One On One Interviews

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.

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

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 per

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

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 loo

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 co

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 w

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.