Mary Shea
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Who's the referee? Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me say I love tennis too. And you know, we do have an umpire and that umpire is our investor and the board. So at the end of the day, we have a wonderful investor in VIP Ventures, which is out of Atlanta. If we get to a point where we can't resolve things together, we've got a boss. Everybody has a boss. And our boss is the board and our investor.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
And so we can certainly go in that direction if need be. But I will pull the thread on another sort of line of thinking here, which is this is a professional marriage. I've been married for or I've been with my spouse for close to 30 years now. As you know, as people know who have made that type of commitment, there are good years and sometimes there's not so good years.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Mediafly is a revenue enablement company. What revenue enablement does essentially is help everyone in the go-to-market organization engage with prospects and customers in efficient and effective manner. So that could be everything from our solution serving up
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
You have to have the resiliency to be in it for the long term. Sometimes you have to go to a marriage counselor and sort it out.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
I think having an executive coach for both of you, whether that's sort of an internal coach or someone you hire externally, can be really, really helpful because it's a highly complex model and having someone who can get you through those tough patches, I think can be really helpful. At the end of the day, we do have an umpire and that's called the board.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
dynamic interactive content that can be delivered in a workspace or in a digital sales room providing rich signals back to the seller and the selling organization on how that content's being consumed it can be leading with a quantitative discussion around how their products and services are going to change their end customers
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Yeah, so I'll be really honest with you since we're friendly too. I've been doing too many reels and doing the whole device thing before I go to sleep. In terms of my reading, I do tend to lean more towards the nonfiction. And one book for me that really changed the lens at which I look at the world and humanity, where we are today and where we're going is
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
This book called Sapiens, and it was written by an Israeli author. Maybe you've read it. Highly intellectual. It's one of the best books and one of the best research books I've ever read in my life. It really helped me understand as humans why we are where we are. What is the role? What was the role of industrialization in driving us where we are?
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
What was the role of capitalism in leading us to where we are today? And I like to think about what's next for us as humanity. He helped me frame out that larger question in really well researched and well thought out way. I have so much respect for the author.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
We also have intelligence, so call recording, call coaching, analytics around how those calls are going between buyers and sellers. And we provide this rich data set that it shows you the buyer and seller activity that's been happening over the course of the time, which provides tremendous insights that companies can use with the algorithms.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Well, thank you, Vince. Thanks for having me on the show. And I look forward to catching up with you in person when we're on the same continent together. Thanks again so much.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Yeah, I'll give you my perspective on a couple of different personas, right? That might be our customers. So if I'm a sales rep, how am I going to use AI?
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
First of all, we've got to embed it into our system so that we know if a sales rep's talking to a certain company of a certain size and a certain industry and a certain role within that company, based on where they are in the sales cycle, the system will automatically surface up content that makes sense to be shared at that point. So how wonderful is that?
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
We're giving automatic recommendations on, hey, you should share this based on who you're talking to, based on what we've seen work with this type of customer. That's one really quick example. Certainly with generative AI, if you're in sales and you're not using it to spin up emails.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
let me be really careful here like you have ai is just simply augmentation it's not going to replace sales people it's not going to replace the work that sales people do so if you're spinning up a renewal note for example you've got to customize 40 to 30% of that AI. If I get an email to me, Mary, I hope this email finds you in good health and good spirits.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
I just like click delete onto the next one. I know that's exactly generated by bot and I'm not going to waste my time on it, but it could be a huge savings if you can get the guts of that email and provide the appropriate amount of customization so you can work much faster and you can save your time for higher value activities, right?
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Negotiating deals, closing deals, expanding stakeholder involvement. If I'm a RebOps leader, I might want to use AI to completely understand where am I at risk in my renewals over the next three quarters. By at risk, I might want to look at in a visualization, are we single threaded?
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
And by single threaded, that means like we're just talking to one person at this company who's a customer, or are we talking to five people? And if we're talking to five people, are they people at director level or BP level above? And so AI can be used and our chief product officer has done this for me where I can take a quick visualization and be like, okay, we need to work on this account.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
We need to add more executive stakeholders. We need to do a quarterly business review with this. I need to be involved in this. And it gives you a quick snapshot of where your risk is, Vince, so you can de-risk it before you lose the renewal. And then certainly I think we all know the marketing use case, which is I'm not great at staring at white space when I write research and blogs.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
And if I can kind of put in the appropriate prompts that I get sort of the structure and initial page of a blog, I'm going to customize 70% of that. I'm going to use maybe what the AI gave me from a structural standpoint, and then I'm actually going to use it once I'm finished and customize it.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
to get rid of word redundancy, to make sure the language I'm using is as succinct as possible, to make sure that I am presenting this in the most easily digestible format that's obviously in my voice. Those are a couple of quick ways. We could iterate on this for quite some time because there's many, many use cases. It's super exciting.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
When people think of sales tech or rev tech, as we're calling it now, people immediately go to efficiency. But I think the golden mean is really about the effectiveness, which is how can I really customize and personalize my messaging to my customers and prospects so that it drives some sort of urgency or outcome? Everybody wants that personalization piece. I think that we can get it through AI.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
So I'm super, super excited. I do think it will lead to smaller, more agile sales teams. Eventually it'll lead to a movement away from the 80-20 rule, which is, in case your listeners don't know, 80% of your revenue is generated by 20% of your salespeople. That's been the rule of thumb for like 100 years or 50 years or 20 years or whatever it is.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
And now I think we'll have smaller, more agile sales teams that are augmented with technology and you'll start to see 100% of the revenue delivered by 80% of your sales team. We're not quite there yet, but that's the vision that I had when I wrote about this at Forrester. There was a seminal report called
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
The B2B consultant seller Rainz, and on Rain, that's sort of a double entendre with Rainmaker, but also the words I used was R-E-I-G-N, Rain. So this is their kingdom. This is their moment. With regard to AI, I called it as sort of the coach that was going to sit on the shoulder with that salesperson, helping them be much more advisory oriented to really deliver that impact to their customers.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
I think we're very, very close to seeing that vision I had become a reality. The biggest thing I want to leave your audience with is it is not a replacement. It's simply augmentation and don't shortcut on the customization.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Yeah, I think you need to think long and hard about it. It's not a trivial model and it's probably not for everybody. And it's not for every company at every stage of its growth journey. There's a moment in time where it can really work well. And there are some criteria that you need to think about before you might want to consider taking it on.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
I will say that the model is becoming more and more popular. There's a couple of things I'd love to direct your listeners to. Number one, there's a recent Harvard Business Review article that's called, Is it time to consider too? And that was published, I think, at the end of 20, around 2022 or 2023. And Carson and I looked at this article. We found it when we were talking about it.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
He had extended the offer for me to join. And it was a very, very gracious offer. But honestly, I was a little taken aback, Vince, because you don't always see the right outcomes. And I think Benioff had just let go his most recent co-CEO. And I was a little bit skeptical initially.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
But what the thesis of the article is, the premise of the article is that today's world, before you even get internal to running your company, has become far more complex than it's ever been before. Whether that's maturation of a range of different technologies, namely generative AI, which is moving at the speed of sound right now.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Whether it's political instability that we're seeing in a range of different places. across the globe, whether it's the backlog of the supply chain that's not really working after COVID, whether it's going through a global pandemic, whether it's a social justice movement world.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
I haven't even gotten to challenges in the Middle East and Russia and Ukraine, which obviously impact financial markets and everything. It's a complicated world. And so the premise of this article was, you know, there's no one individual that can handle everything. Why not consider having two folks?
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
The other piece of it is it doesn't make sense to hire two CEOs if they have the exact same skill set. It's really important to have two people who have a shared vision. but a complimentary skill set. That was really key. I'd encourage your listeners who might be interested in learning more about this model to number one, take a look at the HBR article.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
And then our friends at Freakonomics published a podcast on this around Christmas time, where they did extensive research on this model, kind of brought together folks that are behind the model and others that were really against it. It's a really super interesting dialogue. The biggest thing for Carson and me is that we've known each other for a decade.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Mediafly and Carson were my customer when I was a Forrester analyst, so I worked with them a lot over the many, many years. When I went back into industry, when I moved on from my analyst role, I took an evangelist role at Outreach, which is a Seattle-based unicorn that folks may know about. And Carson invited me onto the board. So I've had a bird's eye view of the company.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Working with Carson, we have immense deep trust for each other. He's focused on the product. We divide and conquer with him, looking at product, financial, people, investor relations. I focus on making the market, educating the market, doing things like I'm doing today, helping folks understand the difference between sales enablement, revenue enablement. I oversee all of our customer facing teams.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Carson oversees the product, but we have the same vision for the product and the future of the company. And so it works. but it's not for everybody. Certainly there are times when decision-making is slower and I'm sure Carson would say this if he were here, there's some days where he just kind of wants to do it the way he wants to.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
I want to do things the way I want to and we can't because we have to really come to alignment between the two of us. We can be in two places at the same time. We can close big deals as two co-CEOs to really make Some of our customers feel like, wow, the level of white glove treatment they have with two CEOs is pretty amazing. We can really drive the business forward in a range of different ways.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
And there's a lot of really positives that are about it. But it's not for the faint of heart. And I'm sure Karsha would agree with me when I say that.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is that we're really honest with each other and we have those conversations and we have the trust that we're going to get to a place where we can resolve it in a way that works. So I would say when we're at an impasse, and there haven't been major impasses, but they happen from time to time, we'll both take a step back.
Chief Change Officer
#188 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Two
We will educate ourselves more, we'll learn more, and we'll come back. Sometimes we'll come back to the table one, two, three, four times. Eventually we get to a place that we both can live with. So like I said, there are times when the decision-making takes longer, but we both feel like we've kind of gotten to a better decision.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
I came from a modest background and I worked really, really hard. And I think sales is a great equalizer where people can get social equity and economic equity very quickly if they can be successful. And I want to help folks do that.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Sure. Well, that's one of my favorite topics and I'm so glad you asked. So Mediafly is a revenue enablement company. And when I say revenue enablement, I'm talking more than just direct sales. When you think about enablement, back in the day when I was at Forrester, we called it sales enablement.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And what sales enablement meant was, how do you get the right content into sellers at the right moment in time so they can deliver that in a cohesive way to their buyers? Today, We talk about revenue enablement more broadly because we're not enabling just the direct selling force.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
There's a whole range of routes to market that companies use, and it could be ecosystem partners, it could be marketplaces, it could be e-commerce on their website, and of course, their direct selling organization. So enablement has morphed really away from or expanded away from just sort of thinking about enabling the direct selling organization to how do you enable
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
everyone who touches a customer and also even enable the buyer. That's just a little bit of a background so that people understand kind of the difference and why we call it revenue enablement. What revenue enablement does essentially is help everyone in the go-to-market organization engage with prospects and customers in efficient and effective manner.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
So that could be everything from our solution serving up dynamic, interactive content that can be delivered in a workspace or in a digital sales room, providing rich signals back to the seller and the selling organization on how that content's being consumed.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
It can be leading with a quantitative discussion around how their products and services are going to change their end customers' ability to be more successful from a revenue and business perspective. So we have a value tool that helps sellers use this interactive tool to navigate a value-oriented discussion on what the potential impact of product and service could be.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
We also have intelligence, so call recording, call coaching, analytics around how those calls are going between buyers and sellers, and then revenue intelligence, which actually grabs and automates all the buyer seller interactions that happen over the course of a cycle, captures those into our system.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And then we have bilateral sync with the CRM, broader CDP, if companies use that or prefer that. And we provide this rich data set that it shows you the buyer and seller activity that's been happening over the course of the time, which provides tremendous insights that companies can use
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
with the algorithms to be smarter about how they interact and engage as a revenue leader even as ceo i can go on to our system and get an energy score of every prospect that we're talking to where they are in the pipeline is that energy score red yellow orange and what are the last interactions been when was last time we talked to them how are they consuming the content that we sent.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And that allows me at any given time to understand what is the health of the deal, the health of the pipeline, and my forecast so that I can course correct or provide the right coaching as needed.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Yeah, I'll give you my perspective on a couple of different personas, right?
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to reconnect with you. It's been quite some time, hasn't it?
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Start with something brief and then we'll dive into specific details. Sure. Happy to share that with your listeners and with your audience. I do love change. And if you think about me, I've been in the business world and walking the world for a while here now. I'm also a Gemini, which means I constantly like being challenged. I'm intellectually curious.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
I sometimes am impatient and like to take on new things. So my professional journey is wrought with lots of risk and lots of change. And I'll share with you that the biggest risks I've taken have resulted in the biggest upsides, whether it's professional, personal growth or economics or typical roles that you might think about. I started out my career as a classical musician. I was an oboist.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
So for those of you who don't know, oboe is a double reed instrument like bassoon. And it's one of the most difficult orchestral instruments there are. I started playing the oboe when I was 12. My whole life was really geared to being a professional classical musician. I played in a number of youth orchestras. I went to college and earned degrees in music performance.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And then I went to Mexico and played in the Mexico City Philharmonic and the Guadalajara Symphony Orchestra. I really lived my dream when I was in my very, very early 20s. which is wonderful because I didn't have to have a midlife crisis then. So I got to do what I wanted from day one.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And I came back to the States after making a name for myself in Mexico and thought, well, you know, if I want to support myself as a working musician, classical musician, I should get a PhD so I can teach and have some stability in my income. And I did that. I got a PhD in musicology, which is the study of Western art music or music that's written down.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And also the degree was in ethnomusicology, which is musics of the world or more likely music that's passed down an oral tradition. It was a wonderful experience. As I came to the end of my Ph.D. time, I felt like the palette was a little bit too small for what I saw in my professional career path. how I saw my professional career taking shape.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And serendipitously, I met some people from Forrester who recruited me to come join the company and start in sales there. And I took a big, big leap of faith. And that was probably the single most... transformational moment in my professional and personal life.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
It changed the trajectory of my life, both from my spouse to the business role, to the economics that I was able to make and to the impact I was able to have on things that I'm passionate about, Vince. One of the big passions is really leading, inspiring and motivating global teams.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
You analyze people.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
There's really two sides of my Forrester career. I was at Forrester for a decade, and I was what George Colony, who's the CEO and founder there, calls a boomerang. So I started out my sales career at Forrester in the mid to late 90s as an SDR. So one of those folks that actually... is front of the cycle rep that sets meetings, that drives interest and demand.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And I worked for a number of folks who were very, very well versed in the world of B2B sales and they were very generous. I learned a lot from them. Forrester was on a trajectory at that time where I got promoted almost every six to 12 months. It actually kind of spoiled me because that's not really the way of the world when you think of it. But I had a great run there.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
I was there for about five years in a range of different individual contributor roles in sales, sales management, and also sales leadership. I ended up opening up the first satellite office for Forrester in Chicago. Then I left for a range of different reasons to go out and make a name for myself globally and take on a role as a general manager and chief revenue officer, which was my dream.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
But subsequently, I went back to Forrester. Around 2015, I was on the product side. And what I did as an analyst was really looked at the changing buying and selling dynamics in the business world. So things were changing rapidly with the digitization of the sales process, sales, digital transformation. I looked at the emergent sales tech industry.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
landscape and then a passion of mine also is really diversity equity inclusion what does it take to get more females into the sales role because i see high level sales as one of the key paths to the c-suite and specifically the ceo and i personally have a passion for seeing more and more women folks who identify women in CEO positions at Fortune 100 companies.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And I think sales is one of the best directions to get there. So that was really my platform as a poster analyst. But I did start, to be fair, at an entry-level sales position and worked my way up the chain there.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
are a couple of different themes or threads that were big motivators for me when you think about sales sales is a great equalizer because if you're really really good at it you work really hard at it you can make a lot of money and so making money wasn't a primary focus for me in sort of my career decisions it was my passion and what i loved in life but once i started making a lot of money
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
because of my sales success. I realized that I had the power to really change things, to do wonderful things for my family, to be generous with extended networks of friends, to funnel my money into charities that align with my values as a person.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And even, and I don't even want to go down this path because we're so politically fractured here in this country right now, but even funnel money to political candidates. And I'm quite involved in national politics here as a fundraiser. Once I got a sense of the impact that I could have by having financial independence, that was a big motivator for me. And also, remember, I got a PhD.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
So I started very late my professional business career. If I wasn't moving really quickly and taking advantage of every opportunity, that I was going to fall behind because I was about probably 10 years behind my peers in terms of my earning potential because I had taken an academic path. which I wouldn't change for the world.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
But when I came out to the business world and saw what was possible, my hair was on fire in a good way and I really wanted to move. And so I moved quickly. The other thing that is really important to me is that I just need the intellectual stimulation. I can't just manage to the playbook. Part of me is that I have to create the playbook
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Work with teams and what those right plays are and then roll it out. The creative process is really important to me in the business world. The other theme is I just love working with people. I'm competitive. I like to see people who I work with, who may work for me at this point, be super successful. I want to be an enabler for those folks.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
So those are some of the common themes that I think you could find against any role that I've had over the last 20 years.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Yeah, it's really empowering. We're at a wonderful position here at Mediafly where we've recently gotten a very substantial round of funding that allowed me to go out and hire some folks who had actually been very, very successful in terms of scale ups. We have a new chief customer officer and she's absolutely phenomenal.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
We also have wonderful leaders at Mediafly who have joined us through acquisition. We acquired five companies in the last 20 months. Our competitive set and peers and analog companies were hunkering down and retrenching and trying to make every last dollar of their venture capital last so that they didn't lose unicorn status and take a down round. We've been able to be highly, highly innovative.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
A number of those leaders that have come in as CEOs from companies that are acquired are in very key positions here at Mediafly. So I see my role and the role of Carson, our founder, is to really step back, enable, empower those folks, support them. allow them to do their jobs. We need to remove obstacles. We need to have courage. We need to build confidence if someone's a little bit reticent.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
And we need to instill in all of our C-suite, our executive leadership team, that they are the kind of mini CEOs of their own functional area of the business. We all need to be aligned. They should be running that piece of the business and coming to Carson and me for advice, guidance, to poke holes in their strategy and to get help when they've reached roadblocks or impasses.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
That's really how I see my role. I feel pretty confident in what I've accomplished since. To see others be successful is almost more motivating to me than my own personal trajectory. When everyone else is successful, you're successful as a CEO.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Yes, I think that's right. The other thing is that they have very deep and expansive subject matter expertise, whether that's in product, whether that's in customer. They bring a great breadth and depth of experience and expertise in those areas.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
Yeah, it's a topic that's near and dear to my heart. And yeah, I am a proud member of the LGBTQIA community. And I think it's important to put myself out there because there's lots of people who are struggling. In terms of... Women, specifically, right now, the research that I've done shows that about a third of sellers in B2B sales are women. And obviously, we're at least 50% of the population.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
So I'd love to see selling organizations be more representative of the world around them. not just talking about white women. So how do I and how do others empower folks who have black or brown skin? Like, how do we get more diversity writ large across the organization and the selling organization? That's something that I really want to do more of. So what do I do?
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
I certainly amplify the voices of diverse voices across the board whenever I can. If I have speaking engagements that I can't do, I try to pass them on to others. I am encouraging. I'm a coach and mentor. I do as much as I can to help folks who are generally part of underrepresented groups be really successful in sales. And this goes back to, I didn't grow up with a silver spoon.
Chief Change Officer
#187 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part One
My dad actually was a child of the depression. His family lost all of their money and he had to stand in bread lines. to get food for our family, his family, because his parents were too embarrassed to do so. If anyone has a parent who's gone through that great depression or any other economic challenges globally or worldwide, you never lose that.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I've done it many times, and it's great. But again, it's just not the reality, the business reality that many of us are in today. Yeah. So I didn't use higher quotient for every role. I hired them and I said, look, I can't, I don't know how I'm going to fill these roles in the time that I need to do it with the highest quality candidates.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And oh, by the way, I have a personal platform around elevating and amplifying the voices of underrepresented in business. So on every single role, I'm For my credibility within the organization and externally outside of the firm, I need to bring in a diverse set of finalists. That's no joke. I can't say one thing and then do another when the rubber meets the road.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And without HireCulture, I never would have been able to do it. So I didn't use them for every single search I had, but there were three that I used that I needed to. One was I needed a demand gen manager. And as your listeners know, demand gen is really hard right now. Now that's not a senior role, but we couldn't fill it.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And Hard Quotient did an amazing job of finding someone that had three different degrees, two masters, data science, phenomenal. The other role I had to fill was a sales rep based in Europe in the continent. And as you probably know, all my contacts are pretty much in the UK, but we needed someone in the continent because we had a deep partnership with SAP.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And we needed that person to speak German, English, and at least one other European language. We needed them to have worked at or understood or have relationships with SAP. And we needed them to have come from a revenue enablement company. And there was no way I could find that person. Hired Quotient found several candidates that met all of my criteria within, I don't know, two to three weeks.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And we had hired that role in four weeks, which blew my mind and exceeded all my expectations. Those are two, I think, pretty inspiring examples, but to directly answer your question about senior level talent or C-suite talent or talent where you need a white glove experience, This was the most eye-opening for me. I had to hire a chief customer officer.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
This was the most important role that I needed to hire at the company for a range of reasons that SaaS companies have been struggling with churn over the last 18 to 24 months. It's been a very tough market. And so in order to grow your businesses, you need to first stop the leaky bucket. So I thought this was an incredibly important role. I had a board member refer a candidate to me.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I also found a candidate that I'd worked with in the past, someone who had grown a business to about 100 million and a very strong candidate. But to be frank, those were folks that they were both, one was a man, one was a woman. They weren't people of color. They didn't really feel my deep need for more diverse candidates.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I posted online, I got a hundred applicants and HireQuotient went through and found the top 1% on a daily basis, surfaced those to me. And I was very actively involved in this along with our recruiter and he did an amazing job. And we found this amazing diamond in the rough.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
We found several candidates that had scaled customer success organizations to 100 million, that had been in SaaS businesses, that had experienced M&A because we were a highly acquisitive company. That was important. That had managed multiple SaaS products and so on and so forth. And we interviewed those folks and they were great. So what happened was we...
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
dramatically reduced the time that it would have taken me and other executives on the interview loops, because by the time HireQuotient had surfaced the candidates, they were really good. I was able to put four finalists together, which also included the internal referrals. And I'll tell you, personally, I fully expected to hire my former colleague.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And as we went through the interview process, I was becoming more and more taken with the two candidates that HireQuotient found. My final set finalists was two women, two men, two people of color. And honestly, I would have been happy to hire any one of them. They were all so strong. Everyone at the company thought it was an incredibly fair and well-run process.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And I hired an amazing person who is now doing a tremendous job in leading not only her organization, but is a strong number two for the current CEO of that company. I get it. I understand. Maybe I'm not going to change the hearts and minds of diehard recruiters who truly believe that the C-suite needs to be handheld every step of the way.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
But I will say, because the AI can customize the external messaging so much, and because that's automated and omni-channel, it allows the person to stay in content, the recruiter to stay in content, constant contact with the candidate. This is a whole other topic, but how many times have you been ghosted and I've been ghosted by HR folks? It happens.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
So it created a better brand experience, even for the candidates we didn't hire. And ultimately, once that three quarters of the recruiting process was handled by HireQuotient, we did white glove internally. I was involved in every interview. I was talking, as was our recruiter.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
and i was texting talking with our finalists on a regular basis so just because you're augmenting a part of the process doesn't mean you walk away from a white glove or blue chip experience and so i really hope this these stories help come to life why i am debunking hopefully that theory and i know you have a different perspective so i really want to hear your thoughts
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Wow. There's so many layers to unravel here as it always is with the events, which is why I just cherish speaking with you. First of all, I'm so sorry that you experienced that because no one deserves that. And it's a very poor experience. I think I will get to your question about technology helping and bringing more humanity into the process.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
But in this case, to me, I think this was just a miss, right? You said a missed opportunity. Unfortunately, someone that early in their career, in my view,
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
should probably not have been running the interview search for a 20 plus year veteran at a big international brand and so to me i don't know if you reached back out to the chief hr officer chro or senior executive there but i think you would be doing them an incredible favor
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
If you just let them know what your experience was like, and maybe once you package up this podcast, you can send them the podcast and they can listen to it and hear the impact of someone who's just simply not ready in their career or has not had the appropriate training or support. I don't want to be ageist against someone who's new in their career. Unfortunately, that was just a miss.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And I don't think that company would want that to happen. And I think the onus is on us to tell the executives. is when you think about, everyone always talks about how pricing is so important and pricing is always inextricably linked to your brand. And we talk a lot about that at Booth, right?
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And JP Dubé has a class on pricing and we know how important pricing is, but I think you bring up another really important point, which is
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
the experience in the recruiting process is also linked to your brand and whether or not you hire someone in some ways is irrelevant from a brand perspective you've got to deliver consistent professional experiences and you've got to weave some into humanity into the process into what is quite quite a challenging process, particularly for a range of different people out there looking.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And it's not just not you're going to get a bad review on whatever the the HR side is. You want to make sure that every candidate has a stellar experience. And I'll just give you one really quick experience of mine, and then I will I promise I will directly answer your question. But I interviewed partner a little bit ago, and like you, I'm deep into my career. I'd done the job. many years.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I think they had a more junior candidate in mind, but they were incredibly professional and kind to me. I worked with a recruiter and I also reached out to an executive three or four or five levels above the recruiter to introduce myself and ask her to look after the process. And she did. And every single executive that I talked to treated me with the utmost responsibility or respect. Sorry.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I don't think they ever intended to actually hire me. They had a playbook and I didn't fit into it. And I was probably too expensive, Vincent. You can say two, two, two, and it's all fine. It turned out great. But I had an amazing experience in working with them. And I did a lot of work for the interview. I wrote a report. I did a presentation.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Like, it's no joke when you interview for these senior level positions. I walked away sad that I didn't get the position, but I was like, you know what? It's probably for the better. And now... I'm a Gartner client. I mean, the way Gartner looks at it is everyone they interview, this is how I, everyone they interview is a potential client.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And so I think that's how this international brand should have looked at it. All right. Now to answer your question, I don't think that technology can overcome some of the limitations that you described, because the technology is designed to be that agent or a partner, not to disintermediate the recruiter. And I think that's where a lot of people get confused.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
confused so you have to have a strong professional in partnership with the tech just like you need a strong sales rep in partnership with the sales tech right sales tech's not going to close the deal people buy from people they know and trust and they want to look someone in the eye at that final moment and they want someone's throat to choke if something goes wrong so it's not going to solve
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
for the kind of problem that you described. But what it will do is let someone who's very talented, who's maybe overloaded with work, who can't respond back or can't meet you for coffee, it frees them up from the downstream activities so that they can interact in more meaningful ways with a candidate like yourself. And so that's the way I see it.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Sure, the fact that we have an automated communication system that's on a workflow cadence helps because we're constantly, folks who use our software are constantly in communication with that candidate. And I think that helps, but it won't take away a problem of someone who's simply not qualified or trained to do their job effectively.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And I hope, it's very long-winded, but I hope that gets to the crux of looking for, wow, this is all good.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Dear Vince, I hope this email finds you well and in good health. No, we can't do that. That's not going to help you get a job. Sure. And I want to acknowledge that it is so difficult out there right now. I know so many... Wonderful folks who are on the beach, who are job seeking right now, who are at Salesforce, Zoom Info, Forrester, super high quality companies. And it's tough.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
For every search, you're getting hundreds, if not thousands of applicants. I applied for a ServiceNow position and there were thousands and thousands of positions. or applicants rather. There's a couple of things and I'll go over some of the basics, but I think, again, it does come back to your humanity and your network and your community, really.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
But sure, you've got to make sure you've got a resume that is going to signal or provide the right triggers to whatever AI is evaluating your experience. The biggest thing you can do is be
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Provide excruciating detail, whether you're a software engineer in terms of all of the skills, language, development languages, certifications, or if you're in sales or sales leadership or some of the other roles, like you've scaled businesses from 5 million to 15 million or like you need to be super specific.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
on exactly what what you've done be very granular there the next piece of advice i would say is make sure that your linkedin really matches that level of detail because linkedin for better or for worse is the primary source that a lot of internal and external recruiters use and so what i see is linkedin Profiles are typically have a lot less detail, right?
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And if you have less detail on your LinkedIn, you could be completely looked over, even though you might be perfect for the job. And so that's where you see, this is advice I give to a lot of underrepresented folks who are job seeking, be very detailed in LinkedIn. then it comes down to your community and your network. I don't know if this is true for you, Vince.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Even in the post-digital age, every single position I have had comes from a relationship. And I don't know if I shared, maybe I shared on this pod or you and I spoke about it before, but I met Smarth Sidhana close to three years ago at SASTR when he came up to speak with me after I did a keynote speech and brought one of his colleagues. And we became professional friends through that interaction.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Thank you, Vince. It's wonderful to be here.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And we stayed in touch even though we didn't work together, even though I wasn't a client for years. I eventually became a client and then I eventually became a customer, an employee. So focus on your human connections. Have community. If you don't have a community or a personal board, use some of the communities that are out there. There's Wednesday's Women. There's Sales Assembly.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
There's a range of different Women in Revenue. I skew a little bit more to the go-to-market, but I'm sure there's many other communities for HR and technical professionals. Pay to be involved in those and get the advice and build that network and network like hell. Don't stop doing that. So that's those are the pieces of advice I would give folks.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Yeah, I thank you for bringing that up because I think, you know, it wasn't exactly top of mind and you're absolutely right. And I've had, you know, bringing that analog to the sales world when, you know, when I was an operator, what I saw from digital natives would be, you know, they were really great at many aspects of the sales process.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
But when it came to asking the difficult questions, when it came to looking someone in the eye and being a little uncomfortable, when it came to closing the Some of the folks that were early in their career just were lost in space. They couldn't do it. And I instituted bilateral mentorship programs so that would help. I'd get more tenured folks with more junior folks on the sales side.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
The junior ones would help the tenured ones be more effective with technology and using it for greater efficiencies. And the tenured would help them really understand some of the nuances of reading the room. eye contact and in sales as Vince, if you're not making someone feel a little bit uncomfortable at some point in the process, you're not selling, right? There's always that moment.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And yeah, that's such a great point. I think technology should not be designed to replace human interactions. It should be designed to augment them or to make our lives better. And we know from social media and some of the terrible horror stories we've heard and the impact of younger folks and preteens, that's not always the case. And so we're struggling with that at a societal level.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
But for some of these folks that haven't done it, I'm not saying you need to go to the old Dale Carnegie meetups or whatever. I don't want to disparage anyone. You've got to morph sort of these networking opportunities into what's relevant today. So Women in Sales is a wonderful community that Alexine Mudar has built. And I love what she does.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
She takes her team and she goes to different cities and she does regional dinners with women in sales who are climbing the corporate ladder. There's only a third of women, a third of B2B sellers are women. She has lots of classes, courses, certifications, a range of things that could be done digitally, right? But she does smaller group formats where these folks get together.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
We see all kinds of industry events and even just anything as simple as virtual coffees and virtual wine tastings and things of that nature. So put yourself out there. I'm not saying you have to go to some old school, awkward job fair. I would never do that. But you've got to use an omnichannel approach. And you've got to rely on the human connections. And you're right.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
If you're not connecting with people, at a certain point, you're not going to feel good. I started my day on the deck, looking out over a meadow in a stream, which is my backyard. I'm fortunate, watching the birds. And I take 20 minutes each day to do that, to level set and to practice gratitude. And then I'm on Zoom like everyone else and I take breaks. But
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I guess the big piece of advice is transfer yourself to the right formats and lean in, don't lean out to the human connections. And those can be omnichannel. But don't forget in-person because that's what feeds us. That feeds our humanity.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Wow, that's a great question. And there's lots of questions within the question. You're so wonderful at what you do, but thank you for asking. So, yeah, I won't go too far back in time, but I was an industry analyst at Forrester for seven years or so. It's one of the most wonderful jobs that you could ever possibly have.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
With that, Mary, thank you so much for your time today. Thank you for having me, Vince, and thank you for all you do.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
You are working with some of the most intelligent, creative, forward-looking people. colleagues and the clients are the same as well. At a certain point in life, I decided to go back into industry and I worked with a unicorn out in Seattle and was CEO of a RevTech company based in Chicago recently.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And I've absolutely fallen in love with not only the technology that HireQuotient has, but the leader of the company, who is Smart Sudhana. He's a founder entrepreneur based out of India. The company is based in Singapore and San Francisco. And I met Smarth at Sastr probably about two and a half or almost coming up on three years now. And I was a keynote speaker.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And he and Aishwarya, one of his colleagues, tracked me down pretty much the whole time that I was at Sastr. And they just wanted to talk tech and introduce me to the burgeoning company and build a relationship with me because I'm fairly well known in the industry and have a nice following. Grateful for that.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And we had so much to talk about that I invited him to come have breakfast with me at the hotel the next day. And you probably know me a little bit, Vince. I'm a bit of an introvert, even though I'm out there in the digital world and speaking, but I don't typically invite people I meet for breakfast. And so that was a strong indicator of my interest in Smarth and the company and his vision.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
the company essentially is hr tech as you mentioned with a focus on recruiting and it's a software company it's not an agency i just want to be really clear and the software really takes some of the most sophisticated uses of generative ai and also automation the company has built rich ecosystem partnerships with a range of data providers that you would know
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And it can essentially offload the first three quarters of the recruiting process for the recruiter. And why is this important? It's important because everyone's doing more with less these days. Many of the recruiters that I talk to, whether they're external or internal, are one human band, so to speak. There's not a lot of them. And so having...
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
An AI agent, that's how I like to refer to the technology, EasySource, to assist them and up-level the engagement process with candidates is absolutely amazing. The company takes a wide swath.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
looking at candidates across a range of platforms not just linkedin and i know you and i'll talk about that because there's some challenges with just focusing on linkedin naturally and it can go out and find very specific candidates with very specific skills but not limited to just one or two sources.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And so that really helps the recruiter manage against the bias problem that I think sometimes we think about when we think about technology and automation and AI. And so I'm just blown away. The technology is elegant. It solves a timely real world problem. And the team is there to support every single customer 24-7. And it's a really special company.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And I'll just say one more thing and then I'll pause because I know you mentioned why is it the moment for HR tech? I've been following tech for close to two decades now. I started at Forrester back in the mid to late 90s. And we saw the emergence of technology. I'll skip CRM, but we'll start with marketing automation, right?
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Which we saw some amazing innovation in the 2000s, some consolidation around 2009. And marketing automation really transformed the way marketers communicated with their total addressable market in a one-to-many setting. That was so successful. In fact, somebody argued too successful. We got too good at that game, but that's another podcast.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Then you saw the emergence of sales tech in 2015, where many of these founders took some of the principles and approaches that marketing automation showed us and applied it to a one-to-one scenario with the sales, individual sales rep, allowing them to offload some of the downstream activities, engage in more personalization and share digital content.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And then we saw some consolidation around 2021, and we're still in a period where we're waiting to see what's next there. As a former analyst and evangelist at multiple companies, I really had the strong sense that we were on the cusp of really being able to transform how
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
recruiters did their jobs and their activities and their day to day activities and processes exactly the same way that we were able to do that in marketing and sales, digital transformation. And so I know the timing is right and we are seeing tremendous momentum in the market and incredibly positive responses from not only the tech, as I mentioned, but our team as well.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
There's a couple of differentiating factors and many really. One is the level of sophistication and in quality of the AI and the ability to use very sophisticated prompts. The second is rich external relationships with database companies, whether that's Apollo, Zoom.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Navigator, Crunchbase, and so I won't list them all out, but there's a very rich ecosystem which allows clients to minimize their spend and focus on consolidating all of their tech providers. But what this does is allows us to, the recruiter will have a search and maybe it's, I'll give you, without revealing the name of the soon to be client, I'll give you an example.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
we were doing a search on the technology for a database company that's soon to be unicorn closing a round of funding and they wanted to hire a principal engineer and that engineer had to have 10 years of experience in engineering they had to have the ability to understand java c plus a range of other different code they needed to work at a database company.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
So they were looking for someone that had come from a competitor, understood the space. And there were several others as well. This is very detailed.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And so what we were able to do is enter in the prompts around where we wanted this person to be located, the amount of experience that they had to have in not only database company, but in their coding languages, because the experience was different in either. And we went on and on. It was pretty deep. The recruiter had been having lots of challenges.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
We immediately entered in the prompts and the system went to work and identified in two to three minutes about 50 candidates. What was interesting was the response of the recruiter was blown away, who said, I've seen hundreds of tools like this over my last 12 years in business. I've seen nothing like this happen before. We looked through and we found the top candidates.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
The system ranked the candidates based on the must-have and nice-to-have skills. We only looked at the five-star candidates. And oh, by the way, We found out they were only male candidates. I'm sure you're not terribly surprised. And so we said, maybe your hiring manager wants to bring a more diverse set of candidates to the tables.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Let's add in another prompt and let's look for some female candidates as well. And we did, we found someone and this person was not what we would call a five-star candidate, but a four-star candidate because she didn't have every single must have aspect. And we said to the hiring manager, okay, let's take a look at this, the skillset, the resume.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And the other thing the system does is it automates out the beautiful profiles of each individual candidate. You can see it in my blog, what it looks like, which allows the recruiter to share that with their hiring manager or client.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And we said to her, this is a case where candidate may not have put on her LinkedIn and other social profiles that she had C+, that she had Java, that she had some of the other elements. So we recommend you reach out to her, talk to her, and see if that was just an omission. This is how many underrepresented candidates, female and others,
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
get missed by bots evaluating bots there's a human component that needs to be brought into this and so we're not trying to take the job away from the recruiter but rather augment the things that the machine is good at and let the human have more time to do the things that they're good at so the recruiter went out to speak with that candidate i don't know what the outcome is but that gives you an example and then i'll give you one final point
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
We're focused on outbound. So if you think of applicant tracking systems that just evaluate rank candidates and then track them through the backend process, our differentiator is that we will go out and actively find passive and active candidates from a range of sources, cross-check them, their experience.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
Maybe you want a sales leader who's grown a SaaS business from 5 million to 100 million, and they don't have that on their LinkedIn. We cross, the AI will quickly cross-check their experience and time with Crunchbase and come back with a recommendation.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
But then what happens is the AI will create outbound messaging through a range of different omni channels, whether it's text or LinkedIn or email, and the recruiter can go out and have the email automate and reach out to all of these candidates.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
And the AI also picks based on each individual candidate, very specific aspects of their qualifications to excite them about how qualified they are for the role. Automation, sophisticated use of or robust use of generative AI and working in concert with the recruiter. Those are the big differentiators I see.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
i know you have some strong views on this can you share your perspectives and perhaps debunk some of the misconceptions around the topic yeah it that is so true vince i think there is and i have had this conversation with some of our business partners and with other folks and there is this misconception yes this is great for the transactional roles look this is great for any role but
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I think maybe the best way for me to answer the question is to just give your audience an example of when I was co-CEO at a revenue enablement company. I just raised $50 million in funding, but simultaneously, we had to really streamline and restructure the organization multiple times.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
We had a new VC partner, and they wanted us to be able to be cash flow break-even on a dime within two quarters, to be frank. And we needed to really... make the company smaller, which is difficult, obviously, on the human and personal side, but it's the reality of business and where we are in the world right now. And then simultaneously, I needed to upskill several very key roles.
Chief Change Officer
#189 Mary Shea PhD: From Classical Music to Closing Deals—The Art of Reinventing Your Career – Part Three
I had about 10 roles to fill. And I had one internal recruiter. That's a lot, Vince. That's a lot for one individual. And he wasn't just sourcing after my go-to-market roles. He was sourcing engineers and a range of other roles that I wasn't intimately involved in at the time. And I couldn't afford to hire an external recruiting firm, which could have cost me 80 to 100 grand a role. You know that.