One on One Interviews

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.