Michelle Cirocco is head of global marketing for Televerde, a company focusing on business-to-business demand generation and inside sales solutions.
Televerde staffs a portion of its contact centers with incarcerated women, providing them with training and helping them find career opportunities after their release.
In this exclusive interview, Cirocco explains how everyone wins when a company provides employees with the opportunity to turn their lives around.
TechNewsWorld: What is Televerde's mission?
Michelle Cirocco: Televerde is the global leader in market insight. Our mission is to provide opportunities for our clients to grow their businesses and achieve their personal best.
We're a B2B sales and marketing agency, and we generate demand and accelerate sales for our clients. Our clients are the largest technology companies in the world, as well as startup, high-tech, high-growth companies. Ninety-eight percent of our customers are in the high-tech space.
We're a true extension of our clients' sales and marketing organizations, and we're consistently delivering measurable value for our customers.
Our company was founded with the idea of providing job opportunities for women in corrections. Our CEO came with a technical background, and when he came to Televerde, he found the answer to what sales, marketing and technology companies needed.
Sales reps needed good-quality leads, and he believed he could teach women in corrections all the skills they needed to enter the technical sales field. He built the business on this idea of providing job opportunities.
We've had over 1,700 women work for us inside correctional facilities in Arizona and Indiana, and we've expanded the business outside of corrections to provide jobs when they're released and want to build real careers.
TNW: Could you describe the trajectory of your career. How did you get where you are today?
Cirocco: My real business career started with Televerde, and I've been with the company for almost 20 years. When you have the opportunity to work with a company with such an amazing social purpose, it makes it easy to fall in love and be committed to the mission of the company.
That's also part of what the company is about -- investing in individuals and helping to achieve their personal best. I started in an entry-level position in project management and account management, and my career has been a procession of increasing responsibility within the company, from sales to sales operations to marketing.
As my responsibilities increased, so did my education. When I started, I had an associate's degree, and then I got my bachelor's in marketing and finally an MBA. It's been a commitment to lifelong learning.
TNW: Why do you have a passion for what you do?
Cirocco: I have a passion for what Televerde does. When you have the opportunity to work with people to recreate themselves and build a meaningful career for themselves and their families, and you get to watch and help that happen, it's very rewarding.
It enables me to have my arms around the brand and, promoting Televerde so that it becomes a bigger organization that can provide more jobs and more opportunities for women. The bigger this company gets, the more women and families we can help.
TNW: What does it mean to use technology to accentuate the human connection? And why is it important?
Cirocco: The thing about technology is that we're a human-touch organization. We're people people. Everybody's using technologies like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, marketing automation tools, search engine marketing and lead analytics tools.
We're using all these tools and technologies to identify who we should communicate with, and we use them to set the stage for our marketing and demand-generation efforts, and to get our names or clients' names in front of their prospects.
Ultimately, though, our real goal is to build relationships. At the end of the day, people buy from people. Technology is a tool for us to enable trust and build relationships.