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For six-months (and counting) COVID-19 has accelerated the need for SMBs to leverage UCaaS (unified communications as a service), forcing executives to jump into one of the fastest-growing segments in the supply chain. UCaaS is a cloud delivery model that offers a variety of communication and collaboration applications and services, including providers such as RingCentral, Nextiva, 8x8 Inc., and Microsoft, to third-party cloud service providers, such as Verizon, AT&T, and BT. For the uninitiated, UCaaS was born out of four distinct technological phases that drove the need to have unified communications: The Rise of the Phone and E-mail For a long time, a company’s electronic communications consisted of two main parts--the phone and e-mail, thanks to the rise of the Internet. Having both a phone and Internet, allowed for a business to literally "be connected" to the rest of the world in a single location (before the Internet expanded to infinite locations). As technology has evolved since the 1990's, the communication needs of businesses and the average entrepreneur have grown. With the voluminous amount of information being shared and distributed on a daily basis, tracking and locating where information is coming from is essential to complying with data privacy laws, but also staying vigilant and organized. A one-stop-shop of information coming in and out would eventually be a universal demand. #3 - Instant Messaging (yes, ICQ and AIM) Millennials everywhere know instant messaging (IM) was a game-changer for the ways in which they communicated with family and friends. Instant messaging grew tremendously from the late 1990s (thanks to AOL) onward, when a small Israeli-based team, Mirabilis, made , the very first instant messaging platform publicly available. ICQ A year after ICQ was made available, AOL released its IM platform, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). And here we are 23-years later with Facebook Messenger (just without the buddy list and endless variations of a screen name that a person could create). #4 - VOIP/Video Conferencing Platforms (Skype, Zoom, etc) Since IM took off, it paved the way for new technologies like e-mail, phone calls, group chats and video conferencing to take place, making it possible for remote communication from anywhere in the world, with very little centralization. What we basically ended up with was a number of communication channels coming from every direction without being able to group the information in a single location. Thus the idea for UCaaS was born. How Our Biggest Communication Platforms Are Using UCaaS UCaaS offers the opportunity to integrate multiple communication methods through a single cloud provider, including enterprise messaging, telephone communication, and video conferencing, which facilitates team communication. Think about the Slack and Microsoft Teams messaging platforms. This type of platform can then be integrated into call center services, such as call routing, and call centers, with additional functionality when combined with phone dialing software such as Avaya, Vonage, RingCentral, among others. One of the leading companies out there, Nextiva, a voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) company and UCaaS SMB specialist , Eric Martorano as the company’s newest Chief Revenue Officer, who will be overseeing Nextiva’s global revenue strategy and go-to-market strategy initiatives as he leads Nextiva’s sales organization. announced that it has appointed Microsoft’s former general manager Bringing to the table his extensive experience with Microsoft in leading direct and indirect sales and marketing teams, executing high-growth channel and distribution strategies, and taking industry-leading products to market, Martorano intends to take on his competitors as the global coronavirus pandemic continues. “We go head-to-head every day with RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage, and they have pretty solid solutions, but the Nextiva solution just fits better squarely with the SMB customer,” said Martorano, Nextiva’s new CRO effective today. “It was built with the SMB customer in mind. It has the ability to scale upwards into the enterprise, but one of the differentiating factors with Nextiva is when we build our products, we think about how we can make a difference with the SMB customer. … I do feel like Nextiva has something that Intermedia doesn’t with our NextOS. When you take a look at what we’re bringing to market, this is something special that the channel is going to really embrace.” Prior to leaving Microsoft, Martorano served as the CEO of Accordo Group, which was recently acquired by MarketStar. Currently, he sits on the Board of Directors for Velosio, one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners worldwide. In a brief conversation with Nextiva’s CEO, Tomas Gorny, the company expressed excitement as Martorano joins the team, sharing that “as we continue to bring innovative products to the market, we look forward to Eric focusing on scaling our sales organization and our partner community, two important areas that will help accelerate our innovation in connected communication.”

Nextiva Takes Huge Step Growing Sales Channel With Addition of Microsoft’s Former GM, Eric Martorano

Marketing in the blockchain industry is not for the faint of heart. Like other emerging industries in tech, blockchain is a highly technical field with significant financial, political, and regulatory challenges, yet also an incredibly captivating narrative and potential for explosive growth. While you may be blissfully out-of-date with your blockchain marketing trends, your target customers, and competitors, are not. With the new year (and decade) right around the corner, here are 6 blockchain marketing trends for 2020: Trend #1: Crypto Twitter takes the reigns from Reddit, Telegram, and BitcoinTalk 2019 saw Twitter take the reigns from Reddit, Telegram, and BitcoinTalk as the blockchain industry’s dominant communication platform in the United States. The reasons for this are twofold. As blockchain companies mature and institutionalize, their communications inevitably become more buttoned up. Brands are choosing to stay a layer above the crypto wars, trolls, and FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) that have become so prevalent in community driven channels like Reddit, Telegram, and BitcoinTalk. Telegram’s purpose, in particular, was to provide a means of getting questions answered quickly leading up to a token sale. With the drastic decrease in token sales, and serious feature flaws like no captcha to screen users, Telegram’s use case as a community growth channel is becoming obsolete. The other catalyst for Crypto Twitter’s growing popularity, is Jack Dorsey. A long time bitcoin advocate, Jack has backed Lightning Labs, launched a crypto division of Square that is now funding bitcoin core development, and grew Square’s Cash App into one of the leading retail onramps in the U.S. Several days ago, that Twitter would “fund a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media” which got the community behind him (and Twitter) full throttle. Jack announced Apart from Twitter, another communication platform that I really believe in for 2020 is LinkedIn. In the past 3 years, LinkedIn has transformed from a job-seekers platform into a content platform with insanely high organic reach. LinkedIn is where Facebook was 7 years ago, and blockchain projects would be remiss to miss out on the opportunity in 2020. Trend #2: Goodbye Medium, hello Ghost 2020 will see an increasing number of blockchain brands moving their blogs away from Medium in favor of setting up native blogs on their own websites or using , an open-source publishing platform with more “crypto-friendly” values. Here’s why: Ghost When you publish to Medium, you lose control of your content. Medium now owns your content and drives traffic to its own services, not yours. You can link your site, but rarely anyone clicks through after reading your post. Medium is an aggregator. At the end of the day, you still need to promote your content across your marketing channels to get eyeballs. Instead of sending a reader to your own site where they can learn more about what you do, you’re sending them to another site and into another company’s customer acquisition funnel. Unlike with Ghost or a native blog, you to set custom domains to blog posts, thus reducing organic visibility and SEO value from your content. Medium does not allow Medium’s have caused some concern and from the blockchain community on the grounds of increasing censorship and threat of account suspension. policies towards cryptocurrencies pushback Whether its for policy reasons or for better SEO and conversion, expect the blockchain exodus from Medium to continue in 2020. Trend #3: Moats will almost be non-existent, other than brands Moats in the blockchain space are slowly disappearing. Competing projects are copying each other left and right. Surviving off cool technology, ICO proceeds, and operational efficiency is not enough. Something could be working for your project now, but it won’t last forever. What is a strong moat for blockchain organizations in 2020 and even a stronger one in the future? Brand. If your brand doesn't occupy a defined position in the minds of users/customers (and the prospective market), someone else will come and articulate their value better than you and occupy the position you want. It may not matter if you are the first to deliver a product. You need to be first in occupying that specific position in the minds of your target market. Some macro examples of blockchain projects that are doing this successfully: Bitcoin → Digital gold Ethereum → Programmable blockchain Coinbase → Simple cryptocurrency exchange MakerDAO → Powering Decentralized Finance Tether → Stablecoin Cosmos & Polkadot → Blockchain interoperability Build a brand, or bust. Trend #4: Education trumps fear. Don’t sell, educate. New things scare people. We live in a time when people form strong opinions before they know the facts. If something causes fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD), the majority of people are hardwired to avoid it. The antidote to fear is education. Crypto still suffers from a lack of understanding and basic knowledge. As marketers in a sector plagued by a dark history of crypto heists (Mt. Gox, Coincheck), black market use cases (Silk Road), and fraudulent ICOs, we’re forced to help clients and partners understand the real value that blockchain technology enables. This requires us to spend a significant amount of time speaking/writing about the benefits of blockchain and the opportunities it enables. Becoming a thought leader in the early days of any frontier industry is priceless. Companies that leverage content marketing significantly outperform those that don’t, both in terms of traffic and sales. Newcomers to the blockchain space, both retail and corporate, are increasingly conducting their own research, so lacking content to aid them in their research can mean immediate disqualification from their considerations. With brands like Messari on content this year, blockchain marketers in 2020 must have rock solid knowledge of the blockchain space, understand their customers, and write like the wind. raising the bar Trend #5: Blockchain projects will get sophisticated about their growth metrics 99% of blockchain organizations operate like traditional businesses. They have employees they need to pay and, therefore, require customers who use their protocol and generate revenue. Just as Daily Active users is the key growth metric for Facebook, or Nights Book is the key growth metric for AirBnb, blockchain projects too will measure more granular growth metrics in 2020 that reflect more than just price and market capitalization. Unlike traditional digital platforms, however, not all token holders in a blockchain utilize the protocol the same way. Some are miners who run blockchain nodes as a passive income scheme, some are developers building either infrastructure or applications that sit on the base-layer protocol, some are speculators, and yet others are ordinary users utilizing the blockchain for its intended function. Identifying each user segment, understanding their needs and behaviors, and retaining those users is necessary in order for the entity to transition into a healthy business. With blockchain business intelligence service providers like , blockchain organizations can label users (holders, traders, speculators), operators (nodes, miners, validators) and businesses (dapps, exchanges), and track the growth metrics specific to each user segment. Flipside Crypto Understanding these metrics will help guide both business and marketing decisions in 2020. Trend #6: Customer acquisition funnels still work Although many of the marketing channels, tactics, and tools in the blockchain space are unique, the core digital marketing principles are the same. And that is not something that will change in 2020. Every business has a unique set of funnels that make up the user acquisition journey, from visitor to paying customer. By mapping the data gathered from your analytics tools to your user journey, marketers can see the bottlenecks where users drop off and implement strategies to improve conversion rates across every stage of the funnel. Start your analysis with a series of questions about how a user engages with the product: How exactly does a user get from visitor to paying customer? At what moment does a user truly understand the value of your product/offering? (Your goal is to get people to this moment as quickly as possible, especially in a field as complex as blockchain) At which point in the funnel do you see drop-offs? (Use data from tools like Google Analytics to measure the conversion rate at every step of the user journey to find the pitfalls) Why are users dropping off at those funnel stages? (User testing and session recording tools will greatly help give you that understanding) What channels can you leverage to guide your users down the funnel? (Whether it's email newsletters, content, live chat, or retargeting ads, try to leverage every possible touch point to drive users through the entire funnel) The blockchain marketing trends for 2020 are, somewhat paradoxically, both more technical and more human. At the end of the day, marketers must work closer than ever with their product teams to define value upfront, replace complexity with simplicity, and give customers what they need.

Six Blockchain Marketing Trends for 2020

I’ve been thinking about . This post will cover why referrals are powerful, how to get more referrals, and how crypto tokens create a double network effect that can supercharge referral results. how distributed applications will grow Why referrals are powerful I worked extensively on referrals as a founder of Reveal Chat (B2C, grew to millions of users via referrals and was acquired by Napster) and at Gusto (B2B, growing fast and on track to become huge). Like any growth tactic, referrals aren’t a panacea, and it can be tempting to prioritize them too early or too aggressively — I’ve done both. Make something people want. Don’t pour water in a leaky bucket. Never spam. All true. But when a well-executed referral program is working, it can be transformative and exhilarating. Like this: Hockey sticks aside, I love referrals for a few reasons. It’s not equally true across the board. Some highly referred products are just optimized spam cannons, and some get better for everyone when new users join (network effect!), while others don’t. But there’s a correlation between how much users like your product and how willing they are to share it. Waze CEO Noam Bardin says a growth team’s job is to “accelerate organic trends.” And word of mouth is the best organic growth channel in history. Referral growth is a proxy for product quality. They’re more likely to sign up, enjoy your product, pay, stick around, and refer others — it’s a virtuous cycle. And since paid acquisition is generally efficient, which is a nice way of saying you need a massive budget to drive massive growth, referrals can slash your customer acquisition cost (CAC). This is especially true if you aren’t offering users a direct incentive for referrals (Facebook), or if you’re offering something that costs you very little (storage for Dropbox) or requires a purchase to redeem (discounts for Airbnb). Referred users are the best kind. I’ve always 50/50 right brain-left brain. And referral growth is a math problem — that you solve with creativity! How cool is that? Let me show you what I mean. Referrals are fun to think about. tested How to Get More Referrals I made a simple framework called PICs to help me think about referrals as a math problem - because nothing spreads faster than PICs. ercent of users who invite or share * nvites or shares per inviter * onversion rate on invites or shares= viral coefficient AKA K factor AKA the number of additional users referred in by any single user. P I C Implications: If you can sustain a viral coefficient above 1 for some period of time, you will grow exponentially and may end up with one of those crazy stories where you took off on a plane from SFO and landed at JFK with 500x more users, and hopefully zero crashed servers. This is what most people mean by “going viral.” Your viral coefficient is the product of , , and , so increasing any one of those numbers by 20% will increase your viral coefficient by 20%. So the question you might ask is “which of these numbers can we increase by 20% with the least work?” Incidentally, there are natural ceilings on and . Unless sharing is required to use your product (e.g. Snap) it’s typically hard to get more than 10% of users inviting or sharing. It’s typically hard to get more than 25% of people who receive a private invite to become users, or to get more than 0.25 users from your average public share. is the most “uncapped” number — it’s often easier to increase the average invites or shares per inviter than the other two numbers. This is why address book import and “invite all” functionality were prioritized by Facebook and LinkedIn to power some of the most aggressively performant referral growth flows in history. Haven’t signed up for a new account in a while? These flows are still the centerpiece of onboarding for both apps. P I C P C I One channel for invites or sharing is likely to work better for you than others — probably much better. What do you want your users to do? Invite friends privately via email/SMS? Share publicly via Facebook/Twitter? Post to online forums? You can and should run small scale tests to find out what converts. So that’s the math. The numbers in B2C and B2B and across products in each are very different, but the PICS framework holds. That’s the great thing about math — it’s the same everywhere. The creativity is in figuring out how to drive up P, I, and C without compromising your users’ experience. And that’s about understanding your product and your users. Here are some questions to ask yourself, or better yet, to talk through with your users and your team. Why would users want their friends to join your app? Is it more like a party or a hardware store? People are more likely to refer friends to your app if it makes them look cool or smart, or if everyone involved will benefit from enjoying it together, like a party. If your app doesn’t get better for users when their friends join, it’s more like a hardware store — some might tell friends about it if they love it, but increasing the percent who do will be tough, and you may need to consider tangible incentives — like a cash payout when someone they’ve referred makes a purchase. P: Who do you want your users to refer? How can you make that easy? Relevancy matters: the number of people I know who might be interested in a new social network is larger than the number of people I know who might need a payroll solution. At Gusto, we learned from our users that many of them wanted to refer more friends, but they weren’t sure which of the people they knew would be great customers for Gusto. So we asked them to connect their contacts and analyzed the email domains to recommend the best people for them to refer. I: : Does the referral copy clearly explain your value prop? (Hint: find out how users tell friends about your product in person). Are you making it as easy as possible for referred people to sign up and start getting value? Many mobile apps grow via SMS, which has fast and high open and click rates but relatively low conversion rates because of all the friction between a click and an app install. Web apps often enjoy lower signup friction and thus a higher C. C How crypto tokens create a double network effect that can supercharge referral results Okay, here’s the fun part. Think of your favorite app that has a traditional network effect: your experience gets better when more people are using it. Let’s use Medium as an example. When new users sign up and start posting, clapping, and commenting, the network gets better for you personally — especially if they’re your friends. That might make you want to tell the writers you know to join Medium. Network effect #1 at work. What if Medium started giving you limited-release “MediumCoin” just for being an awesome user? What if you could buy or sell MediumCoin instantly for cash, or spend it on Medium to get access to special features, or hold it with confidence that its value would increase if the network continued to grow? What if you and your friends could get MediumCoin free if you referred them and they signed up? With your personal and economic incentives aligned, now you might REALLY want to tell your friends to join Medium. That’s network effect #2. You might even start to sound a little crazy when you talked about it. People are already testing the potential of coin-powered referrals. ICO marketers offer token bounties to users who complete simple marketing tasks (e.g. post a link on Facebook, follow a profile on Twitter, loan out your avatar or signature line on Bitcointalk.) These are proto-referral or affiliate marketing programs that can be evaluated and improved using frameworks like PICs. They may only be scratching the surface of the power of this approach. In the early 2000s, PayPal achieved 7 to 10% growth via referrals by giving both people involved $20 when a new referred user signed up. But a key limitation of PayPal’s model is that everyone knew what $20 was worth to them. Some people were willing to spend a few minutes signing up to get it, others were not. daily When tokens can be traded instantly for cash, the current cash value of a token arguably represents its floor. It can also be spent within applications, or held for potential future value, creating a fear of missing out that may make signup even more enticing. After all, $20 of Bitcoin from 2009 would be worth over $25 million dollars today. I’ll be testing referrals concepts in new crypto projects soon, and I’m looking for thought partners to help make me smarter. If you’re interested or want to help, please reach out or in the comments. I’d love to hear from you. privately

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