Category: Business
Her initials are CRM, and so are her topic’s initials! On Thursday morning at the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center at University of Tampa, Chaz Ross-Munro will talk about Leveraging CRM to Deliver an Experience Customers Love.
Chaz has forgotten more about customer relationship management (CRM) than most people will learn, so if you have an interest in CRM, don’t miss this one! Find out more and register here.
This event is part of the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center’s speaker series.
The speaker series takes place at the University of Tampa Lowth Entrepreneurship Center (820 W North A St., 8th Floor, Tampa, FL).
Tomorrow afternoon (Thursday, April 6th) at 4:00 p.m., catch the latest in a great speaker series at the University of Tampa’s Lowth Entrepreneurship Center! The presentation will be Building an Innovative Sales Playbook To Grow Your Business, featuring Sercan Topcu.
Sercan is an award-winning marketer, seasoned sales developer, and Forbes 30 under 30 winner. He empowers sales teams worldwide with his love for data-driven development and engineering analytical solutions for big problems as the Head of Managed Services at InsideOut Lab, overseeing the PlayOps team. Sercan helps market leaders and innovators, including Fortune 500 organizations, leverage scientific methodology and behavioral sciences to enable their sales/marketing people and strategies.
His clients establish higher returns on effort with their business development strategies through Sales Play. A Sales Play is an outbound series of sales activities designed to turn a prospect into a genuine selling opportunity.
Topcu is the head of managed services at InsideOut Lab. He oversees the PlayOps team, which helps clients establish higher return on effort with their business development strategies through a “sales play.” According to Topcu, “a sales play is an outbound series of sales activities, designed to turn a prospect into a genuine selling opportunity. “Think of it like a plan of attack, targeting prospective buyers in a direct, structured way, leveraging sales enablement resources, strategies, KPIs, tonality, buyer personas and ideal customer profiles. For inbound calls or buyer enquiries, we create Sales Motions. These are a perfectly balanced series of conversational activities, designed to increase inbound conversions and customer satisfaction rates for rich, memorable and engaging interactions. Our deliverables are established by consulting on: benchmarking; tech-stack utilization and automation; sales operations optimization; improved buyer engagement strategy development; improved call/email/social/video messaging and personalization; strategy and messaging performance; health checks; sales campaign installations to sales platforms; training teams on-site or virtually to increase their confidence in utilizing their new sales plays with target buyers.”
Sercan was the Co-founder of Tembo Education and responsible for developing, managing, and executing traditional and new-age marketing/branding strategies. He was in charge of email, content, affiliate marketing, and re-targeting. Recruit/manage the micro-entrepreneurs network and marketing team personnel. Tembo educates 0-6-year-old children worldwide via Harvard/Lego Foundation/Pearson-backed curriculum text messages. The 15-min activity is sent to parents each weekday via text message. Parents perform the activity with their children in their own homes. Parents answer a quiz to earn rewards for educating their children.
This event is FREE to the public! Find out more and register here.
This event is part of the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center’s speaker series. Upcoming events include:
- Thursday, April 20: Greg Ross-Munro on What it Takes to Build Successful Startups & Great Software
- Thursday, April 27: Leveraging CRM to Deliver an Experience Customers Love with Chaz Ross-Munro
The speaker series takes place at the University of Tampa Lowth Entrepreneurship Center (820 W North A St., 8th Floor, Tampa, FL).
Need context? Here’s a news story from Canada’s Global News.
This afternoon at 4:00 p.m., catch the latest in a great speaker series at the University of Tampa’s Lowth Entrepreneurship Center! Today’s presentation will be Growth Hacking and Inbound Marketing with Tracy Ingram, featuring Tracy Ingram, CEO and Founder of Intention Technology, and long-time Tampa Baytech entrepreneur.
Tracy says that inbound marketing is important to startups — it helps them build their brand, generate leads and increase sales. Inbound marketing is an effective way to create an ongoing relationship with customers and build trust and credibility. It’s also a great and cost-effective way to reach a wider audience. Startups can leverage inbound marketing techniques such as content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and email marketing to reach their target audience and generate leads. In addition, inbound marketing helps startups create an online presence, which is essential for success in today’s digital world.
Tracy’s an experienced techie with a list of certifications as long as your arm:
- An MIS degree from Florida Gulf Coast University,
- Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE),
- Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA),
- Certified Online Instructor (COI) from Walden Institute,
- …and there’s that time that he was part of the StartupBus Florida team that went to the finals.
This event is FREE to the public! Find out more and register here.
This event is part of the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center’s speaker series. Upcoming events include:
- Thursday, March 23rd: Building Brand Stories with Two Time Emmy Award Winner Reizel Larrea- Alvarez
- Thursday, April 6: Building an Innovative Sales Playbook To Grow Your Business with Sercan Topcu
- Thursday, April 20: Greg Ross-Munro on What it Takes to Build Successful Startups & Great Software
- Thursday, April 27: Leveraging CRM to Deliver an Experience Customers Love with Chaz Ross-Munro
The speaker series takes place at the University of Tampa Lowth Entrepreneurship Center (820 W North A St., 8th Floor, Tampa, FL).
Need context? Check out this article from about 48 hours ago:
Pictured above is Haraldur Thorleifsson, better known as Halli. He founded Ueno, an agency that designed digital brands and experiences for a fine list of clients that included Airbnb, Apple, ESPN, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, NY Times, Oculus, PayPal, Uber, Venmo, Visa, and Walmart. As a result of their success, Ueno was acquired by Twitter in 2021. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Twitter was then acquired by Elon Musk in 2022.
Halli had a problem: he had no idea if he’s still a Twitter employee or not.
Here’s his situation, explained in a tweet made at 3:38 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (UTC-5) on Monday, March 6th:
About four hours later, Musk replied.
Halli made a very good point there. Musk replied with this:
That definitely doesn’t look legally binding, but what other path of communication did Halli have? He replied, carefully treading the line between providing enough information to explain the work he did and not breaking any non-disclosure agreements. What he did required a fair bit of effort; everything Musk did so far required little or none:
Here are Musk’s responses: an adolescent “pics or it didn’t happen” and the “What would you say you do here?” clip featuring “The Bobs” from Office Space (which, ironically enough, was about working for a terrible boss at a soul-crushing workplace):
At this point, Musk wasn’t trying to converse — he was simply trolling. Employees from Twitter acquisitions were laid off the previous week (as evidenced by this tweet by Leah Culver), but Halli hadn’t yet been informed.
Here’s what happened in the end, as explained in a couple of tweets from Halli that appeared a few minutes ago at the time of writing:
Halli was definitely the better person in the conversation, but when Elon Musk is the other person, the bar’s pretty low.
Some notes
What Musk demonstrated in this exchange wasn’t leadership, nor was it management — in fact it wasn’t even decent. It was simply Musk being what he is at his rotten core: an asshole. I’m using philosophy professor Aaron James’ definition from his book, Assholes: A Theory: someone who “allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.”
More irksome than Musk’s behavior is the number of responses by others cheering him on, questioning Halli’s value, or calling for Halli’s firing. I looked at a number of these fanboys’ profiles — and yes, they were largely male — and while many of them liked to portray themselves as independent thinkers and savvy businesspeople, most also appeared to collect a paycheck every two weeks, live vicariously through Musk’s public persona, and their Twitter feeds looked like laundry lists of grievances against “others.”
The cruelty from Musk’s supporters towards Halli reminds me of a couple of lines from a critique of the classic sci-fi short story, The Cold Equations:
…I think these readers are tripping on the story’s considerable jolt of machismo. It’s a commonplace that our civilization is soft and sentimental. It’s less remarked that soft and sentimental people — particularly the chair-bound geek variant — often idolize brutality. The actual inhabitants of barbarian eras don’t necessarily share this feeling; they often took pains to appear as refined and cultured people.
There were a few posters for whom this was the incident that caused them to question their admiration for Musk. It might be that this is the first time they could picture themselves in the position of the person having to face off against Musk, instead of seeing Musk as the movie protagonist you’re supposed to identify with.
Stop worshipping Elon Musk. He’s not Tony Stark; he’s Justin Hammer.
If you’re still using Twitter, give Halli a follow and drop him an encouraging line.
Also: Did you know that Halli is Iceland’s Person of the Year?
From the article in Iceland Review:
Haraldur Þorleifsson, known as Halli, has garnered multiple Person of the Year Awards from various Icelanidc media outlets, including from national broadcaster RÚV, Morgunblaðið, and Vísir.
Halli, a 45 year-old designer, gained nation-wide recognition this year when, after the sale of his tech company Ueno to Twitter, he chose to be paid the sale price as wages. Normally in such large sales, the payment comes in the form of stock or other financial instruments, which categorize the sale as capital gains, meaning it is taxed at a much lower rate. Halli, however, gladly paid the higher tax rate, having spoken publicly on many occasions about the benefits he has received from the Icelandic social system.
Halli was born with muscular dystrophy and came from a working class background. In statements about his decision to pay back into the Icelandic social system, he cited both healthcare and education in Iceland as keys to his success. Notably, he was one of the highest tax payers in the nation after the sale of Ueno.