Alina Vandenberghe, co-founder of Chili Piper, ran over 100 conversations with sales leaders to find the real problem, not what they said they wanted. She discovered that the standard qualify-then-book process created friction in lead handling. The first three paying customers came in three months, and 50+ prospects confirmed product-market fit by saying they'd pay immediately.
Questions this episode answers
If a product existed that would solve your need right now, how would you proceed? Would you pay $10, $50, only use it after a trial, or spend $1,000? This reveals how badly the person wants the solution and their willingness to pay.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. That's fascinating. I mean, how many clients, paying clients, did you have before you actually built the product?
It was— so the first version, it was just one, the $14K, but it was just very rough. The product started looking a lot better after 3.
Got it. And as you were figuring it out, right, did you present— I don't want to lead you too much, but how much did the product evolve from your first person to your third? And how long, as a second part to that, how long did it take you to find true product-market fit?
So as I was listening to everybody's needs on what they said they wanted, I was more discounting on how they said that they wanted to solve for the problem. And I was trying to understand the why rationale, because everybody was asking me to build something completely different than what we actually have right now. And everybody had a different idea on how the problem should be solved. But I wanted to have, I don't know, I had at least 100 or so discussions with 100 or so sales leaders to fully understand how their team operated, why it operated in a certain way, what was the driver, how they were compensated, how they would spend their time, what were the friction points. And the more conversation I had, the more patterns I observed. that could solve for in my product, but not the way they were asking me to solve for it. And I've always been a little bit more prescriptive around how the product should work as opposed to how they wanted it to work. Yeah. Because I've observed that people are very poor at judging what they really need. They just see some specific part of the problem that they have right now, and they may not be fully plugged into all the other things that the product might be able to do to make their life better overall. And that's something that someone who works in product learns to do, whether they want it or not, by observing the same pattern again and again. And something else that was interesting is that because I was thinking of it in terms of a founder, as opposed to the persona that was asking me to solve for that problem, I would always see things that were wrong at the core. So for instance, the way Chili Piper really came out to be was because people would tell me, well, these people come on the form and they ask for a demo, and then we have to follow up with them to get them to book a time with our AE. And we first have to call them and then we have to qualify them. And, you know, we managed to get— it's a lot better than outbound because inbound we get to, I don't know, 50% of them. And I said, you mean that you lose 50% of people that come to your website who are ready to buy? That made no sense to me. And said, but yes, yes, we should, we should do it that way because, um, we want them to be sure that we're— they're qualified and we're gonna get our compensation for it. So the more things that we would uncover like that that made no sense, the more our product would solve for. Obviously, we, uh, It took us a while to convince people that there was a better way, and there's a lot of education that needs to happen as a result because we were ahead of the problem. But that, that's the process that we, uh, we went with.
Yeah, I, you know, the, the funny line that always comes into my head is Henry Ford when he made the automobile. If he would have asked the people what they would have wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Yeah,
they didn't even realize. So like, that's super fascinating. One question that came in, what was the timeline From the first to the third customer, like how fast did this happen?
Really fast, 3 months, 2 months, something like that. We built it really fast.
That's incredible. And then when, like, is that the point when you figured out that you had product-market fit? Or when did that point happen where you're just like, okay, time to throw money at this and scale it?
So even though the product build happened fast in those 3 months, I had all this conversation with all these, The people in our space, the sales leaders that I would see as people that were doing things really, really well. And I knew that it was the right thing to build after talking to 50 people, and they will all say the same thing about their problem. So I would hear the same thing and the same pattern, the same pattern 50 times, then I knew we were on the right track. And they all say, they would all say, Oh, if you'd have a solution to this, I would pay you money right now. That's when I knew that it was real.
I love that. And then, I mean, like, what worked and what didn't work for your organization as you started taking that product-market fit and bringing it to scale?
Because we've built the product the way we've built by talking to sales leaders, VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officers, Chief Marketing Officer, VP of Marketing, our product was built specifically for them to solve for their needs. And in the process, our product was not the best fit for the— it was, it's an enterprise-grade product that solves for the enterprise persona. But we had, at least in the first few years not paid that much attention to the end user as well that was getting the meeting. So that was something that we didn't address, I would think, fast, as fast as I wish I would have had whether if I started it again.
Anything else? Any other good learnings that you've had along the way?
I've also assumed that people see the same problems the same way as I do them, as fast as I do. But that didn't happen. So we had to do a lot of education around better processes about why the tool, our tool is needed. And it's something that took a lot longer in terms of education, educating the market than what I wish it would have been. I think that if we didn't have to make, to do that education on the behalf of our product, that yes, you can put Chilli Piper in, yes, you can double your conversion rates, and as a result, you can get double the meetings. And we'd have to do it again and again with a lot of examples so that we show that it's possible. We're not, we're not just saying that it is possible. Look at all these people that have done it. I think we would have gone, would have been probably at $40 million in ARR by now.
Super, super interesting learnings. Casey gave us a question over here as well. What's a user research interview question that most companies miss to ask? But it's highly significant and relevant.
It depends a lot on the persona and the product that is going to market, because it's never black and white, and it's never as straightforward as one question that might be obvious to ask. But once you've identified that there is a need and that person has something that they want to be solved for. The next question, if I would do a user research right now, would be, okay, if a product exists that would solve for your need right now, how would you proceed? And you'd have, I would pay $10, I would pay $50, I would only want to use it if I trial it first, or $1,000. And then based on these answers, you know How bad this person wants to solve for their problem.
And how much it's worth, right? Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.
