It’s not the problems that matter but the solutions we create. Great leaders seldom crib about the challenges they face, see it as a learning opportunity, and find a way out through effective processing.
A young leader once had many challenges to go through, and one of them was not fitting into mediocrity. She had to go through a tough road of biases and problems to reach where she is today. Meet Marie Brunet, who scaled her way to the position of Vice President, Sales, through her determination, hard work, and passion for work. She possesses the qualities of work efficiency, great communication with employees, and a desire to grow, which makes her a strong and capable leader.
The organization she is associated with, Uniphore is a global leader in Conversational Automation. It uses AI, computer vision, and linguistics to ensure that the billions of conversations that are happening every day are truly heard and understood.
Marie is committed to bring emotional intelligence front and center of core business decisions starting with B2B sales through Uniphore. With her expertise in knowledge and leadership, she is helping the company disrupt the conversational space. She is driven to relentlessly pursue excellence through leadership and integrity with the vision to always build long-term partnerships with clients.
Let’s shed some light on her inspiring journey as a leader.
A Journey to Become Sales Maverick
Marie’s journey included working with Meta as the head of the B2B sales team responsible for bringing enterprises into the metaverse. She helped built that entire business from scratch empowering companies of all sizes benefitting from Virtual Reality and Augmented reality with hardware and SaaS solutions. Their business ranged from helping major healthcare companies train surgeons in Virtual Reality, onboarding hundreds of thousands of remote employees, and even supporting virtual fashion shows. She helped the company grow in its niche, which benefitted them phenomenally.
Marie spent most of her career working on leading-edge technologies. She started as an engineer in the semiconductor industry, helping develop photolithography processes used today to manufacture almost every chip. Her numbers do the rest of the talking after transitioning to sales.
Speaking about her rough patches, she had to face many biases, including sexual harassment. She has overcome all the difficult roads in her career to be where she is today.
Driven By 4 Core Values
Uniphore is the global leader in Conversational Automation. Every day, billions of conversations take place across industries — customer service, sales, HR, education, and more. They are the new currency of the enterprise. The company has built the most comprehensive and powerful platform that combines conversational AI, computer vision, emotion, tonal analysis, with a business-user-friendly UX to transform and democratize customer experiences across industries. Its vision is to define conversational AI and automation platforms to realize the value of every enterprise conversation. To achieve this vision, Marie has formulated four fundamental values called CATE. They include Communication, Accountability, Trust, and Empathy.
Starting with Communication, Marie believes proper responsive communication is the key for any team to be efficient.
Followed by Accountability, it is critical to know the responsibilities and be responsible for delivering accordingly. It is ok to miss a deliverable sometimes, but it is also important to own it and learn from it.
Speaking about Trust, she believes that trust is the difference between feedback being perceived as negative criticism and a genuine way of helping someone grow.
Lastly, she states that Empathy is an important sales function, as the ability to put yourself in your audience’s shoes is an invaluable trait. In non-sales functions, trying to understand where someone is coming from, what led them to reach their point of view, is extremely valuable in any situation.
What does the Future Hold?
Marie firmly believes that the next phase in the evolution of AI will revolve around the ability of machines to sense and analyse people’s emotions and help us be better humans. For the past 13 years, Uniphore has mastered conversations by leading the way in Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) innovation. Each year it processes & analyses billions of conversations—making the cognitive computing technology the most powerful on the market. The latest innovations in Emotion AI allow the company to understand human emotional cues through a combination of the following:
- Automated speech recognition (ASR) and NLP-based phonetic analysis
- Computer-vision-based facial expression analysis
- Audio-based Tonal & Sentiment Analysis
This technology has immediate applications in B2B Sales and any interactions leveraging video calling.
Speaking about numbers, Marie shares, “Pre-pandemic, 61% of B2B sales conversations were conducted in-person with trust being the key element for success. Today, over 66% of B2B sales are conducted via video calls. The biggest difference between top performers and their peers is Emotional Intelligence. It is proven that 95% of purchase decisions are emotionally based. With Q for Sales, we are leveraging Artificial Intelligence to make Emotional Intelligence skills teachable in a scalable way so people at work can build more meaningful and trustworthy relationships. This technology is about augmenting and enhancing human potential while helping remote sales teams overcome the communication and business challenges associated with selling over video.
Customer-centric Approach
Uniphore is all about improving Customer Experience. Whether conversations happen via phone call or video, it makes sure people are being heard. Not just the content of what people say but also the tone they use to say it and the emotions they express. This makes the conversations more meaningful, more productive, and more trustworthy. Marie states, “With Q, we want to give emotional Intelligence the importance it deserves at work. EQ is not something people have or don’t. It’s a human skill people can learn and improve on. With Q, we make it easy for any salesperson to improve their EQ skills and measure the impact it has on the business. The initial response from the market has been overwhelmingly positive. We are looking forward to continuing our hyper-growth and bringing our EQ platform to even more partners.”
Accelerating the Change
Moreover, Marie strives to vanish the gender bias in a way considerable progress is made so that the future of her 8-year-old daughter is secured along with the whole generation. She is doing her best to accelerate the change so that there is a better time to come.
