Amy is known for her skill in the Final Jeopardy! Round, having responded correctly 30 out of 41 times in her run. She has a new book called, “In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life” which is actually a series of questions.

In eighth grade, she was voted “most likely to appear on Jeopardy!” by her classmates”. (How did they know?)

We discussed:

• Why she always liked to ask the question why and how she became fearlessly curious.
• How she retained so much information and trivia? Do people come up to her and try to stump her?
• How she played Jeopardy! at home with her parents and how it took her over a decade to qualify for the show.
• How she likes being famous and its perks of being well known!
• Why she wrote the book even though she has a love and hate relationship with writing.
• Why the book shows the messiness of your life and when she realized she was a woman. (She discusses how the book is not intended for her youngest fans.)
• How she feels about being a de facto spokesperson for trans people?
• What is society in general getting right or wrong about trans people?
• What her advice is for other transgender people specifically teenagers?

Listen to the entire interview with Jeopardy! champion, Amy Schneider.

Image: Amazon

This article, "How Jeopardy Champion Amy Schneider Became Fearlessly Curious" was first published on Small Business Trends

Successful businesses don’t need to be complicated. In fact, Winch Enterprises, which operates under the name Cleanlots, has run a simple operation for decades.

The company provides a much needed but simple service. And the founder even offers expertise in a book to other entrepreneurs. Read more about the business in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

What the Business Does

Cleans parking lots.

Founder Brian Winch told Small Business Trends, “We’ve been providing a parking lot litter cleanup service since 1981.”

Winch also wrote a book about this simple business idea.

He adds, “I share my experience with others in my book Cleanlots – America’s Simplest Business.”

Business Niche

Field reporting.

Winch says, “Our clients have commented to us on many occasions how they appreciate the way we make their jobs easier. Anyone can clean. We provide extra value to them by reporting any incidents of property damage, graffiti, illegal dumping, burned out lighting or vagrancy while we’re on site cleaning.”

How the Business Got Started

As an easy side project.

Winch adds, “I was looking to start a simple outdoor service business in 1981. One that I could start as a side hustle while still working my day job. I had little money and skills and no college education. My dad (who had unexpectedly passed away at the time) was a janitor who took on various side jobs to supplement his income. One of his gigs was cleaning up litter material outside a nearby shopping plaza. He had taken me to assist him a couple of times when I was a young teen. I recalled how easy and peaceful this work was to do in the early morning hours before the businesses opened. I decided to start my own parking lot litter cleanup business to make him proud.”

Biggest Win

Getting his first paying customers.

Winch explains, “My biggest “win” was getting my first client to clean two shopping plazas. I knew my prospects were property management companies, so I started cold calling them from the information I found in Yellow Pages telephone directory. This was the internet back in the day! I developed an elevator pitch and began calling to introduce myself and briefly pitch the benefits of my service. I made about four or five calls until I got a very interested prospect in my service. Long story short – they became my first client! This provided me the confidence to continue.”

Biggest Risk

Expanding.

Winch says, “We decided to bring in more people to clean in order to more efficiently service the entire city. This put more pressure on me to build our clientele. Many of our existing clients were more than pleased to learn that we could service more of their properties. We have never looked back!”

Lesson Learned

It’s not always better to offer more services.

Winch explains, “We thought at the time that we should offer other services in order to make ourselves more attractive. We spent a few years hating these other services. They were dropped and we returned to our roots – to be seen as the “specialists” for litter cleanup.”

Fun Fact

The team uncovers lots of treasure.

Winch adds, “We find all sorts of interesting, and sometimes odd, items that people discard outside the properties we clean. Wallets, purses, phones, articles of clothing and sometimes money. We try our best to return these valuables, but people are careless with their money. We find paper bills of various denominations outside restaurants, bars and stores. The most I’ve found at one time was $600!”

* * * * *

Find out more about the Small Biz Spotlight program

Images: Image: Cleanlots, Brian Winch

This article, "Spotlight: Cleanlots Finds Success With the World’s Simplest Business Model" was first published on Small Business Trends

Bryan shared a vision of the future of what things like machine learning and deep learning could do to impact the way we experience the world around us. And while some of the things like AI creating things like art and music and human sounding voices get a lot of attention, there are some more practical examples of AI already being used to help create better customer experiences when we need help with a product or service.

With a year going by I was curious to hear how things are progressing in these areas, and I was fortunate to speak via LinkedIn Live with Erik Pounds, Sr. Director of Enterprise Computing and Data Science at Nvidia, around the direction things like conversational and speech AI have moved in since l last spoke with Bryan.  Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

Brent Leary: What are we dealing with when it comes to speech AI and conversational AI today?

Erik Pounds: You think of speech AI, think of functions like automatic speech recognition where the AI is running in the background and can immediately recognize what you’re saying. It can transcribe what’s being said. It can then act in real-time on that information. And you can provide a lot of helpful things by doing that. Imagine a customer service agent on the back end of a phone conversation. A lot of us on the other end, on the consumer side, we want to… And what do we really want? Well, one, we like talking to humans, and the other is we want to get help quickly, right?

Imagine using on the back end of it, so on the agent side, imagine if I’m talking to an agent trying to get some help and I’m asking a bunch of questions, imagine if the AI is running in the background, pulling up knowledge-based articles, finding information, finding helpful tools, and help me answer my question.

Then the agent has all this information right at their fingertips to help me solve my problem. It’s like having almost like this superpower sitting right next to you, to help someone have a great experience and solve their challenges, right? When we think about AI, especially in that context, it’s not about replacing the human with a robot that you’ll talk to. There’s these incremental steps that are going to be able to help businesses that provide a service to their clients for literally decades to come.

Data is foundational, empathy adds needed human element

Brent Leary: When people think of AI, they have this narrow definition and a narrow view of what it can actually impact. But when it comes to the customer experience when they need help, it feels like not just the AI, but the combination of at least feeling like you’re communicating with a human, at least a human sounding thing or somebody who has some sort of human empathy. It’s just as important as having the right data at their disposal.

Erik Pounds: Absolutely. Data is the foundational element of all of this. If we transcribe a call, that produces data in real-time. But also, there’s other data that is already in existence, often sitting at rest inside of a business that can be leveraged. And I think one of the best strategies any business can take is figuring out, “All right. What is the valuable data that I already have, that I already possess? And how can I leverage that to provide better customer experiences?” Some of it can be just general data.

For example, every time a customer transaction occurs, an engagement occurs, that produces data. You can gain a lot of information from that with regards to trends and patterns and things like this. They could help future customers, right? Often a lot of these calls, interactions are transcribed and stored. We all hear that part of the beginning of any call like, “This call may be monitored.

If you proceed, this is what’s going to happen.” Think of that as almost like crowdsourcing information. You can really leverage that information to your best benefit. So I think a lot of it starts with the foundation of how you leverage and utilize data.

Connecting context

Brent Leary: Can you talk a little bit about the component of this where we’re not just able to have great natural language transcription and understanding, but also the sentiment component, the ability to leverage empathy along with the speech AI as part of the combination. Because part of it is solving the challenge or helping, but the other part is how it happens and the feeling that people get not only from getting the thing corrected, but the manner in which the thing was corrected, the manner in which they were engaged, their community, the empathy going back and forth. Can you talk a little bit about where we are with that?

Erik Pounds: Often when I say one thing, and then you respond, then I say another thing, that following sentence is tied to the first sentence. When you look at how traditionally algorithms have worked, they often don’t understand that context. They’re not processing that or taking that into consideration. That is possible now. For example, we’ve put out some demos recently at our conference just last month, NVIDIA GTC, we put out a demo.

It’s a customer service demo using an AI framework that we call NVIDIA Tokkio that shows exactly how this works with regards to providing an interaction that is lifelike, that understands what I’m saying, what I’m asking for, and be able to do it in a natural type of flow of a human conversation. And that is critical. As we automate more of the complete process, that’s absolutely critical. Because like you said, we want to interact with humans, right? Like you said, someone calls in, they want to hear a human voice, they want someone that is friendly, that understands them, that appreciates what they’re saying.

If the AI is built to that level, it needs to be able to do that. Otherwise, the experience isn’t going to be good. I think this is important when we’re talking about AI technology. When it comes to speech AI or conversational AI, there’s a lot of technicalities of like, “All right. Well, what percentage of the words are you saying do I understand? Am I able to understand your words in a noisy environment? I’m able to do all this stuff.” And that’s how the technology works.

But what really matters is, is it a great experience or is it not a great experience? You can apply amazing technology to this challenge and still not provide a great customer experience. And that’s the most important thing, right? So we’ve taken the approach with our technology that one of the most important things that we can help our customers do is take the AI, take these pre-trained models, and be able to customize them for their own domain and their own environments.

If you’re running a call center where most of the discussions are around botany, I can’t remember the names of the plants that I’ve changed through times of my front yard, right? But if that’s the case, you need to make sure that this AI understands certain terminologies and phrases and context around that domain. Or if it’s a medical devices company, you can imagine there’s a lot of things that will be discussed in that conversation that are not in a normal conversation that an AI model would be trained in.

So customization is super important as well as lingo, right? So based on the areas of the world that your customers live in or call in from, you want to be able to understand dialects, lingo, things like this and be able to handle that properly. So a lot of this is not… You can’t just take a stock AI model and deploy it to work in an environment and it provides a great experience everywhere. Customization is going to be very important.

Don’t overlook the data right in front of you

Brent Leary: What are some of the things that are how maybe companies are still trying to get their head around in terms of moving forward with this?

Erik Pounds: In the context of this conversation, like you mentioned, you have good relationship with a bunch of companies that build these CRM platforms that are used by many different enterprises and organizations. Often an enterprise, they have their existing service stack or tech stack, and then they want to do something new. Sometimes where they are today has some limitations.

So that often adds some complexities because part of it is, “Well, I can build this my own on my own and plug it into my existing platform.” Or sometimes you got to go back to your ISV, make a feature request like, “Hey, we really want to do this. What are your ideas?”

I think most importantly, as you get those conversations going, understand the data that’s at your fingertips. Understand what you can do on your own, what your ISVs are capable of doing, what you could even possibly be able to do if you had just a little bit of consulting help. And I think just having a full understanding, so you can make positive steps forward.

Most first AI projects inside enterprises are used to… They cut their teeth with them, right? They’re not always successful. This is a new technology. So I would say being prepared as much as possible, so you have the greatest chance of success in your first project is super important right now.

Brent Leary: From a CRM application perspective, particularly if you’re a salesperson, they hate using CRM. They don’t like putting in stuff. They didn’t sign up to type or swipe or click. They really want to go out and build relationships and sell things. And my fantasy is, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just talk to your enterprise application, whether it’s CRM or ERB or whatever acronym you want to throw out there, if you could just talk to it like we’re talking right now and get your stuff done, is that just mere fantasy? Or do you see a day when we actually could do that kind of conversation with our apps?

Erik Pounds: No, it shouldn’t be. Especially nowadays when most of these… You mentioned like, “Okay. I’ve got go back into Salesforce and update this record after I have this conversation with this customer or prospect.” And we all know a lot of times these records aren’t that well updated, and then the business doesn’t have the intelligence it needs to move forward, right? The pipeline’s not up to date. You’re not able to learn from that. A lot of these conversations now are like we’re having, right? They’re remote. They’re not in a conference room in some building. Or even if they’re in a conference room in some building, there’s often somebody who is remote. And so there is a system listening to this conversation.

Just being able to transcribe that conversation and be able to do that for, in this case, the account manager or whoever’s involved would be great. And that’s all capable today.  Just like this conversation, this conversation is transcribed. You’re using some ASR function to transcribe the conversation, then you’re applying some NLU or NLP function to understand the context of what the heck we’re talking about. And then you could pretty easily go and update a lot of those standard fields. And this is all repetitive stuff. The more repetitive an activity is, the easier it should be to apply AI.

This article, "Erik Pounds of Nvidia: Traditionally Algorithms Often Haven’t Understood Context of Conversations; That is Possible Now" was first published on Small Business Trends

Ecommerce expert John “ColderIce” Lawson and I recently transitioned our Watching Amazon show/podcast into Pass the Mic.  The new name doesn’t mean we’ve grown tired of, well, watching Amazon, as we still plan to do plenty of that with all the things the company is into.  But by rebranding it as PTM it allows us to broaden the topics and companies we can dive into, and of course TikTok is a great example of that.

In fact, there have been a few recent reports of TikTok potentially following in Amazon’s footsteps by building out their own fulfillment centers and capabilities in order to support the growing digital commerce of creators using their video platform.   And though there haven’t been any formal announcements that this is happening, it got us to thinking if TikTok could really pull this off.  And if they did what would be the potential impact for creators and small retailers trying to reach the billion-plus monthly visitors to the platform.  Or why would TikTok fare better than Shopify who tried to build their fulfillment capabilities only to fail fast.

John and I went round and round on this one, as the thought of the fastest growing video platform taking on such a huge infrastructure project is intriguing. And we probably came away with more questions than answers.

Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

You Ready for FBT (Fulfillment by TikTok)?

Brent Leary: What do you think of this news about TikTok potentially building fulfillment centers?  Could they be a real competitor to Amazon?

John Lawson: I don’t think they have to be a competitor to Amazon. I do think that they could be the definition of social commerce. I think that is an opening that Facebook has failed miserably at. Instagram has tried. Pinterest has tried. Right? But I’m seeing from a lot of people that have e-commerce businesses and doing ads on TikTok, that TikTok is actually driving buyers to their independent website. Let’s see if they can harness that and put in … because I mean basically what are they trying to do? They’re really just trying to ensure that their customer, their user, gets their products.

Brent Leary: Like Amazon, if they can control the fulfillment and order process of their TikTok creators to run their shops and fulfill orders that take place… If they can do that, they’re not trying to take over the world, they’re just trying to maintain control over the ecosystem that they’ve built basically.

John Lawson: That’s all they need to do.

Brent Leary: TikTok is like a runaway freight train of sorts. I think the hardest thing for these social networks to do is to go from being social platforms where people really don’t go there to shop, to being able to handle commerce and also now being able to handle fulfillment.

John Lawson: But if you really think about it, this is not the place you go to seek to connect with your friends and family, but it’s where you go to be served content.

Brent Leary: Yeah. But the original reason you go to TikTok is not to buy something like with Amazon.

John Lawson:  No. Bro, see, I think there are people now that are going there not necessarily to buy per se, but they are going there to research product.

Brent Leary: To research product really?

John Lawson:  Yeah, research product and discover product. I definitely think that because there’s a lot of influencers over there that are doing TikToks about different products or how to prepare foods. Things like that. They’re going there to be informed and if there’s a product in the mix, they’re buying it.

Brent Leary: Just like Amazon, you get to a certain point where if you want control over the customer experience, if UPS messes up on Valentine’s Day, people don’t go to UPS. They come to us because that’s where they ordered the stuff from. That’s the problem for TikTok so you want to have all of that.

All Sellers Aren’t on Amazon

John Lawson: The other thing, too, all of their people are not necessarily Amazon sellers or don’t have stores and don’t have the wherewithal to be on that platform.

Brent Leary: Right now, TikTok’s algorithm is geared towards serving up videos to people the algorithm thinks would be interested in. How can that algorithm be tweaked to not only serve up videos for people to watch, but things that they may want to buy? Because if they can do that, now you really got something.

John Lawson: Well, I think they’re already doing that. That’s why people are seeing good results on their advertising.

What about YouYube?

Brent Leary: YouTube allows, whatever you call them, creators influencers, whatever, they allow them to cultivate a community. TikTok isn’t doing that. TikTok is still algorithmic focused. You’ll see what TikTok wants you to see… and our buddy, JB’s son said it so well. He uses TikTok to create new audience members. He cultivates and builds a community for engagement over on YouTube.

TikTok, it feels like they need to do something more on that end of it but I also do like this fulfillment angle too. It’s like fulfillment is more transactional if you don’t have the community component that allows you to build a real relationship.

Prospect of FBT is exciting

John Lawson: This is a rumor so there’s nothing concrete. But I find it exciting because I think there is a lot of “there” there, and so many others have tried and failed to make a buzz and I think TikTok might be one of the ones that could win this game.

Brent Leary: I still look at YouTube as one that should win because look at all the connecting pieces that Google has on top of YouTube and they allow their folks to build real communities, though.

John Lawson: I don’t know. I mean the ability to advertise a product on YouTube, you can actually have a scroll bar with your products on there. People can order directly.

Brent Leary: But that’s just the advertising element. I’m talking about the actual community engagement element. That’s the thing I think TikTok is missing the most. It’s not allowing their creator to build that kind of community.

John Lawson: But Amazon doesn’t let you do that.

Crossing the business model chasm

Brent Leary: But Amazon is a shop first thing. Their business model is business. The first business model for any of these social platforms has not been to go have people buy something on the platform. That’s why I think Facebook has always struggled with this.

John Lawson: So maybe that is the problem. Maybe because people come there to do the community thing and that becomes a detractor from the community thing when you’re marketing and advertising all the time.

Brent Leary: I never go to Facebook because I want to get hit up by ads and buy something.

John Lawson: Exactly. But neither do we watch a game or anything because you want to be hit with advertising.

Brent Leary: Well, we’re conditioned for that.

John Lawson: Right. That’s what I’m saying. So maybe TikTok is already a little condition for you to see stuff that you’re not subscribed to necessarily.

Brent Leary: Yeah. But like I said, if you’re the creator, and I’ll just keep going back to Jeb the Boxsmith, because he just said it so eloquent – TikTok drives me new viewers, but YouTube is where he can do longer form videos and build out a community. Then he also talked about how he used Discord and even Twitch. I mean I guess you got to figure out the optimal mix for all this stuff.

John Lawson: But the mix between building community and selling goods. Everybody’s not good at both.

Fulfillment ain’t easy, ask Google

Brent Leary: Right. But that’s why I’m like why isn’t YouTube doing some kind of fulfillment thing? Because they have their own stuff. Look, Google’s got Google Pay.

John Lawson: They tried, bro. They tried.

Brent Leary: Yeah, but they didn’t try in conjunction with letting the creators do that on their … I mean you can sell your merch, I guess. You can do some kind of direct e-commerce on your YouTube channel but you can’t go like full bore. You’re not doing a whole lot of crazy stuff.

John Lawson: But I’m saying they did try. They tried product delivery, they tried warehousing consumer products.

Brent Leary: It’s a hard business. That’s why I’m-

John Lawson: It is a hard business and they’re like, “Screw that. We don’t need all that.”

How long would it take?

Brent Leary: That’s why you got to wonder will TikTok do you think … Like you said, it’s not completely a hundred percent, but if they say, “Yeah, we’re announcing TikTok fulfillment and we’re going to help our millions of creators sell stuff from the platform and we are going to make sure it gets to people,” how much chance do you give them of actually pulling that off? Because fulfillment is probably the hardest thing for these businesses to try to do.

John Lawson: It’s a slim chance.

Brent Leary: Amazon, I have to say one thing that people really overlook. Amazon built a complete distribution shipping network in five years?

John Lawson: No.

Brent Leary: Is it longer?

John Lawson: They’ve been doing this ever since they’ve sold their first book.

Brent Leary: I’m talking about the actual being able to go from somebody who pushes a button on a website to buy something to them delivering. No hands other than Amazon hands touching it until it gets to the person’s hands.

John Lawson: Yeah. Well, it’s been more than five years.

Brent Leary: Well, maybe, but because there’s an air component, there’s a boat component, there’s a truck component. That’s hard for most companies that aren’t in that business solely to replicate.

John Lawson: Yeah, and to put that amount of money behind it.

Brent Leary: That’s why I don’t know.

John Lawson: Even Amazon is stumbling a little bit there.

Brent Leary: But that even proves the point even more. Even they are stumbling.

John Lawson: Right.

Brent Leary: That’s a really complex thing.

John Lawson: Very complex.

Brent Leary: And when it’s not your sole business, and when your sole business has been serving up videos, to go from serving up videos with algorithms to that, uh-huh. I don’t know, man. That’s a tough one to do.

John Lawson: It is. But if they do this, they have something up their sleeve. I don’t know.

Brent Leary: Well, yeah, if they do that, yeah.

China adds complexity

John Lawson: They are a Chinese company. So I mean they have other resources.

Brent Leary: But that raises another point too. Last year I guess we had that big thing. Well, TikTok is owned by ByteDance, the Chinese company. They got the servers. They can see all the data. So what’s going to happen if they start doing fulfillment?

John Lawson: I think there will be pretty … They’ll have a lot of routes here in the US if they can do it.

Brent Leary: That’s complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.

John Lawson: For some reason, though, I’m not negative on the idea. Matter of fact, I was more negative on the idea for Shopify than I am for these guys, which I can’t even tell you-

Brent Leary: Really?

John Lawson:  … I can’t tell you why.

Brent Leary: Yeah. I would’ve thought Shopify would’ve had a much better handle on fulfillment.

John Lawson: They have zero handle on fulfillment.

Brent Leary: Well, what do you think of video, social video and fulfillment expertise?

Shopify

John Lawson: I don’t know. I don’t know why. I’m just trying to compare. When I heard Shopify do it, I was like, “Oh, that ain’t going to work. Oh my God, that’s the worst idea.” Where this one, I’m kind of like, “Oh, that’s kind of exciting. Let’s see what happens.”

Brent Leary: I think you’re caught up in the hype.

John Lawson: Maybe. Could be.

Brent Leary: Because you like TikTok. You’re doing TikTok.

John Lawson:  No, I’m not. I tested TikTok. I’m not a TikTok … No, I don’t. I’m not a two-minute kind of or one-minute video kind of guy. I watch long format stuff. Matter of fact, I’m almost at the point where I’m like, “Dude, I don’t even know if I need cable anymore. I just need to subscribe to YouTube.”

Brent Leary: Oh, you mean like … Well, I YouTube TV.

TikTok Advertising

John Lawson: I have a lot of T-shirt people and one of them is just having a ball with the advertising on TikTok. It’s amazing.

Brent Leary: Really? Are they working with an influencer or are they just doing their own videos?

John Lawson: No, they’re doing their own videos. She gave me some of the insight, but then the deal was at first it was all organic, but then she started doing ads and now the ads are really, really performing.

However, we looked at the customer value of a TikTok person and it was about 27% lower than the value of a Google customer.

Brent Leary: So anyway, yeah. I’m really … This TikTok advertising, I-

John Lawson: So you’re not bullish on it at all?

Brent Leary: On TikTok advertising? Absolutely. On fulfillment, I’m not. Thank you.

John Lawson: You’re not, okay.

Big investment and commitment needed

Brent Leary: Not on the fulfillment because that’s just a whole other animal. That is a beast of an animal. And like you said, let’s say they announce it. How many years will it take for them to actually be able to pull it off? Remember years ago when we were sitting at the Panera Bread in that one quarter where Amazon said, “We’re going to invest $800 million in our fulfillment,” and their stock price took this deep, huge hit and we were like, “That’s a smart move.” [inaudible 00:16:08].

John Lawson: Yeah. It was like they’re building the infrastructure.

Brent Leary: How much is it going to cost TikTok to do that? It’s probably like a 10-year difference possibly in starting this from where Amazon did it to where they do it.

John Lawson: Two years? But they’re already working on it now. So it’ll be within that. It’ll be by the end of this … It’ll be within a year or about a year.

TikTok Prime?

Brent Leary: Are they going to do TikTok Prime membership? I mean there’s so many things. Amazon is-

John Lawson: They don’t have to do all that.

Brent Leary: But if you want a loyalty program, you have to have people sign up for stuff and then be able to shoot them stuff. I mean this is why-

John Lawson: It’s not like they can’t partner with somebody.

Brent Leary: Yeah, but then when you bring in partners, then we have clashes of culture and things don’t work the way we thought they were going to work. Walmart has tried. Boy, have they tried. I mean, who knows? I don’t know, man.

John Lawson: It’s hard.

Brent Leary: I am suspect on the TikTok fulfillment. I love the advertising and I love the e-commerce, and I think it does make sense for them to try the fulfillment, but that’s such a tough business. That’s all I’m saying.

John Lawson: Okay. So it makes sense for them to try.

Brent Leary: It definitely makes sense. To me, it made sense for Shopify. It didn’t work out the right way, but you know.

John Lawson: Yeah, it was horrible.

Brent Leary: Sha, do you think it makes sense for TikTok to try to create their own fulfillment and distribution and shipping network for you, for TikTokker you?

John Lawson: Yeah, for you and your T-shirts.

Would creators want FBT?

Brent Leary: Would you be psyched if TikTok offered you FBT – Fulfillment by TikTok – and you pay a certain amount? You put your stuff with them and let them handle fulfillment, logistics, all that stuff. Would you be more excited about TikTok doing that? Or would you be more excited about Amazon doing that?

John Lawson: Companies like CafePress have been doing this fulfillment thing for years. Well, even before Amazon was doing it. Print on demand is a huge … Maybe they’re thinking more of the print on demand business, TikTok.

Brent Leary: Yeah, if they are very narrow maybe.  Then yeah, maybe they do. If it’s digital 3D printing kind of stuff, not actually moving too much stuff from all around.

John Lawson: I don’t see them doing refrigerators, things like that.

Brent Leary: Maybe there are these narrow instances where it would make sense and they would be able to have a better shot.

John Lawson: I can see that. I can see that.  Not necessarily handling the hard stuff like candy and shampoo bottles and all this kind of stuff, but print on demand, I could see it.

This article, "John Lawson of Pass The Mic – Fulfillment by TikTok Would be a Positive for Growing Number of Creators Looking to Sell Merch" was first published on Small Business Trends

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 (2020 and 2021).  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.

Below is an edited transcript from a portion of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear to full conversation.

Integrated platforms even more valuable during economic uncertainty

Brent Leary: When you think of the economic uncertainty, the specter of a recession… inflation just won’t go away. Does it become even more critical for businesses to have an integrated platform that allows you to bring together front office and back office?

Evan Goldberg: That’s such a great point, and let me give you a great example. What’s the productivity of your sales people? I mean, the only way you’re going to be able to figure out is if you take the sales information and combine it with the financial and HR information. How much do they cost, both in terms of expenses as well as salary? Obviously from the sales system, how much are they bringing in? What’s the sales cycle look like? How many can they bring in per year? And just what’s the ROI of adding a new salesperson? They’re hard to find. They can be. Wages are up, they can be expensive. And the only way you can get that sort of real ROI assessment is when you pull multiple systems together.  Some try to pull it all together with spreadsheets, but usually that doesn’t work, and that’s where NetSuite really excels.

Even during economic uncertainty fast growing businesses are always optimistic

Brent Leary: Talk about some of the things that you’ve heard recently from customers in terms of their… What are they focusing in on right now, particularly as we sit here with this kind of pins and needles environment when it comes to what’s going on with the economy?

Evan Goldberg: Fast growing businesses are always optimistic, and they’re always focused on growth. I don’t care what’s happening in the world. I mean, the aliens could be invading, and they’d be like, “Where’s my next sale coming from?” And maybe I can sell to the aliens. So there always is that optimism and still asking, “How do I find my next customer? How do I make sure I deliver our great product to them so they go and tell two friends and so on?”

But certainly there’s a little trepidation out there; “I just got to batten down the hatches a little bit, I think. I don’t want to be caught unaware if this big storm comes”. And so that’s a time where you just, again, want to focus on some of the places where you could be saving money.

It’s probably why we’re getting these kinds of requests from customers; Again, “hard to find great people. They’re expensive. I don’t know what the future’s going to bring, so I want to make sure I’ve really got my ship running as a smooth running whatever”.

Use whatever transportation analogy you want. But I want to make sure that everybody’s doing stuff that’s really valuable for the business because I don’t know how much I’m going to have to constrain things over the next coming months, quarters, and years.

The rise of the composite company

In my keynote, we talked about this sort of composite company that we came up with based on talking to so many of our 32,000 companies/customers. And this is a company that was delivering a product, delivering an internet service, and delivering people services, professional services.

Thank goodness we decided early on at NetSuite that we weren’t going to bias ourselves to product companies or service companies or not for profits or software companies, that we were going to try to really handle all the needs of all of them. And the modern company, I think that they come up thinking this way. Obviously our younger entrepreneurs bring incredible freshness, and it’s amazing to see. They also often talk about the digital generation, the digital natives and all that. And I kind of feel like there’s the hybrid company natives, these young entrepreneurs that just think that way. They’re like, “I’m not going to pigeonhole myself as a product person, a product company, or a service company. I’m going to do it all because I know that’s how I can deliver on this great idea I have in the best possible way.” And it’s great to see these organizations adopt NetSuite and get tons of value out of it.

Passionate after all these years

Brent Leary: Just from hearing you, you’re extremely passionate about this stuff. When did you found NetSuite? 1999, 1998?

Evan Goldberg: ’98.

Brent Leary: So we’re talking about 24 years. You’re 24 years into this, man. Why do you still have this passion? Why are you still doing this?

Evan Goldberg: Well, it’s the ultimate, I guess you could say,  job security. But really it’s the ultimate of not being able to do another startup. Because if you’re interested in business offerings for fast growing businesses, we kind of do it all. Not like I’m thinking about starting a company, but I do kind of laugh when I have a good idea. I’m like, “Well, I mean, it’s obviously a feature of NetSuite, so I can’t start that company.” I kind of put myself in a position where I just have to stick with NetSuite, but it’s my baby.

We are investing really, really heavily in the next generation of NetSuite. I don’t want to undersell what we’re doing this year, but every year we have so much good stuff in upcoming NetSuite because we’re investing so heavily in the technology, next generation, business user experience to make it for these entrepreneurs.

They now come from the world of TikTok and all these great tools that they’re using for marketing and just in their personal lives. They’re like, “Why don’t my business systems work like this? And there’s all this great AI out there. Why is AI not being applied to my business?” So we’re really, really pumped to take some of the great technology advances that people are seeing in their everyday lives, these great user experiences that people have in their personal lives with their technology and taking it and applying to business. And the good news is all the bad stuff that people talk about, we’re not putting any of that in. Only the good stuff.

Thoughts Five Years after the Oracle Acquisition

Brent Leary: It’s been about five years since Oracle acquired NetSuite.  Looking back, any surprises being a part of Oracle?

Evan Goldberg: The biggest surprise for me was Oracle was never known as a company that put a huge amount of effort and energy into user experience. It was more like, “We have the best technology and we sort of dare you to use it.”

And I don’t think Larry Ellison would deny that – if he’s tuning in today – but they’ve done a 180-degree flip. They are like, “We are going to make our products the best products to use for everyday users.” And I had no idea this was going to happen. I used to joke that I know Larry personally and I go into his personal… Meet with him personally or go into Larry World, whatever. And I’d be like, “Oh my God, this has the best user experience of anything anywhere.” And I’m like, “Why don’t we have that in the products?” And now they’re doing it.

It’s not an exact analogy, but I mean Larry has become very passionate about it. And they’ve invested heavily, and we’re drafting off of that for sure. And we have our own great ideas as NetSuite, and Oracle’s been incredible at keeping us independent enough that we can continue to drive our ideas. We have a different market than your traditional Oracle product. And yet let us also liberally beg, borrow, and steal from all the great stuff that they’ve developed over the years.

Tech still isn’t as easy to use as it should be for businesses

Brent Leary: You’ve been in the industry for a long time. What are some of the things that you’re surprised that haven’t changed for the better yet, 24 years since you started NetSuite? What things are like, “Really, we’re still dealing with this?”

Evan Goldberg: That’s a great question, and I have to think about that for a bit. So much has gotten better…but some things have been over-hyped. Everybody thought when the internet came along and business started using the internet that it was going to fix all the problems of the world because, “Oh look, everything connects.” Well, it turns out it’s not quite that simple. What we see, and maybe this is a little self-serving, but we still see companies dealing with the complexity of using tons of different business systems and tons of different systems and, yeah, they’re all on the internet, but that’s kind of saying, “Oh, here’s a cell phone.” Before it was a landline, now it’s a cell phone. So now you can talk to this person in France, yeah, but they’re still speaking French.

I think the promise is moving everything forward together, and we just try to do our part in our little realm to make things work better together. But there’s still tons and tons of work because we see businesses really getting swamped in technology. And I think that really ties to the other thing that I’d say is that technology in a lot of cases has just not gotten easier to use. In some cases it’s gotten harder to use. And that’s because everybody tries to build every bell and whistle into their technology. That’s their way of competing.  And as a result, it just gets more and more and more complicated.

I feel like this revolution in the business user experience is about, I don’t want to say dumbing down, but just sort of going more minimalist. Do the 80/20 rule and make sure that what users see is what they need and they don’t get overwhelmed and just give up.

There’s been a lot of great revolutions though. It’ll never end…

This article, "Evan Goldberg of Oracle NetSuite: Fast Growing Businesses are Always Optimistic, Focused on Growth No Matter What’s Going on in the World" was first published on Small Business Trends

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 toward 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.

Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

Brent Leary: When you think of customer service week, what does that mean to you?

Fortuné Alexander: It means just giving a tip of the hat and recognition to everyone, from the people who are leading contact centers. The people working in the contact center.  To IT. People having to make decisions on what technology to deploy in the contact center to vendors like P&G and others who bring products to market to meet customer service and contact centers jobs easier and more rewarding.

So it’s kind of a week to just celebrate customer service professionals. Customer service cuts across all the industries. So it’s a fun time for us. We enjoy it. We get up and hang out for this week with a lot of fun content, interactive content. And we just we’re putting the finishing touches on this report called The Future of Customer Service and talking about the 3 to 5 year time horizon.

We surveyed over 750 customer service leaders all around the globe (primarily 1 billion+ annual revenue companies) to see what’s on their minds, where they think the trends are heading and how they’re preparing for customer service in the near future. A lot of insights in there.

Brent Leary: I know the report hasn’t been published, but is there anything you can share with us now about the results?

Fortuné Alexander: Surprisingly, 70% of the customer service leaders said that they’re going to be optimizing the customer service experience around Gen Z and millennials. Gen Z and millennials are the guys that make up the majority pretty soon here. So contact center leaders are definitely looking to make sure that they optimize their experience for those target audiences.

Brent Leary: But those same generations are also making up a bigger, bigger part of the employees that are going to be helping with these experiences. Maybe you could talk a little bit about not only the expectations as a consumer for Gen Z and millennials, but also them as employees that are going to be interacting as service agents.

Fortuné Alexander: I have a lot of fun with this one because we talk customer experience for years and now it’s the employee experience, and some people are talking total experience. But you’re absolutely right. You’ve got Gen Z and millennials coming into the workforce and they’re going to be working in customer service.

They’ve got iPhones in their personal lives. They don’t want to have these green screen antiquated systems that they’re trying to help do their jobs with. So that’s what I’m super excited, as we start to apply AI and automation more broadly in contact centers, they’re not having to swivel chair and stick their head up and ask a colleague; or get on Slack.  The system is really guiding them through the whole process. It’s like you’re just watching the system and you’re getting a much better employee experience as well.

Brent Leary: So how are the expectations for customer service changing when you think about these two new generations that are not only coming in to being the ones who are buying the most, but also they’re all they’re going to be the ones doing all the servicing?

Fortuné Alexander: I think a couple of things come to mind –  Fast and everywhere. People overwhelmingly want fast resolutions if you work in customer service. That’s pretty obvious but it’s still top of the list in terms of, hey, I want a fast resolution. Ultimately, I think where we’re trying to get to the future customer service is no service, because you’re going to be proactive and preemptive.

Now we know we’re not going to get there anytime soon, and people have said that for a while. But it is a good aspirational goal to say, hey, we’re not going to have a contact center with 2000 agents. We might have 50 people and they’re going to be managing the AI and the AI is going to be doing all the interaction.  And it’s going to be like, you get stuck at the grocery store trying to check out in self-service and you’ve got a pack of beer and somebody has to come over and make sure you’re 18. But then they don’t take over. They just approve it and walk away and the machine keeps going. And that’s kind of how it’s going to be.

Most of the interaction is going to be AI. And you’re going to agents just dealing with either managing the bots or handling the super complex stuff.

Brent Leary: Do you feel like these new generations are going to be more receptive to working in conjunction with AI and with bots. Not feeling like the bots are going to take over their job, but really looking forward to working with bots to hand off the tough stuff and allow them to have more of the more human interactions with the folks they’re servicing?

Fortuné Alexander: Absolutely. And, poking fun at my own generation, Gen Xers, if I look at my daughter who’s ten, she’s digital native. And this this is second nature. I think this whole worry about our jobs being taken away is going to be less of a concern for these younger generations that come into the workforce because they’ve grown up with AI and technology at their fingertips since they were babies.

I do feel like jobs will change, and they always have and they always will. There will be jobs. They will evolve and they will look different.

Brent Leary: What are some of the surprising things you might have found in this report? I know you can’t tell us a whole lot, but were there anything that would make you do a double take? You’re like, wow, really?

Fortuné Alexander: One little signal we picked up on is more and more contact centers are thinking about revenue generation, cross-selling, upselling. And if you think about that, that’s been prevalent in some industries for a very long time.

You call your mobile phone provider and they’re always trying to sell you a new phone or get you on a different plan or what have you. So that’s not new, but what was new and that’s a little bit eye opening for me is to see that across other industries. We saw some of that data coming on where people are saying, yep, we want to measure customer lifetime value and we want to make sure that we’re engaging with our clients when they reach out for service on how they can use other services.

So that was the one nugget that came through.

Structural Changes Needed to Service Millennials and Gen Z

Brent Leary: What kind of structural changes do companies need to make in order to fully embrace some of the findings? You know how millennials and Gen Zers not only will consume, but also how they want to work.

Fortuné Alexander: We touched on a minute ago and I’ll just circle back to it. This is weird because as a vendor, and every vendor does this, you assume the market is where your latest release is at, but the market is still ten years behind.

Ten years ago, if you look at the average contact center and what they’re running and what they’re doing, a lot of them are still using stuff that’s not modern. I feel like we really need to see the industry invest in more technology to be able to use AI powered decisioning and guidance that allows that servicing process to be more seamless and faster.

That’s what people want. They want to get in and out, and ultimately they don’t want to have to call you at all. They want you to know that there’s an issue and fix it before they even know it.

READ MORE:

This article, "Fortune Alexander of Pega – 70% of Customer Service Leaders Say They’re Optimizing Experiences for Gen Z and Millennials" was first published on Small Business Trends

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 co-founder 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.

Below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.  And a big thanks to Anita C. for allowing me to continue doing these conversations and featuring them here at SBT, and to Jon for helping me kickstart the series and for coming back to join me for another year.

Brent Leary: 12 years ago I asked you if CRM was more important then as it was when you co-founded Goldmine in the late 80s.  You said it was more important at the time.  So, if I asked you today, is CRM more important now than it was 12 years ago, your response is?

Jon Ferrara: CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, but today it stands for Customer Reporting Management because CRMs are primarily used by sales and marketing teams to pound prospects and customers. But if you think about it, Brent, what percentage of sales people are in a company? Maybe 5%. What does the rest of the company do to manage the constituency around the business in order for it to achieve its business goals? They use spreadsheets today still. Why? Because CRMs aren’t built for relationships. They’re built for command and control of leads and most outcomes of business relationships is in the sale. And so CRMs are absolutely more important today than they ever have been, but they’re misunderstood. Every business buys the CRM because they think they should, because everybody else has one, but they don’t know why they’re buying it.

It’s a frigging database for people and contacts, and everybody in the company should be using it because no matter who picks up the phone, you should know who that person is, what their business is about, who talked to them, what they talked about, and what’s going to happen and who’s going to do it, and most businesses can’t tell you that.

American Express can tell you that, but most businesses rely on some sort of email productivity suite, Microsoft or Google are the tools today. But they suck at contact management because every team member in Microsoft and Google has a separate contact database and email and calendar history, so you don’t have a shared contact database in your company for the constituency around your business.

From customers to constituents

What is your constituency? It’s more than prospects and customers. Today, to grow a business, you’ve got editors, analysts, bloggers, influencers, third party developers, investors, advisors, and prospects and customers, and what you’re doing is you’re using a CRM to qualify leads to pound them into a deal. But the outcome for 95% of the relationships you have is in the deal, so you end up in spreadsheets.

Still Passionate 33 years in

Brent Leary: What year did you co-found Goldmine?

Jon Ferrara: ’89.

Brent Leary: All right, ’89. So you’ve been involved with this for 33 years.

Jon Ferrara: Geez.

Brent Leary: 33 years and I don’t detect any less an ounce of energy and excitement for this now than you had then. Why are you still so excited and energized by this space, by the work you do?

Jon Ferrara: Because I believe, Brent, that my purpose on this planet is to grow my soul in the brief period of time that I’m here. And the best way for me to grow my soul is by helping other people grow theirs, rinse and repeat. What better contribution can I give to my fellow humans than to empower them to reach their dreams by building the relationships that they need to achieve their goals? I believe in relationship management.

I believe that it takes a village for us to achieve our things. Nobody does things on their own, and if you do what I’m going to tell you right now, which is to build an identity and share and give away your knowledge in the places where your constituency learns and grows with the intent not to bag and tag and sell them more, but to help them achieve their dreams and grow, that you’re going to have all these connections and conversations and how do you manage them?

Today, you don’t have a personal CRM. Your personal CRM is Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and spreadsheets. If you believe in the power of relationships, then you should invest in your own personal CRM, your golden Rolodex, and that’s why I keep doing what I do because I love to power people because it powers me.

Still coming up short

Brent Leary: Let’s talk about the shortcomings. 33 years in, what are you surprised that we’re still getting wrong with this stuff in general?

Jon Ferrara: Well, at its core, CRM is a database and a database should define what you put in and what you want to get out of it. I think that most people misunderstand CRM and so I’m just going to dissect it real quick.

A contact manager is essentially something that automates the Rolodex or the day timer. SFA (salesforce automation) is something that automates the six by nine callback card. There’s a difference. The callback card was a card that you essentially put the name of the person you’re calling, the notes on the call, and the date you’re going to call them back. “When should I follow up with you?” Okay, recall date, boom, file it on that date. Every day you pull up your cards and you call those people back. That’s Salesforce automation with a little bit of forecasting and a spreadsheet.

What happened was GoldMine and ACT pioneered relationship management and individual people loved it because they all rolled with Rolodexes and then day timers and it helped them achieve their relationship goals. SFA just accelerated that sort of relationship outreach. But then CRM was built because Microsoft came in and basically copied GoldMine and built Outlook and Outlook and ACT had to shift up in the marketplace and they grew into the needs of the customers by delivering SFA, market automation, eventually CRM.

But CRM really didn’t take hold until Siebel came in and built the enterprise CRM because management was afraid of what sales reps were doing with their individual contact databases in GoldMine and ACT. I think that we lost our way in the core of CRM, which stands for customer relationship management, now it stands for customer reporting management, because the reason they call it salesforce… you have to force salespeople to use it. No one in their right mind would use a CRM if they weren’t beat on to do it.

CRM should be about relationships not reporting

What should a CRM be about? It should be about contacts and relationships at its core to empower the customer facing business team members, not just sales people, to build the relationships that your company needs to achieve its goals and then it should have the functions to do the individual things like sales and marketing and the analytics and things you need to do for management to keep the finger on the pulse of the business.

But today, I think that CRMs aren’t delivering on the promise of relationships and I don’t think that Microsoft and Google are delivering on the promise of contact management. SFA is still a big hole, which is why outreach and SalesLoft is something that my son uses for sales as an SDR because CRMs don’t deliver SFA. CRMs don’t deliver contact management or SFA effectively and this is a big problem, and this is the hole Nimble fills.

Here’s the big problem with CRM. There’s 225 million global businesses. Less than 1% use any CRM. Why? Because you work for the CRM and you have to go to it to use it. Before meeting, if you’re diligent, you Google somebody, then you go log that in the CRM, and then you engage with them, you might engage with them on email or social or Zoom or face to face. Then you got to go back and log that in the CRM because the CRM doesn’t work where you’re working. It doesn’t live in your inbox, it doesn’t live in your Zoom or your Teams, it doesn’t live in your LinkedIn or your Twitter effectively, and it doesn’t work for you.

Your CRM should do the non-human things like automatically build in a record and log in the interactions, so you could do the human thing, which is listening and logging the note and scheduling the next task because it’s the basics that wins games and most people don’t do the basics because they’re too busy doing the hard stuff, which is data entry and typing.

Biggest failures – Adoption and Data

I think the biggest cause of failure of CRM is lack of use and bad data because you do type the stuff in, it’ll decay like fish. Most people A, don’t define what their CRM should really be doing other than maybe capturing a lead and putting it in a drip marketing thing and maybe handing it to a sales rep who could pound it into a lead, which is 5% of all the contacts in your company.

I think that they fail because they don’t deliver on the promise and the promise is really empowering that customer facing business team member to be good at engagement. To be able to engage you need to listen because you need to learn what you need to do to add value, but most salespeople don’t listen because they’re too busy typing shit in the thing, trying to log all the stuff so management gets off their back.

I think that a lot of small businesses buy a CRM because everybody else has one and they think they should have one too. They don’t really define what should go in or what goes out, and then at the end of the day, they have it, but they’re not really using it. Most people use a CRM as a contact manager.

READ MORE:

This article, "Jon Ferrara of Nimble: Only 1% of 225 Million Global Businesses Use CRM. Why? You Work for the CRM, not the Other Way Around" was first published on Small Business Trends

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.

Below is a portion of an edited transcription of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud to hear the full conversation.

Salesforce+ Year in Review

Brent Leary: With Salesforce+ recently celebrating its first year in operation, can you give us a summary of what this first year has been like?

Colin Fleming: We’re an enterprise software company. This is not status quo for us. So, as with anything, we’re learning tons. We’ve seen big momentum on viewership. Just thrilled with the quality of the content. We’ve moved things into season two. In season three, we’ve cut bait on some things that didn’t quite work. Just recently, We’ve won content marketing program of the year for the second year in a row as a result of this effort.

It feels like it’s working. People are coming back to the product often.  It’s been a big kick in the pants inside Salesforce to just rethink the way that marketing works inside the company. Of course, we’re all planning for this cookie-less future. We’re all planning for first party data, we’re all planning for these things. And this has been great to take a tactic go out and try this, and turn it into a strategy.

I’m just thrilled with what we’ve been able to do. This past week, we introduced a new partnership with CNBC to launch a series with CNBC, which we’re thrilled about with called The Shift.  The level of ambition here, it’s just sort of unfathomable to a degree.

Data was the driving factor. Are people watching this and staying on and coming back to the platform and if they weren’t, then we decided to cancel it.  And it was kind of a black and white decision. Frankly, that’s a muscle that Salesforce has not had historically. It’s a lot of activity before achievement, like, “oh, we’re doing all these things and we do a status report of how are you marketing the sales cloud or whatever”. That’s not what we’re doing here. We look at achievement.  And so I think that’s been a mindset shift for all of us along the way.

When we were together a year ago, we started talking about persona driven content where we had an ambition to build a content series for each of our core personas in which Salesforce markets itself to. We are generally still on that strategy.  But what we found, and we did not expect this, is the softer and more altruistic side of the content has really performed better than expectations. Trailblazer has been an incredible series, the Ecopreneur Series, which we produced with the Fortune team has been just a runaway hit for us.

We signed a partnership with our friends Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway on the Pivot podcast as well to bring their podcast, which is runaway popular into a video setting.  We did a little 2 to 3, four minute snippets in a video setting, and that’s been by far the most popular part of Salesforce+.  Pivot is that big eyeballs number for us that drives interest to the platform that might not be in our core audience.

What I’m really energized by is they’re not just coming for that.  You see people come in for Pivot and they go to Ecopreneurs, they go to Trailblazer, or they go to something else. And that cross-pollination strategy has really worked for us. And then the one big thing that has been the biggest surprise of them all. I really resisted any level of heavy practitioner technical content. I wanted this to be an upper funnel like Emmy winning type of thing, right?

But we trialed this idea of a Salesforce on Salesforce series, which is really practitioner heavy. And I was worried about being myopic. But it has massive popularity with people wanting to know how Salesforce is overcoming problems. And we’ve tried to be hyper transparent, outlining our playbooks for how we do events and first party data and sales enablement and all these things that have been locked up in the four walls of Salesforce.

We’re totally opening it up. And I cannot produce those things fast enough right now.

Salesforce+ impact on Dreamforce

Brent Leary: How is Salesforce plus being integrated in supporting Dreamforce?

Colin Fleming: You’re going to see a pretty transformative experience. The media experience is going to be front and center. In fact. Hopefully not giving away too much here….

Brent Leary: Don’t worry about it, it’s just us…

Colin Fleming: Between the main keynote room and the campground is an entire Salesforce studio area. It’s like a hybrid theater, capturing content for Salesforce Plus in this really interesting way.

We have a Today Show, and we have a Tonight Show at Dreamforce. We’ve got professional hosts. We’ve got Saturday Night Live talent as well that’s going to help us host this content.

Dreamforce is too much for one person, anybody to absorb in the three days that we do it. And so this idea of highlights before the day and highlights after the day with really a media-inspired talk show-like environment is new for us. Tune into that on Salesforce+. Dreamforce Today, Dreamforce Tonight will happen there.

You’re going to see shorter content across the board because we know attention spans on Salesforce+ or any streaming platform are shorter than they were before all this pandemic thing happened.  So you’re going to see shorter series, shorter content. I think you’re going to see just more of a media inspiration across the board. We’ve brought in talent from the media landscape. We’ve brought in people that do this for a living.

Dreamforce is an ambitious exercise. We’ve got over 200 sessions on Salesforce+. Salesforce+ will not turn off for the next week.

We are we have an APAC picking it up, we have a EMEA picking it up and then the US takes over in the morning so it never turns off. I literally hand the keys to the Enterprise to Australia to run the show over the night for us. EMEA takes it from them until the early morning and then we take it back before the main keynotes, stuff like that.

We’re thoughtful about not only the volume of content on the platform, but our programing for the global audience. Dreamforce before the pandemic had roughly to 20 to 30 different countries represented at Dreamforce. There’s 117 different countries that watched on Salesforce+.

The game has changed materially in terms of the types of content we produce.  We have to produce a lot more one-on-one style content, as we’re introducing ourselves to new audiences and Dreamforce as a user conference… it’s more than that. But that’s where it originally started of course. So I think we just have to think through everything in a, in a bigger and more grand way.

Salesforce+ Lessons for Traditional Marketers

Brent Leary: With all the things you’re doing with Salesforce+, how do the lessons from all of this translate to your traditional marketing activities?

Colin Fleming: The center of gravity has pushed into high fidelity, impactful, thoughtful content that builds audiences instead of content that people fill out forms to download a white paper where you have to put in the name of your first-born child. That sentiment of B2B marketing is kind of gone. I was I was fortunate to attend the Cannes Creativity Festival this summer, and somebody said something and I remember who I should probably attribute to attribute this better.

But they said there’s no room for boring in B2B marketing. And, you know, we have to think like that. The bar for marketing inside a company like Salesforce can’t be set by B2B companies it has to be set by B2C companies; and we should operate at that level of quality.

If Salesforce is a top 40 brand in the world, and we have ambitious things we want to do, why shouldn’t we operate like that?  Let’s operate at that level and hold ourselves accountable to that. And hopefully you’re seeing it in the work that we’re putting forth. But, I think we’re still at the early stages of that journey as well.

Salesforce+ Built on Salesforce platform

Brent Leary: How easy was it for you to get buy-in to try some of these new things out?

Colin Fleming: We have an incredible CMO, Sarah Franklin, that understands the balance of building the brand with driving performance marketing. We know the Salesforce brand is now a top 40 brand in the world. We have to invest in the long term.  It’d be hard for us to talk about first party data strategies and cookie-less futures and CDP and the marketing lens if we weren’t doing it ourselves.

We took the narrative that we were projecting publicly and asked ourselves, okay, are we the model citizen here? And one of the things that I’m most excited about, behind the scenes, it’s a very Salesforce on Salesforce story. It’s all built on our core technology. It’s all running on our CDP. It’s a free service, but we are very thoughtful in how we’re using this as a first party data strategy for us to help build an audience, which is not something that B2B marketers like myself typically think about;  building an audience and keeping them entertained and keeping them energized and keep them coming back.

And that’s where our technology comes in. I am customer zero of the richest of the rich of Salesforce technology. I have a direct line to the product manager of all of our major marketing products. I have a direct line to our commerce leaders and just like, here’s what I’m learning, here’s what working, here’s what’s not. And some of the features you’re going to see.

Dreamforce has been inspired by some of the lessons we’ve learned on Salesforce+. And so I think that that’s what’s really exciting behind the scenes. And we’ll continue to do that and I’m really excited about Salesforce being a little bit more deliberate and clear about that. And walking the talk in a thoughtful way. So that’s what I’m perhaps most excited about.

At some point we’ll kind of open the doors and show everybody the platform because I think it’s pretty cool what we’ve done.

Thoughts about the future of events

Brent Leary: Any last thoughts going into the big week?

Colin Fleming: We built Salesforce+ because events didn’t exist for us for a good period of time. And now that events do, it’s interesting to see how these two things coexist now. And this year is the first time of true coexistence. I won’t call it a hybrid event because I hate that phrase, but these events are coming together in ways that we didn’t build. Salesforce+ for originally. So it’s fascinating to see the cross-pollination and how we’re going to balance the two, because last year we had a thousand people inside the center. It was awesome and we were thrilled we did it, but it was nowhere near the size and scope of what a historical event would have been.  So we’re happy to return back to that size this year and learn how these two things will play together. And hopefully, they play together nicely. That’s the intention.

READ MORE:

This article, "Colin Fleming of Salesforce says Salesforce+ Will Make Dreamforce a Transformational Experience Compared to Previous Years" was first published on Small Business Trends

Next week Salesforce’s big industry event, Dreamforce, is back in full force for the first time since the pandemic.  It’s the 20^th 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.

Below is an edited transcript from a portion of our conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

Brent Leary: I saw a recent video of you speaking about diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) as being an important component of the future of work.  I hadn’t heard anyone tie those two together like that before.

Lori Castillo Martinez: Our vision is to be the most inclusive company, you have to have the big audacious goal of getting there. You talked a little bit about that earlier of it’s so hard and it feels like companies take steps forward and steps back. But I think you can’t lose sight of where you’re going. And what we try to do is continue to have that focus on where we’re going.

Future of Work is DEI as well as WFH

We have to evolve where we’re going with where the future of work is going. And the only way to really do that is to make sure that as you’re breaking/redesigning your processes, you’re thinking about what inclusion looks like in the future versus what inclusion may have looked like in the office.

You have to put equality at the center. And so this is something that we think about from hiring through to experience. We have to think about what that means in our hiring process? If you’re going to have people remote in the office, how can we stay connected from everywhere that we’re working so that we can be successful from anywhere where we’re going?

When we think about that in true practical reality, it’s how do you think about those connections? How do you make sure that you keep your culture alive? What are those strategies? And I think for us, it starts with this notion of equality at the center. But the question I get from most people is, okay, that sounds well and good, but what do you actually mean?

For me, it really is about hiring plus experience. It’s about what are the ways that we attract people to come and work in our company? How do we make sure what we say is what we do? And then from an experience perspective, we want to make sure that it’s not just about getting you in the door, but we want you to stay.

We want to make sure that we are figuring out through our data where are those barriers? How do we think about barriers to entry from an attraction perspective? What are the challenges? My gosh, the society is overwhelming. I can’t even say months. It feels like now it’s gone on to years. So how do we make sure that we’re thinking about what’s happening outside?

How do we prepare our managers to be empathetic and supportive? How do we make sure we’re being thoughtful about opportunities? How do we make sure that managers have these sort of new skills and competencies we’re asking them to have to manage in a different way? And then how do we make sure that we’re continuing to listen deeply to our employees?

Because I can sit over here in my virtual square all day long guessing what people want, but I actually need to ask the questions and then I actually need to listen. And so that’s just a constant mechanism of, you know, training ourselves to do that, deep listening and then making sure that we have those mechanisms to continue to bring it in to the way we’re redesigning our work.

And it may be everything from how do we connect in our intentional in the offices to how do you make sure you’re still being inclusive to people who might be on a zoom call when maybe two thirds are in an office and another one third are spread across the world at different time zones. So all of those things together are the inputs, I would say, to ensuring that we’re thinking about equality and inclusion as we’re thinking about the future of work.

The Future of Work and Growing Black and Brown Opportunities in Tech

Brent Leary: How are you seeing the future work impacting ground floor opportunities as well as leadership opportunities? Those kind of two tracks?

Lori Castillo Martinez: I think some of it, again, comes back to experience and being intentional about careers. A couple of years ago, we launched a program called The Warm Line. Very specifically focused on our black, Latinx, indigenous, multi race, and our LGBTQ+ communities, including women of all races. it’s an advocacy and belonging program, and it really gave us some insights about what the barriers were.  Why are people having challenges and why are they leaving your organization? Really making sure that you’re paying attention and listening to that is super important. And I will tell you, one of the number one things that comes up is career.

Sponsors and Mentors

And so some of it is “how do I navigate? How do I find sponsors”? There’s a difference between a mentor that’s helping me figure a few things out and a sponsor. Who’s that? That person that’s talking about me when I’m not in the room, the person who’s seeking me out for those opportunities. And as we started to hear some of that feedback, part of what we’re doing is figuring out how do you get really intentional about those kinds of programs?

How do you teach leaders how to be a sponsor? How do you teach employees how to have that conversation, and to have clarity about what they want their career to be? Because I think what we’ve realized is that there’s accountability on both sides.

I was talking to a group this morning that was sharing with me, “Lori, I feel like an imposter sometimes –  that age-old imposter syndrome.  I’m not sure if I’m qualified. So I didn’t apply for the job”. We’re saying you applied for that job. Don’t wait till you’re 100%. And so some of it is building up that confidence, locking arms of people, really being the sponsors that are encouraging people and being their champions, helping them prepare along the way, too, so that they are best prepared for those opportunities.

Giving Leaders the tools to Lead in DEI

Lori Castillo Martinez: On the lighter side, how do you really work with your leaders and say, is your network diverse both internally and externally? We all have our own personal lived experiences. We all show up with the network that we’ve naturally grown, as you alluded to earlier, in tech. Our networks may or may not be that diverse.

So how do we get really intentional about saying, how do I meet people externally so that when those roles come up, I know who those big names in the industry are? And then internally, how do we make sure we’re thinking about everything from succession planning to proportional slates? And that’s something that we just started talking a lot about.

A lot of people used to be like, we’ll have one woman or one person of color. That doesn’t work. We know already through so many studies that it’s actually about being proportional, which means about being intentional in your sourcing so that you have talent pools that are really diverse. So when those leaders have these jobs open, what recruiting teams can do is become so much more sophisticated.  And our recruiting team, best in the industry, they really went through a whole transformation of 22 different initiatives to make sure we were thinking about careers both externally and internally; so that we’re really thinking about that talent on demand when our leaders are ready to hire. I would say that’s part of the piece that we think about in terms of careers.

Both sides need to be intentional

Lori Castillo Martinez: The other piece I would say is sometimes people are waiting for some big event – like this is going to be how people move up in the organization. And what I tell all of the lovingly referred to as the mushy middle (those hiring managers, the managers, senior managers, directors, senior directors) every day, is every one of you have the power to ensure that your teams are more diverse.  And so look around your team. If you don’t have widespread representation, go out and get it. If you don’t know how to do it, ask the resources within your organization to help you. I guarantee there are someone in your organization that knows where this talent is. Go find it and get connected to it because it’s not going to be me in my position.

Brent, that’s actually going to change it. It’s literally every hiring manager in every organization by them making a different choice, both in hiring and in promotion. That’s actually going to change the makeup of our organizations.

Not following the leader

Brent Leary: You guys have been doing this stuff for years and revenue is still increasing and growing. The business is doing well as you’ve integrated this in.  Is there a correlation there? Do you feel like the business is in a better position because of the things that you’ve done, even looking at it through the traditional lens of financials?  Because it just feels like from the beginning companies have looked at DEI as more of a cost as opposed to a central piece of the business.

But you guys have done that and you have benefited. And it just feels like, well, if you guys are doing it and you’ve been wildly successful, why do the questions remain?

Lori Castillo Martinez: It’s a good question.   Many people come to work for Salesforce because of our values; equality, sustainability or innovation or customer success. And our number one value is trust. So when we talk to why do people come work for us, a lot of it is because of our values.

I think it’s that balance of how you integrate it into the business. It shouldn’t be separate what you do, to your exact point. It’s got to be about how you do what you do. I was speaking with somebody recently and they said, “Oh, my goodness. But don’t you focus on your inclusive language trainings and don’t you focus in…”.

Aligning DEI with business results

I say to them yes, but I start with the business, like where do we align with our business results? We know that our customers are looking for a more diverse sales organization, and so we start to track our representation of our account executives on a weekly basis. Not only do our sales leaders report out their numbers, they report out their representation because we do so much hiring.

This is an opportunity for them to share that, not only do we look at, again, our business results, but we also look at our representation. And those are part of our corporate goals. And so when you line it up side by side, you’re setting that tone at the top that it’s just as important.

Not one person’s issue to resolve

Lori Castillo Martinez: I think that’s where it starts. And then it’s actually the less sexy work that’s rolling up your sleeves, one manager at a time, one employee at a time, in that mushy middle.  That is where you can do the best work. It’s not about what’s this one thing that fixed it.  It’s really the multitude of things that come together. And I think you have to really push yourself on those small wins because those small wins. It starts to build your momentum. And that’s what I hope other companies will learn and take away, because that’s really what’s benefited our business.

Looking at it, it’s not one person’s issue to solve.  It’s each one of us every day making a conscious decision and an intentional decision to the way we hire and then the way our employees experience our organization. Those are the two most powerful things that people can do. And to your point, those are the ways that you start to add value to your organization. It’s much harder to be inclusive when you don’t have representation.   When you have representation people can learn from each other and be curious about those lived experiences.

That’s actually the power of this work. That’s when you start to see those amazing business results because you’re now looking at solving your customers issues through the lens of many lived experiences. Not one myopic way of thinking about the world and that’s the power of it, quite frankly.

READ MORE:

This article, "Lori Castillo Martinez of Salesforce – Future of Work is Opportunity to Integrate DEI Into Core of the Business" was first published on Small Business Trends

I’ve known angel investor, advisor and entrepreneur Larry Augustin since his days as CEO of SugarCRM, and have had him as part of this series a couple times (2011 and 2016).  SugarCRM grew from $10M in annual revenue and a $15M loss to $100M in revenue and $7.5M in EBITDA. Accel-KKR acquired SugarCRM in August 2018. And after nearly a decade as Sugar’s CEO, Larry spent a couple of years at Amazon Web Services (AWS) as vice president responsible for their applications services businesses – including their contact center offerings.

Currently, Larry is focusing on angel investing and advising a number tech startups.  And with his varied experiences and background, my CRM Playaz co-host Paul Greenberg and I were excited to catch up with Larry for a long overdue LinkedIn Live conversation.  Below is an edited transcript of a portion of a conversation.  Click on the embedded SoundCloud player to hear the full conversation.

Thoughts on Amazon before working there

Brent Leary: Larry, I don’t know if you remember the conversation we had over a decade ago. We talked about should Amazon, or potentially, would Amazon buy either FedEx or UPS because it just felt like they were going to have to do something on their own when it comes to shipping. You remember that conversation?

Larry Augustin: Oh, absolutely. Are you kidding? We were having that discussion about Amazon becoming… where do they go next? And my argument was that they had to become vertically integrated. And if you think about Amazon, that’s one of the strategies of Amazon. What is it that Jeff Bezos says, “your margin is my opportunity,” right?

If you think about that, every step of the way where they can take over someone else’s gross margin dollars, they’re good at it. And when it comes to logistics delivery, that was what Amazon was built on. And taking that to the next mile, all the way to the house and first of all, they get all that gross margin but then they get the end-to-end control.

The thing I didn’t understand at the time is that Amazon would rather reinvent the business process and the capability from scratch to do it in a new way, with new technology; and make it better than buy something that exists that may already have a lot of the infrastructure in place but which was designed and built on technologies of 50 years ago, 40 years ago, decades ago.

So, you see ultimately they’re doing it themselves. They’ve built out all the tools, the fleet, their goals to go all electric, in terms of delivery fee fleet. The idea that the delivery is there, you get a picture of exactly where the box is when it’s delivered but that reinventing that and owning that supply chain end-to-end.

No, I remember that conversation as I watched them move down that path. My first thought was that they would acquire it but again, they’re willing to invest for the long term and own it.

Small Business CEO vs. Huge Business Exec

Brent Leary: You spent roughly a decade as a CEO of a small software company, SugarCRM, and then you took a little time off and then you jumped in and you became a VP level at a behemoth with AWS. Can you compare and contrast what it was like to go from being the CEO of a small company to being a VP level at a huge company? What adjustments did you have to make? And then which one do you prefer?

Larry Augustin: They’re both great experiences. I’ve been really lucky in my career to be able to do both and do all those things. I give this, I don’t know, this great career advice for people but I give it to people which is; do things you enjoy and do things you learn from. For me, I tend to do different things at different stages in my career because I like learning new things. I love the challenge of something new and I like learning from it.

Part of the reason I went to AWS was I wanted to learn about that organization and understand, they’re just fantastic at things. And if you’re in the tech world today, you’re probably building on AWS infrastructure.  It has fueled a great, great part of the entrepreneurial development of new technologies today and new companies. So I wanted to get inside that and I really enjoyed seeing the… And being able to operate at that scale.

That was one of the things that was fun and interesting in the smaller company you have. It’s this interesting contrast.  A smaller company, you can tend to have control of everything, which is, “hey, we’re going to do a product.” I can decide we’re going to do a product. We’re going to go launch it. I can drive that across the whole organization. I can make everything happen from sales to marketing, to engineering, to do it and you can pull all that together but you don’t necessarily have the reach to do and the scale to do everything you want at a place like AWS at Amazon.

Okay. You’re in a bigger company. You have more infrastructure and constraints around you. There are expectations because you’re building an AWS product. There are various things you have to plug into. So you’re a little bit more constrained in terms of flexibility about doing all those things. Although I will say Amazon is a great place for pushing people to just have the flexibility and get things done but you still have to fit within. The structure of the organization but you have immense resources to pull up, right?

We go to 50 of the largest companies in the world and talk to them about product ideas. How can we be helpful? What can we bring to you? We’ve got this new thing where we want to bring out to market this new idea. I have the instant access to do that and have the reach and have the scale to make some of those things happen. So it’s different. They are both fun. They are both interesting.

The Sales Challenge

I find personally that one of the big challenges in bringing new technology out to the world today is sales and marketing, which is interesting, because I’m an engineer by training. I think it’s actually gotten easier to build the technology. I think it’s gotten harder to get it in the hands of customers. I like to get my hands very deep on the sales and marketing side because reaching customers is actually, I think the biggest problem in bringing out a new technology today. And so in spite of the reach of a big company, I find sometimes that it’s harder for big companies to do that because they have so much installed base. They have so much weight behind existing products. it’s fascinating.

One of the things I like about the smaller company is in many ways, I think, you have more of an opportunity to put all the weight behind some new ideas. So it’s really fascinating contrast between the two.

Angel Investment Strategy

Paul Greenberg: How do you even determine this? How do you pick, how do you think about it? I honestly couldn’t find a pattern in anything.

Larry Augustin:  I look for people that are excited about what they do; all in with it and solving an interesting problem where people know they have a problem. And there are some common things there. For example, I’ve got this business, I’m working with people that do the virtual agent for IT and HR help desks. And a lot of that ties to my experience with call center, customer experience, that space because it’s really about helping employees get information. It’s also AI. What I call an AI native company, which is re-imagining an application built from the ground, up around AI. That’s a theme I like.

I’m doing another one. Another company I’ve spent time with open DB, completely different space if you’re familiar with the Bloomberg Terminal.

Paul Greenberg: Yeah.

Larry Augustin: There are 300,000 users of Bloomberg Terminals today. Bloomberg Terminals are $20,000 plus per year thing. But what’s happened in recent years, retail investing has gone big. Retail investors now drive markets. And there are tens of millions of people doing stock picking, investing as individuals. What’s the Bloomberg Terminal for them. They don’t have access to that. And the thing that these guys are doing with open VB is democratizing access to financial information, making it available.

Imagine tens of millions of users with access to something that used to be really expensive that only a few people had. I love those… Drive the price way down and go abroad with things. It’s a little bit, if you remember the computer…

But as the price goes down, the market gets big. I love that concept. In businesses where you take something that only a few people could afford or benefit but then you really lower the price and now you make it available to mass numbers of people and you hugely grow the market. I love businesses like that. Because I think they make life better for everyone because you’ve taken something that used to be the domain of a few and you’ve now enabled many people to have it. I think they make life better for everyone. I think they’re a fun place to be because of that. And I like businesses like that. So if you see me doing some things that feel a little consumer retail, it’s probably something like that.

One of the ones I also told you I’m doing is this company recently invested in that does flywheel batteries for residential, where’d that come from?

Well today, if you wanted to do battery backup for your home, you’re buying expensive lithium batteries. It’s again, not a technology that can go mass market. This flywheel battery technology can go mass market. It’s a 10th of price and it’s something that you could imagine every small home in the world having one of these things and significantly improving their carbon footprint and improving their access to energy and costs because you could put one of these things in. So those are fun places to be.

READ MORE:

This article, "Angel Investor and Advisor Larry Augustin – It’s Gotten Easier to Build Tech, Harder to get it in Customer Hands" was first published on Small Business Trends