How Chili Piper Turned Profitable in 2024 and Tied Every Promotion to AI Skills (Co-Founder Alina Vandenberghe at SaaS Open 2024)

Cold open

Nathan Latka

00:00Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording.

Alina Vandenberghe

00:18>> Once you feel that you're having a conversation that feels artificial, you lose trust. It's about a quarter of a million impressions, which is hard to get. We see conversion rates of growing from 40% to 80%.

Chili Piper Growth Journey: Bootstrapping to Profitability

Alina Vandenberghe

00:34>> This is our growth to date. The first years we've been bootstrapped, and then the gods of SaaS were kind to us, and we've been showered with VC money as well. They both came with the good and the bad. This year, we're finally profitable, and we're growing, which I'm very grateful for. I can sleep at night. Well, not all nights. Last night, there was a poker game. Do we know who won?

Core Product and Demand Conversion

Alina Vandenberghe

01:00>> You won? Shout out for Jen. What we're known for is demand conversion. On your website, if you have contact us or request a demo, We put in touch directly with your sales team, there's no leakage in that inbound funnel. People don't get ghosted. We see conversion rates of growing from 40% to 80% of that inbound funnel. We have other things in our portfolio of products, but that's what we are mostly known for. And in this presentation,

AI Upskilling and Career Progression Framework

Alina Vandenberghe

01:31>> I'm gonna follow the pattern that I was given around the things that we actually do with AI, with upskilling, with our processes, AI in our conversations with our customers and in our ecosystem as well. I wanna start with our employees. We actually put it as a constraint on the growth of their career within Chili Piper, on their promotions, and on their salaries, how well they're learning and how well they're upskilling in AI as well. We have actually

01:59>> levels set up so that we can determine whether they're making progress there. Because I don't think that if you don't measure it, then it you don't see action. And I actually made this framework open sourced. I put all my skills for, for instance, for my marketing team, what I'm assessing them to go grow from a director to a VP or from a senior to a manager and so forth, and how we're mapping the various skills

AI Automation as a Team Sport

Alina Vandenberghe

02:26>> towards those levels. We also make it the automation with AI a team sport. Everybody in the company is collaborating and improving processes. So SDRs contribute, account executives contribute. We all want to make the machine run smoother. So we have a Slack channel in which we give ourselves ideas on things to optimize with AI, and we prioritize very simply. If it's a low lift and it has a big impact, we do it. If it's a high high

02:54>> level of effort and it has a high high impact and we can bring a tool, we bring a tool as well. And I'm gonna give you some examples of the tools that we use and some of the things that we've built ourselves.

03:06>> Obviously, we use AI also for our creative actually, who who here is using AI for creative for your creative motions? One, two, three, four, five. Who here is using AI for creative successfully?

AI Tools for Creative and SEO Content

Alina Vandenberghe

03:21>> So so? Okay. We have five percent with moderate success. These are the tools that we are using with our creative team. One of them is Surfer SEO. The team is right there. Shout out to Kazik. It's a very useful tool to creating SEO optimized content out of the gate. We also use Opus for Shorts,

03:42>> Descript for for our videos, for our podcast. I don't have here one other tool that are some of our SDRs use, but I've just seen Will. We're also using Lavender. Shout out to the Lavender team.

Demand Conversion Experimentation and Lead Routing

Alina Vandenberghe

03:56>> And we also do a lot of experimentation on our demand conversion channel because that's where our product is. So we've been experimenting with distributing high level hand raisers to best closers as well. So as opposed to just doing a round robin or doing a regional distribution, we also do based on conversion rates. And that has yielded impressive results. As you can imagine, it's quite controversial because you have your newcomers and you want to distribute leads to

04:21>> them as well and you want them to practice. So we're doing a fair distribution there. We're also doing a lot of AI experimentation on the funnel with Mutiny. I don't think the Mutiny team is here today.

SDR Bots and AI-Powered Outreach

Alina Vandenberghe

04:34>> On our SDRs, we started building our own bots for a lot of these things. We're practically empowering SDRs with assistance, and we're distributing our bots with duct tape on doing research, on creating account information for them to make sure that when they reach out, are very precise in their their messaging. Has any of you has been prospected here by our SDR team? My my SDR team? Alright. They're doing their job. I

05:06>> like that.

05:08>> And we're obviously doing a lot of AB tests on on their cadences. But every message that we send comes from a human, and I'll explain later why.

05:17>> For our account executives and our AMs, we actually prepare them a lot as well so that when they reach out to someone, they know when they talk to someone, they know ahead of time, and we we scrape this from our partners from all sorts of signals. They know ahead of time if a competitor is already using our product, the use cases in which a competitor is using our product, what use cases a particular account is active

05:42>> in the market. We also know if they've been active with a previous customer or with a churn customer so that we understand the entire picture before we get on that call.

Sales Bots Architecture and Snowflake Data Stack

Alina Vandenberghe

05:53>> And we also take the transcripts of our account executives to put marketing attribution in in our CRM to actually know which some which marketing motions are working and which are not. This is an example of how the bots are scraping things. We have as a data source Snowflake. So we consolidate all our data in there from our CRM, from marketing, from our website, from our product, and then have intermediary places where we store the information

06:26>> that we have and we distribute bots on it. We're now playing with some other tools to help us do this at scale because we have a lot of accounts that we reach and our SDR team books more than 500 meetings a quarter. So as you can imagine, this becomes very hard to manage at scale. So we're now testing some tools that can wrangle the bots for us.

06:51>> Any question on the on the sales bots part? Yes.

06:58>> We are deploying bots that go because in our case, we sell better to companies that have a contact us form on their website and it's not hidden. We check if there is a contact us form and how it works, how it distributes. So we have the bots kind of do the that research work for us and take screenshots so that we can include that in the outreach. We're also very strong believers in doing motions in in

Partner Program and Ecosystem AI Integration

Alina Vandenberghe

07:29>> the go to market space using our ecosystems. So we have a very robust partner program, and we also work a lot with b to b influencers. And I want to show you how we're using AI there as well.

07:42>> On the the partners front, we actually have both a product partnership program and a channel channel partnership program.

07:51>> And our playbook is actually in this book by Bob Moore, and he's here and he's presenting this afternoon, if I'm not mistaken as well. The book is really good. It's the top seller, and you can find some of our playbooks here.

08:05>> We're now working with some tools that are listening to calls to sales calls. And if a partner is mentioned, then we know to reach out afterwards and have a conversation about how we can go to market together.

08:21>> We also have bots that are helping us in terms of signals when a new customer of a partner goes on board. It pings our SDRs with information about how they might be reached out effectively at scale as well.

Influencer Strategy and Human Relationships

Alina Vandenberghe

08:41>> These are some of the influencers also that we're working, but we haven't deployed any bots in our relationship with them. And I'll explain to you a little bit why. Does any of you recognize some of the faces here of these influencers? Two, three. Okay. Alright. Because I believe products these days in a SaaS company are super easy to copy. It's very easy to build product. Now with AI, content is very easy to write.

09:10>> The hardest part is the human relationship part. That's why we don't deploy SDR. That's why we don't have AI robot callers. That's why we don't have automatic SDRs. Because I believe that once you feel that you're having a conversation that feels artificial, you lose trust. And that's the hardest to build. That's why when we work with influencers, we work with those that don't sell themselves short, who are genuine in their conversation. And then everything that we

09:38>> post feels very playful and authentic to them and authentic to our brand. So we let them while we let them we don't have constraints with our legal of what they can post, what they cannot post, we truly let them let them put whatever comes to their mind, even if it might not be politically correct.

Influencer Impressions and Brand Impact

Alina Vandenberghe

09:59>> These are some sample impressions that we get on our typical work with an influencer. This is one sample that I pulled before I came here from Q1. It's about a quarter of a million impressions, which is hard to get in other kind of even if you are very good at writing content, these kind of impressions are hard to get. In one quarter, we get about four to five million impressions from influencers.

10:25>> And again, it comes to my belief that if someone comes across as a robocaller, somebody comes across as disgenuine, then that relationship with the brand is just done.

10:40>> I made it short because we're running out of time. But oh, there's a QR code here. If you connect with me on LinkedIn, and you just mentioned SaaS open, I've got to share with with you anything that you've seen here that you might be interested in. And also to have conversations about running a business and, I don't know, maybe doing some therapy together.

11:06>> Cool. Any questions from the room?

Q&A: Influencer Compensation and Marketing Tiers

Alina Vandenberghe

11:13>> I know it's not an AI question, but how much are you paying influencers? How many how much are we paying? Influencers. Yeah. Influencers? Yeah. For that 250,000 impressions question. That one that one influencer is about $3,000 a month. It's completely worth it. We have others that are lower than that. We pay them $200 per post or $100 per post. We have different tiers. Everybody's very different. Everybody prefers to work very differently. Some of them

11:46>> like to just work with us for brand exposure themselves, so it might be quite a net zero cost to us. But because they want to help their brand, they work for free with us as well. So I have the entire tier.

12:12>> So you've I've shown earlier that we actually do transcripts of our account executive calls, and we look for mentions for our campaigns and influencers names. Sometimes we use UTM's in our our call to action as well, but it's a lot harder to go from a LinkedIn post to a lead magnet of some kind or get them people to book a demo. And ever since we started the company eight years ago, I've been very, very bullish on

12:40>> brand. And I do think that impressions help more than than one imagines. Actually, I'm I'm curious. How how many of you knew of Chili Piper before coming here?

12:50>> That that proves my point. Brand work really works.

12:56>> Any other questions?

12:59>> Alright.

13:07>> I just approach them and I say, I'd love to work with you. I like your work. How do you want to proceed? And sometimes they throw a number out there that's completely crazy. Then it's harder to back from it. But they have and b to b is a new

13:26>> it's a new line of work for many of them. In b to c, it's very different. It's much easier. But in b to b, it's harder to have the right conversation and the right content. So many of them can afford to have crazy prices, and some of them are just starting and are learning alongside with us.

13:43>> Alright. Thank you, everybody.

Nathan Latka

13:49Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and one went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with b to b software

14:15founders. So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling a 150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.