BetterUp transforms lives and careers with tech from Salesforce.

San Francisco-based BetterUp is on a mission to transform careers and businesses around the globe. BetterUp’s platform combines coaching, technology, and behavioral science to deliver change at scale — improving individual resilience, adaptability, and effectiveness. Focused on driving growth and transformation for both individual members and their organisations, BetterUp leverages a network of more than 3,000 coaches, working in 64 languages across over 70 countries worldwide, who deliver a personalised, transformative experience for each of its users.

BetterUp’s results speak for themselves: 90% of members report a reduction in stress levels, and users also report huge gains in resilience, focus, and agility. The company’s coaching platform is trusted by more than 600 organisations including NASA, Google, Hilton, and other leading Fortune 1,000 companies.

BetterUp has seen a 60% reduction in deals that require manual intervention since adopting Salesforce.

How did BetterUp grow, in less than a decade, into a global company changing the lives of hundreds of organisations and thousands of people each year? Through a combination of delighting customers, cultivating a strong internal culture, and, of course, always staying true to its mission. BetterUp has also been a Salesforce customer since 2016, leveraging the platform’s scalability and work-from-anywhere flexibility as the company has grown. Let’s take a closer look.

BetterUp focuses on three key impact areas: mental fitness, career and leadership development, and social connection. “We’re striving to help people everywhere live their lives with greater clarity, purpose, and passion,” Adam Lavezzo, VP, Revenue Strategy & Operations, said. The company aims to help people find greater meaning and direction in both their personal and professional lives, because they're increasingly interconnected. Internally, team members look at it as, “A journey of, ‘How do we bring out the best in a person?’"

Right now, it’s bringing out the best in people through the BetterUp platform, a comprehensive organisational solution that focuses on four areas: growth and transformation, mental fitness and organisational health via BetterUp Care, diversity and inclusion, and sales performance. The platform combines a science-based approach to behavioral change and HR topics with one-on-one and group coaching, assessments, and content activities. It’s all managed by Identify AI™, BetterUp’s proprietary algorithm that finds the best coaches and recommends personalised pathways to growth for each individual user.

The platform leverages the power of mobile devices and videoconferencing, so it’s easy for organisations anywhere in the world to adopt BetterUp and roll it out at scale to employees, onsite or over distance. Coaching sessions take place remotely, over video calls, and coaches can suggest additional sessions and supplemental content to focus on specific topics for peak performance. Individual users have dashboards that track their progress across key indicators, and BetterUp also offers specialists to help members focus on key areas including communication, nutrition, and even navigating the journey of being a working parent. The goal is to help each user reach their individual potential, in turn helping teams and organisations realize greater success.

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BetterUp’s approach is working in a big way. Managing a global network of coaches, clients, and technology is no small feat, however. Let’s look at how BetterUp leverages Salesforce to help it grow by helping more of its own clients grow.

Virtually all of BetterUp’s go-to-market (GTM) teams — account executives, customer solutions, operations — run on Sales Cloud. Lavezzo cites this as a key to keeping the business moving forward. “We all benefit from the workflow management on the sales side, and the CRM powering a lot of our outreach on the marketing side,” he said. Sales Cloud also serves as a key source of truth for data in decision-making, helping the team decide which customers and markets are primed for growth.

The addition of Salesforce CPQ (configure, price, quote) to BetterUp’s tech stack took its GTM efforts to a whole new place. “CPQ has been a game changer for us in terms of the efficiencies of all of our deal flow,” Lavezzo said. Between customising the size and scope of its offerings to fit different customers, and sourcing and managing coaches from a global talent pool thousands deep, BetterUp’s deals can get complex in a hurry. CPQ automates manual and time-consuming processes, including:

• Getting internal approvals for quotes
• Reviewing redlines with the legal team
• Sending quotes out to customers for review

Lavezzo said CPQ has had a huge impact on streamlining BetterUp’s internal processes and helping drive more efficiencies. The result is the ability to close more deals, faster. “Our sales reps can now spend more time selling, versus waiting for the manual process of closing a deal,” he added. “That speed directly impacts our ability to achieve our mission, bringing BetterUp to more people, faster.”

The automation also benefits BetterUp’s supply side operations when new customer companies come online. When a new customer signs on with BetterUp, the quote includes data on the number of employees in the company and where those employees are located. For example, if the engagement is to coach a group of people in Japan and BetterUp’s network isn't as robust there, a signal can be sent up internally to begin recruiting and sourcing talent for the job.

“Especially on the go-to-market side, we live and breathe Salesforce. The reporting we have there is our source of truth, not just on what has happened, but how we’re continuing to trend against our goals,” Lavezzo said. This ranges from sales tracking data to reporting on customer health. Many of BetterUp’s client engagements begin with just a segment of the organisation getting access to coaching. Over time, initial small-scale success can serve as a proof point to expand the engagement to reach more of a client’s workforce.

“We’re continually tracking the health of the account, and our relationships with the folks we're in contact with. Salesforce makes it easy to lean into how we can make BetterUp available for more people in a given organisation,” Lavezzo said. “That’s really important to us.”

While COVID posed challenges for BetterUp as it did to all businesses, the company had embraced remote and hybrid work long before the pandemic took hold. “Since our inception, we've been incredibly remote-friendly,” Lavezzo said. More than half of BetterUp employees worked remotely pre-COVID, so while the transition into the pandemic wasn’t painless, BetterUp already had some tools and procedures in place to make things a bit smoother.

More than its familiarity with collaborating — and celebrating company wins — over Slack, though, BetterUp’s raison d’etre really shone through during the months when so many people were relegated to working from home. “COVID accelerated individuals and companies alike, recognising that there wasn't a distinction between people’s personal and professional lives, and that we need to focus on individuals’ mental fitness,” Lavezzo said. BetterUp saw more customers understanding that investing in their people was mission-critical, and how having access to a coach and a mental fitness platform in your pocket could help.

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That drive to help more people lies at the heart of the company’s long-range plans. BetterUp is doubling down on things like processes and efficiencies. “We want to redirect our talent to doing what they’re uniquely capable of doing, which is engaging customers to bring BetterUp to more people in their organisations, and deploying quickly and seamlessly,” Lavezzo said. “So I think we're spending a lot of time thinking about where we can be investing in systems and processes to cut down on busywork or administrative work.” For Lavezzo, the goal is building intelligence throughout the company, from sales through deployment to post-sales renewal expansion, and on- and off-boarding. “It’s gotta be one cohesive system,” he added.

In many ways, BetterUp has long been a global company, as it works with many companies that have employees all over the world. Over the last year, however, it took the step of opening its first offices in Europe, and building out teams there. Having Salesforce already in place made it easier for BetterUp to add new reps, regions, products, and even new currencies in a seamless fashion.

BetterUp’s growth is all in service of the company’s core mission to transform the lives of as many people as it can reach. It’s a mission that uniquely blends the hyperpersonal with hypergrowth. And that means working with an incredible amount of mission-critical data every day. “If company X is buying us because it wants to transform the lives of its working parents, we learn about the programs it has in place and the challenges that are there,” Lavezzo said. That’s a wealth of information to inform how BetterUp configures its product and gets its coaches up to speed on how best to work with that company’s individual employees. Sales Cloud and CPQ make all of that data actionable. “With Salesforce, we have that information captured, structured, and accessible,” Lavezzo said. “It allows us to deliver personalisation and transformation at scale in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to.”