The latest Tech Adoption Index podcast is a combination clinic and therapy session for anyone who has ever tried to build software products for small businesses. At the recent Tech Adoption Summit in San Francisco, Neal Polachek interviewed Ted Paff, a former VC turned entrepreneur who founded Customer Lobby in 2007 and sold it in 2017. Today, when Ted isn’t…
What makes building and selling innovation to small, local businesses so challenging? Bob Yakominich – Broadly’s Vice President of Sales and a veteran of American Express, Zip and CitySearch, among others – joined the Tech Adoption Summit to share some perspective. Unlike enterprise companies, SMB owners wear many different hats — they work both in the…
Enterprise companies manage relationships. Small and local businesses have relationships — and they hinge on being able to track and understand conversations. That was a key point of Broadly CEO and Co-founder Josh Melick’s Headline Talk during LSA’s Tech Adoption Summit 2018. Melick went on to say that innovators often forget that small businesses are unique,…
Responding to session interviewer Greg Sterling during a fireside chat at the Tech Adoption Summit today, Kushagra Shrivastava, Managing Director for Yahoo Small Business, talked about how Yahoo Small Business has evolved over the past 20 years. While giving a nod to competitive pressures brought by new products coming to market, he added that there…
After another successful SMB digital marketing bootcamp yesterday at Yelp’s San Francisco office, we kicked off the Tech Adoption Summit, which continues today, with a presentation of new data on small business technology adoption. That was followed by a panel discussion of small business owners. The panel included the owner of a multiple office dental…
Earlier today ThriveHive and David Mihm announced that he would become the new VP of product strategy for the company. I’ve known David for years and consider him one of the most thoughtful people working in local arena. He’s also pretty independent. So, I was curious about what attracted him to ThriveHive and why he decided to take…
We’ve just concluded Wave III of the Tech Adoption Index survey of small businesses. The survey tracks the shift of local businesses to cloud-based services across multiple operational categories and verticals. The data will be presented at LSA’s upcoming Tech Adoption Summit in San Francisco on November 6 – 7. Anyone selling services into the small business market should attend. We…
Today in New York Facebook held its Global Partner Summit. There were a number of announcements coming out of the event: Creative Compass (tool to measure the impact of ad creative) New Marketing Partner categories: Facebook Marketing Consultants and Facebook Pros It’s the latter two announcements that are most relevant to this blog. Marketing Consultants are individuals…
This week Salesforce is holding its massive developer and partner conference Dreamforce in San Francisco. In conjunction with the event, the company has released a survey (reg. required) of 490 small and medium size business owners (SMBs). It explores technology adoption and other issues. The surveyed SMBs range in headcount from 2 to 199. Many of the findings are segmented into…
With four months left in the year, our event schedule is still going strong. We had great shows in Chicago (LSA18 and MarketingBitz Bootcamp) and London (Place Conference), and have six more events before the end of the year. Whatever you’re looking to do (network, learn, partner, sponsor, exhibit, etc.), there is likely an event…
