How to Drive True Innovation (and not be a sheep)

Rachel Cossar: Hello everyone and welcome to the 4th season of conversations in the future of work. I am your host, Rachel Cossar, co founder and CEO at virtual Sapiens. Now the world’s been changing at a an alarmingly rapid pace and I thought that it would be very appropriate to have one of the true technology evangelists and innovators in the sales space join us for our first episode. So on how to drive true innovation and not be a sheep, I’d love to introduce Mary Shea. Mary, over to you. Thanks, Rachel.

Mary Shea, PhD: It’s great to be with you today, and it’s great to connect with your audience. So as Rachel mentioned, my name is Mary Shea, and, I’ve done many things in my life, but I’ll just share a few of them with you now. I’m working for a very interesting company called Hyra Quotient. It’s an AI first company software, and we do what many of my, companies have done in the past for sellers and marketers but we’re focused on the HR professional. And so we use automation and AI to help recruiters folks that are in talent acquisition quickly source rate and rank candidates and communicate with them in a multichannel workflow. And so I’m looking after all of our business in North America. And prior to that, Rachel alluded to the fact that I’ve been an evangelist. So I’ve been an evangelist at Outreach, which is a unicorn based in, Seattle that focuses on sales execution. And I also was a force for analysts for many years. So I think that will bring us back to, maybe making some predictions about the future, Rachel, or where things are going from a tech perspective, but it’s great to be here and thank you for having me. Awesome, Mary. Thank you so much, for joining.

Rachel Cossar: So first question, I mean, innovation’s obviously happening all over the place and all the time, but there’s also a lot of following. And I’m just curious to hear how how do you define and find true innovation in such a a busy noisy space. Yeah.

Mary Shea, PhD: It’s, that’s such a great question and a thoughtful question, you know, from my time as being an analyst at Forrester and I was there for about 7 years and I followed the sales tech and marketing tech landscape. And I really focus on the future of work, future of buying and selling in the business world. And I learned how to connect the dots with what’s happening today. And envision what’s gonna happen in the future. And so I think I have a, like, sort of a sense anyway, but finding the methodology that we had it forced to really help me be, a provocateur and to put a stake in the ground on where I think things are going. And oftentimes you’re not right. But you provoke interesting discussion. And so that’s, I think, really interesting. I don’t think I answered your question at all. So where you find innovation, you can find it anywhere. You can find it, you know, in, go to new and innovative go to market strategies. You can find it in product innovation. You can find it in ecosystem partnerships. You can find it in, what have I missed, Rachel? A range of different things. And so I’m always on the hunt for it because I’m just not excited to get up and go to work to get every day unless I’m sort of at the tip of that spear. And I love creating versus just sort of, operationalizing someone else’s playbook. And so that’s where I try to find myself in in places where I can create and help set up the systems and processes for those that are gonna come behind me. Yeah. So that that’s interesting. I I love your point about, like, the innovation can be found also within, like, benign or or seemingly wrote processes.

Rachel Cossar: Right? Like, I think Right. There’s such an emphasis on, like, the product and product innovation and technology. And, like, what about process innovation? Like, that’s actually really Totally. Process, innovation.

Mary Shea, PhD: So, you know, we have our workflows and our processes that every functional area of the business typically owns and refines over time. And now, you know, you can see our company as well as many others out there that are taking some of the traditional workflows and automating them and enhancing them with, proprietary and commercially available AI models. So, you can innovate your process in the sense of you can streamline your processes. You can add tech to your processes. You can do a range of different things. And and I agree with you. I think we think about innovation too narrowly. Immediately, we go straight to product. But there’s so many different ways to innovate. And you can innovate at so many different types of businesses. Those can be retail establishments to big tech and everything in between. Right? And we’re seeing the world change and youthiest award called alarming, and I I’m gonna I’ll play the devil’s advocate and call it exciting, but, things are changing very, very quickly. And you’re right. You know, if if if we’re not on top of it and by on top of it, I mean, educating ourselves, learning, doing new things, trying some of these new tech, you know, we’re rapidly following behind. So I I get where you’re coming from. Yeah.

Rachel Cossar: It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a a lot at virtual Sapiens because, you know, we we were, ahead of the curve and a lot of this, like, video AI analytics and stuff. And Right. While we have to be careful because it’s very easy now to just, you know, grab what OpenAI is doing and become a wrapper around OpenAI. And that’s fine, but I just I don’t think that’s going to cut it from like a competitive edge and mode perspective. Right? So I’m always like, how do we just be wary of not falling into some of these traps of convenience and how do we continue to innovate? You know, ourselves. Right. That’s such a great point.

Mary Shea, PhD: And I think we’re seeing it now, and I’m I’m not gonna point out any company names, but you’re seeing, some of these unicorns from the, you know, 2019, 2020 really struggling, for a range of different reasons. Right? It’s been a tough macroeconomic environment. Buying patterns are changing. You know, you’re seeing layoffs and all kinds of different types of things. Buying cycles are longer. You need more ROI before you can pull the trigger. But one of the interesting things is that some of these unicorns actually don’t have a defensible mode now that, chat GPT is launched and now that companies can spin up their own proprietary AI. And so that’s a very, very interesting question. What we’ve seen is I’m almost calling this like a a 3rd wave of upstarts. Right? So, you know, you’ve got late stage startups that are technology. You’ve got big tech, right, then you’ve got late stage startups that are the unicorns. Then you’ve got some established companies that haven’t quite, you know, made the valuation you want. Now you have the walking zombies, right, the ones that have a big customer base, but they can’t grow. And so what do we do there? Well, now there’s this really interesting collection of companies that I’m noticing, and some of them are actually being started by my friends, which is exciting, that are like these this this upstart 3.0. And I think in some ways they may have more advantage than the later stage startups who actually went to market got valuations on a certain expectation. And now Honestly, I don’t wanna say anyone can spin up a cadence tool, but I think anyone can spin up a cadence tool. So why would you buy the Porsche when you could either spin it up yourself or get it from a lower cost provider? So it’s a very interesting time And I’m glad you’re thinking about that. And if I could be so bold to put a question back on you because we haven’t spoken in a little while, you know, what are you doing to make sure virtual Sapiens has that mote and has that relevancy in a world where tech is becoming more and more available to a wider collection of of people. Yeah. Absolutely.

Rachel Cossar: I mean, so one of the things that we found interesting from the beginning, as you know, you know, we came out of the gates with such a strong focus and level of nuance around our nonverbal behavioral analytics. And that is something that we have found is continues to be very defensible. Because we’ve developed a a framework and a methodology around what our AI is looking for, why it’s important, and how important it is for professionals. So by continuing to invest in the behavioral analytics, components. We Okay. We get to continue to just differentiate ourselves. So that’s been really cool. Okay. But we do have to be careful. Like, we have to, you know, we have to make sure that we’re being very clear about our use case. And I think that we are gonna have to gain some competitive competitive edge and innovation around, you know, the numbers of people that we are accessing and targeting and working with. Right? Cause I think at this point, actually customer acquisition is more important than ever. Really is. Yeah. Thank you for that. Yeah.

Mary Shea, PhD: That’s interesting and that makes sense knowing your business. My latest obsession is on go to market innovation. And because I think you’re gonna find, and we just saw, you know, a a very well known tech company let go 7000 people this week. We’re finding that sales teams are gonna be smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. So that means Not only do you need to acquire the right talent at the upfront, but then you’re gonna need to enable them with the right tools and then right tech. And then you’re gonna have to continue to develop and train them so that they’ll stay and retain and you’re gonna have to create different structures within the go to market organization that will allow you to be super agile, do more with less and drive home customer obsession. So that might be another podcast, but I just thought I’d share my my my my recent most, of my my recent obsession there. Yeah. Totally.

Rachel Cossar: So moving on to the next question, because it’s in line with what you just shared, but what are some of the trends that you think will actually stick? Oh, well.

Mary Shea, PhD: Well, I’m sure the, Chancey from from Amazon won’t be so happy with me, but, I really think that hybrid work and remote work and flexible work, is here to stay. I think the cat is out of the bag. And despite c CEO egos or the fact that a lot of money was spelled spent building a beautiful headquarters that there’s 2, you know, the flexibility that we enjoyed in in life over COVID And and the fact that we have come I mean, we’re not machines. Right? We partner in in augment ourselves with machines, but look, I mean, you know, I have I have an elderly parent. I have to go to the take her to the cardiologist. Well, people who are 90 don’t move quickly. So, you know, I have to, like, step out of the office. People have young children. And so I I just think that that’s a losing proposition for some of these companies, and I know it’s very popular in financial services as well, but I think whether, you know, wherever you are in your career, people are going to demand that level of flexibility. Other things that I think will stick, well, some things that haven’t really even begun yet that I would think will happen We will have a 3 to 4 day work week, in under, 5 years. When you think about the amount of scale and muscle that generative AI gives you and powerful automation gives you, like, you are gonna get a 7 day week done in 3 to 4 days. And then the other thing is I think we will have smaller workforces. So, you know, we will have to take some sort of look at universal basic income, and I know that’s probably a little ways away, but we’re in the midst of a very, very big, beginning transformation of how we work. And I think we’re if I were to use a baseball analogy, we’re we’re an inning one, really. You know? But that game’s moving a lot faster than typical baseball games move. Yeah. Definitely.

Rachel Cossar: And I do think that this feeds into the next question too, like, in terms of staying staying positive about the future of work, but a lot of the things you just mentioned, you know, there are such that there’s such upside to leveraging technology effective. Right. Right? Reducing down to that 3 to 4 day work week. Yeah. Using some of that extra time to spend more time with family to have greater flexibility to invest more money. Right?

Mary Shea, PhD: More meaningful, like, technology should enhance our life and provide a more meaningful experience for us while we walk this earth. Right? Now you and I know there are trade offs and there are you know, not everyone is benevolent who understands how to use technology and, you know, so it’s complicated. But to answer your question, I tend to be a very positive person. I am very excited about the future of work and what that means for all of the reasons that you just really listed. So I won’t say them again, but I think those are absolutely within our grasp. But technological innovation comes with trade offs. Right? You know, I was thinking about this you know, generative AI being bigger than electricity or what have you. And electricity was amazing. We could read in bed at night. We didn’t have to burn the barn down every time the kerosene lantern fell