This episode of the Futurum Tech Podcast – Interview Series is the eighth installment of our Intelligent Enterprise Industry Series — done in partnership with SAP. I welcomed Lance Senoyuit, an executive advisor for the financial services industry at SAP to discuss how he is helping organizations focus on furthering their intelligent enterprise story.
The Interconnected Insurer
SAP recently partnered with Oxford Economics to conduct a research study to identify how an interconnected mindset impacts organizations. It also covers the industry’s progress to date, along with challenges, benefits, and best practices that are facing the insurance industry. The report includes findings from 3,000 senior executives, including 300 from the insurance sector.
My conversation with Lance revolved around the following:
- How the insurance industry is doing in 2020 as a result of the pandemic.
- The digital transformation initiatives organizations in the insurance industry are undertaking.
- How organizations within the insurance industry are innovating a mostly stagnant industry.
- Ways insurance companies are approaching recruiting and retaining talent.
- The data silos that currently exist in the industry and how the leading organizations are eliminating them.
- The landscape of insurance partnerships.
Lance and I explored some of the findings of the Oxford Economics report: The Interconnected Insurer that will have a big impact on the future. We only explored a few topics in the report and there’s so much more to it. If you’re interested in a comprehensive view of the subject download The Oxford Economics report on the Interconnected Insurance sector here.
Listen to my interview with Lance here:
Disclaimer: The Futurum Tech Podcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Read more analysis from Futurum Research:
Increasing Resilience, Profitability, And Sustainability In The Utilities Industry
Increasing Resilience And Sustainability In The Public Sector
Increasing Resilience, Profitability, And Sustainability In The Professional Services Industry
Image Credit: Cogneesol
Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Welcome to The Futurum Tech Podcast, the Interview Series. I’m your host, Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst, and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. And welcome to this exciting interview series podcast with Lance Senoyuit, I almost got that name right. I’m pretty sure it’s close. And he can correct me when he comes on the air here. But Lance is a Industry Executive Advisor at SAP, and he covers the insurance space. And if you’ve been following the Futurum Tech podcast, Lance is going to be joining us as one of 10 guests in a continuation of an Oxford Economics Study, where we are really talking about the convergence of the intelligent enterprise, of business and digital transformation, what each of these industries is doing. And I’m really excited about this particular show, because it’s an industry that is rapidly transforming. So without further ado, Lance, welcome to the Futurum Tech podcast. Thank you, and thank you SAP for joining me today.
Lance Senoyuit: Hey, thank you, Daniel, for the time today, I’m looking forward to talking with you here for a little bit.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s going to be fun and I’ve really enjoyed this whole series. I always tell everybody that’s listening, because I don’t know where you picked it up, and if you pick this up off of a social share, and this is the first one you’re listening to, or if you’ve listened to a whole series of these, but these are all really enjoyable. We’ve talked to public sector, and automotive, and oil and gas. And what I’ve found is that every single discussion there’s something that you could learn, whether you’re in that industry, or you working in an adjacent industry, or you’re just in business and interested in hearing how companies are transforming. And of course, the year 2020 has made for some even more difficult and different approaches and business transformations. And there’s so much to learn from businesses across the spectrum there.
So I’ve given everybody your name, your role, your title at SAP, but go ahead and give us a quick rundown, Lance, of your background and insurance, and just a little bit about what being an Industry Executive Advisor at SAP really means on a day-to-day basis.
Lance Senoyuit: Yeah, certainly Daniel. The industry executive advisor is basically, break it down, industry, I’ve been fortunate enough to be in financial services for the last 25 years. And that’s a combination between banking and insurance company, with some big names that you may know like JP Morgan Chase, KeyBank, and what have you, as well as Northwestern Mutual. And then when you talk about executive, what our responsibility to do, Daniel, was connect with senior level executives in the C-suite, and in a sense, be the liaison between them and our technology teams. Now, myself included, we’re not necessarily tech experts, but we do have a clear understanding of what’s going on in the industry. So for example, a line of business, we love engaging with line of business leaders. We never leave them out of the poll. So from the advisor standpoint, we do that. That’s what we do. We have those nice customer first meetings, and we try to give them a nice overview of how we go to market and how we engage. And then we just work with them and partner throughout the entire journey.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. And it is very interesting, this in this industry, as you heard me mention before, fast paced, fast moving, it’s got its share of disruptors and its share of laggards. I’m sure you’re speaking to all sides of them. You’re trying to drive the laggards board, get them transforming and investing. And those that are on the disruptive side, you want to keep them disruptive and keep them from basically becoming victims of their own success. Now, as I mentioned to you, I’m an industry tech analyst that focuses on working with companies like SAP, and other big technology organizations. But in my part-time side gig is I’m an author. I’ve written seven books on digital transformation, on the future of work, human machines, AI, building future-proof organizations. And I’ve talked a lot with insurance companies. It seems when we used to travel and leave our homes, I used to do a lot of speaking in between advising tech, and it was funny, but insurance companies were always super interested in hearing about the future.
So there’s no question that this industry is fast moving, it’s on its toes. It knows it’s in the space of being disrupted, there’s been launches, new IPOs this year of companies that are promising to disrupt this industry as a whole. I got imagine is pretty exciting out there. I know 2020 has been crazy, but before, I’ve got some specific questions about what you’re doing every day and about there’s an interesting Oxford Economic Study that SAP got involved with that has some specific insights, but just overall perception, how is the insurance industry doing in 2020? What are you hearing? What is the market saying? Is it plowing forward or is it struggling?
Lance Senoyuit: Yeah. It was funny that you tied and talked about laggers, fast followers and disruptors. What has happened the last seven months, everyone has been disrupted, even disruptors have been disrupted. So we’ve all taken a step back, taken a deep breath, and then we’ve readjusted ourselves from there. I will say, one thing that commendable, and you kind of pointed out in the Oxford study, is how important the insurance industry is to our overall not only business environment, personal environment, but the world in general, and the insurance industry, Daniel, really stepped up and did the right thing in a lot of ways. You saw our reductions in premiums. You saw them pull back on accepting premiums. That’s just first and foremost hats off to a lot of the executives that we talk to on a daily basis, and teams, because they helped channel a lot of ways.
One big thing, too, you’d think that financial services, banking, insurance are a little ahead of the game when it came to remote, myself included. I used to manage a line of business and had roughly about 300 people in a contact center that managed different lines of business, and Daniel, we would allow only the best of our best to work remote. And that was 10 years ago. So we had some of the VPNs in place. We had some of the technology in place, so it was a little easier shift for insurance and in banking, financial services, to move toward remote, which basically was a huge disruptor. Having said that, that was from a customer facing standpoint, a lot of the back office though, last couple of years, probably yourself included, myself, we work remote. So we were fortunate enough to be able to have all those capabilities in place.
So unlike other industries, perhaps manufacturing and auto, I don’t think we missed a beat there. We had to revamp things, we had a huge surge of activity on our end. A lot of the cloud companies had a huge surge of activity, like ourselves, ,because a lot of people that were not adopting and were fast followers had now had to adopt clouds. So we had a huge uptick right after the situation, [inaudible] adopting, they’re seeing how it can help drive down the overall cost. It’s been a blessing in disguise, but once again, hats off to insurance banking and all the others who put their best foot forward in these unfortunate times.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, no question. We’ve heard stats, 5, 10 years of transformation in weeks, months, days.
Lance Senoyuit: Good point.
Daniel Newman: It happened really fast, and it did really happen across the industries, but you’re right, a lot of the white collar type industries were able to transform quickly, even more insurance perhaps than banking because less retail, of course some people might’ve walked into their State Farm office or American Family, but there wasn’t a lot you couldn’t do remotely. Whereas in some cases, some banks had been much more progressive. There was the Allys and some of those, Capital Ones, that have been largely gone digital. And there are other banks that still really depended a lot on retail presence. In insurance, it was really everything could be done through a series of online forms, and that transformation had started a couple of years.
Ago in terms of your organization, certainly remote was very possible. I’d say the biggest thing I’ve noticed is collaboration. Just sometimes it’s good to get into rooms of people, be able to hammer stuff out, not have multiple apps running, you know you’ve got people’s attention. I love the Zooms and the WebEx-es and the Microsoft Teams, but I could also go for a few of those brainstorms, where you’re physically around people. So rather than let you respond to that, I want to push forward, because I want to get into this industry stuff that I’ve got for you. Is that all right with you? I gave you a lot of meat there, but I think this actually flows really nicely, because we started talking about the transformation, the laggards, the followers, and one of the things that came out of the study, and the data, and just what your industry is specifically facing is a slow transformation to personalization. Customers want it, they want more personal experiences, they want to feel this way, and insurance, we certainly see the commercials from certain companies that makes you feel like that’s already happening. But I think that the data point is about half of insurers are not even really playing in this personalized space yet, they’re lagging behind. In this era, how should insurance companies be thinking about this? How do they get more personalized? What do they do to compete?
Lance Senoyuit: Insurance companies probably are in the best situation to make this happen, and mainly because of who their sales channels are. When you talk about property, casualty and life annuity, which I work in day to day, a majority, Daniel, of the representatives are independent contractors, or they are captive agents. That being said, they’re still in a sense self-employed business owners. A lot of them are mission only type of individuals. And they really have to own their business. And personalization is the lifeblood. For example, when I was a life insurance agent years ago, it was important for us, and we didn’t have the data to support, but if I’m working with you, Daniel, and I find out you have a wife and two children, I want to be able to, on a consistent basis, our reach out to you and identify what’s going on. We would do a lot of that stuff in Excel spreadsheet.
A lot of the insurers today are adopting that data and realizing how important that is in working with their agents and pushing that information out to them on a consistent basis, being able to predict life changing events, even as simple as, what’s the most important date of the year for you? It’s probably your birthday, correct? I know it is for me, it’s the most exciting day of the year for pain next to the holidays.
But I have a representative, a financial representative that I worked with, oh, for 20 years now. And this individual, Daniel, to this day calls me on my birthday and just wishes me a happy birthday. You talk about personalization and getting to know me, and we don’t have a discussion unless we need to involve my finances. But what does that do for me? Paul now is become more than just my financial advisor. Paul has become my friend. It’s personal between Paul and I.
And guess what happened, Daniel? Paul not only has my relationship, he has my wife Karen’s relationship, my daughter’s relationship, and now my son just took a position, a part-time position at UPS, and my wife set up a ROTH for him. So guess who has that? Paul. So it’s important to have that personalization. Insurance companies are on the leading cutting edge because they have the sales forces that are engaged. So when you have contractors that have been with your company X amount of years, if you’re able to provide them the right data, be able to help them predict and provide the right analytics around their client base, I don’t believe there’s any industry, more poised in order to be successful personalization than the insurance industry.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, you make a lot of great points. I think about how I ended up with my first insurance broker, how I ended up with my first investment broker, and it was very much personal. Dad, friend, family, in my case, my father handed me to both of them. These are people, that’s very typical. Now the difference in the digital age and digital commerce age is the way people are finding information, the way technology is, the Robinhoods or the E-trades have shifted investing and taking out some of the… So these companies that are more traditional needing to up level the personalization to try to say, hey, there’s a reason to keep working with us. There’s a reason to still have that local relationship. And by the way, we don’t just use local, and handshake, and old buddy, pal type friendships. There’s also, we have the right technology, the right products, the right mix. All that stuff has to be part of it or else you’ve to personalize on both sides, by transforming, and updating, and using analytics and data and concurrently, keeping that high touch that has won business for generations.
Lance Senoyuit: Yeah. You’ve made a good point with some of the different organizations out there that do a lot of their business online only, and there is a gap there. When you experience and identify where that gap is with those organizations is when times are tough. I can guarantee you when the market goes down and you’re looking to identify what’s going on with annuities, you’re probably not going to go ahead and purchase online, you’re probably going to want to make sure you’re talking to a professional that understands what the different rates are going to be and how that’s going to impact your overall retirement plan. You’re going to go ahead and gather the information, studies are out there galore that talk about how people, before they even engage with you, right, Daniel, that about 90% of their mind is made up.
The other thing too, you pointed out too, is referrals, our millennial and generations B are more apt to go by referrals. And a lot of it is digital. You just think about restaurants, Yelp. I don’t go to a restaurant unless I look at Yelp first, and you’re seeing more of that in our industries. So all of that is combining together to make that overall customer experience that much more important, and your traditional organizations, like I talked about before in the past, are right now position in order to go ahead and make those types of things happen, but they have to be proactive. It’s one thing to go in and gather information, but if you are consistently reaching and cultivating that relationship, you’re understanding what those life changing events are, you’re having that, hey, happy birthday, happy holidays, or what have you, you’re going to be top of mind.
The difference is, you become a trusted advisor and not just a source of information. That’s where organizations, and even Robinhood is starting to figure things like that out. You can start to see those organizations adapting, and those direct to market organizations are realizing, listen, I’ve got to provide much more information. I’ve got to really educate my consumer before I even make a transaction. So they’re even adopting that from a digital standpoint.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. You make just a ton of great points. And I want to flip back for a moment, from the customer here, because the other part of success longterm is people, and I’ve said it forever, culture and people. So to drive a pipeline and transform and becoming an intelligent enterprise, you can’t only do it by the product and services you deliver, but it’s those people that work within these organizations that are coupled, that are marrying all this technology that stand behind it and make sure that those relationships are cemented. How are these companies approaching acquiring, and recruiting, and winning the best talent and keeping that talent? Because it’s not only about finding it, it’s about retaining it and then having it grow. And we know that up skilling and changing that path is going to keep becoming more difficult as AI and ML and data changes roles, and of course automation as well.
Lance Senoyuit: Yeah. That’s a great point. When I was a senior level executive and I had teams, it didn’t matter if I had a team of three or a 3000, I add a model, perfect extraordinary service for the internal client, external client, and stakeholder. Daniel, notice which one was first, the internal client, because I realized that they were my client as a senior level executive. And guess what? Happy colleagues make happy clients. If you have unhappy colleagues, guess what? You have unhappy clients. You don’t need to have an Oxford study to figure that out.
But Oxford points out some really great points in relation to the overall life cycle of an employee. And it starts right there when you’re making them aware of your overall industry and corporation, you have to do just like you’re doing with your clients. You have to educate them, and you have to enable them to have a better understanding of what you offer.
Not just a matter of that, hey, I’m a Fortune 500 company, SAP for example. Hey, we’re a Fortune 500 company, you’re just going to love the work for us. No, you have to let them know about the various programs you have in your organization. You have to go ahead and do branding, like we do on a consistent basis around employee engagement. You have to make sure that you’re ranked very high when it comes to surveys and what have you. And then from there, you’re going to go ahead and have to onboard these individuals correctly. Daniel, when I started in the industry, it was actually in banking and finance and I started in collections. It was my first job out of college next to the restaurant job that I worked. And I was thrown right into a pit with about 45 different people that were just going on the phone all day.
It was a horrible experience. You would never think to do that today. I don’t know how I survived, but I did. I learned a lot doing it, but the onboarding is very critical, especially with our millennial generations, they have a lot of different alternatives. Technology has allowed them to do things, you’re seeing more entrepreneurs at that age then you ever have before. Why? Because they have the capabilities. So you have to be a cut above not only your competitors, but you have to be a cut above what their mindset is to go and be an entrepreneur. So provide that type of experience for them. Let them know about that on the onboard. And then from there, it’s about retaining and rewarding. When you talk about our industry, there is nothing more important than making sure that you are paying individuals correctly. You’re talking about men and women that work 12, 13, 14 hours a day, not just five, not just six, sometimes seven days a week, Daniel, in order to go ahead and make the rent when they’re building their business out of the gate. Because you have to do that in order to be successful when you’re working for some of the captive organizations.
So you have to make sure that you’re paying them on time, number one, number two, Daniel, you have to make sure that they have an insight to what they’re going to get paid. When I started in the industry, I remember my wife, she’s our CEO, CFO, she still is at our home, and she would come to me and say, “what do you have? What are you bringing home this week?” “I don’t know. I know I closed the Johnson policy. It was a two million life insurance policy.” “Well, how do you not know?” “Well, it’s complicated because this, that, and the other thing.” That has to go away, you have to streamline that. And these individuals have to have a dashboard that they can go ahead and prove to their friends, family, and loved ones who are putting a lot of pressure on them to say, “Why are you doing this? You can go and work here, there, or anywhere.” They have clear line of sight to what they’re going to be paid.
And then from there, as you cultivate and grow these employees, continuous education. One of the blessings here in SAP, we have Open SAP, which is a platform I can go to at any time, Daniel, and I do. I discipline myself, my mentor and my manager disciplines herself, in order to make sure that I am consistently growing within the organization and taking advantage. So we’ve outlined a program the beginning of the year, and she holds me accountable to it. And I have to admit, I’ve been here five years, I’m a heck of a lot stronger than I was day one when I started here, Daniel. And then, when you look at an individual like myself, I don’t plan on working, I want to be like you, I want to write books. I commend you, seven books. That’s outstanding. I haven’t written seven letters in my lifetime, Daniel. So that’s outstanding, but organizations have to go ahead and prepare and help us to understand, hey, listen, you’re a valuable resource, you’re a valuable asset, Lance.
We’re going to help you to understand what your roadmap is here for the next X amount of years in the organization. And we’re going to give you opportunities. What do you want to do, Lance? And those discussions never go away. Like I said, perfect extraordinary service for the internal, external and stakeholder. Put internal first, and you can’t go wrong, Daniel.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, absolutely. And I sense your passion. I love that.
Lance Senoyuit: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: I know you are customer facing, but it sounds like leadership is something that you would enjoy and probably thrive at. So there’s a recommendation, and thanks for the compliment. Writing the books has been quite a journey to go alongside building a company.
But it’s also a great way to document that journey and to really have a chance to share, because we’re all knowledge seekers out there. We’re knowledge seekers, and we’re also over communicators. So I guess I get to do a little bit of both there. I want to talk a little bit about the tech that underpins everything. So we’ve talked about the industry transforming, we’ve talked about people transforming, you’re working for a tech company that’s a solutions company, that’s a software company, that’s a data analytics company. It’s a lot of things. The intelligent enterprise.
One of the big challenges that companies have, and I got to imagine your industry, is cutting data across the organization, you have data, tends to be, you’re talking about, how do you not know the amount you’re taking home? Well, this system and that sales analyst doesn’t talk to this business analyst that doesn’t talk to this finance department. And now all of a sudden, what we’ve seen monumental movements here, it’s getting better. It is getting better, but how is the industry dealing with it? Is the industry being proactive here? Is the insurance industry keeping up with the possibilities. And what do you recommend to the industry about breaking down those data analytic silos?
Lance Senoyuit: When you look at it from the Oxford study, Daniel, when you look at insurance in comparison to the other industries that were surveyed, we’re doing an outstanding job internally. One of the things that we really have to do a lot better at is working with our partners. There’s an awful lot of activity that comes, especially in the area of claims, that you work with different outside organizations, third parties, in order to make things happen. So if you want to have that true “digital experience” where you have your systems of record interacting seamlessly with your business operations intelligence, you’re not only going to have to be able to include the data that is within your organization, but being able to share that data outside of your organization.
And the thing too that’s a little more complicated, I believe for insurance is data, and you’ll see in the study comes from a number of different areas. There’s customer, there’s employee, there’s operational, there’s financial, sales, R and D, contract, supply chain, you’ll see that and the impact that we have with all that different data. So it’s not just a one size fits all. And then you have different regulations of what you can share too. So more so than you have in other industries, because we are regulated to a certain extent. So we’re doing a really good job of that.
Naturally, we can do a lot better. I think every organization is unique too. I talk to organizations all day, every day. I used to be able to get out there in person and then literally sit inside those organizations for two, three weeks at a time. And I would interview, I would interview the IT leaders, I would interview the finance leaders, sales leaders, marketing leaders, the HR leaders, and understand, hey, what are your concerns? What are your constraints? What’s your nirvana state?
Basically what you find is they all want the same thing. They want access. They want to know, they want to be able to predict, and they want to be able to make their life a lot easier. And they want to get away from using Excel spreadsheets, myself included. We still have some things here, and were are no different than others at times. We are guilty of our own sins, that sometimes a manager will say, hey, I need this updated on an Excel spreadsheet, and you go, oh, you’re killing me.
Daniel Newman: I’ll interrupt you to make you laugh. I read a survey today that said 66% of sales execs would rather clean their bathroom than update their CRM.
Lance Senoyuit: Thank you. Thank you. Now, if you have a great CRM, like, and I don’t want to brag about ours, but there’s some great UI there, but you still get those offshoots of ad hocs that you have to do. But that’s a great point there too. So when you look at that information, you also have to take a step back, and every organization is different, Daniel, and you have to, in a sense, let’s say you are in charge of marketing. You want data that’s 360 on your clients. Well, that’s easier said than done, but there’s a number of different people that you’re going to have to endear yourself to, in a sense, sell yourself to, and your idea. And one of those is IT. And IT, Daniel, has a list a mile long of things they have to get done yesterday, and now here you come.
So what finding is individuals that are accessible in this are partnering with organizations like ours, partnering with [inaudible] of the world and different organizations, putting together business cases before they even walk into IT, and being able to lay out a roadmap of exactly what they want to do, how easy it’s going to be for them. And then what the return is going to be on the organization, because each persona is different. IT has different wants, needs, and desires than finance does, sales and service has different wants, needs, and desires, and definitely different personality characters, in a good way, other than the others. And then marketing and HR. The one team that I believe is being left out, and Oxford I’m glad pointed it out, was the HR team. And we just talked about how important the employee experience was. Why does HR not have a seat at the table, Daniel, to this day? It just baffles my mind.
And if we are in a situation, which we are, that it’s cumbersome in order to attract new and good talent, and then even more cumbersome because of our structures at times, especially in the frontline, the lifeblood of organization sales to retain that talent, why are we not with HR, giving them cutting edge information that helps them to go ahead and make, number one, their our internal colleague, right? Make their life a lot easier. And number two, help to make the individuals that are dealing with and trying to attract and retain and onboard a lot easier. Shame on us as an industry for not giving HR a seat at the table.
Daniel Newman: I would actually say, it’s not just your industry. It’s not just insurance. It’s many industries leave seats, important seats at the table empty, whether that’s diversity of thought or of department, and that’s going to always cost businesses. The data is in, and this is absolutely to be true. And I’d say the other reason we struggle is the tech is there, but the enterprise has struggled to adopt and adapt quick enough because people in tech have to be more interdependent. It’s not one and the other.
We have about five minutes left. I got one more question I want to give you a shot to talk to, and then we got to wrap this up. Lance, it’s been great having you, thanks so much for spending time with me.
Lance Senoyuit: Pleasure is mine, Daniel. Thank you.
Daniel Newman: So I want to talk just a little bit about the landscape and partnerships. Insurance industry is, is ripe with partnerships. It’s an extended landscape. The pandemic is probably making this an even more important factor. Talk a little bit about how the industry can think about this, thinking about partnerships, digital native relationships, or investments in becoming more digital, appearing, expanding to drive business opportunities, and then of course increase customer staff.
Lance Senoyuit: Yeah. And that’s a great point too, and that’s all around the extended interconnected landscape, and extending that outward. So how do you do that? You become so inundated from a day-to-day standpoint with what you know, and actually as human beings, what we do, we migrate to what’s comfortable for us. In here, we’re really talking about thinking outside of the box, not only engaging your partners, but remember I talked about those life changing events, right Daniel? So why are we not working with organizations that are on the front end of that? Let’s just take hospitals for instance. They have a maternity wards, and they know who’s having a baby and who’s not, so why are we not gathering some type of data, if we can partner with them in one way, shape or form, whatever from a HIPAA standpoint is right. And, or just understanding what’s going on, announcements what have you. Social media is another great way to be able to identify these life changing events. And being able to partner and engage outside of your organization and extending.
So teaming up with the Googles, the LinkedIns, the Twitters, and what have you, and perhaps having some type of analytics provided to you in order to be able to predict what those life changing events are going to be so you can be on the front end of those and position your advertisements correctly, and extending yourself that way, I believe is a very important way, and just extending your overall landscape and then partnering within your organization too. Think outside the box, just because you’re in IT doesn’t mean that you should not be sitting down and going out on calls with your sales team to understand what’s truly going on out there and how you can extend what you’re doing to them on their platforms and understanding, really understanding their platforms. I think what we’re guilty of sometimes as IT professionals, we buy a certain set of software, we plug and play that software, and then when we walk away and we look at the next type of software, and we don’t do a good job of going back and seeing.
So within your organization, as IT professionals, you have to go kind of door to door. We talked about the marketing department, sit down with them. Continuously interview them on a consistent basis to understand what’s working, what can we do to help you more? And then you can gather ideas from them, hey, who outside of our organization should we partner with? You’re on the front lines every day, Mr. and Mrs. Salesperson, what are you seeing? Where are your leads truly coming from that are important to you? Being able to monitor and identify where your business is coming from, and then being able to get on the front end of that, Daniel, I think is extremely important to be able to go ahead and extend your overall plan.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. It’s a lot of great points, Lance, and it sounds like, like I said, you really are passionate about this business.
Lance Senoyuit: Thank you.
Daniel Newman: And I think when you’re trying to help companies transform and adopt new technologies, and adapt to all this digital change, I think it’s always going to be that combination. You got to understand the tech, you got to understand what can be done, but you also have to truly love and be able to show the community and the businesses that you serve, especially in an industry like yours, that has a lot of small players to go with the big ones, for sure, you understand. And by the way, that’s what this series has been all about, getting deeper into these industries, getting deeper and understanding that there’s these converging forces of information, intelligence, business and automation and people. So this study, the Oxford one that you referenced a few times, hit that on the head. So at this point, Lance, I got to wrap up, but hey, I want to say thank you again so much for being a guest, hope to have you back sometime soon.
Lance Senoyuit: Well, Daniel, thank you. My next point of business today is to buy one of your books. I’m excited to read that. So thank you again.
Daniel Newman: Absolutely. Every podcast I can get a book sale, I can sell a book. Anyway, so everyone out there, I want to say, thanks a lot for tuning into this edition of the Futurum Tech Podcast Interview Series. It’s been great having you with us, check out all the different podcasts with the SAP industries. We’ve enjoyed this partnership, talking to these industry executives, 10 different industries, so much information, so many insights, all about 2020 and how these businesses are handling a very challenging year.
Hit that subscribe button. We’d love to have you as part of our community. We’d like to have you tune into all of our episodes across the industry with executives and interviews. And then of course, the podcast from our rich team of analysts that have all kinds of insights about where the market is going and what’s going on with technology. But with that in mind, that’s all we’ve got for you today. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you later. Bye bye.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
