I’m back from Boston and eBay Live! this week.

The conference was great! Lots going on, here are some photos and some highlights:

My book eBay Inventory The Smart Way for sale in the eBay Live! Book Store.

Doba booth filled with people. Met lots of new people, caught up with lots of others.

Adjusting my mic on stage at the 2nd session of our presentation on Product Sourcing that I do with with Lisa Suttora from What Do I Sell and Rob Cowie from Worldwide Brands. Why am I adjusting my mic you might ask? Well, Tuesday night last week I went to a Boston Red Sox game. Major league ball players (and probably others too) get what they call walk up music. As the batter approaches the plate, they play a clip of song of the player’s choice. Some pick country. Some pick rap. Some pick rock. No one picks Celine Dion. Anyway, I’ve always wanted walk up music. I present last, and I worked with the AV guys to play my walk up music so I could warm up for my part of the presentation. And during the walk up music, I jumped off the stage and onto the chairs in the front row to get people a bit crazy. And my mic fell off. Not sure if most people get crazy enough at a presentation such that their mic flys off and about puts out their eye, but that’s how I roll. Especially when my walk up music was the first 30 seconds of Guns and Roses Welcome to the Jungle.

Q&A after the presentation is over.

Perfection. Let me explain. We have a 90 minute session. We present for 60 minutes, 20 minutes each. And then do Q&A for 30 minutes. I started my watch timer for us keep track of time while at the podium the second Lisa started talking. She finished, then Rob went and finished. As I was closing my presentation, I said, “Now we’re going to take some questions.” and at that second, without looking down, I stopped my timer. It shows 1 hour exactly. 60 minutes to the second. If my watch would have tracked hundredths of a second, it would be to the hundreths of a second. Folks, last time I checked, that’s pretty spot on. That’s perfection.

I’m looking forward to eBay Live next year in Chicago. Maybe I’ll see you there.

As I continue my whirlwind travel schedule I find myself in Boston this week for the 5th annual eBay Live event that starts tomorrow.

For the past 2 years I’ve been involved in a panel presentation that covers the basics on how to find products to sell on eBay. I present with Lisa Suttora from What Do I Sell and Rob Cowie from Worldwide Brands. This year, “Product Sourcing - Find Products Buyers Want.” will be presented twice, once on Thursday the 14th at 3:00 p.m. and again at 9:00 a.m. on Friday morning the 15th.

(You can watch my part of the presentation from last year’s eBay Live in Vegas by clicking on the Sourcing Success chapter.)

If you are at the show I’ll be at those presentations and then around the Doba booth #417 off and on throughout the show.

And next week, I’m actually at the office in Utah for an entire week!

I’m always impressed when I run across the owner or general manager of a large retail store working the check-out line. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it’s usually a sight to behold (think over-aged person fumbling with cash register and credit card terminal, and you won’t be too far from the truth). Aside from the joy one receives as a result of watching the big dog work just as hard as everyone else, I’m usually hopeful that the owner or manager in question is gaining a specific and measurable level of respect, appreciation, and understanding for his or her customer’s and their needs and wants.

Most business owners–especially those who run large retail operations–remove themselves from the showroom floor, favoring instead to troll the hallways and offices that the customers cannot see. They always have meetings to attend, people to hire and fire, reports to review, orders to place, and major decisions to make. Somewhere along the way though, they eventually become so disconnected to what’s happening in the front of the house that they themselves could not even begin tell you in which isle you’ll be able to find the JELL-O.

In my line of business, nearly 100 percent of Doba’s customers–all of whom are small to medium-size business owners and entrepreneurs themselves–interact on a daily basis with their customers. Our customers, for the most part, sell goods and products on Internet sites like eBay, Overstock, and Amazon, or on their own web sites or retail operations. Unlike their larger brethren, on a daily basis, our customers field questions and inquires from their current and potential customers themselves. For the most part, they have no back hallways to patrol or front-line employees to handle such trivial matters (as many large retail owners would call them) such as, “Where can I find the JELL-O?” or “Why does your store do it like that?”

Recently, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, Doba exhibited at eBay Live! in Las Vegas, and in addition to bringing some of our own front line employees to the show to work our booth, our entire executive-level management team attended the show as well, and just like everyone else, they too worked the exhibit booth, explaining to anyone and everyone who came by the booth exactly what Doba does and why they should consider us as a part of their product sourcing solution. At other trade shows I’ve attended, executives and management team-level personnel come to the show, but rarely will you see them working in their booth or making themselves available to anyone who approaches–regardless of age, appearance, or company affiliation.

The reason we choose to bring our management team to shows like eBay Live isn’t as a reward or so they can schmooze it up with other muckity-mucks on the sidelines of the exhibit hall. We bring our executives because at Doba we believe that everyone in the company should connect with customers on a one-on-one basis. Regardless of what their title is or what floor they work on in our building, listening to our current and prospective customer is job one, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

Last week, after everything finally settled down back at our offices, many of those same management team members who attended eBay Live! got on the phones and called some of our customers. At many companies I know, those types of calls would have been assigned exclusively to customer service reps or assistants, but at Doba we recognize that a great company is one that listens to its customers and members and, as a result, can develop the propensity to anticipate their needs.

One of the really cool things about blogging is that it affords you the opportunity to meet people you may not have otherwise met had you not had a blog of your own. Case in point: Guy Kawasaki, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures and one of my favorite authors and bloggers (starting to see the connection?).

As I mentioned in this past Wednesday’s post, Guy took time out of his eBay Live! 2006 schedule to stop by the Doba booth for a meet and greet. The meeting, which was informal at best, was arranged entirely as a result of me reading and leaving a comment on his blog. Had I tried to connect with him through a more traditional channel–say via his publicist, publisher, or even by calling his company directly–chances are, the meeting never would have happened (and not because I suspect Guy’s the type of person who’d be all snooty or anything, but rather, like many successful and in-demand people, he’s so darned busy that his own people would probably view my request just like all the other’s he receives, and it’d get lost or prioritized differently).

The power of the blogosphere is pretty amazing. One day you’re just a guy who runs a company and has lots of ideas about this, that, or the other. The next day, you launch a blog, and by sharing your ideas–and demonstrating the quality of your thoughts–people like Guy are willing to read you and even meet with you in person. It’s similar to how eBay works. Before you post anything on the site, you’re just an average Joe, but on the day you sell your first item, a whole new world of possibilities opens to you.

It’s day two of eBay Live! 2006, and the show has been nothing short of amazing. Highlights include:

• Doba signed up as many new members on the first day of the show as we had expected to sign up over the entire three-day event.
• Ten percent of the show’s attendees–around 1,500 people–attended my Monday panel discussion on Product Sourcing.
• I met one of my favorite bloggers and author, Guy Kawaski, who stopped by the Doba booth for a meet and greet.

Suffice to say, eBay Live! and Doba are firing on all cylinders. To top it all off, hundreds of our current customers have stopped by our booth to share their excitement about the show and Doba, and we still have one more day of the show to go!