Introducing Jeff Ernst - entrepreneur, Former Forrester analyst, blockchain enthusiast, CrossFit junkie

Hello Steemians,

After being a quiet observer in Steemit for a few weeks, I'm ready to dive in and am looking forward to meeting some wonderful people, and connecting with people who share my interests. Please follow me if you're interested in entrepreneurship, blockchain, marketing & sales, or fitness.

That's me in the back of that photo with my family after a day of scuba diving. My wife Susan and I are now enjoying our empty nest. We love our kids of course, but now in our 50's, we're taking time to do the things we love to do, like overnight jaunts with other couples, going to restaurants that don't use plastic cups, and not worrying about what time the kids get home. Actually that's not true, my wife still worries, even though our kids live on the west coast. My son is an engineer at Microsoft in Redmond, WA, and my daughter is a consultant at IBM.

Since much of the dialog here on Steemit is about crypto and blockchain, I'll talk about my interest in blockchain. Having been a marketing and sales executive for many years, I know first-hand just how important it is to earn a customer's trust in order to earn and keep their business. Yet there's no bigger trust gap than that which exists between buyers and sellers, especially in the Business-to-Business world.

Blockchain will transform how buyers buy...how they explore solutions to their problems, how they evaluate suppliers, how they begin to trust people and companies, and how they make decisions. Which means that marketing and sales executives will be forced to change how they do their jobs. And I actually think Steemit will become part of their marketing arsenal.

To stay on the leading edge of this, I'm the founder of a Meetup called .
Blockchain Transforms Marketing & Sales. This meetup is for forward-thinking marketing and sales leaders who want to build their expertise on blockchain and distributed apps (dapps), explore how blockchain will transform buying behavior, predict how trust will be earned in this new world, and figure out the process, skills, and technologies we'll need to do differently to attract and win customers in this new world.

I'm also a serial entrepreneur, having started, grown, advised, and sold several tech companies. My latest venture is called SlapFive, which helps companies capture their customers' voice and unleash it to win, grow, and keep more customers. Here's an example of what you can do with it to showcase your customer voice, click to see it in action.

Back to blockchain, I'm in the planning stages of taking my current business to the blockchain. In this TechStars video you can see me talking about the concept:

Before my current venture, I was an industry analyst at Forrester, and their VP of Marketing. What a ride that was. Imagine a company that is all about advising their clients on the importance of embracing leading edge marketing and customer experience strategies, but from the top down doesn't believe this applies to their own company.

I'm a physical fitness fanatic, so you'll likely see me post about running and CrossFit. Or more specifically, about the trials and tribulations of being an over-50 athlete, and the aches and pains that come from trying to stay young. What I love most about CrossFit is the camaraderie, being around such a great group of friendly, supportive people. Here's our clan after doing a Memorial Day "Murph" workout.

If you're a business owner, entrepreneur, marketing/sales executive, or anyone else looking for advice on how to improve your marketing and sales, reach out to me, happy to share lessons learned from trial and error.

Also, please point me to tags or other ways of getting more exposed to conversations and people with my my interests.