Full Throttle Leaders - Alina Vandenberghe - Co-founder & co-CEO @Chili Piper

All right, welcome everybody. It's Michael Falato again with Full Throttle Leaders Podcast. We have Alina Vandenberg.

Vandenberg.

Okay, I got it right. The co-founder of Chili Piper, some product solution that has been such talked about in the space of SaaS and software and sales. Tell me a little bit how this whole Chili Piper came up.

Thank you for having me. Um, I started working like you did in many, uh, organizations and many structures, and I realized that I was a horrible employee, a very unhappy one, because I always want to break and change the rules. So I decided to start Chili Piper 20 years ago and just create something that I wish I had worked in and I never found. So It became a project since 2016 for me and my co-founder, and now we are in 40 countries and we are doing things very differently than most companies.

How big is the company right now? Size-wise?

So we are in 40 countries, we are fully remote, and employee-wise or agents-wise, like humans, 150.

Wow, that's incredible. And then Is your headquarters in Brooklyn or is there headquarters? Yeah. Okay.

In Brooklyn.

And then did you mention earlier that you and your husband started the company or did you meet your husband working with him and then basically you were, he was at Chili Piper or how, tell me about the love story portion of this.

No, we did meet through work. We had separate paths. I started building my a career in corporate America, and I wanted to be CEO of a Fortune 500 company. That was my dream when I was little. And I started as an intern in 2008 in New York. I, in about 6 years or so, I got all the way to senior vice president in a large scale-up. I was getting ready to kind of go to the next stage to be an employee, you know, as far to the executive, to the C-suite as I could. And I realized that I was not meant to be an employee. On the other side, my husband was starting different ventures. Some of them went well, some of them less well. His strength is people management and operations and sales, and my strength is product and engineering. So we figured that we could try to work together and see if it works, and it worked out.

Awesome. What's, what's some tips and tools that you're enjoying right now as far as AI team, like teaming up with either with Chili Piper and their solution or, or something that, that you're using on the side that's really been pretty helpful for your company?

So about 3 years ago, 3 years ago, uh, I decided that, um, so me and my husband were co-CEOs, but we serve marketers. We serve mostly, uh, VP of Marketing, CMOs, and I just couldn't understand why so many CMOs have such a short tenure in the companies that we were serving. And I could observe them from far, but I've never been a CMO. I've always worked in tech and as a product lead or on the engineering front. And even though I could understand their attention from outside, I feel like it would be a lot better for me if I took the acting CMO role at Chili Piper. And I had 22 marketers at that time. And the reason why I'm saying that is because we went down from 22 marketers to 2 marketers, and we mostly automated everything using agents and, uh, It was the most brutal job I've ever had. It was the hardest job I've ever had, but we only managed to— I only managed to survive it is because I've approached it through a very, um, engineering mindset to how agents can help with demand generation and all the things. Um, so since 3 years ago, we started deploying thousands of agents to create pipeline, and I think that's been my biggest transformation at Chili Piper in the past 10 years.

So if you had to explain this to a CRO, why they should use Chili Piper, what it does, I would love to hear that explanation because I think I know a little bit, but I don't think I have the subject matter expertise even where close to you. So I want you to explain this to marketing salespeople that might be listening and then maybe even dumb it down to someone that's just a salesperson.

So we started with a very simple use case when somebody came on the website, making sure that the person doesn't waste the salesperson time and they're qualified and they can get directly to a qualified meeting that's being held. That was the first use case that we started serving. And now these days, all of those things, we used to do it with very simple logic in software, like run the qualification process, if you have like an email address of someone, you can know if they're qualified because you can enhance it, enhance their title. You can know what their company size is. You know where they are in their organization, et cetera. So, you know, from the email address, you know a lot and you can route it to the right person in the company. And there could be a lot of complex logic around it. So for instance, we have Verizon as customers, we have Meta, and you can imagine there's a lot of complexity around which salesperson should handle that customer because they might be already talking to someone. So we started with that kind of simple logic and now we have a suite of agents that are making sure that any inbound signal is being turned into pipeline.

And then so as I understood, so like Piper, it had 4 or 5 different things from different module type solutions, right? I mean, you had a scheduling, routing, Could you explain like the different tools that help make the sales team function much better?

So it depends a lot on the makeup of each company because we have like very strong PLG teams. Like for instance, monday.com is a very, uh, monday.com. Yeah. Uh, very strong PLG motion. So we serve different use cases. I would not say it's in terms of products and routing and scheduling and chat and all of that. I think that it's a lot better to look at it in terms of use cases within the funnel or type of things that could be turning that signal into pipeline. So for instance, for monday.com, we have a solution that helps them once somebody starts a free trial, for instance, making sure that they're being routed and they're being exposed within that in-app experience to the person who can take that free trial to an expansion, only if it's like a high PQL, like a product qualified lead, and making sure that they're being touched in all the right places to be able to be converted. So we automate all of that process in order to create the activities that are going to be most conducive to that sales qualified opportunity from different modalities, whether it could be in this case, from monday.com in-app. But we also have, for instance, we in 2 weeks, I think we're going to announce that we are the only one in the space that also integrates with LinkedIn forms. So in the LinkedIn form, you can direct someone to the right rep depending on who they are on LinkedIn to be able to talk to that salesperson.

So it's all off the profile or off the corporate page?

In LinkedIn, from LinkedIn advertising, you have, I don't know if you've ever been targeted yourself, but you can see like an ad and that ad typically has you go to a landing page. On the landing page, you have to identify, tell them who you are before you talk to a salesperson. So we're going to be the first ones to have an integration and the only ones to have an integration with LinkedIn where we already know who that person is that's coming from a LinkedIn ad and being able to directly say hello. Michael, you should be talking to Mary because she's already in touch with you and having that kind of red carpet.

You're not having to give permission. I don't know if it's called OAuth or whatever it is to, or single SSO, single sign, single sign-on or whatever. You don't have to do all that stuff.

There's nothing needed from the prospect perspective to remove friction to making sure that they get to that salesperson.

I actually worked with Jeff Weiner, who is the chairman or was the chairman of LinkedIn at Warner Brothers. So it's interesting to see his path go from Warner Brothers to Yahoo, then running LinkedIn. It's pretty impressive. But yeah, LinkedIn is amazing. It's a billion, billion contacts on there. So if you work with them and make that path easier, there's so many people that put too much, do this, do that, and then you could talk to someone. It's like, you just lost me. I don't want to fill out 20 pieces of forms. Just to talk to somebody.

And if you're— and if somebody is an executive, they're not going to talk to— want to talk to a junior SDR to be qualified. So these are the kind of paths that within our app they can pick, because there's no need for a junior SDR anymore to qualify. That's the kind of thing that can be done very easy with AI. So we have like an agentic— like what people call an AI SDR, an inbound AI SDR that does all of that junior level, uh, work. And making sure that from a buyer perspective, they have like the best possible experience because with AI, you can have so much context. So, you know, like for instance, Michael is coming to my website. He's been visiting all these web pages already. He's been already in this webinar. He's already had, he already read our ebooks. He's already interacted with our social media page. We already know so much about Michael. So we're going to say, oh, welcome back. You already know about these things. Do you want, are you ready to talk to Mary now? Or do you want directly to buy and here's like the best buying process ever that you've experienced. So there are multiple paths in which the prospect can be taken to be able to close the, close one. Um, and we deal with that complexity because we've been in the space and seen a lot of edge cases. And now with, uh, agentic workflows with AI, this is so much more The personalization can be so much more impressive.

What would you say you run up to against when you're, when you're trying to win business? Like, is there a particular competitor or is it more module based?

Based on different, different parts of our application, we have different competitors for different parts that we do. So for instance, on the routing piece, we have Lean Data as a, as a competitor. They don't do as much as we do, but they're, they're well known for the routing piece. For the website-facing pieces, we compete with a company called Qualify that was just acquired by Salesforce. Yeah, so we have several competitors depending on the different parts that we serve.

And what's your golden ICP? Like, is it a mid-market? Is it an enterprise team? How do you charge for, for Chili Piper?

So my best segment by far is enterprise. They have the highest NRR in my segmentation. Then second best is high mid-market, third best mid-market. And now, funny enough, my SMB segment is starting to do better. I used to have horrible NR on SMB, but now it's been 20 points up these past 10 months. I don't really know what's happening, but something's going well with SMB segment too.

What would you say there's something that worked really well that you're like, I want to pass this on to your viewers? Kind of like what you did on the roundtable that you joined. We talked about either like a win or something that you did. You're like, oh my God, I don't want to do that again. But we pass that knowledge on. What advice would you give either positive or negative that you learned from that is making you a better CEO right now?

I've had so many learnings when I was an acting CMO, and I would say that my top ones The biggest mistake that I've made and the reason why my CAC was so high and I had such a big marketing team that was wasting dollars is that we were trying to go after everybody. Like we were spending so much on advertising, we were spending so much on events by being too wide with who we're going after. And the way we fix that is by looking at our customer base, seeing what the segments that don't churn, the segments that have a high NRR, and just like being a lot more narrow focused on our ICP and our, how we scored accounts and how we target them. That was like by far the biggest win. In terms of learnings, the piece that we were doing wrong, we would give accounts to my SDRs that were not yet warmed up, like cold accounts to SDRs are the worst.

And it requires at least 15 touches or so with nurturing and You needed a more seasoned person or it was just too far cold?

No, it's just the account was cold and we can, like, our SDRs cannot close cold accounts. And not only that, but it's not only touches on the account, it's like touches on the right buyer because like the buying groups are larger and larger and making sure that you have top of the funnel activities for most of the buyers in the buying group. Increase the odds of close. Yeah.

Earlier we kind of talked about channel. What channel do you feel like is the best for you or for your clients? But I mean, that could be a loaded question just because there's so many different clients. But let's just say for Julie Piper, events, LinkedIn, email, intent data, like what's, what is like the number one thing that you're loving that's getting you the right customer at the right time? Faster as far as lead gen goes?

In our case, uh, because of the way we're approaching an account and the way we're selling, I think that what has been most effective for us is the variation of channels. So not having just one channel, just like LinkedIn and me posting on it, or just web events, or just webinars, is the ability to be in multiple places at once. I think that It was very hard for us when we were putting all our eggs in one basket and we were doing just a few things. Like, the variation is what helps, and we would do a lot of things with partners, with communities, um, because the more places you see Chili Piper, the more likely would have trust. Um, so that's like one, one piece. I would say that for your audience specifically, and for you because you've been in sales most, what has made the biggest difference in the past 12 months for us is an increased focus in training our sales team on trust building. My co-founder is leading this training and our blended close rate was somewhere around 27%. Um, was pretty decent, like for a combination of outbound and inbound. And right now it's 38.

Wow.

Our close rate, our blended close rate is And it's all, all because of the training that we do on trust building. And I think that the reason why it has like the biggest impact for our funnel is because we're living such unprecedented times where everybody's going through so much transformation on from every possible angle that the ability of a salesperson to be fully there for the buyer to help them navigate through the different things to sell internally, because that's like a job on its own, uh, has made the biggest difference.

The Chili Piper name, tell me a little bit about how that came up and what is it, what does it mean?

I didn't come up with it, it was my husband with it, um, and there are two lenses to it. The way I've I viewed it is like chili is hot and Piper is pipeline, like hot pipeline. That was like my angle. His pipeline— his view is that he saw this ad for champagne that's called Piper Heidseck, and he really liked it. It was really cool, and like, it was like, it was a, uh, yeah. So he viewed it from that champagne, Piper Heidseck.

Mine was pretty easy. I, uh, just that full throttle guy in a Marine It's a black belt jiu-jitsu, and I'm a black belt jiu-jitsu, but I'm Air Force. He goes, you're full throttle all the time. I'm like, wait, that rhymes with my name. So that's why— that's the easy way I came up. I bumped it off a Marine.

That's funny.

Yeah, but yeah, thanks, thanks for being on the show today. Um, how do people get a hold of you, and who should get a hold of you? Um, or do you want to basically pass along kind of a sales at Chili Piper email to, for, to reach out to? So what's, what's the best way to, to find more out about your company?

Well, obviously, um, our website, but, uh, something that I do that is helping me a lot and helps the people that I interact with as well is that I'm still myself on LinkedIn. There's no AI bot. So I'm still the one who goes through the comments and talks to people and talks through DMs to people. Um, and I enjoy that. I enjoy learning like how people interact. And whenever I post something on LinkedIn, I post it out of curiosity because I really want to learn something and people comment and I learn. Um, I really enjoy that part that I'm still myself.

Asking a question is another tip that I've done. It's like, yeah, you go into, to like this event. Uh, do you know anything about the show? Is it good? And not even talking about a roundtable or podcast that has been like, I've gotten, I did, it was about inbound and I sent it to 4,000 people and 600 people responded like, I don't, I'm not going, or I don't know what that is. And I don't care like what they say. I just want to open that channel again on first or second connections. And I was like, man, this, this, you learn so much things like just trial and error. So that's one of the things that I loved. But yeah, I would definitely check out Chili Piper if you're interested in some sales tools and some communication tools and just overall what you call a pipeline solution or what would you—

Umbrella.

Umbrella. Like, what would you wrap around what Chili Piper does before we end the show? Like, as far as Yeah, go ahead.

Agentic-based experiences for website conversion.

There you go. There you go.

I also could call it demand conversion platform. I don't know. There's many things. It, it seems to, uh, it's, uh, hard to explain and it seems like a mouth, mouthful overall. It's like signal to pipeline, but we care about it.

That's a good one. Signal to pipeline. I think that's, that's, that's sweet to the point. And you can even put that underneath your, uh, your LinkedIn. One more thing before we go. The hat, the sailor hat on your LinkedIn. What's, what's, what's the story behind the, the captain hat or, or on your LinkedIn?

I love dressing up for Halloween and stuff. So that was my, uh, suit for Halloween one, one time. But, uh, my husband has a boat now that we sold secondaries. We, at some point we got like close to a billion dollar valuation for the company. So how much he got? Close to a billion dollar valuation. Yeah. And he got himself a boat. So it's like we're the captains of the boats.

You're going to need a bigger boat.

We need a bigger boat. We always need a bigger boat because we don't know what's going to happen.

Well, if you're ever down in Florida, come, come say hi. And thanks for your time.

Thank you for having me.