One on One Interviews

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.

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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.