The Remarkable SaaS Podcast #140 - Van West, CEO of Vocalytics - On understanding the context and triggers that impact human behavior
This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to turn "dead air" into actionable intelligence, helping Retailers, Healthcare, and Hospitality facilities improve on-site experiences and the health of their businesses. My guest is Van West, Founder and CEO of Vocalytics.
Van is an accomplished strategic business development and marketing executive with 15 years’ experience leading teams in startup to Fortune 500 environments.
He has a product-minded entrepreneurial approach with focus on strategy, growth, and product, and is passionate about digital engagement to creatively exploit revenue opportunities.
He co-founded GiftyOne in 2013, was Director of Channel Marketing for Lookout Mobile Security, SVP of Marketing at Oomba, first hire & VP of Global Business Development at VMAXX as well as Chief Strategy Officer at Reality Smash. Besides that, he’s a guest lecturer at the University of California, Irvine.
In November 2019, he founded Vocalytics, an enterprise-grade voice and sound analytics platform built for the physical world. It’s on a mission to improve enterprise performance, associate engagement, and customer experience - all through the power of voice and sound.
That inspired me, and hence I invited Van to my podcast. We explore why so many enterprises today are unaware of the context and triggers impacting human behavior of their people and customers – and how that is leading to compromise in experience, loyalty and the performance of their business.
We address what can be done about that, but also dig into the big lessons learned in bringing such products to market in a time where everything we have become so used to has changed. Van shares his insights behind the choices he made to deliberately not enter the obvious, high-growth categories in the market.
Here are some of his quotes:
Understanding the best practices of your top performers and deploying that knowledge at scale is really what's ultimately been our play. We've also recognized that in the COVID world that we're living in, there's less in-person exchanges occurring and those that do occur are less face-to-face.
With all the traction and all the momentum that we've built understanding at this point in time, we now have to start building towards what that new normal is and recognizing that.
So my little sister has a highly compromised immune system, severely compromised immune system. And we built a technology to listen in the physical worlds. Coughing is the number one way COVID spreads. So rather than filtering out the background noise, let's lean into it to differentiate our product beyond COVID towards this new normal, while also we can help and serve the general population, whether it's returned to work, returned to campus, or returned to the physical world for in-person interactions.
We want to keep everyone safe.
During this interview, you will learn four things:
- How to get things off the ground faster, and with more impact by listening to your customers with intent.
- The essentials to carve out a space that you cannot only be successful in, but actually dominate
- Why time is the most important resource for start-ups – and how to utilize that optimally
- How to create velocity by ensuring every member of the team is committed to the journey ahead and enabling them to shine.
For more information about the guest of this week: