One on One Interviews

Are you a business owner that feels you are going alone most of the time? Your work time and personal time is valuable, so no one needs to inform you that it is essential to find a way to balance things out. And then there is the aspect of finding time to grow your business. What to do?

If this sounds like you, maybe it’s time to rethink getting a virtual assistant.

Join Shawn Hessinger of Small Business Trends and Andrew Cohen of Work Better Now to find out if a virtual assistant can be the solution to your overextended workload.

Andrew answers questions in the video, such as what is a virtual assistant? What does a virtual assistant do? What kind of businesses need them? Is a VA worth it to my business? And where and how you can find a virtual assistant.

Alan Trefler of Pega – Current Climate Makes You Focus on Efficiency, but Not at Cost of Engagement by Brent Leary and Small Business Trends

If you are a professional that sat at home during the pandemic dreaming of starting a small business online, this video is for you. In it, Pamela Wilson of pamelawilson.com lends her expertise on how to use marketing research and the four stages of the iterative process to build an online business that helps sell your knowledge and products globally.

Earlier this year I partnered with Oracle on a survey of over two thousand US-based consumers to learn more about who they trust between social media influencers and brands in learning about products and services, understanding out how to get the most out of them once the purchase has been made, and how they’d like to handle things when they needed help with a product or service. And while there were a number of interesting findings that were surfaced from the survey, one of the overarching findings was that close to forty percent of those surveyed trusted influencers over brands. But a deeper look into those numbers found that Millennials and Gen Zers surveyed were approximately 2.4X more likely to say they trust influencers than Baby Boomers were.

To dig in and discuss some of the numbers and what they might mean going forward, I recently had a LinkedIn Live conversation with Jeff Wartgow, Vice President of Product Management for Oracle. Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

If you are a business owner that gets less than flattering reviews about your company, you may participate in manipulating or suppressing reviews. For instance, you don’t ask unhappy people to leave a review but ask happy customers to leave one.

Additionally, you may also be tempted to buy or incentivize reviews, thinking these tactics will make the problem go away.

However, is that savvy business practices or does it make the problem worse? And—is there a better way to go about responding to negative online business reviews?

Shawn Hessinger, the Executive Editor for Small Business Trends, sits down with Mike Blumenthal, the co-founder and analyst at Near Media, to answer those questions and more. In this episode, they discuss new federal guidelines and how you should respond to negative reviews.

There’s a lot of announcements coming out this week with this being National Small Business Week. And a number of them came from Meta, including things like:

• Native Ad Creation: Businesses can now leverage native ad creation in WhatsApp Business App and no longer need to switch apps to complete them

• Quote Request on Instagram. People can now request a quote from select businesses on Instagram, following a questionnaire that appears before starting a conversation.

• Marketing Messages in MBS: Meta is testing a new capability that will allow businesses to send promotional message campaigns via Messenger to customers who opt in

• Unified Inbox Coming to WhatsApp: Meta is also testing the integration of WhatsApp to Inbox in Meta Business Suite, with the goal of making it easier for businesses to save time by managing their conversations with customers across Meta apps in one place and allowing multiple people at the business to manage messages from the same WhatsApp number on multiple devices

To get some additional insight into some of these announcements, I had a LinkedIn Live conversation earlier this week with Rich Rao, Vice President of Small Business for Meta.

COVID-19 has affected small businesses in several significant ways. In the premiere episode of Small Biz in :15, Small Business Trends Executive Editor Shawn Hessinger and Ivana Taylor, of DIY Marketers, look at two comprehensive surveys from small business owners: one from before and one from after the pandemic conducted by Small Biz Trend’s sister site, BizSugar.com and the important findings that came from them.

If you’re in business today – and even if you aren’t – you can’t go too long without hearing, reading or talking about customer experience, and more broadly the experience economy. That wasn’t always the case. In fact it wasn’t until Joe Pine and his co-author James Gilmore introduced us all to the term experience economy in a 1998 article, then authored the seminal book The Experience Economy a year later. And things in business really haven’t been the same since.

Recently my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I had the pleasure of having Joe Pine join us for a LinkedIn Live conversation on how the ideas put forth in the book have evolved over time, and how companies have done putting those principals in the book into action – especially over the past few turbulent years.

I first met Girish “G” Mathrubootham, founder and CEO of customer engagement platform Freshworks, nearly a nine years ago at CRM Magazine’s annual industry event Evolution. Soon after I had him on as a guest of this series to discuss why he thought it was important for CEOs to regularly spend some time taking customer support calls, in order to stay in touch with their needs. At the time the company had only been around for a couple of years and was definitely a small business with not that many employees.

The last time I spoke with G was before the pandemic at Freshwork’s user conference, Refresh. But a lot has happened for the company since then, including having thousands of employees and being publicly listed on NASDAQ just last fall. So I was very happy to have an opportunity to have a LinkedIn Live conversation recently to get his thoughts on how things have changed for him and the company now that they’ve been public for over six months.

Inspiration and education. They’re the keys to modern marketing, according to Kieran Flanagan, SVP of Marketing for HubSpot. And while some businesses are pretty good with the educational component, most tech/SaaS companies come up short on the inspirational side. That’s just one of the gems Kieran dropped on me and my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg on a recent episode.

With HubSpot’s pioneering role in inbound marketing, we’ve been watching closely as they continuing blazing a path in content marketing with their HubSpot Podcast Network, and the recent launch of their Creators Program. So we were glad to spend a few good minutes with Kieran to learn more about the evolution of their content strategy, why he feels data is killing marketing, why YouTube is ready to disrupt podcasting, why newsletters and blogs are still a growing part of their strategy, and more.