[00:00:27] Jay: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the first customer podcast today. I am lucky enough to be joined by Lamees, but she is the senior VP of partnerships at Zoovu. I think I got all that right. Did I get that
right?
[00:00:40] Lamees: did.
[00:00:40] Jay: Wow. That's a mouthful. How are you
[00:00:42] Lamees: I'm all right, Pinky. Thanks for having me. It's exciting.
[00:00:45] Jay: coming from coming live from a small village outside of London, which we talked a little bit about,
you know, as a, An uncultured american my geography is not great, but I do know where london is So we had a fun conversation around that so a little bit of a different guest today.
I think this is very cool you get to speak to a little bit of you know, different,perspective maybe than some of our normal guests But I think you got some really relevant experience and you've been a founder. So you kind of know that role where did you grow up and did that you know, have any impact on any of your entrepreneurial spirit along the way?
[00:01:19] Lamees: it's a good question. I grew up in East London. So obviously in the UK in London, but it was the East of London. And anybody that is familiar with London knows that the East side of it, isn't the most pleasant side. And so, I'd say that my upbringing was, you know, it was a humble upbringing and I wasn't, you know, born into money, but I actually think that paved the way for a lot of the hunger, and the ambition That, that I had at a very young age.
And so I found myself just always wanting more in, in any situation, whether that was school, whether that was kind of work experience, I just wasn't prepared to kind of take the normal path. and so I was always trying to think outside of the box and come up with creative ways,of doing things, whether, you know, securing job interviews through, sending CVs.
Created like newspapers and wrapping them up as Christmas gifts and sending them to people. it was just kind of built in me,to do things differently. And then just to say, yeah, I wasn't a kid that played with Barbie dolls. Not that there's anything wrong with Barbie, but I was a Lego builder.
That was kind of what my parents gave me. And so I think the Genesis was always building things.
[00:02:27] Jay: What is my mannequin? I want to hear about this thing you founded. what was it? What is it? What are, you know, how'd you come to it?
[00:02:43] Lamees: law degree for the first year and dropped out. It just wasn't for me. you know, and again, I think that being a young Southeast Asian girl, my parents wanted me to follow the path of least resistance, a safe path.
But as soon as I'd done my first year, I just knew that I, you know, I wasn't going to last being in that environment in the way that it felt quite restrictive. It wasn't creative. It didn't allow me to think outside the box. The law doesn't. So, I realized, you know, that I wanted to set up a business and that business manifested itself as a personal shopping business.
So at university, I set up a blog and I actually got some interest from people saying, Hey, do you do this as a service? And so I was earning, you know, back then it was like a thousand dollars. it's pounds per day to take people on these personal shopping, sessions where I'd curate outfits for them and mix and match and create a lookbook.
And I realized, God, you know, this is a problem, you know, that people had because my audience, my customers were typically men. And it was men in the age range of about 27 to about 40, and they all had slightly different problems. Overall, the problems were that they wanted to feel seen and heard by women.
and so maybe some were early in their kind of relationship game and maybe some were later, maybe divorced and back on the market, but they all wanted to find themselves again. And so they felt that kind of getting their confidence back through fashion was a way to do it. And so I recognize that the problem existed, not just in Kingston.
In, in, you know, outside of London where I went to university, but this was a global problem. And so my head quickly went to, how can I scale this small business into something larger? And so my mannequin was born, which was an app that you would come to, and it would ask you a series of questions about your lifestyle, brands that you like, your budget, and it would aggregate an outfit for you from all of the brands that you said you, you liked, and you could then purchase from within the app.
[00:04:40] Jay: And what happened to that?
[00:04:42] Lamees: So long story short, the app itself, we got seed funding for it, which was incredible. had, you know, tons of mentorship and all of those things. I made a ton of mistakes. I was in my early twenties. And after a few big failures, you know, some were my fault, some were external parties, the company failed, and it was the end.
Probably the biggest to this day failure that I've had, but it taught me so, so much. but it did take me about a year to, to come back from that. And I was, what, yeah, 22 at the time.
[00:05:16] Jay: Yeah, I was going to ask how long it took to recover because that is a, that's a big rollercoaster to kind of come over the top of and come back down, especially at that age. That's a lot to process. I would imagine as a
[00:05:29] Lamees: it
[00:05:30] Jay: Yeah. so did you kind of, Recalibrate after that and say, I want to go work and do something different.
I want to work for somebody else and make the business stuff somebody else's problems. what was kind of the actual thought process there when you step back into the ring?
[00:05:44] Lamees: The truth was back then, you know, I was 22. I'd had a degree in, cause in politics I did drop out of law, but I pivoted and did a politics degree while I was building the business. and then when it tanked, I took about six months just to be with myself and kind of get myself back to a place of being able to wake up every day and, you know, try to see past it.
Cause it was heavy. but I just decided I needed to pay the bills. And so paying the bills meant just getting a job. And at that stage, back then it was okay. Let me go to a recruiter and let me just try and get any job that I can right now. And I got a job as a receptionist at a, you know, who Mercedes Benz are, right?
the car.
[00:06:25] Jay: Oh, yes.
[00:06:26] Lamees: Yeah. Oh, yeah. so I've got a job as a receptionist at a Mercedes Benz car dealership. And I just remember that day answering that phone, you know, hello, it's Lamees Butt from Mercedes Benz. How can I redirect your call? It was brutal, like brutal, and I don't think that feeling will ever leave me, but what it did do, it was like fuel for my fire.
And so kind of sitting in that moment, I just realized that I was in a position. Yes, I was in a Mercedes Benz local dealership, but how can I use this position where I am right now to navigate to something different. very quickly, I would say within the space of eight months, I was able to navigate to managing operations at a new branch that opened just through the network that I was building in and around the dealership, I was adding value in a ton of places that were running things inefficiently.
So I just made some suggestions for how they should be doing it differently. and it was picked up and I remember getting called into the office one day and just said, we've got an opportunity for you, you'd have to essentially move. branches, but would you be interested in running operations at this place?
And I was like, hell yeah, like absolutely. So, move did that. And then within another year, I managed to navigate myself to Mercedes Benz headquarters, which was the, you know, big head office. And then was running projects for Europe for Mercedes Benz and living out of a suitcase for a few years.
[00:07:45] Jay: Wow. I want to clarify. I do. I have heard obviously of Mercedes. I have never owned one. I have not been fortunate enough to own a Mercedes, but I have certainly heard of them. let's fast forward. what is it that you do today for Zoovu? Like, I mean, it's a pretty lofty title, senior VP, global partnerships and all sorts of, you know, fancy keywords and stuff that I'm sure you get hit up with, you know, lots of spam about,as a SVP, what do you do on a day to day basis today?
[00:08:12] Lamees: So my job day to day is how do we take the company that we have right now and scale it? So, you know, it's about growth and scalable growth, and that's not going to happen kind of one to one. It's about one to many. So we want to develop a series of partnerships, be that strategic partnerships, technology partnerships, with the right people that kind of fit our ICP, so our ideal customer profile.
and we want to really help their organizations serve their customers, By, enabling them with our technology Zoovu.
Zuvu.
[00:08:43] Jay: So, This is where I think it becomes extremely relevant to this podcast. Like I said, you know, typically we have founders on and it's more about their story and their first customer, but now we're at the point where we can talk about, things that are applicable to everybody, right? So if somebody has a.
B2B SaaS company or a B2C company or whatever. Just talk in general terms about that one to many relationship that partnerships enables you, because we've done that in my company. And I kind of stumbled into that as just the idiot CEO, figuring things out as I went through and just sending people emails and calling people and say, Hey, what's up?
Hey man, you guys have this tool that like potential customers of ours would use. I would love to help, you know, help those customers use your tool. And they're like, absolutely. And that's become, you know, just over the years has grown into this portfolio of pretty impressive partnerships we have with these leading tool companies in the industry.
So talk a little bit about, You know, partnerships in general, what is the one to many mean? And like, how would somebody apply that to their business? If they're just trying to kind of get out of that, you know, hunt and peck, you know, kind of lead prospecting thing, like how did they, how do you use partnerships instead?
[00:09:56] Lamees: So I think, you know, the core and the foundation is obviously always to understand and know your customer deeply. So if you know who your customer is and you know who you're serving, it's much easier to go and find partners that align to your values and your customers. And the beauty is that once you understand those customers, it means that you understand their pain.
And once you understand the pain, you can then kind of, you know, see from a partnership perspective. Do those customers have that pain as well? Because you're not only, because what you don't want to be doing, and I've seen this happen with many organizations, and I've also been a part of some of the largest organizations that do this, but it leads to just inefficiency, poor productivity, because what you do is it's a numbers game about partnerships and not value.
So you find people, you know, Building spreadsheets of, you know, all of the partner referral agreements that they've sent out. And they're so excited because they've got 200 partnerships, but they've actually turned around no revenue because of it, whereas actually, when you look at the organizations that have focused and got maybe two to three partnerships that are highly focused, that really solve a problem for their customers, actually you'll see scalability through those channels.
So. I think the one to one approach definitely is good for the early stage businesses really kind of, own your, own your craft, your mission and get to know the customer. But the moment that you feel that actually you've got a specific set of use cases, you're solving real problems.
Now you can go and actually, it's a different angle. It's just essentially pivoting slightly and looking at the organizations that also have. Those, your customers as their customers and be able to solve their problems. Whether that's, what we call kind of in an attached motion. So whether you're selling both products together, or you might be selling it, completely alone and you're just adding value because, you know, for example, like you said, it's just a tool provider.
[00:11:49] Jay: Um,the one thing that. That's a great point, by the way, it's the high value. I mean, there has to be value in the partnerships. There's no like having a list of 200 partners and affiliate links and it doesn't matter if they're not converting, who cares, right? but one of the things I did learn along the way was I had lunch with this guy and it was another tools company.
It was a little bit bigger one and I was talking to him and he's more of a sales guy and it just struck me. That like his lack of interest in a partnership was because I wasn't providing value to him. Right. And it's very easy to like, try to get value for you out of a partnership and try to like, kind of bring these partners in and be like, well, look, it'd be really great. how do you provide that? How do you make sure you're providing that? Are you pitching value at these partnership? Companies. And you're saying like, this is what we're going to be able to get you because even getting those partnerships is tough. Sometimes it's gotta be a two way street. Money's gotta be flowing both ways or like, nobody's going to
make the first move.
Right. So like, how are you going out and kind of attacking these partnerships in a way that's like, we're going to provide you this value. Is it kind of a standard sales pitch, but tweaked for aiming at partners that you're like, look, these are other partners that we work with. And this is the revenue we've been able to give them.
And this is how we could work together. Is that how you go about it?
[00:13:09] Lamees: You know, I actually really like to tweak it based on the profile of person I'm speaking to. So, you know, I'm sure a lot of your audience will be familiar with that concept of being a chameleon. especially, you know, in the entrepreneurial, the founder space, we have to tailor our narrative to who we're speaking to, to ensure that it lands with that specific individual.
So. If I'm speaking to a salesperson at that organization, let's just say it's a VP of sales or their head of sales. And I want to be able to build a partnership with this person. I'm talking dollar signs. I'm talking what you are going to see at the end of this year by partnering with me. That's what we're talking about.
If I'm talking to a solutions person, or if I'm talking to perhaps even leadership, I'm actually not so much focused on the revenue. I'm actually Focused on what they care about, which is solving a real problem for their customer, because they know that if I'm solving the real problem for their customer, the coin comes.
And so it's just about knowing that at any level I would create maybe two to three different pitches and they have to be tailored based on the persona of the person that you're speaking to.
[00:14:11] Jay: That's great. I love that. How are you procuring your targets to go after for partnerships?
[00:14:19] Lamees: So for at the moment, we are highly focused, on kind of a couple of partnerships, one of them being SAP. So SAP is. our most strategic partner. And it's because ultimately across their portfolio, they have 400, 000 customers. And so quite honestly, there's enough for us to chew on probably for the next few years, if, you know, even if we wanted to, but we're solving very real problems for their B2B customer base and B2C.
I mean, Zoovu's customer base is split, 70 percent B2C, and 30 percent B2B, but that's because historically we have built our business working with, you know, Dyson, Bosch, Microsoft, really focused B2C brands. However, what we're seeing in today's market is we're about to go through a real revolution in the B2B space because that concept of future proofing.
Organizations, the way that they were historically running, having to call a salesperson and be on the phone for 90 minutes to build a quote, because the products are so complex that it's a 2000 page catalog to go through all of the configurations like that can't happen anymore. You know, the millennials, the Gen Z's are going to be taking over these roles in the next five years.
They won't be, They won't be dealing with that level of process. And so we have to think about how we digitize that sales process for the B2B world. And so Zoovu and SAP, it's almost just like a match made in heaven right now, to help these organizations think about their next five to 10 years.
[00:15:42] Jay: Does, yeah, obviously I, even the letters AI make my skin crawl a little bit just from the, just the, you know, the complete oversaturation, of the term these days, but does it have any specific use cases in partnerships?
[00:16:01] Lamees: AI.
[00:16:02] Jay: Yeah, it seems that partnerships seem to be such a human
thing and there's a lot of nuance and context required.
I mean, is there any. Opportunity. Is there anything people are doing with it now? Like, how does it fit in that space?
[00:16:17] Lamees: So, you know, it's interesting cause I think AI, you know, there's obviously a ton of hype right now and obviously generative AI and chat GBT. And I feel like. I was giving a keynote a few weeks back and it was all about generative AI. And the question I kept getting asked was, you know, how come, you know, what's the future I'm going to be like with generative AI?
And it was almost like very vague, vague questions. And he was, this was coming from media and I get it because they want to know how to, report it back to their audience, back to the market. And the one answer that I kept giving back was. You have to think about it from your customer's perspective.
So the, what I mean by that is applied AI works, but you can only apply the AI if you know the problem that you're solving. And so from a Zoovu perspective, for example, we're solving problems by helping our customers find the right products for their needs. So let's just say Bosch, right? I, my washing machine broke and I have no idea.
I'm not an expert. With drum sizes and washing machines and all the things that you need to know. But I just know I need a good washing machine. I also don't have time to go to the local, you know, retailer to be able to have that conversation with a sales rep. So I want to go online and I want to have that same experience that I would have with an experienced sales rep, but have it online.
So ask me, how many kids do I have? What's my family size? You know, how many washes do I do a week? do I want to dry the clothes? What type of clothes am I doing? Ask me human questions and get me to the product for my needs. And so we're solving real problems. With, with our platform that said, I do believe that there is always going to be an alliance between human beings and AI, because I think that always has to be, that context that's applied to it, especially right now, you know, I think it's hard to say in five to 10 years, what it's going to look like because things are moving so fast.
And I don't think anyone at this stage could probably say what it's going to look like, because of how fast it's moving. But what I would say is that. as long as you can apply it to a problem, we're gonna, we're gonna stay on a, you know, stay on a good path.
[00:18:30] Jay: Yeah, I think the, the C word context, I think, is the biggest it's the biggest thing that humans offer to the equation, right? I get the same question a lot about and we do software quality assurance and I get the same question, you know, is a, I going to take over and I don't think so. we're going to use it and it's going to be great. But I'm not concerned that humans aren't going to be involved anymore just because of the contextual nature of what it is that we do.
[00:18:58] Lamees: it kind of provides an assist, right? So like the way I see it is in B2B selling, for example, yes, we're using AI to digitize sales and offer recommendations for quotes, and bills of materials, however, the relationship that. You know, I myself person can have with my customer now is far greater because I'm not sitting here sifting through pages of, catalogs or speaking to different teams, having you on hold, I'm focused on my relationship with you.
And that's the most important. I don't need to worry about the manual errors I'm going to make by building this quote on my own. So it's an assist role.
[00:19:34] Jay: Yeah. Yeah. that's interesting. it does make me wonder a little bit on the flip side though. If the person doesn't have that subject matter expertise and they're relying on the assist from AI, do they lose a little bit of that, you know, authority that you have as a salesperson where you're like, this person knows. Exactly what washing machine I need because they, you know, they've sold 10 million of them. Their grandma uses this one and like, you know, so there, there is like a little bit of a balance there, I think. all right. So let's switch gears a little bit. You have a podcast as well. We're talking about that a little bit.
Tell me about the podcast. what is the premise of it? I think you said your number 50 over in Europe or the UK,
you know, rocking it up the charts. what is your podcast called? And what's it about?
[00:20:19] Lamees: So podcasts called In Her Shoes and In Her Shoes is about discovering the women behind the titles. So, you know, over the last 15 years, I've built my career in tech and the higher that I elevated, the less women I saw. And my goal really was to have the conversations. The, you know, aren't being had outwardly or aren't being publicized and aren't in magazines, real life conversations with women who are at the table, who've had to go through challenges to get to where they are.
and the hope is that it serves as a blueprint to just empower and inspire the next generation of leaders to rise, because there was definitely some challenges and lessons learned along the way, and to be able to package that and give back, is something that. I think as I've developed in my career, it's something that has now become incredibly important to me.
It's almost a bit more of purpose.
[00:21:11] Jay: I love the, in her shoes.
[00:21:14] Lamees: Yes. In her shoes.
[00:21:16] Jay: we'll link that, in the show description notes. All right. I have one more, question for you. Non business related. it's the mystery question. I still don't have a sounder for this. I need
like a sound when it's all right. So.if you could do anything on earth and he knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?
[00:21:32] Lamees: that's a really good question. Let's sing.
[00:21:35] Jay: It's my favorite. It's my favorite question And this pause is my favorite pause in the whole show and people
go wait a minute I actually have to come up with an answer.
[00:21:43] Lamees: yeah, I think if I could do anything in the world, what would it, Oh God.honest, any, I wouldn't be, honestly, I'd solve world peace. That's what I
[00:21:52] Jay: There you go. I love it. I love it. That's fair especially in today's
world. I think that's very topical so all right, if people want to find more about you, from your podcast, obviously which we'll link in the show if you want to reach out to you, how do they do that? Let me see
[00:22:05] Lamees: I mean, find us at Zoovu. com. You can plug us for a demo there if you'd like to, if it's of interest or me personally, LinkedIn. I'm very active over there. So come hit me up.
[00:22:15] Jay: Beautiful. Well, you're a fantastic guest. you're doing some cool stuff and I hope people reach out and thank you so much for being on. I'll talk to you soon.
[00:22:21] Lamees: Thanks for having me.
[00:22:22] Jay: See ya.