Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Brian Rigney, CEO of Zmags (Part 1)

Content and Commerce are trying to integrate, albeit at  a slow pace. The world order is very far still from my 2007 vision: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS). Nonetheless, read on to learn about some very interesting developments in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Zmags.

Brian Rigney: I’m the CEO of Zmags. I joined Zmags just about two years ago. My background before that has been a series of startups including companies like CashStar that does digital commerce through gift cards and other applications.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a Maine company right?

Brian Rigney: That is a Maine company, yes. You can find them at CashStar.com. >>>

From Unicorn to Unicorpse: Etsy Falters on Amazon’s Entry

Etsy (Nasdaq: ETSY) went public earlier this year, a much awaited IPO at an $1.8 billion valuation. But since listing, serious issues with the company have resulted in a tumbling valuation under public market scrutiny. At its current stock price, Etsy is still appearing above the billion dollar mark, but barely so. And its trajectory indicates that Etsy is on its way from being a prized Unicorn to a faltering Unicorpse.

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Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Have you been tracking this area of influencer marketing that is getting a bit of attention these days?

Carol O’Kelley: I’m not sure what you mean. I’m certainly interested in the idea of Masons and that there are gurus in particular areas that can have enormous influence, but I’m not sure if that’s what you mean.

Sramana Mitra: There are two trends that I’ve observed. We’ve profiled a bunch of different companies in some of these spaces. One trend is that there are people with significant influence. These are people who have huge social media influence. Maybe, through their blogs or LinkedIn accounts. In their niches, they are very influential people. There’s a company called Influitive founded by the founder of Eloqua. That one is focusing more on really mining your customers and turning them into advocates. I was wondering if you were tracking any of that work. >>>

Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are other core areas where you think marketing automation and Sales 2.0 is making a real difference?

Carol O’Kelley: To where you can make systems work for the marketers or for the sales people, instead of the other way around. You can even look at an auto dialer that’s improving the efficiency of the sales organization. I think that it’s easy to overlook some of those things and say, “Those have been around for a while.” But if you think about the increased efficiency that’s brought the average demand generation, those can be great productivity boosters.

Sramana Mitra: Are there other trends that you would want to touch upon? >>>

Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 1)

A short discussion on how marketing and sales technologies are evolving.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to your company.

Carol O’Kelley: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of Salesfusion. I joined the company earlier this year after having spent most of my career in technology, marketing, and operations. I’ve done a number of very small entrepreneurial things – everything from being the 34^th employee at Retek, which was ultimately acquired by Oracle to starting and managing a self-storage business. I’ve also worked at larger companies like Red Prairie and Oracle. I’m passionate about technology. I love the pace of this business.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you based?

Carol O’Kelley: I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What turn did the product take?

Brandon Levey: From a positioning standpoint, we had evolved to a real SMB solution. We would now position it much more as a multi-channel inventory order management solution for SMBs. The way that I like to think of the solution at the lowest layer is the management layer. It’s a small scale ERP for SMB. On top of that is an automation layer where we automate a lot of these business processes that are traditionally manual. On top of that, we started building out our intelligence layer.

Sramana Mitra: You were working with e-commerce merchants as well or just brick-and-mortar? Where was your sweet spot?

Brandon Levey: We’ve never just focused on one. That’s a very important part of what we do. What we like to say is we take a holistic approach to commerce. What that means is any way you can sell a physical good, we want to be a part of it. We want to be that underlying layer that makes >>>

Bootstrapping From Germany: Cleverbridge CEO Christian Blume (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How does your work play in to the work of the SaaS providers like Aria? They are managing the online SaaS billing.

Christian Blume: They’re managing a broader spectrum in a much stronger niche market. What do I mean by that? They go into any type of service that could be a subscription, billable type of environment. Whether this is your utility bill or access to a cloud service such as a Box or a Dropbox, they can do all of that. What they actually offer is a very small subset of the solution that we actually have.

You are talking about an Aria system. They’re very specific and concrete around the subscription facilities and the engines that they offer around it. What they’re typically missing is any type of invoicing that’s associated with it. If you want to work with that kind of solution, you need to manage your own payment methods. You need to have your own fraud management and understand how international fraud has an impact on any type of solution that you have in place. You need to set up all of these different aspects to it in addition to the solution that they offer. >>>

Building an SMB SaaS Business: Stitch Labs CEO Brandon Levey (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It was a monthly recurring revenue though, right? It was a SaaS product?

Brandon Levey: Correct. It was the same model basically. In January of 2013, we hired Josh who used to consult small businesses. In March, we hired our first customer support rep who’s now a product manager at Stitch. That’s when things started to change. I like to joke that we accidentally started selling Stitch because Josh really liked talking to people. He’d say, “Maybe we should try calling our customers and helping them get set up.” When we did that, they would convert two or three times better. They stick around better. We started doing more and more of this. That just started showing a lot more initial traction. That’s when we actually started growing the company. >>>