good for SMBs, the local communities they operate in, and for business in general.
Salesforce held their Small Business Basecamp event here in Atlanta attended by hundreds of entrepreneurs, startups and small business owners. It was a day filled with lots of great panels, sessions and networking opportunities – all focused on helping SMBs efficiently move their businesses forward.
One of the partners of the event is Zenefits, a cloud-based human resource software provider for small and midsize companies. With human capital management becoming more prominent in companies of all sizes, I had the opportunity to speak with Ben Lazarov, Senior Enterprise Account Executive for Zenefits, to better understand what HCM has to offer growing small businesses.
Michelle Hurd, CMO of marketing automation platform Act-On , shares with us the idea of adaptive journeys, and how technology like machine learning and artificial intelligence can help you provide a more personalized pathway to engage individual customers and prospects at scale.
Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time at the innovation lab of Atlanta-based First Data, a global leader in commerce-enabling technology. During the trip I had the pleasure speaking with Jim Allen, First Data’s Senior Vice President of SMB Solutions. Jim shares how First Data uses the incredible amount of transactions data they process annually to assist their six million plus customers – the vast majority of which are small businesses – in creating experiences that improve/extend customer relationships.
While the Patriots are favored to win game, based on data collected and analyzed by eBay DataLabs, Falcon fans are buying up merchandise at a higher rate than Patriot fans are since both teams won their respective conference championship games two weeks ago. Zoher Karu, eBay’s Chief Data Officer, joins us to share some other interesting data points they’ve discovered about what’s driving Super Bowl merchandise sales.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend an analyst function for Zoho. It was a day long event where company executives laid out the future direction of their products, services and corporate strategy. And even as larger enterprises are using their apps at an accelerating rate, Zoho ceo and cofounder Sridhar Vembu says it’s as important as ever to make sure they remain focused on serving the small business market that has powered the company’s growth to this point.
Sam Mallikarjunan, Principal Marketing Strategist at HubSpot and editor of ThinkGrowth.org, discusses how the site differs from the content HubSpot is best known for, why they built the site on Medium and how it’s helping them compete with established management brands like Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan, the role “skimmable” content and audio podcasts is playing in reaching execs, and how even in today’s digital marketing world most marketers still aren’t measuring the impact of their activities on ROI.
Holloway shares with us how small businesses can compete, thrive and survive in the Feedback Economy, why Yelp doesn’t recommend small businesses ask customers to leave reviews, and why the speed of which you respond to a negative review can be critical to getting it updated to something more positive.
Jamie shares her thoughts on why CRM adoption rates for small businesses will be increasing, how the fact 60% of revenue comes from current customers is driving successful companies to put customers at the center of the business model, and why you’ll need more than email and spreadsheets to build great relationships with customers.
This week in New York City Salesforce held their Small Business Basecamp, a half-day long pop-up event that attracted over 1300 registrants and a capacity overflow crowd of small business owners. The event brought together Amazon Business, Chase, LegalZoom, FreshBooks, Revel, SquareSpace, WeWork, Zenefits, RingCentral and Yelp to help show small businesses how CRM and related technologies can help them scale their abilities to find and keep customers more efficiently.
This holiday season is breaking records for online sales, and nobody is selling more online than Amazon.com. But how does your ecommerce site get its share of holiday sales? Kevin Gibbon, co-founder and CEO of Shyp - a provider of parcel pickup, packaging, and shipping for SMBs – says that small businesses best opportunities to compete with the Amazons of the world is by focusing on delivering unique customer experiences along with those holiday packages.
Last week on Black Friday we held our first Facebook Live broadcast featuring a conversation with three ecommerce experts discussing what retailers can do to be successful during the holiday season.
Gorny, an immigrant from Poland, shared with me a bit of his incredible rags to riches… back to rags, and finally bigger riches story, in a sit-down interview during the event. He discussed how the Movie Wall Street made hime want to come to the United States (and live in Beverly Hills 90210), how he got started in business, and lessons learned from losing his first fortune - which helped him find even greater success in cofounding companies like SiteLock and Nextiva. Gorny also discusses Nextiva’s new customer engagement platform NextOS, and why, based on his previous business experiences, he feels the company can compete with the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft in the very competitive CRM market.
While there were a slew of announcements that came out over the four days of the event, it was a statement Hubspot CTO and cofounder Dharmesh Shah’s made during his keynote speech that caught (and kept) my attention – that he felt chatbots are the most important technology to come out in decades.
I was able to grab some time with Shah to hear more about why bots have such potential to such a game-changing technology, and to hear about HubSpot’s own Growthbot efforts.
Rick Jackson, CMO of a visual analytics platform Qlik, shares why analytics is quickly becoming a “need to have” tool for SMBs sooner rather than later because of the potential impact it can have on various parts of the business.
Guy Yehiav, CEO of profit amplification software make Profitect, shares with us why prescriptive analytics goes beyond identifying the insight but also provides recommendations for the actions you take next to optimize conversion opportunities.
Sameer Patel, CEO of Kahuna, makers of a mobile marketing/communications platform, shares how modern mobile marketing platforms can ingest signals coming from consumer devices and turn them into opportunities to engage them in a more personalized way in order optimize conversion opportunities – and extend customer relationships. He also shares how turning perishable inventories (goods, services, time, distance, etc) into timely offers can maximize profit margins, and why cross-channel communication goes beyond multichannel to increase the likelihood of meaningful engagement with today’s more sophisticated consumers.
Tien Tzuo, cofounder and CEO of Zuora, introduced us to what the SE was back then. And last week, I had the opportunity to catch up to Tien at the Zuora headquarters to see where we’re at today with subscription business models. He talks about how far the business model has come in those five plus years, how latest technologies like IoT and machine learning is changing the subscription business, and why he feels that five years from now we may not be buying anything the traditional way.
Amy Downs, Chief Customer Success and Happiness Officer Lifesize, shares with us how the key to the company’s transformation to a subscription business model was changing the corporate culture to be customer-first. And how that change raised their net promoter score from negative four to over seventy, increased customer retention rates, and created a customer support team that finally understood their value to the business.
Jody Glidden, CEO and co-founder of Introhive, a SaaS-based platform which brings relationship intelligence into CRM with data automation and sales acceleration, shares how machine learning and automation now makes CRM more appealing to sales professionals. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation. To hear the full conversation please click the embedded player below.
More and more terms like customer engagement and customer experience are being used in today’s business lexicon. And more and more you see them being used interchangeably. On top of that customer service and customer experience are used the same way. And if that weren’t confusing enough, in many conversations all these phrases are sometimes being used interchangeably with customer relationship management (CRM).
At this year’s ExCom 2016 event, Paul Greenberg, author of seminal CRM at the Speed of Light series and known in the industry as “The Godfather of CRM”, broke down these terms and how they differ, and how they are related and work together to implement modern customer engagement strategy.
Last week’s conversation featuring Esteban Kolsky’s ExCom 2016 presentation on why customer service won’t exist in ten years sparked some very interesting conversations. Another presentation from the conference also captured people’s attention. So below is an edited transcript from Constellation Research founder Ray Wang’s presentation on how Internet of Things (IoT) will shape the way customer’s engage with companies.
At this year’s ExCom 2016 event, one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking sessions came from Esteban Kolsky, former Gartner analyst and one of the most respected thought leaders focusing on customer service. Kolsky, who also is the founder of ThinkJar Research, presented on why he feels the customer service fucntion, as we know it today, will be gone in ten years. Below is an edited transcript taken from his presentation. To see the entire presentation, click on the YouTube video below.
When marketing automation software is discussed, it typically is focused on how business-to-business (B2B) are implementing it to convert leads into sales opportunities that are worked by the sales team. But business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations stand to gain just as much, if not more, from using marketing automation solutions.
Kraig Swensrud, chief marketing officer of Campaign Monitor, provider of email marketing and marketing automation products for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), shares why marketing automation is key to the success of B2C organizations today. Kraig also discusses how marketing automation needs for B2C companies differs dramatically from B2B focused organizations.
There’s been a ton of talk around bots ever since Facebook announced its chatbot platform back in April. And now more than 11,000 bots have been added to Facebook Messenger. The original use cases for bots centered around customer support – where you’re looking for a help with something, or maybe a status update, or even needing to change a flight. But now Drift, a messaging app platform for creating marketing bots, is looking to help companies use the technology to connect with website visitors and convert them to customers – and do so at scale.
Dave Gerhardt, director of marketing for Drift, discusses the role marketing bots can play in interacting with modern consumers, and how marketing bots are poised to make filling out web lead forms a thing of the past.
Urban Airship, a mobile SaaS company, recently surveyed 2,000 consumers on how their attitudes and usage of mobile wallet technology, like Apple Wallet and Google Wallet. The findings point to a rapid shift in mobile consumer behavior, including:
• More than half of those surveyed (54%) had already used a mobile wallet pass in one form or another. • 69% said they are more likely to use customer loyalty cards if they are stored on their phone • Mobile Wallets is in the top four ways consumers want to be kept up to date about sales Judy Chan, product manager at Urban Airship, shares more insights coming from the survey, including the positive impact on customer loyalty the use of mobile wallet technology can have.
Billions of connected devices will lead to unbelievable amounts of data –which can lead to new business opportunities for companies agile enough to take advantage of the situation. Jason Mann, director of emerging solutions and product management for SAS, a leading provider of business analytics software and services, shares how companies can capitalize on Internet of Things (IoT) opportunities from both efficiency and revenue generating perspectives.
According to Build for Change: Revolutionizing Customer Engagement through Continuous Digital Innovation, a recent book authored by Pega’s CEO and founder Alan Trefler, companies are not moving fast enough to keep up with behavioral changes customers are going through, which is causing what he calls an oncoming customerpocalypse. Trefler recently shared with me what exactly is the customerpocalypse and why he feels many companies will not survive it. He also discusses why he’s not worried about bots and machine learning technology putting executives out of business just yet.
Most professional sports franchises are small businesses too, with limited budgets and employees. Atlanta Hawks Chief Creative Officer Peter Sorckoff, and Atlanta Braves VP of Marketing Adam Zimmerman, are doing fascinating things to create great experiences for their fans. In a featured session at ExCom 2016, an event on the future of customer experience and commerce I co-organized with John Lawson, Sorckoff and Zimmerman discussed the challenges and opportunities of utilizing cutting edge technologies to stay connected with their fan base. The panel, moderated by social media strategist Dorothea Bozicolona-Volpe, tackled a variety of issues from using CRM for data collection, omnichannel engagement, mobile GEO targeting, disruptive in-venue technology and more. And while their focus is on fan engagement, the lessons and experiences they share can be used well beyond the world of sports.
SugarCRM held their annual user conference, SugarCon, earlier this week in San Francisco. Over twelve hundred people were on hand to see what direction the company was taking its platform in. And while many of its competitors are expanding their offerings to include eCommerce, configure-price-quoting (CPQ), marketing automation and other related areas, SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin emphatically stated that Sugar is staying true to their CRM roots and explore the many ways CRM can be even more important to business success in the near future.
I had a chance to speak with Augustin and hear how the company is looking to bring the latest and greatest technology developments to their platform to make CRM a system more relevant, and attractive, for sales professionals to turn to in order to build successful relationship with modern consumers. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation, as well as the video of our full conversation.
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to co-host ExCom 2016, a conference focused on how customer experience, customer engagement and eCommerce were converging, and the future direction this convergence is pointing to. And mobile devices and apps have been at the forefront of this convergence.
Although there is no disputing the role of mobility in bringing commerce and customer experience closer together in a digital world, businesses have to have a strong digital foundation in place to create the kind of experiences modern consumers expect when they engage on various channels from those devices. During the keynote conversation I moderated, Dilawar Syed, president of customer support platform Freshdesk, shared why businesses of all sizes need to have a service-first culture in place in order to be successful engaging customers through a growing number of channels via their mobile devices.
Nate Shaw, co-founder of Brooklyn Music Factory, shares with us how automation marketing processes transformed the business, changed the business model, and put them on the road to success.
It’s been five years since we last spoke with Cindy Bates, Vice President of Small and Midsize Business for Microsoft. With so many developments taking place in that timespan, we were excited to catch up with Cindy and here her thoughts on what have been the biggest small business developments of the last five years, and also see what she feels will be the biggest development of the next five years.
While many may still view Instagram as a great place to post pictures, more and more video is being consumed on the platform. According to Kati McGee, Instagram Lead for Facebook’s small and midsize (SMB) team, just in the past three months alone time spent watching video on Instagram has jumped 40%.
In a recent conversation with Kati during an event Facebook and Instagram held National Small Business Week, Kati shared how small businesses can use Instagram’s advertising platform to reach more targeted audiences with video. She also shares how many small businesses are using Instagram as a second storefront to complement the eCommerce efforts.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a term that has gained a great deal of traction over the past twelve months, but many still aren’t familiar with what it is. Wiley Publishing has just released Account-Based Marketing for Dummies to help people understand how ABM can help drive more B2B sales. Sangram Vajre, CMO and cofounder of ABM platform Terminus, wrote the book and shares with us his thoughts on how ABM can help sales and marketing teams get on the same page in order to speed up the sales process and close more deals faster.
With next being National Small Business Week, Facebook is holding a small business event in Atlanta, GA. We caught up with Ciara Viehweg of Facebook’s SMB Community Engagement Team as she shares with us how small businesses are leveraging Facebook’s platform to build deeper relationships with customers and prospects to grow their businesses. Ciara also shares a few tools SMBs can use to get the most out of Facebook’s platform from a customer engagement perspective.
Lindsay Bayuk, head of Product for Pure Chat, shares how integrating chat capabilities into your website can help small businesses convert more site visits into transactions, email list signups, and other important conversions that allow you to create long-lasting relationships with more customers.
As the more data gets generated in less time – by more devices – it’s bringing more attention to how companies are using that information. Wilson Raj, Global Director of Customer Intelligence for marketing analytics platform provider SAS, discusses recent findings from the company’s study - Mobility, Vulnerability and the State of Data Privacy. Raj shares his thoughts on why millennials are both more concerned with and expect more from companies with respect to how they are using customer information. And why companies using information to impact customer lifestyles are more likely to find more success with digital natives, than with the Over 40 crowd.
Chad Kutting, General Manager of SalesforceIQ CRM, Salesforce.com’s targeted solution for SMBs, discusses how relationship intelligence can help create more efficient relationship building opportunities for small businesses. He also shares how more intelligence and automated data entry improves CRM adoption, and finally provides real incentives for sales people to use CRM.
Ryan Keeton, Carvana’s co-founder and Chief Brand Officer, shares with us how Amazon inspired the company to change the way people buy used cars, like Amazon did with books and everything else. And if you plan on being in the Atlanta area next Thursday (March 17th) you can hear more of the story from Carvana co-founder and CEO Eddie Garcia at ExCom 2016, a free day long event for small businesses focusing on the where technology is driving customer experience and commerce. And maybe pick up a coke and a used car from the vending machines while you’re hear.
Key findings in a recent Forrester Study on the benefits of using an omnichannel engagement center, commissioned by customer experience platform provider Genesys, include:
• 50% reduction in customer abandonment at key points in the customer journey • Over $1 million in increased revenue through increased e-commerce and voice conversions
While the study focused on customers using Genesys’ omnichannel engagement platform, it’s obvious that having a system to manage the different channels customer are using to engage with businesses today should help companies be more efficient and effective.
Lisa Abbott, Director of Product Marketing for Genesys, shares with us what omnichannel engagement is, and how it can provide better, more contextual experiences throughout the specific stages of the customer lifecycle.
It seems so logical. The best way to get and keep good customers is to respond quickly to them when they have an issue. But, even in 2016, more customer calls, emails, tweets and texts go unanswered than get responded to.
Jay Baer, customer experience expert and New York Times best-selling author, joins us to share a few key points from his upcoming book Hug Your Haters. He touches on why companies have to stop treating customer service as a spectator sport, why companies with a “call-center” mentality are doomed, and why seeking to increase the number of customer complaints is key to better understanding customers and lowering customer churn.
In January 2016, Periscope co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour announced more than 100 million broadcasts have been created since Periscope’s launch in March of 2015. Not only are lots of people using Periscope on their phones to easily broadcast videos, but even more people are watching them.
According to TechCrunch, 350,000 hours of video is streamed daily, while FastCompany says people are watching 40 years worth of live video every day!
As services like Periscope, Blab, and now Facebook begin rolling out their livestream platforms, now is the time to understand the best ways you can use these tools to connect and keep the attention of prospects long enough to turn them into long-time customers.
Monique Johnson, CEO and founder of Ehm Ooo Media, produces videos for businesses and brands that tell their unique story. In a recent webinar I hosted for her, she provides a wealth of information on recent livestreaming developments, and best practices for planning, selecting the right platform, and syndicating your videos to get more eyeballs on them.
Sales is the universal language of business. Closing deals – and closing them efficiently – is key to the growth and success of any small business. But, according to a study done by PipeDrive, a cloud-based application aimed at helping SMBs close sales deals more efficiently, countries like South Africa, Brazil, Chile and others are finding higher levels of success closing deals than US-based SMBs. Timo Rein, co-founder and President of PipeDrive, shares with us more findings from the survey, including which countries close deals fastest, and are able to do so with minimal effort. He also shares why he feels US small businesses lag so far behind other countries in sales efficiency and effectiveness.
Having the right piece of content at the right time, in the right format, delivered in the right channel goes a long way towards creating great customer experiences today. Which is way it’s never been more important from both a lead generation and conversion perspective to optimize your content to create personalized, relevant opportunities to engage today’s customers. Drew Burns, Principal Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Target, a tool for testing and targeting digital experiences, shares with us why mobile devices are driving the need to use location, device type, and profile data to connect content to customers and prospects at “the moment of truth”.
Jim Fowler has been at the forefront of crowdsourcing for over a decade. First as cofounder of cloud-based contact management service Jigsaw, before selling it to Salesforce.com for $175M. Then with InfoArmy, and finally today with Owler – a free competitive intelligence service.
Fowler discusses how changing technology has impacted how crowdsourcing business models over the years, and how these models will only succeed if humans and the way they communicate are not automated out of the equation, but freed up to think and share more efficiently- improving their abilities to create even more value.
Kira Wampler has had a varied career in marketing. From her early days helping Intuit build its social media presence, to helping startups like Lytro and Trulia get off the ground. To now, in her current role as CMO of ride sharing company Lyft.
Kira shares with us how why she prefers to think of marketing in terms of experiences, and why it’s critically important for her to communicate with as many customers as possible. And how the speed and disruptive nature of today’s business climate provides challenges, but also great opportunities to modern marketers.
Brian Solis is one of the leading futurists/ digital anthropologists in business today. And his books, The End of of Business as Usual and What’s the Future of Business, are best sellers and required reading to anyone interested in digital transformation. And with his new book, X: The Experience when Business Meets Design, is probably his most ambitious - and impressive – book, focusing on the importance experience design and the role it will play in business today.
Brian share with us a few key themes covered in the book, including why it is imperative to go beyond focusing on building products and services if you’re looking to create the most valuable relationships with customers you possibly can
Process and automation are keys to scaling a business. And in the case of serial entrepreneur Tom Libelt, they are the keys to him being able to publish as many as 300 books each month - and sell thousands of copies each month. And this combination of process and automation also allows him to run three other businesses. Libelt shares with us how a few of tips about how he’s been able to create processes and systems that allow him to publish so many books each month, do so with a limited number of people involved and limited number of hours of his personal time, drop cost of producing a book by 90% (from $75 per book down to $7.50), and why platforms like CreateSpace are helping him sell thousands of books each moth.
While people are buying more of the products and services they use online, over 90% of purchases are still done the old fashioned way – in person at a local store. But how do you get more of those folks who are using Amazon.com to do their product research, to come to your store when they want to “buy local”?
Matt Chosin, CEO and founder of PriceLocal, shares how his new service streamlines the process of customers moving from their online Amazon research activities, to their neighborhood store to buy the things they want. And why he calls it a “judo move” to use Amazon’s product searches into store traffic and customers you can market to long after the single transaction is completed.
Because of the unrelenting amount of content being created, and the constantly shrinking attention spans customers have, marketing automation tools are more popular than ever. But even with that being the case, it’s estimated that as few as 7% of US-based companies are using marketing automation software.
Andy MacMillan, CEO of marketing automation service Act-On Software, discusses why adoption rates are so low today, why he feels adoption rates are on the cusp of exploding, and the role MA is playing in customer retention.
While it still is dedicated to serving small businesses (over 13 million of them), GoDaddy is not the same company today as it was a few short years ago. They offer a variety of services going way beyond the domain registration and web hosting services they are best known for. They have customers spread out all over the world. And they have an increasing amount of data on who exactly their small business customers are, what stage in the business lifecycle they’re in, and what tools and services they’ll need to keep their business moving forward.
Phil Bienert, GoDaddy’s chief marketing officers, shares with us how their approach to marketing today is focused on understanding and communicating with specific customer segments individually - using a mix channels to do so – in order to better serve them throughout their business journey.
We’ve been pulling out cash and credit cards out of our wallets to pay for things forever. But more and more people are using their phones (and watches) to pay for the things they buy. And while mobile payments are a major part of consumers “going digital”, it’s only one aspect of the mobile wallet.
Matt Stringer, EVP of Marketing for Men’s Wearhouse, discusses how the company has implemented a mobile wallet strategy, and how it has helped them dramatically increase conversions - turning emails into in-store visits and purchases.
Not only are the Golden State Warriors the reigning champions of the National Basketball Association, but they are also known for being just as successful off the court when it comes to digital marketing. Kenny Lauer, Vice President of Marketing and Digital for the Golden State Warriors, shares the team’s philosophy of being in the experience creation business, when and how they use social media to drive ticket and merchandise sales, and the roles their website plays in engagement compared to their mobile app.
At this week’s Dell World event, as the case at last month’s Dreamforce event, some of the main focus was around the Internet of Things (IoT). And while much of the discussion with IoT is usually aimed at big enterprises, small and mid-size businesses need to understand what opportunities and risks there may be to their success as more and more devices begin communicating with each other.
Andy Rhodes, Executive Director for Dell’s IoT Solutions, shares his perspective on why the IoT today is where the cloud was eight years ago. And why it’s important for small businesses to understand what opportunities come with it, before those opportunities become nails in the coffin of their business.
UPS has over 1.5M liking their Facebook page. And it’s not out of the ordinary for them to receives thousands of likes, comments and shares on content they post. But, according to Brian Pember, Director of Customer Communications for UPS, the company can get more meaningful engagement from their LinkedIn activities – even though their following is only a fifth of what it is on Facebook.
Brian shares how the company uses LinkedIn to narrowcast messages to targeted audiences, rather than broadcast to people who haven’t shown interest in a particular subject. And how through a mix of thought leadership, organic optimization and ad placement, UPS has found higher return on investment (ROI) and engagement (ROE) with LinkedIn.
I’ve been using the Amazon Echo device for almost a year. And most of what I do is ask Alexa – the virtual assistant in Echo – what the weather is, who won the Rams game, add batteries to my shopping list, or even to play the new song from Prince. I also use Siri to dial people on my iPhone when I’m in the car. And, with Windows 10, I’m beginning to ask Cortana – Microsoft’s virtual assistant – for stuff as well.
More and more we’re all using intelligent agents/services to handle routine things that take up time. Dennis Mortensen, co-founder of X.ai – the service behind virtual scheduling assistant Amy – shares why he feels we’re at the tipping point with artificial intelligence. He also shares his vision of a world where services like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and Amy will work together on our behalf to free us up from mundane tasks, and allow us to focus on more important things.
While more and more customer interactions are taking place via Twitter, Facebook, text messages and other forms, most of the important interactions still take place in email. And in many instances information in those emails is overlooked – information that could provide important insight that doesn’t come from human eyeballs.
Art Papas, founder and CEO of Bullhorn CRM, discusses how email analytics can help find those insights that can drive real engagement opportunities and help you stay on top of what’s important to customers and prospects.
Last week during Salesforce.com’s massive Dreamforce conference, they officially announced their Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud to help organizations leverage the power of connected devices - and the information they can provide - to create better realtime experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. Adam Bosworth, Salesforce’s Executive Vice President of the IoT Cloud, shared with me the importance of understanding what the IoT has to offer businesses, how it impacts customer engagement, and why becoming a connected company doesn’t make you customer-centric on its own.
Julia Kurnia is the CEO and founder of Zidisha, an online microlending community directly connecting lenders and entrepreneurs, bypassing local banks and intermediaries charging high interest rates. Zidisha offers a person-to-person platform that lets lenders and entrepreneurs communicate openly and instantly.
Julia shares how, without a background in technology but with guidance from Y Combinator, she was able to pursue her passion and create a platform/marketplace connecting borrowers with lenders half a world away, at a fraction of the cost offered by larger, better funded organizations.
Digital is on the minds of everyone today, from a variety of perspectives. But it’s important to connect those online activities and touchpoints to real life interactions to complete customer experiences, especially in the hotel industry. Nick Ayres, global director of social marketing for Intercontinental Hotels Group, shares how IHG ties digital touchpoints together to complete the customer journey; from the dream, through to the stay, and beyond.
There is a lot of talk around the term digital disruption today. The vast majority of it centers around the latest and greatest technology. And while smartphones, wearable technologies and connected appliances are changing the way we experience the world today, the foundational change in how organizations operate and engage customers may be the biggest disruption taking place of all.
Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research and author of the best-selling book Disrupting Digital Business, shares his thoughts on why it’s important for companies born before the digital age to transform their culture and approach to prepare for the full effect of digital disruption. And why it’s important for even companies like Amazon.com to move faster to fully embrace what’s coming ahead.
In business it can be easy to focus on individual sales, and talking about “the deal”. But companies who focus beyond individual transactions, and more on building ongoing relationships with those making the transaction, tend to be in business longer. Which is why those building customer-centric businesses in today’s environment are finding success offering subscription-based products and services.
Amir Elaguizy, CEO and co-founder of subscription commerce platform Cratejoy, shares his thoughts on why subscription business models are taking off, how they differ from more traditional transaction-focused business models, and how they are inherently more suited to capitalize on social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.
A recent report from Forrester predicted that developments in technology, and changing customer behaviors and expectations, would lead to a million B2B sales jobs being cut by 2020. But sales people willing to adopt modern technology and communication skills, and leverage insights coming from social interactions, can build on their years of experience and be every bit as effective today than they’ve ever been.
JP Werlin, CEO and co-founder of PipelineDeals, shares his thoughts on how companies can help their sales people be productive and successful in today’s quickly-changing environment. And why being likeable and having a big social network can make all the difference.
Sometimes it feels that the last thing people use their smartphones for is calling others. In fact last week we found out that Millennials would rather get a root canal than call customer support when they need help with something. But, when it comes to mobile marketing, making it easy for prospects to call you when they want information that could be critically important to converting them into customers.
Steve Griffiths, SVP of marketing, strategy and analytics for marketing technology firm DialogTech, shares with us the results from their study that found just how important phone calls can be to creating successful mobile marketing campaigns today.
Brent Leary talks to Leyla Seka, SVP and GM of Desk.com, a division of Salesforce.com. Seka talks about how businesses large and small are focusing increasingly on customer service as a way to build the bond between customers and brands.
If you are thinking about automating your marketing and want to know what options exist for small businesses, this is what you've been waiting for. Adrienne Weissman, CMO of software review platform G2 Crowd has more.
Are you looking for a way to expand your customer support team? If you thought services like UpWork (formerly Elance and oDesk) are just for hiring people to design a logo, you're mistaken. Learn more about the new ways freelance teams can help your business grow.
Big team or small, running a small business or living life as an entrepreneur can sometimes be a lonely job. Intuit's VP of Product Management spoke with Small Business Trends to explain what his company is doing to help entrepreneurs fight that lonely feeling.
Want to know about the track record and success rate of subscription-based businesses? Wonder no more. This interview with Jerry Jao, CEO and founder of Retention Science, may have many of the answers you seek.
Adrian McDermott, Senior Vice President of Product Development for Zendesk, shares with us how using Facebook Messenger for customer service can help create more successful support experiences. But only if companies don’t abuse the privilege of using a channel originally meant for friends and family.
When trying to figure out whether going into business for themselves is the right decision, there is just one question every would-be entrepreneur should really ask themselves before it's too late
Many products and services today come in a bunch of different configurations. Just think about the options you face when shopping for computers, phones, a car, or even plans for wireless and cable services. Screen resolution, hard drive size, color, etc. Keeping up with which customizable pieces work with others manually makes it more difficult to make the right offer to the right customer at the right time. That’s especially true in a world where customers expect immediate responses for everything.
Russ Chadinha, Director of Product Marketing at PROS, a software company that helps organizations use big data to sell more effectively, shares how CPQ (configure-price-quote) applications can help them sell more, be more efficient, and improve the customer experience with the sales process.
Sometimes a person who has a good business idea isn’t able to translate it into a successful business. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Rohan Gilkes was not the original founder of Wet Shave Club — a monthly box subscription service sending supplies to those men who prefer old-fashioned, traditional shaves. But he saw the potential in the idea, bought out the original owner, and turned his $4,000 investment into $350,000 in revenues in less than a year. Gilkes shares with us how he and his team of 4 was able to turn someone else’s good idea into a great business in such a short amount of time.
As we discovered last month, marketers are building mobile marketing platforms out of smartphones to tap into how much time we spend looking at them. That is why mobile devices also make a great mobile customer service platform, providing opportunities to answer questions right where customers are looking — without making them jump around.
Tushar Makhija, Vice President of Business Development for customer support/engagement platform provider Helpshift shares with us how offering customer support assistance right from within your mobile app can craft the kind of experiences that create loyal customers.
Marketing to individual consumers is a lot different than marketing your products and services to other businesses. That is why Avanish Sahai, chief product officer for Demandbase, a targeting and personalization marketing platform for B2B marketers, says account-based marketing can improve your efforts to bring on more business customers. Sahai explains what account-based marketing is and how it helps align sales and marketing efforts. He also discusses the impact it can have on new customer acquisition as well as extending the lifetime of existing customer relationship to uncover cross-sell/up-sell opportunities.
When Apple Pay was announced as part of the iPhone 6 rollout last year, it accelerated the adoption of mobile payments’ march to the consumer. But mobile payments is just part of the mobile wallets equation, which Mark Tack, Vice President of Marketing for mobile marketing technology company Vibes, says holds the key in turning mobile phones into full-fledged engagement platforms.
Tack shares how Apple Passbook, Google Wallet, iBeacons and other technologies are helping companies go beyond doing transactions over the phone, to creating full-blown experiences that cross the customer engagement life cycle.
Even in the age of social media, text messaging, chat and mobile apps, email is still the main channel marketers use to connect with customers and prospects on a large scale. But, according to a new study from Adobe, two-thirds of email marketers are unhappy with the service they are getting from their email solution providers.
Kristin Naragon, Director of Email Solutions at Adobe, shares with us some of the key findings from the study on why email marketers are not satisfied with the current tools they are using, and what they feel they need to get their jobs done today.
Brent Leary Interviews Tyler Lessard of Vidyard by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Ujjal Kohli From Preact by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Christine Stoffel of SEAT by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews James Ross Of HedgeChatter by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Jon West, Cofounder and CEO of AddShoppers - a social marketing and analytics platform used by more than 10,000 eCommerce companies - shares his thoughts on how detailed measurement of sharing can help turn one-off holiday shoppers into consistent, longtime customers.
Brent Leary Interviews Jeremy Roche Of FinancialForce by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brennan Loh, head of business development for Shopify, helps us understand the impact mobile and social is having on ecommerce from a small business perspective, and how focusing on customer engagement over individual transactions is the key to long-term success.
Brent Leary Interviews John Mason Of IBM on Watson Analytics by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Patrick Llewellyn of 99designs by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Nina Yiamsamatha Of Foursquare by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Giles House of CallidusCloud by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary interviews Elie Challita of Loqate by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Phil Hill Of FlashIssue by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Jonathan Davids of Influicity by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Matthew Bellows of Yesware by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Jon Ferrara - Instincts Vs. Insights by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Interview With Nikolaus Kimla of Pipelinersales by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Richard Owen Of Satmetrix by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Sam Mallikarjunan From HubSpot by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Girish Mathrubootham of Freshdesk by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Lana Khavinson Of LinkedIn by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Anthony Smith of Insightly by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Interview With Aly Saxe: PR Today takes Efficiency, Scalability and Accountability by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Julio Viskovich of Hootsuite by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Brent Leary Interviews Parag Jhaveri of Hucklebury by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Elaine Delos Reyes - Director of Fan Marketing for Chicago Bears by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends
Ramon Ray - Facebook Marketing for Small Business by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends