REALLY Know Your Customer

Lamees Butt joins Betsy and Tony on this episode to delve into the topics of digital transformation and the ever-evolving landscape of commerce. She shares her insights on the challenges faced during her journey, including the importance of failing fast and adapting, which eventually led her to the corporate world. Now a key player at Zoovu, an AI commerce platform, she focuses on connecting busin...

Meet Jay Meyer. Jay is an accomplished business owner and entrepreneur who shares his personal journey of addiction and recovery on this insightful episode with Betsy and Tony. With decades of business and leadership under his belt, Jay has seen a lot change over the years, but one thing has remained: his desire to get to know his customers. Jay started his career by building authentic relationshi...

Meet Mark Ross-Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of StatusMatch.com. Mark joins Betsy and Tony on the podcast from Malaysia. As a self-proclaimed professional frequent flyer, Mark racked up more airline points than you can imagine as he built his former businesses. After he decided to move across the world, he asked the area’s major airline for a status match in their frequent flyer program. He was denied...

Join us for a conversation with Prashant Fuloria, CEO of Fundbox, a working capital platform for small businesses. Did you know that 82% of small business failures are because of a cash flow gap or a working capital challenge? That’s where Fundbox comes in: to create solutions that level the playing field for small businesses and help them succeed. Although automation and user simplicity is essent...

Meet Tony Sternberg, Co-Founder & CEO of ProsperStack, an automated retention platform for subscription businesses. Consider this: You’ve had it up to “here” with your streaming service and you call to cancel your subscription. ProsperStack partners with said streaming service to create a unique retention strategy for what happens next after you live chat or call the provider. It’s unique because...

Meet Gail and Bruce Montgomery. They are the high-energy co-founders of ExperienceYes, a truly one-of-a-kind business, set out to bring fun into organizations that want to improve trust, relationship-building, and EQ to make higher-performing teams. With similar backgrounds in professional acting, singing, and dancing in New York City, they both made their way into the corporate world. Gail and Br...

Meet Jochem van der Veer, Co-Founder and CEO of TheyDo. His business is based on a simple yet sometimes impossible task for large organizations: breaking down processes to make it easier for C-level executives to connect with their customers. Traditionally, small and large organizations have focused on customer journey mapping. TheyDo has a strategic focus on customer journey management, an innova...

Fun fact: 30% of the population learns by listening. Not-so-fun fact: If your website only offers written content, you could be leaving behind a big chunk of your target market simply because you’re not speaking the same language. Meet David Ciccarelli, CEO of Voices, a fast-growing online platform that connects buyers and sellers of one creative service: the human voice. He joins Betsy and Tony t...

It all starts with a story and believe it or not, Doug Brown has a lot of them. Starting with his first job at the young age of 3 when he was sweeping floors. Many years down the road, Doug is now helping companies achieve their top 1% of sales. Join us as Betsy and Tony get Doug’s unique perspective on the state of sales today. Sure, sales people used to push back on marketing and how they didn’t...

Meet Denise Freier. After more than 40 years of driving sales and customer relationships at IBM, Denise made her way to the Strategic Account Management Association. At its core, SAMA is focused on sharing best practices for, you guessed it, Strategic Account Managers. Whether it’s through conferences, free webinars or training services, SAMA is continually finding new ways to help accelerate the...

Meet Gal Oron. Gal is a self-described normal person who got to where he is with a lot of hard work and constant improvement. Whether it’s on the basketball court or in the office, Gal strives to keep three key things in mind: 1. Have humility 2. Exhibit strong work ethic 3. Be dedicated. At Zoomin, Gal and his team are replicating the successes they’ve seen in B2C, and bringing them into the B2B...

Transparency across the organization - it’s something every business strives for, but few master. Customer conversations or feedback is often diluted from the point it enters the organization to when (or should we say, IF) it reaches the impacted department. Fathom, a #1-rated Zoom app, is working to change that. The CEO of Fathom, Richard White joins Betsy and Tony to talk about the business valu...

Darshan Mehta’s time and passion for research goes back to the 1990s, when he became interested in case studies and customer focus groups. Today, Darshan is CEO of iResearch, which built an online insights platform that enables companies to quickly, easily, and affordably extract insights from consumers or employees worldwide. In other words, Darshan saw the value extracted from in-person focus gr...

Slater Victoroff never thought he would grow up to be an entrepreneur, even though he was exactly that from an early age, selling individual Dum Dums that he had bought in bulk to his friends (with a nice markup). Fast forward to today, and Slater is the former CEO-turned current CTO of Indico Data. With a focus on helping their customers do their job in a more fulfilling way, Indico processes uns...

Ross Rich was part of an outdated industry running the same playbook from 30 years ago. A move across the country landed him at Stripe where he helped grow the business from a self-serve model of 250 employees to a sales-led organization with over 7,000 employees. He shares how much he learned at Stripe and what became obvious to him: the market was missing a customer-facing collaboration platform...

Alex joins Betsy and Tony to talk about proper key account management. He shares his entrepreneurial journey and what he refers to as the “classic startup pivot”. About a decade ago, he formed Kapta, originally a Human Resources software business turned key account management platform. The pivot occurred after the Kapta team simply spoke to their customers. They initiated the customer discovery pr...

Howard Tiersky, CEO and Founder of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency has been working on big brands’ digital strategies before they were even on the internet. Over the past 30 years, Howard has become an expert in digital transformation and launched his own business 15 years ago, which now employs about 100 people. Howard shares his story about the company culture and the critical role the l...

During this episode, Jackie talks to Betsy and Tony about her unexpected path to owning a successful Information Technology solutions company. From an entry-level position where she forgot to save her work on her first day (oops), to running a company with 150 employees, Jackie has stayed laser-focused on customers. Listen in to find out three critical things business owners should consider as the...

Lesley Bielby is back. She recently returned to creative marketing agency, DiMassimo Goldstein (DiGo), for the third time in her career. This time, she joins the team as Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer. Lesley shares her global career journey with Tony and Betsy, which includes major marketing agencies in cities like London, New York and Boston. DiGo recently redesigned their strategy to solely...

Betsy and Tony talk to Eddy Badrina about building his business and making a positive impact. Eddy has humbly worked his way from the George W. Bush administration to starting, selling, and buying back digital marketing agency, BuzzShift. His latest venture is leading Eden Green Technology as CEO. Prior to joining Eden Green Technology, Eddy knew he wanted his next venture to have three key compon...

On this episode, Chris Kuenne joins Betsy and Tony to share his 30+ year journey that started at Johnson & Johnson as a Franchise Marketing Director. He has since launched and sold a customer marketing business to Publicis for over $600MM. Chris also teaches a High Tech Entrepreneur course at Princeton University. His most recent stop on his entrepreneurial (and philanthropic) journey is at Rosema...

Nicole Glenn joins the podcast to describe her career path from the retail industry to a passionate entrepreneur and owner of Candor Expedite, a top woman-owned business in the transportation industry. Though Nicole shares that she never felt ready to be an entrepreneur, she has truly found her passion creating positive customer experiences and an engaging company culture that includes everything...

Join us for a conversation with Jay Haynes, CEO of thrv, the first and only jobs-to-be-done product management software, which is based upon the foundational work of Clayton Christensen. At the heart of everything Jay and thrv do, is customer centricity. As humans, our goals don’t change over time. For example, the need to get from point A to point B. It’s how we use technology to accomplish the s...

Meet Ed Vincent, founder of festivalPass, the world's first live events subscription service across music, film, food and wine, sports, theater, tech innovation and more. Betsy Westhafer and Tony Bodoh excitedly talk about how this model changes customer experience! For a long time, concert-goers and show-watchers have been trained to be subject to crazy convenience fees and surcharges for each pe...

We’ve all been there. The aggravation of calling into a customer service line with a problem that you have to explain over and over again, wasting your time and energy. Even nice humans like Betsy and Tony see red during these interactions. Enter Peter Voss and AIGO. From a garage to a company of over 400 people, Peter has seen it all (and researched it all) over the past 20 years of his career in...