The Art of the Pivot

“Our patients today are demanding that same type of experience that they're receiving from many other sectors… We have a goal to digitally disrupt healthcare by improving that member and provider experience and ultimately improve health outcomes.” 

Blue Shield of California is a nonprofit health insurer, providing health and wellbeing services to more than 4.5 million members across the state. But the way those servic...

“There is a fundamental link between customer and employee experience…too often we focus on customers first and then can’t go any further without enhancing the way employees get work done”

Long before sweatpants on video calls and curious cats as meeting focal points, Citrix was helping employees deliver great work from anywhere in the world. The pandemic has naturally made their services even more vital and gives Executive Vice Pr...

“Each of us is creating our own digital ecosystem—in your home, in your office, in your car— and we have to make sure we understand those perfectly.”

As the lines between our virtual and physical worlds become increasingly blurry, the impacts of security breaches on our lives become even greater. Striving to protect us from would-be password thieves and phisherman is NortonLifeLock and their Chief Commercial Officer, Rober...

“In order to have people love you, sometimes you have to have people hate you as well. And it’s the lovers and the people who will be passionate about your business and your brand—those are the ones you want to keep day after day.”

Break out your favorite pint and get ready for a little “Pivot and Chill,” because this episode is our coolest yet.  Dena Wimette, Ben & Jerry's Head of Product Innovation, joined us to...

“We always need to over-communicate, to our customers, to our associates, what we're doing and make sure that we really let everybody be a part of the journey.”

Vericast has been helping businesses connect with their customers for over 140 years. The way the world works may have changed once or twice over that time, but the company continues to innovate and adapt to deliver modern marketing solutions. Join Chief Reve...

“We understand our role. We are there to support and help our customers to grow. And with them, we are growing as well.” 

Phil Friedman built Computer Generated Systems, or CGS, from the ground up — just a few years after the word “start-up” was even invented. Over his decades of experience providing business applications, enterprise learning and outsourced services to companies around the world, Phil has learned a few va...

“We like to think about authentic intelligence, adaptive intelligence, agile intelligence. All the ways that you can leverage that immensely powerful data to shape what’s next.”

Q: Which Art of the Pivot episode features discussions on the role of AI in Marketing, distrust in polling and a forthcoming parody business musical? A: This one! Leela Srinivasan, the first-ever CMO at Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey), joined us for a wid...

“Whenever we get the chance, we’re living and breathing the experience as a service that we want to espouse to our customers.”

What does exceptional customer service look like in a world where consumers are more knowledgable and empowered than ever? How can you bring reps from merely being “nice” to having true empathy, the type that doesn't just help people resolve issues, but builds lasting brand attachment? According to Joyc...

 “Go and fail and start again, and go until you get it right!”

William Niles, CEO of Brinks Home, is an executive who understands that transformation is no waiting game. Since becoming CEO in March 2020, he has already launched a complete organizational overhaul built around the three pillars of people, technology and brand strategy. While some may argue that such comprehensive change would be impossible during the midst o...

“What was the mindset of leadership? Were they ready to trust their employees working remotely? Or was it a brand new thing, where they had to overcome the myths that existed around remote work for many years?”

As CEO of LogMeIn, one of the world leaders in remote work solutions, Bill Wagner has a front row seat to the monumental changes brought on by COVID-19. What lessons did he learn while steering an organization experiencing a ...

“We spend an insane amount of time on developing an exceptional culture… People over profit. Impact over EBITDA… We talk about that in the boardroom much before the dollars and cents.”

Dana Berg is the Chief Operating Officer at SADA, a cloud services provider with an outstanding track record of 25+ million migrated users. But Dana doesn’t just oversee the business transformations of SADA’s customer base. SADA made a “bold existenti...

“Across your corporate existence, you will always face either externally introduced or internally necessary pivotal moments in which you need to decide, ‘Am I playing defense or am I playing offense?’ I think history has proven, in our industry at least, if you go into the offense you can actually translate a crisis into an opportunity.”

The small town of Walldorf in Germany isn’t just known for some of the world’s best white aspara...

“I think there's a different kind of relationship potential that a lot of people are longing for, that is quite frankly being neglected in a world where digital's become everything.”

Wellington Holbrook is the Chief Operating Officer for Canada’s Connect First Credit Union — and he wants you to know he’s not like other bankers. Formed by a merger of four large credit unions in Alberta, Connect First is working hard to answ...

“Storytelling is maybe one of the most critical things you can do both in a business and outside of a business … I think civilization is probably built off the back of storytelling so it's no different from a business to the earliest cave drawings.”

Kiran Akkineni is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zulily, one of the most successful of the ‘flash sales’ businesses founded in the early 2010s, with a mandate to provide a customer ...

“A lot of companies say, ‘Hey, one of the core initiatives for this year is being customer focused.’ Then what happens next year? What happens the year after that?”

Yamini Rangan is HubSpot’s Chief Customer Officer, bringing together marketing, sales, customer success and the operations behind them to deliver delightful experiences for customers.  Join Yamini to discover how values can be a competitive differentiator, why seeking to...

“Think about social media relative to where e-commerce was 20 years ago ... My best advice is if you're not thinking about this, think about it more.”

Social media management platform Hootsuite has over 18 million customers, but that’s not enough for Chief Technology Officer Ryan Donovan. He’s looking to help businesses scale up their social media, to help hundreds if not thousands (or tens of thousands) of employees keep colla...

“Anyone building a building now has to be thinking ahead on how that building can respond to a variety of situations instantaneously so they don't get caught flat-footed.”

We’re all familiar with smartphones — but what about smart buildings? Think of a dynamic space that reacts to what its occupants need, from air filtration to automatic elevators to recognizing people when they walk through the front door. Phil Clement, Global...

“The impact that leaders can have in this period of time is extraordinarily important [to] building that positive energy with the employee, so that he or she builds energy from their employment.”

CEO is a tough job as it is. But try stepping up right in the middle of a global pandemic. That’s the challenge that confronted Aaron Cooper, who’s still serving as interim CEO of Groupon. Discover Aaron’s single priority when he took over,...

“If you know that your customers have the power of choice every year, that drives change in how you sell to your customer. The most important part of SaaS is service.” 

Over the last year, Stephanie Nashawaty, Chief Customer Innovation Officer, North America at SAP,  has seen dozens of businesses accelerate innovation, to the point where business model changes that used to take years, now take weeks (and in one case, literally overn...