Marie Brunet, who is passionate about growing enterprises, assisted in the growth of the workplace by Facebook, a SaaS communication platform. She subsequently went on to establish the commercial channel at Facebook Reality Labs (AR/VR) from the ground up, delivering both hardware and a SaaS management platform to enterprises. In a few months, she was able to increase her revenue to the two digit millions of dollars. Marie is presently the VP of Sales at Uniphore, a unicorn business that Deloitte just named one of the fastest growing companies in North America.

Life chose Marie more than she chose herself at the start of her career. When she finished with a master’s degree in material science, the employment market in France was so dismal that it was difficult for a newly educated engineer to find work. As a result, she was forced to work at McDonald’s to make ends meet. Getting a compensated Ph.D. in the semiconductor sector was a big step ahead. After a few years, Marie took complete control by first determining what she wanted to achieve in the long run and the industry in which she wanted to concentrate.

Marie mostly loves technologies that put people at the center. She is a firm believer that technology’s goal is to help humans. She asserts, “To make our daily lives easier, to achieve more, and even to help us be better humans. This is why I am so passionate about a platform like Q for Sales.” 

Marie’s life began in a Korean orphanage, so it’s been a long road. She was lucky to be adopted by French parents, but she grew up in a small town (7K people) where many were surprised that Asians could eat anything other than rice.

Marie understood schooling was her only route out when she was seven years old and devised a long-term strategy. She eventually earned an engineering degree and began her job in the semiconductor business. She was fortunate to work on cutting-edge technology from the outset. Every chip made today most certainly employs one of the photolithography processes she helped design.

After pivoting to sales, Marie joined Facebook, where she helped scale Workplace, its first enterprise SaaS platform. Then one day, a colleague made her try virtual reality. She says, “The potential for work applications was so clear to me that I joined the tiny team building the AR/VR enterprise platform. I was one of the first salespeople worldwide to bring companies into the Metaverse. I am immensely proud of the team I built there and all the challenges we tackled together.”

Then Marie met Uniphore, an AI unicorn business that had recently been named one of the fastest-growing firms in North America by Deloitte. The management team highlighted their goal of reinventing business-to-business sales. Uniphore had been developing an AI SaaS platform that could read emotions. She shares, “A tool to help salespeople develop more meaningful, emotionally intelligent rapport with their clients. The concept itself was very appealing.”

According to Marie, Uniphore also has two primary aspects she enjoys: starting a brand-new business from the ground up and cutting-edge technology that puts people first. The chance was simply too good to pass up.

Uniphore

Uniphore is the world’s leading provider of conversational AI. After securing a $400 million Series E Funding Round, Uniphore, which was recently recognized on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500TM, has seen exponential growth and worldwide demand soar, with a valuation rising to $2.5 billion.

Every day, billions of interactions take place across businesses such as customer service, sales, human resources, education, and others. Conversations, whether human-to-human, human-to-machine, or machine-to-machine, are at the center of all we do and the new currency of the company.

The Uniphore team thinks that the firms that best understand and act on such dialogues will triumph. It has created the most complete and powerful platform to revolutionize and democratize customer experiences across industries, combining conversational AI, computer vision, emotion, tonal analysis, workflow automation, and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) into a single integrated platform.

Uniphore also offers its blog and knowledge-enhancing work on a variety of venues, and you can find it on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Marie is primarily responsible for generating money at Uniphore. However, that is only one component of her job in the organization. Her crew is the one that interacts with clients.

It is their responsibility to listen to clients and to represent their voices in an aggregated and accurate way to internal teams like product, engineering, and marketing. She shares that listening to the market and adjusting accordingly is even more critical while launching a product. While leading a team, there is also all the work related to building processes, playbooks, and training. In a fast-paced environment, it is equivalent to building a rocket ship while already flying it.

The one role that is dearest to Marie’s heart is about fostering the right culture. She says, “Many people have great ideas about innovative technology. I am convinced the difference between the ones that succeed and the ones that fail is related to culture.  Attracting top talents in the current job market is challenging. It is more crucial than ever to build a culture making them want to stay.”

Marie holds her team extremely accountable. “Demanding but fair”: that is how they describe Marie. The most pride she has felt in her career is when colleagues or people in her organization would tell her she helped them grow or inspired them.

Hurdles of Achieving Goals

Marie declares that she failed at many things. Early in her career, she often failed at making people listen. She believes that some of it was their fault due to prejudice associated with being an Asian-looking woman in a world dominated by white men but not only.

She shares, “It took me a while to learn how to put myself in the shoes of my audience; talking to people in a way that would resonate with them and with enough self-confidence. I realized one day that the way I expressed myself penalized me a lot. I was very shy and sounded hesitant whenever I spoke. If I seemed to doubt myself, it was not fair to expect others to trust my expertise.”  She further adds, “So, I forced myself to change.  For a shy person, attending a networking event alone is a daunting exercise. I forced myself to go, with the promise to keep going until I would feel comfortable enough to talk to anybody. The first times were horrible. I would stay on my phone, unsure if I preferred someone to talk to me or not talk to me at all. I could not say my name without turning entirely red. Sometimes I would leave just after 5 minutes, beating myself for failing. Ultimately, the frustration towards myself overcame the shyness. Today, people around me have a tough time believing I was once shy.” 

The Degrees of Success

Society often associates great leadership traits with more masculine qualities. Marie believes it is time for us to adjust this definition. She says, “The younger generation of women makes me very hopeful.” 

For Marie, there are different degrees of success.

• She sees that the first one is ringing the NYSE bell when the company goes public.

• The second one is financial. She recalls, “Growing up knowing my parents gave me up because they could not feed me left a mark. Then, during my college years, I had to hustle, working many little jobs to pay the bills and college fees. As a mother of two, it is important to me that my kids get an easier start in life and that I would never be a financial burden to them when I am old.”

• The third is about helping more women break the ceiling and doing whatever they can to fight gender bias at work. Marie expresses her greatest fear is that her 8-year-old daughter will face the same difficulties she did earlier in her career. She opines, “Success would be to know I have done everything I could to make it easier for her than it was for me.”

Building Long Term Relationship 

Uniphore’s staffs assist its clients in providing the greatest possible experience for their customers. The primary business unit, U enables call center agents to provide a significantly better experience to their clients. Q for Sales assists Uniphore’s partners’ sales professionals in developing more meaningful and trustworthy relationships with their clients.

According to HubSpot, just 3% of respondents believe sales representatives are trustworthy. Marie says, “We are dedicated to improving this by putting emotional intelligence at the center and revolutionizing B2B sales.”  Marie wants to make sure her team enjoys the rocket ship ride while fueling it.

Website: https://www.uniphore.com/