By Bradford Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer at HubSpot
A few years back, we discovered two frameworks that have changed the way we communicate at HubSpot: DiSC and Situational Leadership.
The idea of DiSC is simple: you answer a series of questions about yourself, and DiSC produces a detailed report about your personality and behavior, centered around four core traits: dominance, influence, conscientiousness, and steadiness. This allows leaders to understand how their personality foots with those around them. It highlights moments that excite others, and flags traits that can frustrate the team.
Situational Leadership is the core idea that, as a leader, it’s on you to adjust your leadership style to match the needs of individuals around you. As an example, individuals facing a new task often need direct management as they learn how to take on a new situation, while by contrast folks with experience in an area thrive best with a high amount of ownership, autonomy, and encouragement.
The best are able to pair the insights from DiSC to adjust their communication style for every situation.
This works well at an organization that trains everyone on DiSC, and has these profiles accessible to anyone. But what about external communication? What about those important engagements in Sales and Customer success? Enter Crystal.
Getting to know Crystal
At HubSpot, we’ve known Drew and the Crystal team for years. We got an early look at the platform back in 2014 and it spread like wildfire. I’ve, honestly, rarely seen a product spread virally inside of HubSpot with the energy, excitement, and curiosity of Crystal in those early days.
First email from Christopher about Crystal.
You can imagine our excitement. We knew the impact DiSC personality profiles had on our internal relationships. Crystal promised to bring that insight and coaching to all our communications.
The value of tuning your communication style
We believe this is what makes Crystal unique — the core ability to bring the value of personality profiles to your external conversations. Crystal uses machine learning to analyze people’s online presence to predict their personality, with 85% accuracy, and then uses your ongoing communication to improve recommendations and insights. Where the internal profiles created for DiSC take process and time to develop, Crystal brings it all to your communication instantly and effortlessly. The end result is a set of tools that act like a spell checker, coaching users through suggested changes in wording and tone to better match their recipients’ personalities.
Powering the future of communication
Crystal’s promise can lead to a world where communication is more tailored to each individual’s personality, leading to more productive conversations and meetings. We’re excited to work with Crystal and explore creative ways to use a psychographic database to power better inbound marketing content, more helpful sales conversations, and stronger customer success relationships.
Congratulations to Drew and the Crystal team on the Series B.
