Ep # 162: Turning Personality Insight Into Daily Execution ft. John Betancourt (CEO, Humantelligence)

john Betancourt 00:07 Culture is so specific to the region, to the company, and all of recruiting is missing that because they don't have access to the values, motivators or work styles. The few companies that think it's important are only spending money on behavioral tools. And that is not very predictive on culture fit. Taylor Kenerson 00:17 Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearthed the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 00:36 Hey, greetings everybody. This is Adil from Hyperengage Podcast. I know we started a little late, but it's all good. We get a push through recording, and the editing team will take the work, and you'll have this episode right on time. Today, we're going to be talking about human behaviors and how they have exceptionally evolved with AI, and how the understanding of AI has made a huge impact into understanding the human brain and how they actually react. And the number one industry that has impacted, that was quite some years ago, like it's, what, two, three years ago, like HR tech, people's teams, and how they're basically having their understanding on the human level with people while onboarding, while hiring, while, you know, training and all of that. So that's why we've got, like, this is one of the, one of the dream episode that we're going to have, because, you know, this is an episode that I'm going to learn myself with John, who's the Chief Executive Officer of Humantelligence, building an AI-first coaching platform for HR teams and people teams in different organizations. Thank you very much, John, for taking the time. John Betancourt 01:40 Thanks for having me, Adil. Adil Saleh 1:45 Love it. So, John, just a quick background on the inception of all that you've been doing. I know that you've been pretty much heavily invested into Humantelligence and now this AI coaching that you recently built for the past decade, like you've been more involved in that. But apart from that, like, as an entrepreneur, as a thought leader, you've been a part of, you know, one of the biggest brands that, you know, that ever come on the United States and, you know, when it comes to sports, when it comes to different other industries. So could you walk us through a little bit, if you just take you, like, 30, 20, 30 years back, and what was the biggest, biggest moving force for you to build out of this and move, build all this technology and then come into the AI part like that, you know, you pretty much rode that wave early on when it comes to conversational AI and, you know, all of this. So it'd be super inspiring to people listening. John Betancourt 02:38 Yeah. So my journey that took me from wanting to just do business to running an AI software SaaS company, you know, I'm 55. That journey was a 25-year journey. So I'll try to summarize it. It was not a, I woke up at 18, I wanted to run a software company. That was definitely not my journey. So I was a risk averse guy. So I went to great schools. As you go to great schools, you minimize risk. So I went to Harvard for college, went to Wharton, MBA from Wharton, right? The two best schools in those respective areas. Then I went to work at the best training and leadership management company in the world, has more CEOs in any company in the world, more higher acceptance rate to Harvard Business School and Wharton Business School than any other company. And that's Procter & Gamble, great school, learned a ton, left there to go to Wharton. And then I worked at several companies in management, Puma, Reebok, a sports company called Decathlon out of France, all over the world. I worked as a headhunter, so executive search consultant for 15 years to the largest firms, Heidrick and Struggles and Corn Ferry. And then I worked in software at a company called Siebel Systems, the first CRM company before Salesforce. We went from 100 employees to 12,000 in one year. So you can imagine hiring a thousand people a month. And we went from 8 million to 3 billion in revenue in two years. There is no company in history that has had either of those two growth metrics in less than seven years. So truly the quickest, most powerfully growth minded company in the history of mankind, right? I got to watch and work for Tom Siebel. So I had all these great experiences. I left the US at 22. I speak five languages. I spent 10 years in Latin America, 10 years in Europe, a few years in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, realized that the only place you can build something if you're not from that country is the United States, because all the leaders of companies in Germany and the most influential and powerful and wealthy people are German. Same with France, same with England, same with Brazil, Mexico, every place I lived. So I came back and I wanted to create a company by the time I had money after doing executive searches, one of the most profitable businesses in the world, that took all of these life lessons and put it into a platform. Like, how do I extend my superpower as a human being? That's, I know languages, I understand people, I know how to connect. And I realized in all these different companies, connection wasn't happening. I also was one of the best recruiters in the world and I could read people and understand them quickly without even interviewing them in a way and know where they would fit from a culture perspective. Skills and resumes are a commodity. You can always find a thousand people for a job, but who's the right fit with something that was a superpower. And so between the idea of connecting people so they're happy at work and recruiting better my two superpowers, I found a psychometric instrument, a personality test that I bought to build into software for recruiting and for better connection. And over the last 10 years with AI and being within workflow, kind of like Grammarly, I've created the world's first personalized AI coach in workflow, or in Teams, in Outlook, in Zoom, where you can just ask any question to this virtual AI coach that's worth $50,000 per person, right? If you get a personal coach you call every month and ask questions, I mean that's like 50 grand for executives. Our coach is better, smarter, has more access, more information, knows you better, and can give any tips around leadership, talent development, recruiting, hiring. It solves most of the problems that HR departments and companies have not been able to solve around their people for the last 100 years. Adil Saleh 06:34 Ooh, so I mean, yeah, I mean it was so amazing for someone to come up and say this because I know that there are so many platforms that came only in this body, like 150, 70, 60, 70 episodes, but like five or seven platforms that came and they couldn't claim it because of course they're starting out and it's all about like understanding human better and all these chemistry that you're mentioning, that is a neuroscience that actually makes it different. So now thinking about recruitment, thinking about, you know, hunting people, getting the best people to work, like I know it's a big problem, starting from like all these Amazons and Googles and, you know, Salesforce recently laid off a lot. I was in SF while that happened and it was crazy like because they think that they didn't make the right decision in the first place, it took like several years to do it right. And then, so how do you see it like making this problem, making the right decision on people, not on skill level, not on experience. And that is a part, like on a personal level, like, you know, there's this platform that came like that is judging the sincerity that was kind of something that I was like, how can you like actually judge that? Like, like what's the problem then? And so what is the biggest problem? And so how do you see it? What's your viewpoint on this industry problem, like getting the right A players and getting them to motivated enough and knowing them ahead of time and, you know, understanding their traits and everything. So how does, I know we're going to be talking about Ask Aura in a bit, but how did it all came along and how do you, did you over time make it really, really efficient as you can come and say this? John Betancourt 08:08 Yeah. So most people focus only on skills and experience, right? Basically what's on the resume, which is what someone has done, but that completely ignores culture and how to do a job within the specific culture of a company. I'll give a couple examples and culture, by the way, let's define it. Culture is not an engagement survey. People are happier. That's not your culture. Your culture, if you're a restaurant is, are you a service oriented restaurant? And do you have service oriented people or people focus more on money, but you could pay the best $30 an hour waiters and have all the demand for waiters who all care about money. And maybe net promoter score is low and everybody hates your restaurant because the service sucks. But if you hire people don't care about money, but care about service and giving good service, you have great service, right? So culture is the aggregation bottom up, not what you put on your website, what you want to be in an ideal world, what you put on your website as a culture should align with your people. But today it's not because no company in the world today can measure the behaviors of all their people, the motivators and values of their people that drive behaviors and the work styles of their people. If you don't know the values and work styles, you don't know your culture, your people. And there is no tool other than Humantelligence is psychometric instrument that can do that. And not for $1,000 a person, right? We are just a couple bucks per person. So we're the only tool that can actually measure culture. And so what we ended up finding was if you get someone who really succeeds at Home Depot as a cashier register, and they have 10,000 cashier registers, their top 1000 cashier registers are great at that job, those skills in the culture of how Home Depot does cashier registering, you take those top 2000 people and put them at Lowe's, a competing store that does it differently, and half of them might fail terribly. And you think, wait a second, it's the same exact job. They were a high performer in company A, why wouldn't they be a high performer in company B? Because of culture, because of the ways people work, what's important in that company. Procter and Gamble has great people in brand management and marketing. Those people go to Clorox and they could fail, they go to Pepsi, they could fail. Coca-Cola salesperson for Tennessee runs the region, the top guy or girl. PepsiCo could hire that Coca-Cola salesman or woman, same region, same territory, same clients, and fail. Because the way companies do things is called their culture and the values of that company. People are hiring without knowing that. LinkedIn and every other job board, you're getting thousands of resumes and you might as well close your eyes and just pick. Because without knowing the fit of the culture to the company or the role or the team, you literally are missing the point. And by the way, even within a company, the culture of high performance at Starbucks, Store 107 in Miami, where it's all Hispanic customers and Hispanic workers, the culture in that store is not to be in a rush and get out in two seconds and the pickup counter for order to go is empty. You have a line of 20 people and they’re all taking, and the cashier register is talking and making comments about the baby and squeezing the cheeks of the baby. Because in Latin culture, that kind of connection is important and people want to open about their personal life. And that's a high performing store in South Florida. You take that same Starbucks store group of baristas and put them in New York City, in Battery Park, we have all these investment bankers going to work. The last thing they want to do is talk to the barista, have them squeeze their baby's cheeks and wait for 20 minutes while this is happening. That high performing Starbucks barista team would be the worst performing team in the world in New York City. So, culture is so specific to the region, to the company, and all of recruiting is missing that because they don't have access to the values, motivators or work styles. The few companies that think it's important are only spending money on behavioral tools. And that is not very predictive on culture fit. Adil Saleh 12:19 Amazing. You know, I'm just thinking through how deep down you already know, as a subject matter expert, and it's not possible because, you know, when AI came just three years back and ChatGPT, and all these recruiters and all these teams that are building HR tech, and they're thinking of, hey, we have the data, we have the information, we can collect information from people, candidates and employers, and we get the best technology because, you know, AI will do the rest. But overall, it was like the people that actually won, you know, being example, human intelligence are basically the people that have the deeper understanding on the subject. John Betancourt 12:54 Yes, because all that agentic AI that's making recruiting faster, all it's doing is having people fail faster and hire bad hires faster. And it's cool stuff, but it's going to help you sift through a thousand resumes to get to the wrong hire faster. Like they don't have the right inputs. They’re missing, Look, there was a study that showed that only skills and experience are only 30% predictive. 70% of success on a job is the culture fit piece. And most companies aren't measuring that, not looking for that. They don't even know. They don't even know what their own culture is. They think they put it on the website and they think that's their culture. That's crazy. Like there have been studies, a guy named Professor Don Sull, former Harvard Business School, now MIT professor, studied the Fortune 500 and the five values that every company put on their websites. Can you imagine 500 Fortune 500 companies? They're all completely different industries. 80% of them had the same four or five words as value. So first of all, everybody wants to be agile, service, right? And then secondly, all the same buzzwords, right? And then he actually, I think asked like 5,000 people at every company across all these companies, statistical significance sample, I don't remember the exact numbers. And there was zero correlation of what all the employees of the 500 companies at every company, zero correlation between what the people at the company experienced working there and the five values on the websites. Zero correlation. So it is, I mean, to put it in a young person's term that I heard the other day, the heads of HR and CEOs are quote smoking pot, meaning they're on drugs. If they think putting the culture that they want on the website is actually their company culture. Now, the good news is there's tools like Humantelligence that will show them the actual gap for the whole company, for every division, for every team and for every person. And AI can do a development plan to get every person to be more like the culture they have on the website. So in seconds. So the good news is there's a solution now to align people, individuals, teams, companies, groups with culture and a development plan to make it happen with AI. Adil Saleh 15:11 Love it. Love it. And just on this, because we're going to be getting to technology and how you're measuring success. John Betancourt 15:16 I have 20 hours for you, Adil, whatever it takes. Adil Saleh 15:19 Love it. So, John, now thinking about AI capabilities, the next biggest problem is, okay, you're a domain matter expert, you are the subject, you've been doing it, been there, done that, and you've lived that problem all your life, let's say 20 years, 30 years. The problem still is the same, like how you are going to make AI smarter and have a deeper understanding as you have as a human at scale. You might be doing for like, let's say a lot of these problems that come up with these founders and they're struggling, to be very honest, like it is so much hands-on, you know, just say, for example, AI for sales, the sales are different in oil and gas, sales are different in B2B SaaS, sales are different in healthcare, sales are different in real estate. I mean, all of these industry verticals are altogether different. And of course, they might have subject matter expertise and they might not have a deeper understanding of the conversational AI and building verticals and specializations, but they still have to go expand in these verticals, really, really hands-on. And of course, the cost has been a bigger problem, like, you know, they're not able to scale it. So, how was your journey at Humantelligence and then specifically building the Ask Aura? John Betancourt 16:27 Yes. So, at Procter & Gamble, they trained me when I got promoted for my first leadership role, something that shocked me, which is also what we built into our product 30 years later. I got promoted. So, I was clearly the best assistant brand manager and I was a brand manager. So, of the other five, I was the guy they picked, right? So, my ego was high. I had just come out of Harvard. You know, my head was bigger, couldn't fit through the door. And my boss closed the door behind me, sat me down and said, hey, you know, now's the tough part. And I'm like, what do you mean? The tough part was working 60-hour weeks to get this job to be boss. Now I'm going to be like all the other bosses, leave after 40 hours a week and tell people what to do. And he goes, well, how are you going to lead and manage each person? And I'm like, they'll just do what I do. And then he goes, no, now that you're a leader and a manager, you need to change how you communicate how you listen, how you manage and how you lead. You have five people under you now. That means you need five versions of John, five versions of how you manage, five versions of communicating. You need to meet each person where they're at. And I was like, that's exhausting. Are you kidding me? Like you're joking, right? And he goes, no, that's what makes a great leader. And that's when it hit me why leadership is not scalable and why most leaders fail and they suck because they just think I'm the boss. People will just do what I say. To be a successful leader over time is that model works for like a couple of months to really get people motivated, you know, engage and to follow you to the top of the mountain, you need to connect. And so we built Ask Aura to be able to get all leaders and managers up to speed that quickly without having to do a lot of work because without a tool, without a psychometric assessment, I could be a professional PhD IO psychologist and it would take me weeks to get to know Adil, Priya, Javier, Mohammed, Steve, LaQuisha. It would take me a long time if I was a world-class expert IO psychologist. What Humantelligence has been able to do is feed AI with a 10-minute personality test that you give to 10 people on your team or 1,000 people at your company in a day. Monday morning, 9 a.m., everybody gets a link. Hey, please take this. It's a personality test. It's fun. And in 10 minutes after you take it, all of our systems will know your psychology, the psychology of your team, the psychology of the company, and this aura, this agent Ask Aura will know you better than yourself and help you be happier, find projects that engage you, reduce friction, and help your boss manage you the way you want to be managed. And so instead of having confrontation all the time, they're actually doing things the way that we all approach our spouses. You look young, don't know if you're married, but are you married, Adil? Adil Saleh 19:19 Yes, I have a five-month-old. It's pretty tough. John Betancourt 19:21 And you've been married five years, three years? How long have you been married? Adil Saleh 19:25 Yeah, three years, but we just had our first baby five months old. John Betancourt 19:29 So conflict will increase now that you have a kid. Conflict always increases with a kid. And so there are moments with a spouse that everyone learns in personal life, but they don't do at work, which is, oh, I need to get this from my spouse, my husband, my wife. I need their approval to go out with the boys for a poker night, or I need, or she says, I need to go out with a girl. How do I approach her? I need the kid this weekend, or I want to do this activity. And so you learn how to couch the information in the way that best received by your spouse in the right moment. This kind of understanding and coming to meet your partner where it's at, we do it at home all the time because we respect and love our partners enough to change for them. That's what's being called, that's human. To be really human, you care, you understand, and you change for the other person. We've created that with Humantelligence and Ask Aura, where everyone now at work can change and have data to tip them and say, hey, in this meeting, Mary doesn't speak up very much. She's not going to say anything, but if you want her to be seen, ask her in the beginning, in the middle, at the end, what her thoughts are. Now, some people might say, well, that's AI cheating. It's giving you tips when you wouldn't have known. Well, if AI helps you cheat to be more human and to connect more, I'm all for cheating. Adil Saleh 20:46 Let it be, yeah. John Betancourt 20:48 Let it be. I've literally had people tell me, but AI to help people work with each other, that's cheating. Or AI to rewrite an email the way the other person likes to read it. So what, you're suggesting I keep writing it my selfish way and hope everyone likes it my way? Let AI rewrite it so that they're happy too? Are you kidding me? It's amazing how people, when they hear AI, they get so closed-minded. They can't even visualize how AI today, at least in our product, does not replace anyone. It enhances humans at work and makes them better work colleagues, makes them better managers, makes them more human at work. And what's coming, 30% of jobs will be AI agents. And guess what Humantelligence would do for them as well? It'll make those AI agents more human when working with every person because those AI agents will actually understand people like they're their spouses and not like a robot that just says the same answer, like those damn chatbots that I always write to in the corner for some customer service that never answers my question, that's not personalized, and I want to kill it. Right? But it's a chatbot. I can't kill it. Ours will actually make your life easier and make you feel more human. That is Humantelligence, the first AI on the planet that makes work more human at scale for everyone. Adil Saleh 22:06 So interesting that you, you know, really expanded your answer on like the capabilities and doing it at scale has been the biggest problem and how you can, you know, of course, like I know that training could, it's only possible when it's impersonated and it's on a human level, as you mentioned, when at your first role, you got to the leadership and your manager said like, you got to make sure you go to that level, you know, and go meet at their level and you know, understand. And same as when AI agents are going to come, they're going to be replacing humans. For example, human brains, you got to treat them as same, right? You got to make sure that they're at their potential, that you're getting the best work out of them. John Betancourt 22:45 You're going to have an AI manager, right? Your manager might be an AI agent. Damn right, I want that AI agent to use Humantelligence and talk to me the way I like to be talked to and engage me the way I like to be engaged to like, that would be awesome. Right? Or if it's just a robot, it treats all five of us the same. Like, I'm not going to follow that AI agent. I'm going to quit be like, Oh, it's a freaking robot. It doesn't understand me. Adil Saleh 23:06 Interesting. So now, John, also thinking about like, I know that we're not so big about like having flashy words and putting on the clients that, you know, we've got John today, they're working for these big clients and logos and all, but just on the go-to-market side of things, I know that success has been the bigger portion of how you're, you know, making Ask Aura a win for all of these organizations, for all of their hiring and people management needs. How are you measuring success? I know I was in New York City earlier this year and we, you know, we were so big about like, Hey, you're generating this much and we're recurring. How much are you putting back into the success of their customers? So what is, what kind of vision do you have around that and how you're investing? What kind of tooling have you involved to measure the success? For example, you measuring success for hiring managers, you know, have the best, best understanding of ground, different roles to how you as a platform measuring success in turn. John Betancourt 24:00 Yeah. So selling our product has been tough because today, for whatever reason, CFOs dominate decisions on spend and budgets for all software, whether it's finance software, HR software, supply chain software, marketing software. And unfortunately the CFOs first requirement is prove me the ROI or I'm not paying for it. And unfortunately there's a group that we are automating with AI called talent management, talent development, leadership development, L and D learning development. And those groups, when you, they spend millions of dollars, if you were to ask them today, and they've been spending millions for years. Well, what's the ROI of having a management training program where your managers get this training by this workshop. You spent $30,000, 10 times a share for 10 groups, 300,000. Well, we just were investing in our people. They're going to be better managers. I mean, that's literally the level of ROI. They don't calculate it. They don't know it. What kills me is we're now showing them, they can do that kind of training for $30,000 for 10,000 employees, not $300,000 for 30 employees, which to me, there's already an ROI that you can hit more people with less money. Today, they're investing tools like disk and predictive index and principles, you and all these behavioral science tools that they do a workshop and they use once. So ROI is one use and never again, because nobody, everybody has a folder of all the tools they've ever taken the assessment tools and never looked at it again. Either a digital folder or physical. The ROI of usage, which is an ROI, we get usage 20 times a month per employee for 67% of employees. So you can imagine that's 240 uses per year of getting insights on how to connect, how to communicate, how to collaborate, how to lead 240 moments of value versus the one moment of value of all the previous tools in the world that came before us. These are all great examples of better ROI than prior, but we can't really connect it to, you will have more sales, more savings. And unfortunately, ROI has been defined. I don't buy who, what God of ROI exists, but has deemed the world that ROI can only be cost savings or revenue. And we often get, I stopped looking for money from venture capitalists because they would bucket us in. Well, John, there's only one type of ROI. And we only invest in companies that are painkillers that if you turn it off, the company fails, not vitamins are nice to have. Right. And so I heard that so many times I stopped going to VC because no, your company won't turn off if you don't use our platform, but attrition will increase. Turnover will increase. Leaders will be unhappy. They'll be bad. Like you won't be as effective. Can we quantify that with a number? No, but at least one in five companies we pitched do end up getting it. The concept and understanding that they don't need a cost or revenue ROI. And they do end up moving forward with our tool. Companies, such as Accenture, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, PepsiCo, Honeywell, and Cemex, Bachoco in Mexico, and so on and so forth. Potentially Aditya Birla Group in India, which is one of the largest companies in the world, et cetera. Adil Saleh 27:19 Interesting. I know that this has been a biggest, you know, I would say the biggest penetration that you've had in the enterprise segment. So how are you thinking as a founder, like penetrating towards a mid-market that almost 600 million businesses between the SMB to midmarket is to this day? And there's a huge market. John Betancourt 27:39 Yeah, that's the huge. To do that, you need money and process and a structure, right? You need a lead gen structure where you're driving thousands of people to your website, content thought leadership, where you're kind of getting your brand out there, thought leadership, where people are clicking to get to your website to learn more. And then you need someone to be following up and a team of SDRs to qualify the thousand a month or a thousand a day, ideally, to the 30 that are interested and qualified to then get to an account exec. You know, you're looking at a minimum of a million dollars a year to do that. We don't have that money yet, but once we do, probably in the next six months, we'll start that kind of process of a lead gen funnel, fill the funnel at the top, down to the bottom. And it's a great mathematical equation. We do this many meetings, we'll close this many at this average price. Okay, now I know how much I can invest to put more in the funnel and make that output bigger. So we haven't got to that repeatable, consistent lead gen model yet for a SaaS company, but that should happen by the end of next year. Adil Saleh 28:42 Absolutely. I mean good luck with that because this has so much potential. Like you've done the hard miles, you've done like, I know this is doing it at this product, this capabilities at scale is the hardest bit, which you've already done. And a lot of these companies, I'm not talking about SMBs so much because they're not, they're so focused on growth and all of that. They're not so much focused on culture and team early in the first five years. But the companies that are like post product market fit and they're like a size of close to 500 to 1500, they are really thinking about like getting the best work out of people, investing into training for the leadership and hiring external leadership for sales for all of their teams. And without knowing people, I don't think they'll ever be able to figure out like what is the best training for their team members or their leaders and all that without knowing them. So that's the biggest gig that I'm looking at. Then our human intelligence, I know this, you launched this Ask Aura how long ago, John? John Betancourt 29:40 So the company Humantelligence was 10 years ago. We focused on recruiting, scaled that business, COVID really hurt that business. So we had to pivot, kept the recruiting module. So when recruiting would come back, we would have it, but then moved into talent management and broader talent development with the psychometric tool for the last five years, really fiddling around with a lot of versions that just weren't sticky or didn't get a lot of usage over time and adoption until Ask Aura. That way of consuming information, I mean, I used to go to Google search 20 times a day. Now I go to ChatGPT 20 times a day. Would you prefer to write a question and get a thousand answers and have to click through and read and interpret, or just... Or just ask her a question and get an answer that does all that for you, right? That is how we transformed, we re-platformed everything as an Ask Aura coach, taking all this great content to be consumed through questions and answers with this coach. That started 18 months ago and we launched it eight months ago. So it took about 10 months to build it and eight months for Ask Aura to be in the market. So kind of the Ask Aura has been in market for eight months. Adil Saleh 30:57 Eight months, interesting. And now thinking about only enterprises, like I know that adoption has been the biggest concern, big red tape and global operations divided. Like what kind of challenges you had during the onboarding? And I know that you already mentioned that. Is there any tool that actually measures the stages, on the stage that will be the life cycle of these customers, that are like how they're consuming, how they're adopting to the platform over time? So could you also walk us through that? John Betancourt 31:25 Yes, we have built into the platform the ability to track usage, right? So we know that 92% take the assessment. We know that 67% ask questions every quarter, that every month 47% ask questions, and that the average questions asked is 15 times per month per employee. So we have those metrics. We also track, with a little survey at the end of every month, key questions like: did this product help you work better with your manager? Or did this product help you work better with your subordinate or with your team? Did this product help you resolve conflict? And so usually we are between 85 and 95% yes-es, that it has been helpful every month in a wide variety of use cases. Did it help you write an email better this month? Right, things like this. So qualitative performance, customer success. Where there is lower usage and some problem child customers, all it takes is going in and doing a demo for that population. Because a lot of people are just overwhelmed and if they do not see something or why they are doing it, reading about, oh, this is an AI coach for me, I do not have time. But then they see a demo of it and they are like, oh my God, I can ask how I should ask my boss for a raise. Oh, I can ask how I can develop this one area of myself that is causing conflict at the company. So people see what is in it for them, and seeing a demo, those demos really go a long way to get them 90% adoption and usage. We just do not have a huge staff to do that with every client. So there is where there is a gap. And we try to send videos, but one of the hardest things for adoption is the whole training component of a new software platform. I did not realize going into this as a startup, you can have an amazing product that everyone would love if they tried it, but getting them to try it, how do you do that? Adil Saleh 33:19 I have done 100 episodes, more than 100 episodes, just on that onboarding. John Betancourt 33:24 I mean, it is the hardest thing in the world. Unless you are Accenture and you can throw 3,000 consultants at IBM that are in there every week, but... Adil Saleh 33:31 Yeah, spread money every single day. John Betancourt 33:33 Right, if you have money and people. But what if you are a small startup of 20 people trying to convince a big company to have all 20,000 people to use your product? You would think that just the CEO sending an email would work. It does not work that way. Adil Saleh 33:47 Love it. So now John Betancourt 33:48 one day, we will have another meeting where you can tell me what the secret to that is. That is where we still are. I would not say failing, but we need the most help. Adil Saleh 33:56 Yeah, I mean, of course, because this has been the challenge, and this is something that you can, and you can even expand within the enterprises. Like if you just nail this part, like how do you do the right onboarding, make sure that you have the adoption kind of playbook that people can easily adopt, sort of a standardized playbook, not 100%, even you do 60% of it, that’s gonna save a lot of time in the sales cycle and onboarding cycle. I believe like interviewing more than 100 companies from SMB to large enterprises, more than 30% of the customers actually quit during that stage, during the onboarding stage. Yes, they quit. Yeah, they may not review six months down or three months down, a year down, but they actually mentally quit your platform. They are not gonna use this platform because onboarding is not right.They are not getting the right information. John Betancourt 34:45 Right, right, right, right. Adil Saleh 34:46 They are not integrating with the right systems. John Betancourt 34:47 And you have done the hard part selling them, and the onboarding game to use it should be the easier part. Adil Saleh 34:54 Absolutely. And you know, all these VCs in SF right now, they are more concerned about not like how much your growth you are gonna have, like it is how much net dollar retention. John Betancourt 35:03 Usage and churn are the key metrics for VC. Adil Saleh 35:05 Absolutely. So they are thinking about how are you, what are your growth metrics on like retention, on expansion, like tell us more. So it is more about the success this time. That is why this category is growing. I am not building a product in that, but we are overlapping with the customer success teams. A lot of the time, many customers do not use our platform to nail this onboarding, adoption, all of this. And, you know, just quite like, it was pretty funny. Like at SF, I met a company that were deploying sensors onto pharmaceutical labs and, you know, scientific labs. And they were just tracking the temperature for the sensor. And they have this CRM Salesforce and they are integrating our product to measure success for those sensors. And they have a team that actually sees it. Like, say, if two degree cuts down on your room, you won’t care, but in a lab, it is a big deal, right? So they are trying to measure success for the data that is coming out of the sensors and transmitting onto the platform, which we eventually integrate with them. And then overlapping with Salesforce and all of these qualitative measures to help them succeed with these pharmacies and all these pharmaceuticals. So it is such a big thing and everybody is looking at that way, like measuring success and enabling the customers and getting them to adopt really early and delivering value fast. It is just about it. Like time to value is the biggest thing. Now, so you guys have a CRM like Salesforce, HubSpot, or is that any traditional CRM you are using or you have built within your system? John Betancourt 36:39 We use HubSpot. Adil Saleh 36:40 HubSpot, okay. And I mean, so I was curious, like with HubSpot, like how do you think, like you have this all product you are setting, you are tracking the success and all of this, and these are numbers, like do you really know it, right? A lot of people, they cannot come up and say, like, I have 87% people inquire about my product every month, every quarter, we have got this. So you pretty much nailed it. So what was one thing that did not let you take, like your team take action on them? Like, how much of this data is available to the customer facing teams? Like I call it go-to-market team, let’s make it this way, like sales, account executives, customer success or account management or whatever. And they are able to take action on this. Let’s say, John Betancourt 37:09 we are not a large team, we only have one customer success person. So all of our customer success people know these numbers because there is only one. I could imagine if you have layers of 20 people, most of them probably would not know these numbers and that is where you have problems. So because we are still small, one person who is totally overwhelmed, and they also have another role too, so like only half their time is customer success. We do what a small company in our size does. We only focus on the biggest clients to really help them. The smaller clients that might be, if we are gonna lose a client, it is better to lose a 300 person client than a 30,000 person client. So it is sad to say that, but you know... Adil Saleh 37:52 Yeah, but at the same time, you can... John Betancourt 37:56 Yeah, and the smaller clients are the ones that churn faster. They are the ones who have economic problems faster. Right, so like in an ideal world, we can get more larger ones than smaller ones, but right now we need all the money we can get, so... Adil Saleh 38:08 Yeah, yeah, I love this guy, Elias is an ex VP of marketing at HubSpot. In the early days, he built the infrastructure for HubSpot pretty early and then he exited Drift for more than a billion and now he is building customer success for enterprise, pretty much fishing in the same water with us. So I was just listening to Iman's podcast. It is more of an enterprise problem now. People see it in the SMB. You can play with, you can automate, but eventually from a commercial standpoint, as a founder, as a GTM leader at a company or a co-founder, you won’t think too much about SMB. Once it gets slightly bigger, then you start caring about. So it is all about helping, like. for your team, like with one team member, you can think about how you can help that person, one person, prioritize the high value task, high value mission-critical tasks around that enterprise account. You know, any tool, any data, any layer, you can build on top of HubSpot. And I know a lot of these companies building on top of HubSpot these days for less money. I know they are pretty expensive when you go, you know, multi-product with them. But again, we will talk about it later on this. So now go-to-market size. I know the size is pretty big. You already know that rest of the market around the training and investments in the Fortune 500s and I would say smaller enterprises too. How do you think of like penetrating what makes you excited this coming year? I know, you know, unless you are not a founder like yourself, you are a founder, like you are thinking what, hey, Thanksgiving, I will just think more about in the second week of January, back from vacation and we will just start new, have new investments and all. What is that you are thinking like, what makes you excited towards a go-to-market? What is the first industry that you are thinking you need to penetrate more? John Betancourt 39:47 So two things. I have never hired, I have been doing founder-led sales and given how amazing our product is and where our sales are, I am realizing that that gap means that I suck at sales. There are some founders who are great at sales. That is not me. So we have been interviewing several people over the last few months and we have found someone who has at least conceptually accepted to start in January to be our salesperson. They come with 20 years of HR technology sales experience, which is very important in this space, not just because they have a Rolodex, but they know conceptually how to sell to this buyer. HR buyers are the hardest buyers of any function to sell to. Harder than CFOs, harder than supply chain, harder than marketing, harder than salespeople. So very excited about this new salesperson. And then we will have money starting in February from a couple of partnership deals we have done where I can now start to spend and starting a very light lead gen funnel to get this salesperson, and he will be our SDR and salesperson, but to get him leads to qualify himself, unfortunately for him at the beginning, to then try to close. And I think that will be the beginning of kind of a hockey stick, because when you have a great salesperson who knows how to close a deal and get them through the funnel and money to get more leads and more meetings, and you know your product is already product-market fit and amazing, that is a recipe for really scaling. So I am really excited to scale the business next year, make more money, have more money, be profitable. So yeah, it has been 10 years to get to this point and we are right at the, we are about to walk through that door. Adil Saleh 41:30 Absolutely, and I love the way that you are thinking through like making sure that you have done the product right. And that is, people take like as many years to do the product right. So... John Betancourt 41:39 A lot longer than I thought, man. And with a lot more pivots. I read an article that usually all the unicorns actually take 10 years on average before they hit hockey stick. So its average is to be miserable for 10 years before you hit whatever he sees. You are so lucky, it is so fun, right? Like, well, no, it is 10 years of misery. And then I saw another report that showed that when you do finally hit it, the product or service that you are going to market with, that actually does take off, is only between 10 and 15% similar to the idea you first had, meaning... Whenever you think you are going to launch as a startup, you better just go in to say, I want to be an entrepreneur. I do not know what I will be selling in 10 years because... Adil Saleh 42:21 Absolutely, that should be the mindset, yeah. John Betancourt 42:23 You think that you will succeed with your idea, you are wrong and you will fail because you have to really give up on your idea. And the faster you do to find the right idea to sell, the quicker you will be successful. But it is really hard for founders to do that. Adil Saleh 41:38 Yeah, I mean, a lot of these founders that, you know, I get to speak with a lot as well. I am a cellphone founder. There is so much of like, especially these technical co-founders. I have a technical co-founder, he is more emotionally tied to the product. Like whenever I talk about... John Betancourt 42:49 Hey, it is their baby. Adil Saleh 42:52 So whenever we like, we have so many fights, like brotherly, we are friends and brothers too, and then co-founders for the last five years, we are doing every single day together. So whenever I come up and say, hey, we need to pivot this. Like we are talking about customer success. There are some adjacent use cases. We can do this, we can do this. There is a huge market and you can see people getting funds. A lot of VCs are showing interest in this and all. And he is like, hey, I want to really do this. And I said, like, you have to see from the commercial side of things too. You know, I got to make sure that, you know, I am from background, I am a sales guy. So I think of like how to better sell it, how it can grab as many USPs as possible with whatever we are building, because that is what then matters. You know, if you are like 10, 15, 20 years down, and you are still thinking, hey, there is something that I need to build and then I need to wait for it and then sell it. You got to know from day one as a sales guy, like yourself, that you are going to hang around these folks. These are your ICPs, whatever you are going to build. So I know on the product level, you always pivot, but on a high level vision, let’ say, you never thought about like building outside of HR tech. John Betancourt 43:58 Correct. For me, it was like recruiting and connection and just figuring out a way to get these psychometrics used, kind of like Grammarly figured out how to use the thesaurus and dictionary and they are worth $8 billion. Everyone had a dictionary or thesaurus on their desk. Nobody ever used it, right? Or even in their digital versions. Everyone has used a psychometric tool at some point, but nobody ever uses it. So we are like, how do we Grammarly and ChatGPT this whole category? And we kind of put that category into a ChatGPT version of Grammarly and boom. So it was a lot of copying of what is out there and applying it to this space. Adil Saleh 44:36 Yeah. So when I saw the growth of Grammarly, because I used it, the business plan for about four years. Yeah, until I stopped because I now have Notion, the many new tools when that came after ChatGPT 3.5. So now at that point, I was listening to the CEO, she is a female, right? The Grammarly CEO. And she was more about like, we work where you work, it was more about, like integration and everything. So how did you see that? I know that you guys have integration. John Betancourt 44:59 Yeah, so we are in email. So you write an email in Outlook or Google, you push our button in the email, it rewrites the email right there in your email. You do not have to go anywhere. You can even Ask Aura in the email, you write your email and you can Ask Aura, what is wrong with this email for writing to Adil? Or how can you like, or what are the two things I need to know about Adil before I write this email? So you can just ask and communicate. You are in a Zoom meeting or a video conference for Microsoft Teams, seven people, you are presenting some project you want approval. And in Zoom, you just click on our button. It is in Zoom, next to Share, React, Chat, there is a HT button. Adil Saleh 45:34 Yes, yes, yes. John Betancourt 45:35 It will pop up. You cannot do it right now because you have not turned it on, but it will pop up the dynamics of the meeting. It will pop up and say, hey, Adil, everyone is decisive and you are the only deliberate person. Or you can even ask the coach, who is gonna butt heads with me today? And confidentiality is gonna tell you, oh, Steve is gonna butt heads with you because you are so different, here is how you are different. Or how do I overcome rejection from this person? So in workflow, in the meeting, you are getting all these coaching tips as if you had like God in your ear whispering to you. Adil Saleh 46:03 Yeah, I love it. And also just imagine like sales call, I know that there is so much of sales intelligence and all. So how do you think like seeing it as a conversational intelligence kind of a platform that helps people with training while they are engaging, while they are at calls? So have you also think about like these adjacent teams that are working or you just? John Betancourt 46:23 Well, so for sales, so because our tool, our platform, you need to take a personality test, a 10 minute test. Right now, it is only for internal use. So it would help train a salesperson on how better to do things the way they like to learn. So if I were giving you advice and you are conceptual in the way you learn, the AI would give you conceptual advice. If somebody else needs detail examples, it would give them detail examples of how to change their sales presentation. So that is how it could help. Now, one day I do see it helping salespeople in selling to external clients and prospects because one day, you know, everyone in the world has a resume basically. Adil Saleh 47:08 Yeah. John Betancourt 47:09 And that is only your skills, your hard skills. On the back... Adil Saleh 47:12 Experience skills, yeah. John Betancourt 47:14 On the back one day will be everyone’s soft skills. Everyone will have an assessment taken. I hope to be the company that delivers 8 billion assessments where now the hard skills and the soft skills are all in one document, in one person’s digital wallet, okay? When that happens, that will open up the possibility of using these assessments and this insight around the coach for people outside of your company. So you go to the hospital, you check in and they match you with a doctor that is aligned with how you communicate. If you have a detail oriented patient, you probably want a detail oriented doctor. Detail oriented people, when they get the doctor who are only conceptual, not detailed, are always leaving frustrated. And when the conceptual person who is a patient does not want the detail, they cannot. So imagine matching Uber drivers, imagine matching match.com, dating apps, finding love. If we could all understand each other instantly, it would solve so much conflict in this world for how we find love, a doctor, an Uber driver, a dentist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, working, pitching a client, doing the presentation the best. Here, redo my presentation for this person. One button push and it redoes the presentation based on how that person likes it. So that is coming down the road. I do not know how far down the road, but that is coming down the road. And I am running up against time. How much more time do you need? Adil Saleh 48:37 Yeah, I think not more than three minutes. Okay. Three to four minutes. Yeah, so just last question before I set you free. Like, I know that you are big about culture and you are so into it and you kind of lived it for long enough to build a platform that can help teams have people on board, people culture fit. And this has been the biggest problem we already discussed. So what is that kind of appropriate, considering you are getting along inside your team? Like what kind of culture that you are kind of instilling in your team? No, you are not as big to, you know, talk so much and put it on the wall, but I am sure the kind of person that you are, which I understood in the past 40 minutes, you are really about people and understanding those people. So any advice that you have for founders, you know, smaller teams, I know that they do not talk about culture. They said, okay, hey, you come here, you come here to work. This is a place of problems. We are a startup. You gotta wear different hats. We will give you the freedom. We will give you the opportunity and that is all you are gonna learn. So that ship has sailed now. It was good enough when it started back in the Valley 10 years back and not anymore. People now, these young people, they are now thinking about people that can motivate, that they can look up to, that they understand better, that they understand them better. So getting back to any advice would be... John Betancourt 49:50 Yeah, so I think most companies under 10 employees probably have very similar cultures. They are probably product oriented cultures where creativity and innovation are driving it. They are probably less process and structure. The more process and structure early on, the less you will have productivity and innovation. So I think most companies, it is a bunch of bunk that say, oh, we defined the strong culture exactly what we wanted from the beginning, bullshit. You are a maverick thinker, innovative company, quick to say, you gotta be fast to market, agile and change and pivot quick. I mean, that is like every startup under 10 people. And then you get one or two clients and then you find out that you could lose them if you do not have process and customer success and you need other things than just turning out new products. You need support and clunky guides and videos of how to do everything. And all of a sudden you are getting slowed down because clients can slow you down. And then you have a hundred clients and that can really slow you down. But if you make one mistake in some product innovation, you have a hundred clients, 10,000 people complaining and now you just ruined your company. So now you need quality assurance and QA and testing and you cannot just release and you gotta make sure it is perfect and not just good enough. And so there is a culture of going from like fast, agile, quick with mistakes and that is okay. C and fast is better than A and slow in startup. A hundred clients, 10 million dollars, it is better to go C slow than A fast. I mean, or A quality slow and C fast. And so I think all cultures transform over time depending on the scale of the company. And the problem though is most CEOs want to keep that same culture from the first 10 employees. But that is not the culture that is gonna get them to 10 million, to 100 million, to a billion. Every one of those phases, there is like cliffs. There is a cliff at zero to 1 million. There is a cliff from 1 million or 2 million to 10. There is a cliff from 10 to 100 and there is a cliff from 100 to a billion. Why are those cliffs there that you, like it is like roadkill. You see thousands of companies failing at those cliffs, it is because that is the cliff where the culture needs to change regardless of what you do, what industry you are in. And most CEOs try to carry back what made them work to the present to the future. And they have got to look at it different ways. I got to reinvent my culture based on the structure, scale, size of where we are. And that is the best advice I can give to founders and CEOs is when you hit a million dollars you better be thinking consciously and intentionally how your culture should be changing. So you are hiring different people on purpose that may be, in the interview process, nine of the 10 people currently at your company won’t like the next three hires, but those next three hires are what you need. You keep hiring the same culture of those 10 and you will never get to 10 million or a million, et cetera. So that is the biggest problem, that people hold onto a culture instead of looking to proactively hire for a different culture depending on the size of the company. Adil Saleh 53:01 And not being able to evolve over time. John Betancourt 53:03 When I say size, I mean the challenge that they are about to enter. The challenge of a zero revenue, pre-revenue startup and the challenge of a million dollar revenue with a few clients going to a 10 million and the challenge going from 10 million to 100 million are completely different challenges that necessitate completely different cultures and people. Adil Saleh 53:23 Absolutely, cannot agree more. And of course, being in the first stage, I know that because at the end of the day it is all about people make companies, right? People make culture. So when you have like more of those people you have more things that you need to service and you need to make sure that you evolve your culture with them as you grow. So it was really, really nice meeting you and getting to know you more, John. It was quite a pleasure and let us keep in touch. Thank you very much for your time. Adil Saleh 53:56 Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please hear your feedback at ail@hyperengage.io. We definitely need it. Uh, we will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower. Engagements with some building, some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.