Chili Piper

MQLs 🤢 QHMs 😍 Marketing Qualified Leads are universally disparaged for a reason. MQLs are pretty subjective. It's easy to game the system and bolster numbers so Marketing looks good. That's why we use Qualified Held Meetings as our main metric at Chili Piper. They're far more likely to predict future revenue than MQLs. QHMs help Marketing and Sales stay aligned to have a bigger impact on the business. Here's how we define QHMs: 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝: To be considered qualified, the lead must meet specific criteria set by the sales AND marketing teams together. The criteria will be different for different organizations, but the bottom line is that quality (shared definition) matters more than quantity. 𝐒𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭: The presence of an AE is crucial because it signals a stage in the sales process where discussions are more in-depth and tailored to the prospect's specific needs. 𝐇𝐞𝐥𝐝 𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠: The meeting must actually take place, indicating active interest – it's not enough for the meeting to be scheduled. This way, no leads slip through the cracks, and everyone is highly motivated to follow up with no-shows. Focusing on QHMs works if you: 👉 Have clearly defined and documented stages and entry/exit criteria 👉 Have clearly defined and documented Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and enforce them (i.e., you hold everyone accountable) 👉 Make QHMs one of marketing’s top 3 KPIs (and ideally, that’s how they’re compensated) What do you think? Would you try tracking QHMs instead of MQLs?

Just promoted our head of growth to head of growth and demand conversion. Here’s why Growth and Demand gen as a function in most marketing teams have become synonymous with any kind of tactic that increases footprint for the company Paid channels, partnerships, thought leadership, and sometimes even events might go under this function At Chili Piper, until recently, under “growth,” all the systems that allow us to increase our distribution in various channels However, we find that most juice comes from all the small optimizations across the path that improve conversion in those channels Some examples:  - A/B testing AUTOMATIC image generation for accounts we reach out to (where we include their forms/their chat etc) - these images were manual before !! - Automatic ICP identification and scoring for our accounts that improve our yields But even more important, as part of us drinking our own “champagne” We measure all these below - Serviceable Obtainable Market: An estimate of the portion of revenue within a specific product segment that you’re able to capture  - Target Accounts: A subset from the whole list of target accounts the marketing and sales decides to focus on  - Accounts Engaged: Accounts that have some awareness (accounts that follow social media, visit the website, sign up for the newsletter, attend events, download content, respond to sales emails) - Hand raisers: Marketing qualified accounts that have filled out a form or opened a chat conversation and requested to talk to sales  - Qualified Booked Meetings (QBMs): Accounts that were qualified that booked a meeting  - Qualified Held Meetings (QHMs): Accounts qualified that had a meeting in the books   - Sales Accepted Accounts: Accounts with an open opportunity  - Accounts with Closed won Opportunity aka Customers: Customers with a closed won opportunity   And have a maniacal goal of improving these metrics - Qualified Handraisers Ratio - ( Handraisers/Accounts Engaged x100)  - % qualified accounts requested to meet with sales or started a conversation  - Qualified Handraisers Booked Ratio -(Accounts Qualified with a Meeting Booked / Qualified Handraiser x100) - % qualified accounts booked a meeting with sales  - Qualified Meetings Held Ratio - (Qualified Handraisers Booked/Qualified Handraisers Meetings Held x100) - % of meetings held  - Qualified Meetings to Open Opportunity Ratio - (Open opportunities / Qualified Meetings Held x100 ) - % of opportunities open  - Open Opportunity to Closed Won ratio aka wins- (Closed won/Open opportunities x100) - %of opportunities closed won  To beat the benchmarks we collect (you can see more about our benchmarks here https://lnkd.in/ea7aabku ) As a result, Batikan Erdogan became our Head of Growth and Conversion Watch out for more experiments coming to our blog from his work

We recently promoted Batikan to Head of Growth and Conversion Systems. Never heard of that title before? As you know by now, we like to buck the trend at Chili Piper. But there's a good reason we made this move—converting more interest into demand is one of the most impactful ways to increase revenue. Pipeline and pipeline coverage are THE most important leading metrics for generating revenue. There is no such thing as spending too much effort, time, mental bandwidth, energy, or budget on increasing the amount of qualified pipeline. Here's some math to prove the point... Generally speaking, about 1.2% of demand generated (website visitors, people who engage with ads, etc.) turns into qualified pipeline. Then, roughly 25% of your pipeline turns into closed won deals. That means a measly 0.3% of leads turn into revenue. This is a HUGE opportunity! As the Head of Growth, Batikan was already focused on key growth initiatives, such as A/B testing landing pages, building automation, and integrating systems. But since we launched our Demand Conversion Platform last month, we knew we had to walk the talk and have someone solely dedicated to converting more of the demand we’ve created into pipeline and revenue. And there's no better person on the team than Batikan. So, what does he do exactly now that he owns demand conversion too? On top of his regular growth responsibilities, he also: – Tests and optimizes forms. For example, do you get better self-reported attribution on a secondary form? – Automates data enrichment on forms so that we have complete and accurate lead and contact data – Automates lead scoring to ensure hot leads are handled appropriately – Setting up tools to automate next best actions based on buyer intent and behavior As you can see, it's a natural fit for someone in growth to also take on Demand Conversion and conversion systems. Huge congrats to Batikan on the promotion. He’s an integral part of our GTM team.

Who's carrying who? 🤔

Calculating how well your demand is converting should be as simple as a BuzzFeed quiz. To help, we've put together a formula that makes it easy to see how you're doing. (We're gonna get a little technical, so please bear with us.) Your Demand Conversion Score (DCS) is a composite index that ranges from 1 to 20 and reflects the health of your demand conversion process. A higher score indicates a more efficient pipeline with minimal leakage. Leads swiftly transform into sales opportunities (yay!) and eventually become customers (double yay!) You can calculate your own DCS with the formula below 👇 Here's how you're doing: 1 to 5: You’re in trouble—time to bring things back to the drawing board. 5 to 10: You’re at benchmark level, but there’s room for improvement. 10 : Your demand conversion is strong. Soooooo... what's your score looking like?

Demand conversion shouldn't be so d@&# demanding. Marketers need 8 tools just to optimize, schedule, route, and hand off leads to the sales team. 👀 It's almost like there should be *one* tool that captures and converts all your demand. We've got you 😉 Scheduling Form Routing Chat Handoff Lead Distribution all in one Demand Conversion Platform 🌶

No need to hurt your brain when booking a meeting 🧠 Buying committees are big and often include people from all over the globe. When you book through Chili Piper, we auto-populate your time zone based on browser data so you get suggested meeting times that actually make sense for everyone.

Demo? Sure! Oh... Wait! Wait! Wait! Noooooooooooo! If you already know someone is your dream buyer, why make them speak with an SDR first? Seriously, not everyone needs to sit through a qualification call. Pre-qualify your high-priority leads and route them directly to the right AE to avoid pissing them off. Surprise: You'll speed up your sales cycle and close more high-quality deals. Oldie but a goodie from meme genius Will Aitken 👇

Time off? In this economy? Sales friends, when was the last time you took a vacation *without* taking calls? As usual, Will Aitken gets it. (But seriously, go take some time off. It's summer, and you deserve it.)

Vanilla may be the most popular ice cream flavor, but it's also boring as hell. So before you try to please everyone with your marketing, remember that it's not about pleasing the *most* people—but the *right* people. It's one of the reasons we're so spicy on LinkedIn. Sure, our posts may get *too* spicy for some people, but those aren't our people. Our VP of Marketing, Brandon Redlinger 🌶️, recently spoke about our LinkedIn strategy with Alice de Courcy on Cognism's podcast, The Loop. They talked about how to adapt LinkedIn strategies so they actually feed demand. TL;DR: Your audience isn't everyone. (But you already knew that.) Catch the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.