One on One Interviews

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.