Technology offers enormous benefits. It makes things better and improves the quality of solutions. It is important to tap the potential of technology for the development of businesses. Leaders who have got the better knack for technology are able to tap the potential of technology and are able to deliver better solutions. Morag Lucey is one such business leader who has great knack for technology from her young age. Her approach is to find balance between technology (AI) and the human touch. Morag Lucey is the CEO of Televerde, a 600-person global sales and marketing solutions company whose customers comprise the top global technology companies.
“Be humble. Be hungry. And always be the hardest worker in the room.”
With more than 20 years of executive leadership experience in marketing & technology, Morag is skilled at eliminating silos, delivering on revenue and profit targets, and inspiring teams. She specializes in transforming the customer experience and solutions offerings and creating companywide strategic messaging alignment.
In an interview with Insights Success, Morag Lucey shares her journey and about her contribution through Televerde: Below are the highlights of the interview between Morag Lucey and Insights Success:
Kindly take us through your journey on becoming a proficient tech business leader.
Believe it or not, at 20-years of age, I was set on a career in fashion. I absolutely love clothes, style, and the art of designing. What I didn’t know was how difficult it was to turn this passion into a lucrative career. While I was coming to terms with this reality, I was offered a great opportunity with a technology company. The job was simple: represent the company as a demonstrator at trade show events. The job came with plenty of perks, such as a company car, high quality, fashionable clothing, and dry cleaning — all paid for. Best of all, I’d get to travel the world. There was one catch: I had to be able to talk intelligibly about this company’s technology. If I could do that with authenticity, the job was mine.
I began taking courses to understand technology: how it worked, its benefits and differentiators. In a short time, I learned I had quite a knack for it. While I was still enticed by the benefits, I couldn’t deny the technology interested me, especially in the ways it drove business. Most satisfying was that everything I encountered in tech taught or challenged me in some way. I couldn’t get enough of it. I quickly moved up from showcasing technology to consulting on software systems and applications for various organizations. I gained invaluable insights and experience with financial systems, key business strategies, and organizational structures. In just two years, I had grown from a hopeful fashionista into a successful Product Manager. (While looking good the entire time!)
How do you diversify your organization’s offerings to entice the target audience?
You have to understand the value that your organization brings and also identify how your current offerings can be used to leverage gaps in ways that optimize business outcomes for potential and current clients. When you diversify your offerings, you actually create stickiness with your customers. By offering a connected set of services or solutions where your clients can add value across a spectrum of services – in our case, sales, marketing, and customer success – you create a true partnership with your clients, which strengthens brand loyalty and reduces churn rates.
What are the vital traits that every business leader should possess?
Listen to understand, not to respond; empathy to learn how your employees and customers are feeling so you can deliver value and superior experiences consistently; emotional intelligence to foster and grow relationships with your customers and people; and the ability to adapt to unexpected circumstances, evolving technology, and changes in expectations from your customers and employees.
Where are you focusing your energy now, and where do you hope to make an impact next?
Providing value beyond our traditional business – value in terms of business intelligence that we can share with our customers (think market intelligence, sales performance intelligence, etc.). Leveraging AI to reduce intensive human labor and tedious tasks, which will free up our people to strengthen relationships with our clients and create better outcomes for their business. Our approach is a balance between AI and the human touch.
How do you keep yourself up to date with the latest technology?
The fact that I am married to a CIO certainly helps! It also helps that we are in the technology industry. With technology transforming the world of sales and marketing, we need to be at the top of our game in understanding tech trends so we can converse and consult with our clients. We look to understand the technologies our clients are using to see what impact it can have on our business. We are also always evaluating our internal technologies to improve our own business so that we can serve our clients better and adapt as they do.
What does it take to attract and retain tech talents?
Opportunities to continuously learn new technology and skills; interesting and rewarding projects.
What culture change do you suggest for companies that want to embrace the full power of AI?
Understanding how AI and humans can work together. AI is not a replacement for people so companies will need to figure out how to use their employees in new ways – develop new leaders, discover new talents, reskill, upskill, etc. It’s an exciting future of work as AI will remove the rote tasks that employees are often saddled with and allow them to focus more on strategy development and execution, creativity, customer experience, employee engagement, and better decision-making.