One on One Interviews

Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time at the innovation lab of Atlanta-based First Data, a global leader in commerce-enabling technology. During the trip I had the pleasure speaking with Jim Allen, First Data’s Senior Vice President of SMB Solutions. Jim shares how First Data uses the incredible amount of transactions data they process annually to assist their six million plus customers – the vast majority of which are small businesses – in creating experiences that improve/extend customer relationships.

While the Patriots are favored to win game, based on data collected and analyzed by eBay DataLabs, Falcon fans are buying up merchandise at a higher rate than Patriot fans are since both teams won their respective conference championship games two weeks ago. Zoher Karu, eBay’s Chief Data Officer, joins us to share some other interesting data points they’ve discovered about what’s driving Super Bowl merchandise sales.

Last week I had the opportunity to attend an analyst function for Zoho. It was a day long event where company executives laid out the future direction of their products, services and corporate strategy. And even as larger enterprises are using their apps at an accelerating rate, Zoho ceo and cofounder Sridhar Vembu says it’s as important as ever to make sure they remain focused on serving the small business market that has powered the company’s growth to this point.

Sam Mallikarjunan, Principal Marketing Strategist at HubSpot and editor of ThinkGrowth.org, discusses how the site differs from the content HubSpot is best known for, why they built the site on Medium and how it’s helping them compete with established management brands like Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan, the role “skimmable” content and audio podcasts is playing in reaching execs, and how even in today’s digital marketing world most marketers still aren’t measuring the impact of their activities on ROI.

Holloway shares with us how small businesses can compete, thrive and survive in the Feedback Economy, why Yelp doesn’t recommend small businesses ask customers to leave reviews, and why the speed of which you respond to a negative review can be critical to getting it updated to something more positive.

Jamie shares her thoughts on why CRM adoption rates for small businesses will be increasing, how the fact 60% of revenue comes from current customers is driving successful companies to put customers at the center of the business model, and why you’ll need more than email and spreadsheets to build great relationships with customers.

This week in New York City Salesforce held their Small Business Basecamp, a half-day long pop-up event that attracted over 1300 registrants and a capacity overflow crowd of small business owners. The event brought together Amazon Business, Chase, LegalZoom, FreshBooks, Revel, SquareSpace, WeWork, Zenefits, RingCentral and Yelp to help show small businesses how CRM and related technologies can help them scale their abilities to find and keep customers more efficiently.

This holiday season is breaking records for online sales, and nobody is selling more online than Amazon.com. But how does your ecommerce site get its share of holiday sales? Kevin Gibbon, co-founder and CEO of Shyp - a provider of parcel pickup, packaging, and shipping for SMBs – says that small businesses best opportunities to compete with the Amazons of the world is by focusing on delivering unique customer experiences along with those holiday packages.

Last week on Black Friday we held our first Facebook Live broadcast featuring a conversation with three ecommerce experts discussing what retailers can do to be successful during the holiday season.

Gorny, an immigrant from Poland, shared with me a bit of his incredible rags to riches… back to rags, and finally bigger riches story, in a sit-down interview during the event. He discussed how the Movie Wall Street made hime want to come to the United States (and live in Beverly Hills 90210), how he got started in business, and lessons learned from losing his first fortune - which helped him find even greater success in cofounding companies like SiteLock and Nextiva. Gorny also discusses Nextiva’s new customer engagement platform NextOS, and why, based on his previous business experiences, he feels the company can compete with the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft in the very competitive CRM market.