One on One Interviews

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.