How To Grow An AI-Powered 2-Minute Microlearning Company – with Matteo Penzo from Zick Learn

In a recent episode of the HR business marketing podcast, A Better HR Business, Ben and his guest, Matteo Penzo, talk about how traditional e-learning solutions are falling short, with very low completion rates and poor engagement.

Matteo Penzo is Co-Founder & CEO of Zick Learn, a leading AI-powered microlearning platform making corporate training effective, scalable, and simple for employers. Matteo brings a scientific approach to product development and sales, driving high client ROI and international growth.

But as Matteo’s emphasized, this isn’t just another tool powered by generic AI. Before writing their first line of code, Zick Learn partnered with UC Berkeley to develop a robust, research-backed learning methodology – one that dramatically improves retention and engagement.

Matteo points out that, across industries and geographies, “standard e-learning is now failing everywhere,” with completion rates between 5% and 15%.

Zick Learn’s microlearning approach, however, meets learners where they are – integrating with their daily workflows and giving back precious hours to both learners and HR leaders. “Our average ROI for clients is 10 hours per month per employee,” Matteo shares, meaning productivity gains can quickly translate into substantial organizational savings.

You’ll hear practical strategies for using AI in consulting, attracting high-value clients, and packaging learning solutions that drive business results.

Whether you identify as HR, workplace, L&D, OD, recruitment, or people & culture, you’ll discover real stories and actionable advice to attract clients, win contracts, and grow sustainably.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why completion rates for traditional e-learning are plummeting—and what works instead.
• How Zick Learn uses AI and research-backed methodology to transform corporate learning.
• Practical outbound sales, demo, and pricing strategies that convert more HR & L&D buyers.

Resources & Links Mentioned:

• Zick Learn website: www.zicklearn.com/en
• Zick Learn playbook: The L&D reinvention playbook
• Matteo’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matteopenzo/

Scroll down for the video and audio versions and the transcript.

Ok, onto the show!

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About The ‘A Better HR Business’ Podcast

In my HR marketing podcast, I talk with different HR consultants and HR tech companies from around the world to learn about what they do and how they keep their businesses healthy and moving in the right direction.

If you have questions you want to ask me about growing an HR consultancy or marketing for HR tech companies, just let me know or visit the HR marketing services page.

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Episode Transcript

Episode 294: How To Use AI Microlearning To Win HR & L&D Consulting Clients – with Matteo Penzo from Zick Learn

Ben [00:27]:
Hello. Welcome back to the show. Great to have you along. And I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation with Matteo Penzo. Matteo is the Co-founder and CEO of a fascinating company called Zick Learn. And they’re just creating huge waves in the microlearning space. Zick Learn makes corporate learning simple and effective by turning training content into two minute micro lessons delivered directly into chat apps like WhatsApp, Teams, Slack and WebEx. And they’ve had some amazing completion rate statistics. But before we get into all of that, Matteo, thanks very much for joining me today.

Matteo Penzo [01:02]:
Thanks, Ben, for having me, and hello to everybody who’s watching us.

Ben [01:07]:
Yeah, and thanks for doing this. I know you’re Italian. I did an Italian course about 20 years ago, so I would just embarrass myself if I tried. But thank you very much. And I know you’re based in a couple of countries. Where are you doing this call from today?

Matteo Penzo [01:21]:
So today I’m doing the call from my hometown. We moved here three months ago. A small medieval town, northern Italy, surrounded by lakes. We just got a new kid, so we thought it was the best place to spend the summer. And now we’ll be moving back to Milan, Dublin for the winter.

Ben [01:40]:
Fabulous. Sounds amazing. Very good, very good. So, yeah, I kind of teased or described Zick Learn. Do you want to give us the snapshot of what Zick Learn does? And then I’d love to hear about how you’re helping employers solve problems.

Matteo Penzo [01:52]:
Zick Learn is an AI platform to transform, distribute and track micro learnings to basically any corporate chat client on the market. So we target mid market mostly and large scale corporations, they sit on huge amount of content with most of the time it’s there, just not used. That needs to be rejuvenated. So our AI applies our own methodology, learning methodology that we have developed with UC Berkeley, California, creates the lessons and then you can ship the lessons right into your learner’s pocket to have them learning in the flow of work.

Ben [02:32]:
Yeah, I love that. And that’s interesting that you mentioned you’ve developed your own learning methodology or whatever. It’s not just plucked out of thin air. Because what we’re seeing these days with the rise of AI is all these force making tools that are just glorified LMS systems, but you’ve got a methodology and an actual formal approach that produces results.

Matteo Penzo [02:51]:
Yeah, we actually did our research with UCB even before writing the first line of code. And then we built the product on top of everything else. And that research, it’s still ongoing and drives our product implementation.

Ben [03:06]:
That’s smart. So for people listening, one of the reasons I got in touch is when I saw something about Zick Learn, I had a little flashback to when I was an HR manager in a manufacturing company company back in Australia and would have loved this. Just getting people into a classroom and trying to get information out of all the product leaders heads, the experts heads. It was so hard to do. And how do you help employers train their workforces?

Matteo Penzo [03:31]:
So standard e-learning it’s now failing everywhere independently from geographies and industries. So if you look at market available data, completion rates range between 5 and 15% where the variation is because of who is doing the research. There is no uncertainty behind this data. The certainty is that employees are not being trained anymore. And we believe we are at a fundamental moment in time where reskilling and upskilling your employees is of the utmost importance. Because otherwise in three years we would be having millions of people on the streets looking for a job.

It’s just nothing but huge change coming down the line for an employer or an L&D leader or an HR leader. How does Zick Learn work for their learning and development requirements. So they’ve got information, what do they do with it?

So I’ve been obsessed with time since I was a kid. And what Zick Learn does, it basically multiplies the availability of time for all the actors involved. For the it doesn’t need to integrate a new technology into their infrastructure because Zick Learn leverages their own teams or their own slack, whatever they’re using and it is as secure as their network. For the HR department, you don’t need to rebuild or build from scratch trainings taking days or weeks. Our AI does that for you on content that is already existing in a matter of seconds. And finally for the learners who don’t have to spend hours and hours attending a super boring training. And by the way, let’s state the truth, nobody’s attending those training, they’re just “click and sleep”. They’re having the training on one screen while doing their work on the other screen.

Because at the end of the day, everybody wants the employee to stay productive. But we let you train them in the flow of work. So keeping their productivity high. Our average ROI for clients massively using Zick Learn is 10 hours per month per employee. So the savings they’re producing by giving their employees productivity back yearly saving are immense.

Ben [05:59]:
The counterargument might be that someone says what are you going to learn in two minutes? So what can they learn in two minutes?

Matteo Penzo [06:05]:
I would say everything. There’s topics I always suggest not to put on Zick Learn. If you think about financial mathematics for example, not something I would learn in my chat client, but if you look at soft skills, hard skills, process based skills, induction, everything can be built in a training that delivers every 24 hours a one minute, two minute lessons into the pocket of your learners.

Ben [06:33]:
Just thinking back to that example I gave when I was an HR manager on a site, you could almost treat it as FAQs, frequently asked questions. Or if I think back to new starter orientations, they’ve got questions or they’re getting the tour around the place and they’re starting the jobs and they’re learning with someone who’s an experienced operator, they will have frequently asked questions. I’m imagining that would be how it would work. You’ve got questions or little pieces of information that you can impart, share in two minutes quite easily.

Matteo Penzo [07:04]:
The way we built the methodology is to make the learning curve very steep. So the type and amount of content that is being memorized by the learners is exactly similar to what you would be having with a standard training. It just happened in a fraction of the time.

Ben [07:25]:
And so you’ve described an evolution in the way you help different types of companies. So is it the large firms, small firms, who are the ideal clients and how do they use it?

Matteo Penzo [07:36]:
We started with large enterprises for a very simple reason. Our business model is land-and-expand. So we land. The first license is probably very small, but then because of the word of mouth between the managers and the learners, our license sales start piling up. And so the larger the organization population, the more money we’re making with no effort. But the problem is that with large scale corporations, the sales life cycle is utterly long. This was nearly crashing us because even when you make a sale, then you convince the manager to acquire, then you have to speak with basically everybody else in the organization and everybody has to put their yes before you can actually send invoice and get paid.

Training or somebody changes role or gets fired or promoted and you have to start from scratch. So we decided yes, this is still an important part of our reach out to the market. But our go to market, it’s focused on the mid market type of companies in Ireland, in UK, in Italy and soon in the rest of Europe because that’s the easiest spot for us to start quickly, very fast decision making and then start putting the product at play.

Ben [08:31]:
And then just before that happens, they all decide, I’m going on vacation for a couple of weeks.

Yeah, that makes sense. I know when I ran my HR consulting business and finally got this large national company to or international company to sign their agreement and just ran my eyes back over the contract, over the agreement and I realized I just had to change the year because it had taken an entire year just to get this thing done. So I feel your pain. You’re having amazing success with the business and also you’re growing it quickly and you’re expanding into new markets, into new countries and so on. Can I ask what are you doing to actually market and grow the business?

Matteo Penzo [09:38]:
So we’re very strong in outbound sales. We started from the very beginning focusing on cold calling and cold emailing. We hit a wall on emails and we have to learn a lot for cold calling. Now we’re, I would say, we’re super strong at cold calling and we learned how to do email campaigns. We’re not as good on emailing as we are on cold calling, but it’s something we’re continuously developing as a reach out. We also have some inbound but if I look at the totality of the business, that’s a small percentage.

Ben [10:21]:
These days the talk is always inbound and I would encourage businesses to do it, to have that profile, that brand is seen and the inquiries come to them. But you’ve gone the opposite way. You’ve said outbound from the start. So for people listening it’s cold calls we get. But the emailing is cold bulk emailing. So that’s at large numbers you’ve got. I guess there’s more technology to make that easier these days. But can you tell us a bit about the outbound calling? Because not a lot of businesses do that well.

Matteo Penzo [10:50]:
So I think the foundation, if you want to do outbound calling, is respect the law. That’s the very first rule. So with the way you obtain the numbers, it’s very important and there are tools in the market that let you obtain numbers and contacts of your targets aligned with what the GDPR requires. So you will be calling contacts that knowing or not, they have signed for being called by external parties and they have signed an agreement with somebody so that their data can be transferred to somebody else. So that to me is the first rule because it protects the reputation of your organization, which is something that if you lose, there’s no way to get back. So there are a lot of databases on the Internet, there are a lot of ways to obtain the context of your targets, choose the proper one. And then at the beginning, I think very similarly to what everybody else is doing, my reps were pre-qualifying every target they would be calling. So they were probably doing 25 to 35 calls per day.

Matteo Penzo [12:04]:
And they would be knowing that if they called Ben, they would have known his role, current role, past role, some signals about his organization, are they investing in learning, are they hiring? So they probably have to do induction. But then Ben would not answer the call or would just close the call as soon as he realized it was a sales call and all that investment would have been lost. And back then we were probably doing four to five demos every month per rep. Actually our outbound team is not focused on selling, it’s focused on opening up opportunities so that the account executive can then take it over and actually close the sale. And so 4 to 5 wasn’t working for us, was not enough numbers to then successfully close the selling. And so I said, “Okay, we’re losing a lot of time”. I’m a data driven person, so as soon as I have data I start digging deeper and find better ways to improve those data. Back then we were using HubSpot for calling targets and Cognizant is our source of data.

So if your listeners want to take a deeper look, these were the tools we were using. HubSpot provides some high level data about the calls and based on that data, I decided to abandon quality and focus on quantity.

Ben [13:48]:
If I just pause you there. The reps were looking up data to find all the information about the people. Could they possibly be a good lead or sales source? And then when the time comes to actually phone them, they don’t answer, they hang up quickly and you’ve wasted all that time and effort doing the research. So you say, “Well no, let’s get rid of that. Let’s spend less time trying to perfect that quality side. Let’s spend more on quantity.”

Matteo Penzo [14:12]:
Yeah, more than getting rid of that actually the turning point was accepting reality. You are calling people out of the blue and you are pissing them off. So knowing this, you have to know that the majority of the people will hang up on you. My rep’s job is just to find the two persons every day who are willing to speak with them. Because what we know is that since the problem that we’re fixing is pandemic, then we have to assume that everybody has the problem. We don’t need to search for the people with a problem. We know everybody has it.

We just need to search to look for the people who are willing to recognize they have a problem and recognize they need to know the solution. So we completely shift approach. My reps do not know who they’re calling. Well, obviously they have the name, the surname. We do a very thorough prospecting so that they’re not speaking with a leader of engineering in an oil and gas company who will not be interested in a training tool. Although we do have some engineering leads.

Ben [15:27]:
I can imagine you would. Yeah. And do they have scripts that they follow? How does that work?

Matteo Penzo [15:31]:
There is a high level script, but I don’t trust scripts. I think that if you follow a script, it’s very likely your target will immediately recognize this is a sales call, which basically burns your possibilities. We always try to focus the conversation on a friendly tone and on the challenges of our targets. And that’s at the very beginning of our call. We obviously introduce ourselves, but then focus, ask: what are the challenges when training people or when inducing people into a new role? And based on those challenges, the rest of the conversation follows. So, yes, the challenges are pretty similar for everybody, which, by the way, are the problems we solve. So good news.

But then we personalize every call, and that’s what I tell to my reps: “It might be looking like your job is the most boring of the planet. Calling 100 people every day, all days of the week, for your entire tenure here at Zick Learn. But behind the curtains, that’s one of the most creative jobs on the market. Because every call, it’s a new one. You can be a new person with a new personality at every call. Adapting to the personality of whom you’re speaking with.”

Ben [16:57]:
Absolutely. That opening is tough. That’s the toughest part. After they’re talking, then you’ve got information, you can build rapport, but that first couple of lines, I’m imagining, that’s pretty tough.

Matteo Penzo [17:08]:
Absolutely. But that’s why I was telling you we are in the business of speaking with two persons every day, not more than that. And what we track is, for example, the duration of the call and we get to a pretty consistent metrics where we know the ratio of calls beyond two minutes that we’re able to convert into demos and then a ratio of calls beyond three minutes that we’re converting into demos. And that’s how we operate is we know that if we can make the conversation lasting longer, then it’s very likely we close it as a demo.

Ben [17:47]:
And are you hiring seasoned, highly experienced sales reps or what are you doing?

Matteo Penzo [17:54]:
At the beginning, I was doing so because I thought it would have been a much faster way into the market. The problem is that when you hire experienced people, yes, they bring professionality to the job, but also they’re bringing their background of things they have tried and they think they don’t work, or things they never tried because they believe they don’t work. We realized it’s much better for us to start anew. And so, for example, our best rep ever before joining Zick Learn was a pizzaiolo in Dublin. What we’re looking for is not the experience. I think you can build the experience. What you cannot build is the approach to the conversation. So, for example, when I hire, there is a part of the very first interview that I run where I ask to turn off the camera so that both of us can focus on the flow of the conversation.

And then I ask the person I’m interviewing to do an outbound call out of the blue where I won’t be judging the technicalities. So I don’t care if you’re good cold caller, I will be judging: is this person annoying me? Is this person making me bored to death that I cannot wait to stop the conversation? Or is this person entertaining me, making me curious? Curiosity, I think, is the number one success in cold calling.

Ben [19:37]:
Curiosity gap. What’s going to happen next?

Matteo Penzo [19:39]:
Exactly. And that’s why, for example, I always tell my reps: “Don’t tell everything in the call”. If you’re capable of creating curiosity without satisfying it and creating a promise that their curiosity will be satisfied in the demo, number one, it’s more likely they book the demo. And number two, which is more important to me, they show up at the demo. They actually show up at the demo. If you start sharing all information in the call or via email, number one, you’re losing your time. Instead of calling new targets, you are still picking with this one. And number two, it’s high risk that this person will put very low attention to the material you share and will very likely do not attend the call.

Ben [20:26]:
And that’s a tough lesson for anyone, but especially HR tech, HR consulting, founders and leaders, because it’s your baby, you want to talk about it and tell everyone all about it and all the amazing things it does. And yeah, you’re saying it’s that curiosity, leave a little bit off the table to bring it to the next stage, the demo. And speaking of demo, how has that changed? I’m guessing that you don’t do the same thing you used to do.

Matteo Penzo [20:50]:
Well, actually, we very recently changed our approach because originally when you get a target, you get a potential client into the demo, we start from the challenges. So we focus the demo, personalize the demo on the challenges. We want to dig deeper around that because that’s how we’re going to close the deal. Showing them that they have problems that they are not solving with our product. With Zick Learn, they can solve their existing problems. So that’s the foundation of our selling approach. But then we were spending the majority of the demo showing the product. We were starting with creating a context through a product deck and then actually showing the product and then closing the demo with a training sent to their WhatsApp right away so they can start looking at the product not just from the administrator part, but also from the learner’s part and actually leave the experience, leave the Zick Learn experience in their hand.

And then at the end of the demo, we would have set up a follow up meeting probably a week later. And during this week we were tracking their engagement into the training because we can track over 20 data points live, coming up on their interaction with the training. And so that’s a good guidance on we will be able to close the deal or not.

Ben [22:17]:
Are they using it or not? And if they haven’t even opened yet…

Matteo Penzo [22:19]:
If you’re not using it, what’s the likelihood you being interested in it? Yeah, but what happened is that all the demos were going really well. Really, really well. You can feel the excitement in the conversation on the phone. You can feel the excitement when you have FaceTime with your prospect in the demo. But then in the second call, many of them did not show up. It’s not the right moment. So I believe we were losing momentum with this approach. And so the way we redesigned the demo, which is our first real touchpoint with a prospect, is let’s ride momentum.

And so let’s not show the entire product, let’s only show the parts of the product that they care about. So their challenge is something like “We do in person training. So we don’t have any real data about the engagement of the class, the impact on the business. We just run some pause at the end of the training and then nobody reads the results or is able to interpret the results.” Then let’s just focus on the analytics and the insights and how in depth we can go for each single learner up to the entire organization. Or if their challenge is that they have a small learning and development team and they have no time to create the content, then let’s focus on the AI component. Or if they have a very diverse a population speaking so many languages, then let’s focus on the component that does the automatic translations and delivers automatically in the language spoken by each single learner. And the rest blur it.

It’s there. If you ask me question, I will be using part of the product to answer that question. But that moves from being 15 minutes chapter to probably be a 5 minutes chapter. And then after this, we pull up the pricing slide and we ask a very simple question. What is going to make possible for us to work together.

Ben [24:32]:
And what are you looking for there?

Matteo Penzo [24:33]:
Anything. And we’ll get answers. Such as? Well, you know:

“I love the product, but I’m not really a decision maker, so you should be speaking with Mark”.

“Okay, let’s bring Mark in the conversation. Help me bring in Mark in the conversation. “

Or

“Yeah, it’s a great product. Yeah, it would solve my problems. Yes, I can decide on buying it, but I’m done with the budget.”

I love this answer because budget is the thing that it can flex the most.

Okay, so we’re moving the problem from a week in the future, two weeks in the future, to right now. And by moving the product to the present, from the future to the present, we also can solve the problem or try to solve the problem right away. And that makes the conversation afterwards very easy because it’s either, okay, we stop the conversation here, there’s no way ahead for us, so we’re saving time of our account executives or we’re able to set a proper next step which goes in the direction of actually treating the problem.

Ben [25:41]:
I love that approach. And I’ve seen so many bad demos. We all have. We’ve all seen bad demos. And a bad demo is often where the person treats the product like an encyclopedia and they show you all the facts from A to Z. And some of the demos I’ve been on: “Here’s where you log in and here’s where you upload”. I don’t care. I don’t care. Please stop talking.

Matteo Penzo [26:03]:
Yeah, I hear you. But I’m a product person, so the product is my baby. So I know what I have to do. But I suffer. My soul is suffering because I know, “Oh my God, this is such a cool feature we just released. And I’m not showing that to you.” So I understand the friction, but you need to get to that friction in order for doing the business with that prospect.

Ben [26:29]:
And can I just clarify, you said you get to the pricing slide and then you ask the question so you have the actual numbers or the pricing scale or something on the screen as you say this.

Matteo Penzo [26:40]:
We’re a SaaS product, so it’s pretty easy for us. We get paid by seats, basically by active seats. So our clients only pay the learners that are engaged in our training during the month. My business model is learn-and-expand. So I don’t care if this is a 5K deal, 10K deal. I know my ACV (annual contract value) and I know eventually I will be lending there in the course of the year. The question I ask, is usually I show the price and then I ask how many employees do they have? I already know the range of employees, but I want the exact number. Because you might be speaking with a group that has 10,000 employees, but the person in front of you is only responsible for a slice of that.

And market ratio gives you an average of 30% of the company population constantly involved in a training. So if you’re a thousand people organization, you don’t need a thousand licenses, you probably need around 300 of them. And I create the pricing for the year. And once there, I ask the question: “Okay, is this thriving you? So when we end up to the final price, is this something scary for you or is this something that you can think you can play with? Because if it scares you, I have ways to reduce that price. For example, by changing the learning strategy. You don’t need to train all 30% of your employees every month through Zick Learn, for example. So let’s create a smaller package, smaller yearly package, which hits lightly your budget. Or I can show you the ROI you’re getting if you invest that budget.”

So recently we got signed a very large client way, way beyond our standard ACD, 10 times more. But the saving they were producing, the yearly saving they were producing by using Zick Learn. And we built the business case together with a client. It was over a million.

So even thinking you’re not improving the way your employees work through learning, I know you will be improving. But let’s assume nothing changes, you’re just having them investing less time to learn the same thing and look at what’s the outcome of that investment. And so it was a no brainer for them. Even though we closed the deal mid year with most of the budget already spent.

Ben [29:24]:
I love that. And a less experienced person. The first reaction to the does this scare you? Yes, it does. Would be, “Oh, I can do a special right for you.” Whereas you went straight to, you could adjust the learning methodology of the approach so we can do different things or look at the ROI. There was no talk in there about discounts. Who knows, maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t, but that was not your reaction to go to that point. So I think that’s a huge lesson for people listening to this.

Matteo Penzo [29:49]:
Yeah, I hate discounts. I think discounting is lying to your clients because if you can discount, it means that you’re either sacrificing your margins or you inflated the price. So to show the discount. And I know it’s an easy trap to fall in because discounts are sexy. I don’t find them sexy. Yes, we do discount and we communicate the discounts approach to the target, to the prospects. But is based on the volume of seats you’re acquiring. So I’m telling you that if you buy a thousand seats, this is going to be the price, but if you buy 2,000 seats, then this is going to be the price per learner. So I show the discount right away, but there’s a caveat in between.

Ben [30:39]:
Yeah, there’s a rationale to it all. Yeah. No, I appreciate that you’ve mentioned several times that you’re a data person and clearly you’ve adjusted your outbound call approach, your email approach, your demo approach with data. So for people listening, this term gets thrown about a bit. You know, you got to be data driven. How would someone listening to this apply data to their own marketing methodology? What advice would you have for them?

Matteo Penzo [31:03]:
We obviously have to be burned many times before getting to this approach. But our basic approach is that a BDR should be doing 100 calls every day. Not counting people who’s answering, not answering the length of conversation. It’s feasible to do 100 calls. You can do more, but let’s focus on 100. And we tried that. So me and my co founders started doing, okay, let’s focus two hours of our time doing calls and let’s count how many calls we can do proper calls and then we multiply by the entire working day. Of these 100 calls, you will be able to get at least two demos.

So that’s your quota. And there are markets where to get to the two demos, you have to do more calls. There are markets where to get to the two demos, you have to be doing less calls. Culture plays a huge role here. So for example, calling Ireland and calling UK, two completely different approaches and two completely different results. And out of these two demos per day, per rep, I know how many clients I will be signing within a period of three months, which is our sales lifecycle. And now we’re working to find ways to shorten this life cycle. Changing the demo funnel is one of these ways.

Matteo Penzo [32:25]:
So if we want to fail, we want to fail much faster than we did before. And obviously you need to use the tools that let you track everything. So for example, we moved from HubSpot to a French software called Aircall. I love it because I can track everything. They even have an AI agent that goes through your calls and detects sentiments and gives you guidance. We’re not using that, not yet at least, but I have all the numbers I need.

Ben [33:00]:
So map out the main steps: outbound the calls, the actual volume, the quantity of calls that you’re making, the duration of the calls in this case was another metric. You were looking at the number of demos and then going from there, but knocking out that full process, that sales pipeline, and then every step of that process saying, well, what’s the existing number? How can we improve that? And sometimes you try stuff that doesn’t work. But your point is fail a bit faster so you can get on with it and find the best way. Is that right?

Matteo Penzo [33:30]:
Yeah, I think failure is a good measure of your success because I always believe that if you’re not failing, it’s probably not because you’re very successful, but because you’re not trying hard enough. So what we’re doing is iteratively reviewing our quota. Because I don’t know if 2 demos per day, 2 demo set per day is success. I know that it’s feasible, but once I engineered across markets and geographies, I want to raise that number and I want to raise the number of people that we bring to demo and then we close as actual deals. We’re constantly reviewing our quota because the only way ahead is accelerating. We are a startup, so the only reason for a startup to exist is constant growth and acceleration.

Ben [34:27]:
It’s probably all music to the ears of VCs. Just say you took on funding, how would you apply that funding?

Matteo Penzo [34:34]:
I think it really depends on the historical moment. So for example, the first funding we got from Angels went entirely into the product.

We had nothing, we had our research and we need to build the product on top of that research. And then the use of proceeds start moving from the product to the growth. And now, for example, the product is entirely sustained through our own money, while growth, most of the growth is sustained through VC money, through investors money. So we use the investors money to accelerate the business. We use our own money to improve the product and scale up the product.

Ben [35:19]:
So you’ve shared a lot of wonderful information, I guess. Last two questions would be your overall marketing and growth advice to other HR software, HR consulting, related businesses. What’s your general advice on how to grow and scale up faster? And then lastly, just if you could recap, who’s your ideal target market? If people are listening to this and they think, oh, I know some companies that could become customers of Zick Learn, who should they be looking for? So firstly, what’s your overall advice?

Matteo Penzo [35:46]:
My advice would be start small. You don’t need a sales team to start selling. And as a founder or as a business owner, the best advice you could receive is you have to try things yourself. If you cannot sell your product, it’s going to be very difficult for everybody else to sell your product. Then just hire people who are better than you at selling. That’s my secret sauce. And when it comes to our ideal customer profile, we’re looking for HR leaders or Learning and Development leaders working in organizations ranging from 500 to 10,000 employees where training is failing or where they’re constantly jugging. And I know you’re juggling between productivity and upskilling. That’s the people we want to work with.

Ben [36:50]:
So Matteo, if people want to learn more about Zick Learn, what should they do next?

Matteo Penzo [36:54]:
Best thing is go to our website, www.zicklearn.com and there’s free demo there so you can try Zick Learn on your WhatsApp right away for free. And a lot of material that we have collected, such as a playbook. I spent my spring interviewing over a hundred HR leaders, understanding what they do well and what they do that failed. We created a playbook that helps you in completely restructuring your learning approach. There are articles, interviews with HR leaders, such as the head of Campari University or Professor Serrano, who’s my scientific partner on the Berkeley side, for the future of corporate training. A lot of material we’re distributing free. And then if you’re willing to work, I’m here to listen.

Ben [37:48]:
Love it. So again, that’s www.zicklearn.com and that details of that study will be in the show notes. So check that out. But otherwise, Matteo, thank you for sharing A) what Zick Learn is doing and how it’s helping organizations. And also B), just on the business growth side of things. You’ve shared so many gold nuggets there. So thank you for that as well. But I wish you and the business all the best for the future.

Matteo Penzo [38:08]:
Thank you, Ben. Thanks everybody. Matteo out.

Topics covered: using AI in consulting, L&D consultants, how to attract HR consulting clients, HR tech, business growth strategies for consultants, packaging consulting offers.

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