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Book the right meetings faster with one-click scheduling
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Engage website visitors with automated Journeys and live chat
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Qualify, route, and schedule prospects directly from your web form
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Route records in Salesforce based on a Trigger
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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
The second week of January is a special time.
The perfect time to complain about the terrible weather. Lament about how early the sun sets. And look forward to seeing spring.
It’s also (apparently) a great time to give up your New Year’s Resolutions.
That’s why we decided to host a virtual party all about Marketing Resolutions the second week of January — to propel our resolutions to at least the end of the month 😜
Check the recording here:
If you’re someone who prefers reading articles to watching webinars, I totally feel you. I wrote a recap of the webinar for your reading pleasure.
Let’s jump into it 🦘
2024 was full of unbrilliant moments.
Like…
We launched Distro on our new FIre platform.
So I thought it would be great if we rewrote the lyrics of Alicia Keys’ “This Girl is On Fire” to “Distro is on Fire”
We did a full remix of the song, you can listen to it here.
And… only 25 people liked it 😂
And all of those 25 people currently or used to work at Chili Piper 😂
So embarrassing 😳
There was too much background knowledge that people needed to understand the joke.
They needed to understand what Distro was.
They needed to understand what our Fire Platform was.
We fell victim to the trap that so many marketers do — becoming so familiar with your own product and own jargon, you forget it’s not common knowledge.
Lesson learned ✅
We thought that if we implemented a PLG-motion for Distro people would see how easy it was to use — and would be willing to pay for the full product.
Did not happen 😭
We only managed to scrape together 10 free trials in an entire quarter, and none of them converted to revenue.
A few reasons:
If you don’t know, Distro is a CRM Record Routing software.
So anytime a CRM record is added or updated, Distro can route the record (e.g. Lead, Contact, etc.) to a sales rep.
And people’s routers can get INCREDIBLY complex.
At this level of complexity, a self-serve PLG motion just didn’t make sense.
No, it’s not just you. EVERYONE’S Salesforce is a mess.
Which is why it was difficult to implement a self-serve motion for a product that is completely intertwined with folks’ Salesforce.
Before anyone could do anything with Distro, they had to connect their Salesforce.
We had a few people sign up for free trials not be able to do anything, because they needed to connect their Salesforce first.
We worked with a few LinkedIn influencers last year and we found that when they posted from their personal accounts, the videos did quite well.
But if we reposted from our company account, they didn’t take off the same way.
For example, this is the same video posted from Tim Davidson’s personal account and from our company account:
He got 3x more reactions from his personal account!!
This is super interesting because Tim only has 23K followers while the Chili Piper account has 70K followers.
So instead of reposting from our company account, we started putting spend behind their posts using Thought Leadership ads — and we got a good amount of traction that way.
I think the main reason it failed is because people prefer interacting with people versus interacting with brands.
This learning is helping inform our overall organic social strategy at Chili Piper — where we encourage individuals to post on LinkedIn versus the brand account.
OK this one was only half a fail.
We were planning to set up an ROI tracker at all in-person events — where we showed the number of meetings we booked and the expected revenue from those meetings.
Basically proving ROI of the booth in real-time.
This resonated super, super well at INBOUND. People really got what we were doing and thought it was very interesting.
We repeated the experiment at 6Sense Breakthrough and people just… didn’t get it.
We ended up taking the dashboard down halfway through the event and replacing it with our demo video.
Key Lesson: Be okay with pivoting! Sometimes your idea doesn’t work and that’s fine. Pivoting at the last minute is totally fine, nobody will remember (unless you decide to tell people about it during a webinar and/or article 😅)
We launched our Demand Conversion Platform in June 2024 and we received accolade after accolade.
…but we realized people thought it was just a repositioning.
They didn’t actually realize we launched a new product 😅
Embarrassing 😅
But that is a perfect segue to our wins from 2024.
2024 wasn’t all doom and gloom! We actually did do some effective marketing in 2024. 😂
Since nobody realized that we launched Chat as part of our Demand Conversion Platform, we decided to relaunch it!
Tara was scrolling through LinkedIn and was like “wow these ‘starting a new position’ graphics are really the cheesiest things to ever exist”
And then she was like “ohhh but what if we Chili Piper-ified them and announced our ‘new job’ of Chat….”
The result was pure brilliance:
Total surprise. According to my LinkedIn feed, webinars died years ago.
But in Q4 last year we decided to give them a shot. And boy were we surprised.
We generated 29 QHMs from 2 webinars in 2 months.
(QHM (Qualified Held Meeting) is our north star marketing metric. So the prospect needs to be qualified, they need to book a meeting, and they need to show up to the meeting.)
Here are some of our webinar tips:
This is nicer than the generic Zoom webinar reminder — and encourages people to show up! We use Reachdesk to send these out.
Our attendance rate has been between 30-40% for our past 3 webinars, partly thanks to these caffeinated reminders 🙌
We send out a swag pack or a little something something to folks who participated in the chat.
As a result, our webinars tend to be pretty engaging — lots of activity in the chat and lots of questions!
For example, here’s the gift we sent out to folks who participated during our marketing resolutions webinar:
If you use a gifting platform like Reachdesk, it’s super easy to find fun, unique gifts on their Marketplace!
For our two product-specific webinars, we offered Apple Airpods to folks who booked a meeting with sales and then showed up.
As a result, our show rates was nearly 100%.
And most of these meetings were also genuinely interested in our products — we got a Closed Won just a few days after a meeting 🙌
We also use Recahdesk for this! In their marketplace, they have a lot of cool products that you can add your logo to (like these AirPods!).
I think Tara Robertson coined this acronym. You saw it here first.
Essentially we cross-referenced an attendee list with a list of our top Accounts. And created “Wanted” posters for the main POCs and scattered them throughout an event.
If you turned yourself in, you got a prize.
And if someone turned you in, you both got a prize.
It was super successful! And we managed to drive over $100K in pipeline from this one event.
We released A LOT in 2024. I’ll be hosting a full webinar just on product releases + 2024 roadmap.
But… here are the highlights
I mentioned this earlier, but yes! We have Chat!
Now, you can reuse Rules, Teams, Distributions, and Meeting Types across multiple products and routers.
In this example, you can create a Rule for “Region = EMEA”.
And then you can re-use that rule when building out routing logic for Concierge, Handoff, Distro, or Chat.
No more updating the same rule over and over and over again.
You want matching, we’ve got it!
Fuzzy matching, exact matching.
Lead/Contact to Account, Lead/Contact to Opportunity, Lead/Contact to Case.
Deduping, custom matching, lead-to-related-lead…
ALL THE MATCHING.
We actually did a whole webinar about our matching. The recap article is pretty good, you should read it 😜
Yes! Double Round Robin!
A common use case we see for this is if you want to set up a meeting type that round-robins between both a pool of AEs AND a pool of Solutions Engineers.
Our engineering team is working on this as I’m writing this article, so I expect this to be live quite soon.
This takes Concierge to the next level.
With Concierge Live, you’ll be able to qualify, route, and connect via live call — instantly.
This is great if you sell into a customer base that doesn’t necessarily live and die by their Google Calendar.
Folks like… truckers, auto body shops, schools, child care centers, etc. etc.
If you’ve ever wanted answers to questions like…
…then you’ll love AI Insights
We’re doing lots with AI this year, insights is just the beginning.
Take a sneak peak at all the AI happenings at https://chilipiper.com/ai 👀
This being said, we’re putting our resolutions for 2025 in writing, so we can stick to them.
The majority of our pipeline is still for our form scheduling product, Concierge (about 70%).
In 2025, we want to move beyond Concierge to drive pipeline for our other products as well.
It’s been on hiatus for too long, but it’s coming back in 2025! Stay tuned for Demand Gen Chat season 4.
We are on a mission to share more CHili Piper use cases with the world in a new content stream called SpicyOps.
Both ways our Chili Piper team is using Chili Piper, and also highlighting customer use cases.
So if you’re a customer and have a use case you want to highlight, hit me up 😊
We’ll be hosting our very first in-person event, in Arizona!
No booths, no speakers — just roundtable discussions with smart people like you.
Stay up to date with what we’re doing by following Tara or Madeleine on LinkedIn.
If you liked this content, subscribe to the Sauce! It’s a monthly newsletter. No spam, just spice.
In the meantime, stay spicy 🌶️
The second week of January is a special time.
The perfect time to complain about the terrible weather. Lament about how early the sun sets. And look forward to seeing spring.
It’s also (apparently) a great time to give up your New Year’s Resolutions.
That’s why we decided to host a virtual party all about Marketing Resolutions the second week of January — to propel our resolutions to at least the end of the month 😜
Check the recording here:
If you’re someone who prefers reading articles to watching webinars, I totally feel you. I wrote a recap of the webinar for your reading pleasure.
Let’s jump into it 🦘
2024 was full of unbrilliant moments.
Like…
We launched Distro on our new FIre platform.
So I thought it would be great if we rewrote the lyrics of Alicia Keys’ “This Girl is On Fire” to “Distro is on Fire”
We did a full remix of the song, you can listen to it here.
And… only 25 people liked it 😂
And all of those 25 people currently or used to work at Chili Piper 😂
So embarrassing 😳
There was too much background knowledge that people needed to understand the joke.
They needed to understand what Distro was.
They needed to understand what our Fire Platform was.
We fell victim to the trap that so many marketers do — becoming so familiar with your own product and own jargon, you forget it’s not common knowledge.
Lesson learned ✅
We thought that if we implemented a PLG-motion for Distro people would see how easy it was to use — and would be willing to pay for the full product.
Did not happen 😭
We only managed to scrape together 10 free trials in an entire quarter, and none of them converted to revenue.
A few reasons:
If you don’t know, Distro is a CRM Record Routing software.
So anytime a CRM record is added or updated, Distro can route the record (e.g. Lead, Contact, etc.) to a sales rep.
And people’s routers can get INCREDIBLY complex.
At this level of complexity, a self-serve PLG motion just didn’t make sense.
No, it’s not just you. EVERYONE’S Salesforce is a mess.
Which is why it was difficult to implement a self-serve motion for a product that is completely intertwined with folks’ Salesforce.
Before anyone could do anything with Distro, they had to connect their Salesforce.
We had a few people sign up for free trials not be able to do anything, because they needed to connect their Salesforce first.
We worked with a few LinkedIn influencers last year and we found that when they posted from their personal accounts, the videos did quite well.
But if we reposted from our company account, they didn’t take off the same way.
For example, this is the same video posted from Tim Davidson’s personal account and from our company account:
He got 3x more reactions from his personal account!!
This is super interesting because Tim only has 23K followers while the Chili Piper account has 70K followers.
So instead of reposting from our company account, we started putting spend behind their posts using Thought Leadership ads — and we got a good amount of traction that way.
I think the main reason it failed is because people prefer interacting with people versus interacting with brands.
This learning is helping inform our overall organic social strategy at Chili Piper — where we encourage individuals to post on LinkedIn versus the brand account.
OK this one was only half a fail.
We were planning to set up an ROI tracker at all in-person events — where we showed the number of meetings we booked and the expected revenue from those meetings.
Basically proving ROI of the booth in real-time.
This resonated super, super well at INBOUND. People really got what we were doing and thought it was very interesting.
We repeated the experiment at 6Sense Breakthrough and people just… didn’t get it.
We ended up taking the dashboard down halfway through the event and replacing it with our demo video.
Key Lesson: Be okay with pivoting! Sometimes your idea doesn’t work and that’s fine. Pivoting at the last minute is totally fine, nobody will remember (unless you decide to tell people about it during a webinar and/or article 😅)
We launched our Demand Conversion Platform in June 2024 and we received accolade after accolade.
…but we realized people thought it was just a repositioning.
They didn’t actually realize we launched a new product 😅
Embarrassing 😅
But that is a perfect segue to our wins from 2024.
2024 wasn’t all doom and gloom! We actually did do some effective marketing in 2024. 😂
Since nobody realized that we launched Chat as part of our Demand Conversion Platform, we decided to relaunch it!
Tara was scrolling through LinkedIn and was like “wow these ‘starting a new position’ graphics are really the cheesiest things to ever exist”
And then she was like “ohhh but what if we Chili Piper-ified them and announced our ‘new job’ of Chat….”
The result was pure brilliance:
Total surprise. According to my LinkedIn feed, webinars died years ago.
But in Q4 last year we decided to give them a shot. And boy were we surprised.
We generated 29 QHMs from 2 webinars in 2 months.
(QHM (Qualified Held Meeting) is our north star marketing metric. So the prospect needs to be qualified, they need to book a meeting, and they need to show up to the meeting.)
Here are some of our webinar tips:
This is nicer than the generic Zoom webinar reminder — and encourages people to show up! We use Reachdesk to send these out.
Our attendance rate has been between 30-40% for our past 3 webinars, partly thanks to these caffeinated reminders 🙌
We send out a swag pack or a little something something to folks who participated in the chat.
As a result, our webinars tend to be pretty engaging — lots of activity in the chat and lots of questions!
For example, here’s the gift we sent out to folks who participated during our marketing resolutions webinar:
If you use a gifting platform like Reachdesk, it’s super easy to find fun, unique gifts on their Marketplace!
For our two product-specific webinars, we offered Apple Airpods to folks who booked a meeting with sales and then showed up.
As a result, our show rates was nearly 100%.
And most of these meetings were also genuinely interested in our products — we got a Closed Won just a few days after a meeting 🙌
We also use Recahdesk for this! In their marketplace, they have a lot of cool products that you can add your logo to (like these AirPods!).
I think Tara Robertson coined this acronym. You saw it here first.
Essentially we cross-referenced an attendee list with a list of our top Accounts. And created “Wanted” posters for the main POCs and scattered them throughout an event.
If you turned yourself in, you got a prize.
And if someone turned you in, you both got a prize.
It was super successful! And we managed to drive over $100K in pipeline from this one event.
We released A LOT in 2024. I’ll be hosting a full webinar just on product releases + 2024 roadmap.
But… here are the highlights
I mentioned this earlier, but yes! We have Chat!
Now, you can reuse Rules, Teams, Distributions, and Meeting Types across multiple products and routers.
In this example, you can create a Rule for “Region = EMEA”.
And then you can re-use that rule when building out routing logic for Concierge, Handoff, Distro, or Chat.
No more updating the same rule over and over and over again.
You want matching, we’ve got it!
Fuzzy matching, exact matching.
Lead/Contact to Account, Lead/Contact to Opportunity, Lead/Contact to Case.
Deduping, custom matching, lead-to-related-lead…
ALL THE MATCHING.
We actually did a whole webinar about our matching. The recap article is pretty good, you should read it 😜
Yes! Double Round Robin!
A common use case we see for this is if you want to set up a meeting type that round-robins between both a pool of AEs AND a pool of Solutions Engineers.
Our engineering team is working on this as I’m writing this article, so I expect this to be live quite soon.
This takes Concierge to the next level.
With Concierge Live, you’ll be able to qualify, route, and connect via live call — instantly.
This is great if you sell into a customer base that doesn’t necessarily live and die by their Google Calendar.
Folks like… truckers, auto body shops, schools, child care centers, etc. etc.
If you’ve ever wanted answers to questions like…
…then you’ll love AI Insights
We’re doing lots with AI this year, insights is just the beginning.
Take a sneak peak at all the AI happenings at https://chilipiper.com/ai 👀
This being said, we’re putting our resolutions for 2025 in writing, so we can stick to them.
The majority of our pipeline is still for our form scheduling product, Concierge (about 70%).
In 2025, we want to move beyond Concierge to drive pipeline for our other products as well.
It’s been on hiatus for too long, but it’s coming back in 2025! Stay tuned for Demand Gen Chat season 4.
We are on a mission to share more CHili Piper use cases with the world in a new content stream called SpicyOps.
Both ways our Chili Piper team is using Chili Piper, and also highlighting customer use cases.
So if you’re a customer and have a use case you want to highlight, hit me up 😊
We’ll be hosting our very first in-person event, in Arizona!
No booths, no speakers — just roundtable discussions with smart people like you.
Stay up to date with what we’re doing by following Tara or Madeleine on LinkedIn.
If you liked this content, subscribe to the Sauce! It’s a monthly newsletter. No spam, just spice.
In the meantime, stay spicy 🌶️
Madeleine Work is Product Marketing Manager at Chili Piper. She loves bringing people together, learning new things, and making hilarious jokes. When she's not typing away at her laptop, you'll probably find her running, hiking, or hanging out with her baby. Follow Madeleine for laughs and product marketing tips on LinkedIn.
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