One on One Interviews

In January 2016, Periscope co-founder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour announced more than 100 million broadcasts have been created since Periscope’s launch in March of 2015. Not only are lots of people using Periscope on their phones to easily broadcast videos, but even more people are watching them.

According to TechCrunch, 350,000 hours of video is streamed daily, while FastCompany says people are watching 40 years worth of live video every day!

As services like Periscope, Blab, and now Facebook begin rolling out their livestream platforms, now is the time to understand the best ways you can use these tools to connect and keep the attention of prospects long enough to turn them into long-time customers.

Monique Johnson, CEO and founder of Ehm Ooo Media, produces videos for businesses and brands that tell their unique story. In a recent webinar I hosted for her, she provides a wealth of information on recent livestreaming developments, and best practices for planning, selecting the right platform, and syndicating your videos to get more eyeballs on them.

Sales is the universal language of business. Closing deals – and closing them efficiently – is key to the growth and success of any small business. But, according to a study done by PipeDrive, a cloud-based application aimed at helping SMBs close sales deals more efficiently, countries like South Africa, Brazil, Chile and others are finding higher levels of success closing deals than US-based SMBs.

Timo Rein, co-founder and President of PipeDrive, shares with us more findings from the survey, including which countries close deals fastest, and are able to do so with minimal effort. He also shares why he feels US small businesses lag so far behind other countries in sales efficiency and effectiveness.

Having the right piece of content at the right time, in the right format, delivered in the right channel goes a long way towards creating great customer experiences today. Which is way it’s never been more important from both a lead generation and conversion perspective to optimize your content to create personalized, relevant opportunities to engage today’s customers.

Drew Burns, Principal Product Marketing Manager for Adobe Target, a tool for testing and targeting digital experiences, shares with us why mobile devices are driving the need to use location, device type, and profile data to connect content to customers and prospects at “the moment of truth”.

Jim Fowler has been at the forefront of crowdsourcing for over a decade. First as cofounder of cloud-based contact management service Jigsaw, before selling it to Salesforce.com for $175M. Then with InfoArmy, and finally today with Owler – a free competitive intelligence service.

Fowler discusses how changing technology has impacted how crowdsourcing business models over the years, and how these models will only succeed if humans and the way they communicate are not automated out of the equation, but freed up to think and share more efficiently- improving their abilities to create even more value.

Kira Wampler has had a varied career in marketing. From her early days helping Intuit build its social media presence, to helping startups like Lytro and Trulia get off the ground. To now, in her current role as CMO of ride sharing company Lyft.

Kira shares with us how why she prefers to think of marketing in terms of experiences, and why it’s critically important for her to communicate with as many customers as possible. And how the speed and disruptive nature of today’s business climate provides challenges, but also great opportunities to modern marketers.

Brian Solis is one of the leading futurists/ digital anthropologists in business today. And his books, The End of of Business as Usual and What’s the Future of Business, are best sellers and required reading to anyone interested in digital transformation. And with his new book, X: The Experience when Business Meets Design, is probably his most ambitious - and impressive – book, focusing on the importance experience design and the role it will play in business today.

Brian share with us a few key themes covered in the book, including why it is imperative to go beyond focusing on building products and services if you’re looking to create the most valuable relationships with customers you possibly can

Process and automation are keys to scaling a business. And in the case of serial entrepreneur Tom Libelt, they are the keys to him being able to publish as many as 300 books each month - and sell thousands of copies each month. And this combination of process and automation also allows him to run three other businesses.

Libelt shares with us how a few of tips about how he’s been able to create processes and systems that allow him to publish so many books each month, do so with a limited number of people involved and limited number of hours of his personal time, drop cost of producing a book by 90% (from $75 per book down to $7.50), and why platforms like CreateSpace are helping him sell thousands of books each moth.

While people are buying more of the products and services they use online, over 90% of purchases are still done the old fashioned way – in person at a local store. But how do you get more of those folks who are using Amazon.com to do their product research, to come to your store when they want to “buy local”?

Matt Chosin, CEO and founder of PriceLocal, shares how his new service streamlines the process of customers moving from their online Amazon research activities, to their neighborhood store to buy the things they want. And why he calls it a “judo move” to use Amazon’s product searches into store traffic and customers you can market to long after the single transaction is completed.

Because of the unrelenting amount of content being created, and the constantly shrinking attention spans customers have, marketing automation tools are more popular than ever. But even with that being the case, it’s estimated that as few as 7% of US-based companies are using marketing automation software.

Andy MacMillan, CEO of marketing automation service Act-On Software, discusses why adoption rates are so low today, why he feels adoption rates are on the cusp of exploding, and the role MA is playing in customer retention.

While it still is dedicated to serving small businesses (over 13 million of them), GoDaddy is not the same company today as it was a few short years ago. They offer a variety of services going way beyond the domain registration and web hosting services they are best known for. They have customers spread out all over the world. And they have an increasing amount of data on who exactly their small business customers are, what stage in the business lifecycle they’re in, and what tools and services they’ll need to keep their business moving forward.

Phil Bienert, GoDaddy’s chief marketing officers, shares with us how their approach to marketing today is focused on understanding and communicating with specific customer segments individually - using a mix channels to do so – in order to better serve them throughout their business journey.