Long ago at our first “B2SMB Summit” circa 2017, Steve Aldrich, the former CPO of GoDaddy and current Board Member of several large B2SMB brands, brought forth what was, at the time, a novel approach: instead of engineering what we think SMBs should need, why don’t we ask them what they want? With years of B2SMB product leadership at Intuit, Outright and more, Steve put listening above all else, to avoid presumption, to throw out “we know better than they do.” He takes us through a Playbook on Listening: to get to the perfect Small Business product, ask these perfect questions.

Small Business think 24-7 about money. Do they have enough? Are they making enough? Are they spending or saving enough? Since 1993 Derek Ellington has been a banker to SMBs, and he thinks 24-7 about precisely the same questions. Today, as EVP and Head of Small Business banking for Wells Fargo (the #3 Bank for SMBs in the US) he’s more deeply engaged with Entrepreneurs’ money challenges than ever. There’s no one better to break down the long-standing obstacles – like access to capital – that deserve the attention of anyone who cares about SMBs. We kick-off our Problem-Solvers workshops talking the dollars and cents of Small Business success.

Verizon Business successfully delivers thousands of Small Business solutions every year. But like most tech-sellers, Verizon is challenged not just to close the sale, but to gain full adoption. Mark Tina is a 20-year veteran of Verizon who has overseen macro-adoptions (internet, cellular, cloud) and micro-adoptions (niche apps, vertical solutions, customized products). No one is better to take us through the lessons learned in helping SMBs “break the seal” on what they just bought. His lessons on tech adoption apply to any B2SMB enterprise’s best moves between invoice and fandom.

Small Businesses are not immune to the future. In fact one could argue that they are susceptible to the future, especialyy futures that they don’t quite understand. So while we might rue SMB adoption of the internent, of mobile, of the cloud, we once again face a new revolutionary capability that Small Business will likely struggle with: AI. Denise Zheng is Managing Director & Global Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Lead and she brings us a bleeding edge perspective on what AI will do to alter that business landscape, perhaps more than any other advancement of the last 50 years. She’ll help us gain a foundational understanding of AI, and then take us into the near and distant future of AI in the Small Business ecosystem.

Yahoo. DealMap. Google Shopping. Change.Org. HoneyBook. For close to 25 years, Dan Visnick has successfully marketed a wide range of offerings that demand Buyer’s trust. How does a B2SMB brand build trust with a Small Business Buyer that is naturally suspicious, skeptical, and even cynical? It’s not easy! Dan takes us on his journey to message, to market and to deliver a promise fulfilled.

Partnerships are hard. From finding partnerships that are genuinely a good fit, to aligning operations between large orgs, to measuring success and optimizing partnership performance. Our B2SMBI Partnerships Circle Co-Chairs do this hard work every day. Kelly Benish (Uberall) and Kate Daniels (Netsuite) kickoff our networking workshop sharing their Partnerships Playbooks that highlight how they approach great match-making on behalf of their enterprises. Then we’ll break-out into smaller groups to facilitate meet and greets and partnership explorations. If “partnerships” are what your looking for, this workshop is worth sticking around for.