Guy Benjamin of Healthee on the red flags in a marketing leader interview

Guy Benjamin

Hey, great to be here, thank you so much.

Guy Benjamin

I'm Guy Benjamin. I'm originally from Israel, grew up there, I'm the youngest of four brothers. First career was a bit different: I used to be in the Air Force, I used to be a fighter pilot. I flew F-16s for about 13 years. Then came to the US about 12 years ago, went to Yale for my MBA, and then worked at McKinsey, the consulting firm, for about seven years. While I was working at McKinsey in New York I realized it's probably easier to fly a jet than to navigate health benefits. Every time I had a question I would go to [unclear @ 01:14], they would send me to a call center. Wasn't really the experience I was hoping to get, and I thought there has to be a way to leverage technology to access health and wellness benefits.

So I left McKinsey about three years ago, and together with my co-founders we started Healthee. Healthee is a one-stop shop for health and wellness benefits. Basically a platform where employees can figure out what is the best plan for them and their families. They can navigate their care, find providers, book appointments, know what they're covered for, what benefits they have, see how much things are going to cost for them before they get it done, and then also talk to virtual providers at no cost, so therapists and telemedicine providers, no cost. So it's kind of like a one-stop shop. We work today with thousands and thousands of employers, hundreds of thousands of employees are using us, and we help them first of all be smarter healthcare consumers, but also reduce significantly their cost and their employer's cost for healthcare.

Guy Benjamin

Happy to talk about that too. So look, I think you're right, like an idea doesn't have much value if you don't execute it in the right way, and we're super focused on execution. Our execution, first of all, is our people. We have very strong talent, a group of leaders and employees that are very passionate about what we're doing. At the end of the day we're helping employees be healthier, we're trying to make them live their healthiest lives effortlessly, because today it takes a lot of effort to know what you're covered for and what you can do, and again to be healthy in the US takes effort. We're trying to make this effortless, and it all starts with our people.

We have people in marketing, R&D, design, sales, customer success, product, really strong talent, and they're the first reason we're able to execute so well. Then the other reason is that we're obsessed about impact, we're obsessed about the user experience, and we're obsessed about just getting our platform to as many employees as we can, meaning we work with distribution channels, we work with partners, we're constantly signing more partners to help us bring this AI technology to as many employees as we can. There are 160 million employees in the US that are covered by their employer for health insurance, that's almost an unlimited market. If we're today close to, let's say, a million, there's still 159 million more people who could use our platform, and everybody could use Healthee, because everybody should have the ability to be healthy effortlessly. So that's what really helped us focus on being good at execution: our people, our focus, and our mentality of being obsessed about this.

Guy Benjamin

First of all, it's not on me to define that, because I'm not a marketing person. That's why I surround myself with people who are much stronger, much smarter than me on these topics. For example, for our marketing we have our VP marketing, Omer, who's been doing this for years, he's the one who defined it. I think our main KPI is number of leads that we're able to... first of all, our main KPI is revenue, how many deals we're closing. And even more than that, we have a KPI of engagement, how many people are using our platform, and how much money we're saving for our customers and our users.

But for marketing it's number of leads that we're able to bring into the company, and it could be leads from inbound, it could be leads from conferences we're doing, putting our name out there and seeing if it creates the result we want to see. At the end of the day marketing needs to create a pipeline, that's their main KPI: how much money we're creating in the pipeline, how much potential revenue we're getting through marketing. And again, marketing is everywhere. It's in our sales effort, it's in our product marketing, which is important, it's in our brand, it touches every aspect of the company. When you go through all of our departments, people, customer success, sales, design, marketing touches everything.

Guy Benjamin

Our VP marketing is part of our leadership team, and he thinks strategically the exact same way that I think strategically, and I expect that from everyone in our leadership team. He's not only looking, no one in our leadership is only looking at the next milestone, they're all looking at the vision. The vision is to become the biggest company in this space, the vision is to help as many employees as possible, the vision is that every employee in the US will have access to Healthee, and by that have better access to their healthcare and be healthier. So first of all we talk about vision all the time.

Now, when you think about the shorter term, yes, of course we have targets, we have targets for our sales, for this year, for next year, and we know exactly, to get to that number of sales, if we want to get to a specific number next year, we know how much revenue we need to have in our pipeline, potential revenue, and that's the next pipeline. We work on a quarterly basis, even though for us, because we sell to many different types of customers, we sell to large employers, it could be an employer of 120,000 lives, and it could be an employer of [unclear] lives. We also sell through brokers, which helps us sell to smaller customers, we also sell through partnerships, and each one of those types of customers has a very different sales life cycle. For example, for us to close a small customer next quarter, they should probably be in our pipeline at least a quarter before.

Sometimes you can get them in at the beginning of the quarter and they'll close by the end of the quarter. That happens for a large customer too, if you want to close them. For our larger customers this year, we're probably not going to sell to too many new customers that are not already in our pipeline. Most if not all of the enterprise customers we're going to close this year are already in our pipeline, we already met them, they already know about us, they're starting to think about it, because that's the sell cycle, they need to meet you, it takes a few months, sometimes it takes six, sometimes it takes 18 months. So the marketing team is actually not even focused on this year anymore, they're now focused on next year, because next year's target is obviously much higher, and they're now building a pipeline for 2025. So all of the things they're doing between now and the end of the year is to keep building that pipeline for 2025, and then in 2025, for the first six months, same thing, they'll do what we call planting: they'll plant the seed, so in the second half of the year we can go harvest. That's kind of the way we operate, our sell cycles are sometimes really long, so we need to make sure that everything we want to close this year should already be in the

Guy Benjamin

So there are different ways that we measure our marketing. First of all, as I mentioned, pipeline is one of the biggest ways to measure our marketing, how much potential revenue we have in our pipeline, meaning a lead that expressed some interest and is now in our pipeline, and we need to go through the motion of getting them from a lead to a closed and signed deal. The second thing is also how many impressions we have, how many followers we have on social media, how much traction we get from events we create, if we do a webinar, how many people show up, we publish a piece, like a white paper or an article, how many people actually download it and use it, how many people go on our website and ask for a demo, how many people go on our website and sign up for a newsletter. There are many different KPIs, and at the end of the day they all combine into that pipeline, how do we create and increase our pipeline.

But we've got to remember that marketing has a lot of art to it. Again, Omer is the expert here, I'm not even going to try to mimic what he usually does, but he's great at understanding that it's not just "did we get the lead," it's "can we create emotion so that eventually a lead is going to come in." It could start with them just looking at a white paper, then it could be them joining a webinar, then it could be them hearing about us from a conference they attend, and eventually they'll become a lead, they'll ask for a demo. But it takes time, it's a life cycle to get those leads into the pipeline and become actual legitimate leads. So it's something we need to remember, there's a time axis as well, you can't expect to go to a lead right now and then have them go into the pipeline right away, there are a few things you need to do to make that happen, and you have to be patient.

But you also have to be able to measure all the efforts you're putting into this, because obviously we put a lot of money into our marketing, it's one of our biggest expenses. It could be on, we go to a conference, okay, how many leads did we get from that conference, how many of those leads actually converted over time. I can tell you, that conference we attended earlier in the year, in January or February for example, we know our ROI on those conferences was very high, because it's enough for us to close two, three deals from every conference, and we're obviously, you know, 10x-ing our cost. So those are things we also measure, and it also helps us understand what are the conferences we need to attend next year, based on the ROI we got this year.

We're constantly measuring that, we're constantly thinking, because we're a startup, we're resource-limited, and resources are not only money, it's also our time, every conference like that takes a lot of time and effort, we have to fly there, obviously it costs a lot of money. So we need to constantly evaluate and understand, okay, this conference makes sense, this one doesn't, because there are so many of them. This channel on social media makes sense, we see the impact of it, or it doesn't, we're always evaluating where we should invest our money or not. I'll give you an example from a couple of weeks ago: we invested, it wasn't a huge investment, but we did this really cool video of going on the street and asking random people what they know about their benefits, and it became viral, it created a ton of buzz, and now we're going to create the second episode of it, and the third episode, because we're seeing there's so much value to it, even though we still haven't seen the exact ROI, because no deals have closed because of that video, obviously, and I'm not expecting them to, but it helped create our brand as an industry leader, as a thought leader, as a company people will go to when they need to know about their benefits.

Guy Benjamin

We're not building a company for the next year, we're building a company for the next ten, twenty years, and our goal is again to have as many employees on the platform, and some of these employees are only going to go on the platform in two years and three years. We're going to keep growing, we've exploded this year, we want to explode again next year. So we're not building a company just for the next year, not even for the next funding round, we're building a company that's here to last, and we're building a company that's going to make a huge change for the healthcare system in the US. We're not trying to change the healthcare system, because it's by design, we're trying to change people's behavior, we're trying to help employees and their family members be smarter consumers, and that's what we're doing.

And in that mindset of building a huge company that's here to last, that's here to make a significant impact on people's lives, we've got to remember that there are some investments we're going to make that we're not going to see the ROI on tomorrow, or in the next quarter, or maybe not next year, but we're building the foundations for a huge company, and those foundations include the brand. We can't expect that in two years, if we don't make any investment, our brand is suddenly going to become a household name. It will become a household name, it will take some time, but we need to make those efforts now and build a foundation for that today. And again, our marketing team, and especially our VP marketing, knows that he's not trying to build a company for 2024, we're all trying to build something here that's going to completely change the lives of millions and millions of people in the US, and hopefully at some point in the world, not just in the US, because everybody could use better access to healthcare, everybody should be able to enjoy the benefits of AI when it comes to their health, and to one of the most complicated things in their lives, which is navigating healthcare.

Guy Benjamin

First of all, I don't think so, I mean, I'm sure they have, there's a budget for marketing, and they have, okay, this is going to go to social media, this is going to go to conferences, this is going to go for brand awareness, this is going to go for webinars, this is going to go for product marketing, for internal, for our customers. But at the end of the day I also think we've got to remember that they don't have to be this disconnected, building a brand is also going to improve our pipeline, and building a brand will improve our engagement.

If employees suddenly hear, you know, my vision is that a new employee comes to a company, they start working there, and they say, well, you don't have Healthee, so how am I supposed to navigate my health benefits, how are you helping your employees navigate their health benefits, how are you reducing the cost of your health benefits, that's kind of the vision, it becomes table stakes, an employee joins a new company and they're looking for that solution, the Healthee solution, and for that you need to build a brand, you need to keep selling, you need to grow, you need to expand. Even the fact that we're constantly innovating and delivering and adding features to our product and improving the capabilities and the offering, that's also part of our brand, because we're a brand that doesn't stand still, we're a brand that keeps innovating and delivering. Customers who see us at a specific point in time, and then see us again in six months, always say, wow, you guys are not stopping, you're constantly adding more and more things to the platform, and they love it, and that's the brand I want us to promote, the brand that doesn't stand still, the brand that keeps innovating and delivering.

Guy Benjamin

I would say there are two mistakes. One is not bringing the right people, and it's not just for marketing, but let's focus on marketing: when you build a brand, when you build a startup, when you're starting from scratch, you need people who are resilient, who are scrappy, who are okay with trying something, learning from it, failing, trying again. You can't bring somebody who's going to build a marketing strategy for six months and then come out of a cave after six months and try to implement that, that's not going to work. You need people who from day one are going to work with whatever they can to improve it, to increase that pipeline, to build that brand, to build out brand awareness, to bring in leads, you need people who are going to just jump on it, that's kind of what you're looking for. If somebody in an interview tells you, give me three months or six months and I'll build the best strategy, that's not the right approach for a startup.

You need somebody who's going to say, hey, tomorrow I'm going to try something, and if it doesn't work, which it probably won't, I'll try something else the next day. That's what I love about our marketing team, that's what we do. And then the second mistake, I think, is not having the right expectations. We talked about it: if you expect that we do something and you get an ROI immediately, at least in our industry it doesn't work like that, it takes time, you have to educate customers, you have to build brand awareness, you have to keep putting things out there, and it's okay if you put a post and there's just two likes, and then you put another post and there's four likes, and then you just keep growing, and you build your brand as a thought leader, as an industry leader.

Those things don't happen overnight, it's not flipping a switch, it's a lot of trial and error, and it takes time, and that's, I think, a second kind of mistake founders sometimes make. And then the third, I know I said only two, but let's talk about a third one: it's not trusting the people that you bring on. The worst thing that I can do is tell my marketing team what I think is the right approach for marketing, because I'm not a marketer, and I brought them on because I wanted to surround myself with people who are smarter than me on this. It's fine to give an opinion, but if I don't follow their lead, the professionals, people who have experience in marketing, which I don't, we're not going to be successful. That's another mistake I'm seeing, where you don't trust the experts you bring on, and it's not just with marketing, it goes with fully trusting our VP sales, our VP people, our VP R&D, all of our leadership, because I was never in their shoes, there are things I know I'm good at, and things I definitely know I'm not as good at as they are, and you've got to make sure you trust the people you bring in.

Guy Benjamin

It's kind of a tricky question, because I didn't hire our marketing team, our VP marketing hired the marketing team. But I can tell you, when I hired our VP marketing, it's the same thing I mentioned before, I wanted somebody who's resilient, who understands that we're running, it's not a sprint, it's not a marathon, let's call it a sprint-marathon, it's a marathon that you just sprint in all the time, and they're okay with it. It's somebody who's okay with failure and learning from failures, and resiliency is exactly that, you fall, and how soon are you going to get back up. So that's what I'm looking for.

And then if I go one level deeper on our marketing team, same qualities, but also you want to find people who are good at specific things, like we have people who are really good with content, they can create very cool content from scratch, that's something we want, we want people who are really good at finding opportunities to get our brand out there, and we're really good at creating content for conferences. I was just at two conferences last week where I spoke, and I was heavily relying on the content our marketing team created. I think those are the things we're looking for. First you have to bring in the most important role, the first person who's going to lead the marketing team, in our case that was Omer, VP of marketing, and then you bring in people who are passionate about what you're doing, who are resilient, and who each have their own specialty, so they can also create a team that complements each other.

Guy Benjamin

Wow, there are a lot of lessons that I've learned, that I'm still learning, as a founder. I think the biggest one, and we've talked a lot about it here, is how important the people you surround yourself with are, and how diligent you have to be about picking those people, but also how fast you have to be when you figure out they're not the right people, to move on and find someone else, because one thing I've realized is that if it's not a good fit for you, it's not a good fit for them, they can go and be successful somewhere else, and you need someone else with a different skill set.

It's better to move on faster than to linger and try to see, oh, maybe we can make it work. But again, it's just bringing the right people. We brought in our VP people, Debbie, as one of the first employees, because we realized that people are what's going to make this company a success or not, and it's worked for us. We have amazing talent because we invested so much time and effort in the beginning on bringing the right people, and the person to lead the culture of the company, our VP people. That's my biggest lesson. We've made many mistakes in hiring, it's just something I've learned, if I would do this over again there are a lot of people who were just not the right fit, and I know now what I'm looking for, I know much better what I'm looking for.

Guy Benjamin

I think one misconception is that you raise funds and you're successful, and I don't think that's the right way to think about it. If you raise funds it means you were successful in showing potential or some traction, but being really successful is creating impact on the company, on people's lives. I'm not measuring myself on how much money we raised, I'm measuring myself on how many people's lives we're touching, how we're helping them be healthier, how much money we save them, how much revenue we have as a company, and how much we grow. It's definitely not, you know, I get a lot of "oh, congrats, I saw you raised a funding round," and that's just the first step in the journey, that's kind of one major misconception. The second thing, another big one, is that it's all about the founders, and I would argue it's all about the people the founders surround themselves with.

Guy Benjamin

I think the main one is, it's going to be tough, but you've got to stay resilient, and you're going to fall many, many times, but at the end of the day it's worth it, and you're learning from every time you fail, and it's going to work out if you keep trying.

Guy Benjamin

I mean, you asked most of it, I think it was a very interesting conversation, I love talking about our technology, about the AI revolution. Look, AI is just getting better, if you're not getting on the AI train now, you're going to miss it, and it's going to be too late, and companies that are not adopting AI in their day-to-day life today, I'm not sure they're going to be here in a few years. So I think that's one of the things we didn't talk about, the fact that we're bringing in technology to help employees be healthier, but also to help companies be stronger, be more successful, grow better, and not spend so much money on healthcare, which today is like the second biggest expense of any company in the US.