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“Our cost of acquisition was very high. Neither I nor my marketing team could understand where to put more money to make a predictable machine that yields the right outcomes.”
Like many CEO-Founders in SaaS, Alina Vandenberghe didn’t know much about marketing when she co-founded Chili Piper in 2016. As a technical founder, she just focused on building a great product and hired a wide-ranging marketing team – from social media managers to product marketers – to create demand. It didn’t work.
So Alina took a bold decision: to become acting CMO.
Nobody in her team thought it a good idea. Lots of people quit. She was teased on Reddit.
But under her guidance, Chili Piper went from 22 marketers and 240+ days lead times to 1400 SQLs with just two marketers (and freelance support). At SaaStock USA, Alina explained how she did it.
The marketing equation: Attention + Growth Plays + Orchestration
Alina discovered that SaaS marketing boils down to: Attention + Growth Plays + Orchestration.
- Attention = Ways to get noticed (i.e. blog or social media post)
- Growth Play = The channel which distributes that ‘notice’ (i.e. Youtube or newsletter)
- Orchestration = Internal mechanisms that translate eyes into pipeline (i.e. automation or segmentation)
Attention: 3 ways to get noticed
- Be funny. Humour on social media is hard (you’re always going to upset someone), but take a risk with it. E.g. When Chili Piper joked about moving its office to Chili in upstate New York, it attracted 800K impressions.
- Wow your audience. Break the mould of what they’re used to seeing. E.g. Alina worked with an influencer to produce a video on a ‘day in the life of a billion-dollar SaaS founder’.
- Create helpful content. Ignore fluff and AI-generated content. Focus on producing content that is practical and actionable. E.g. Chili Piper shares its experiments publicly.
Growth plays: Don’t put your eggs in one basket
Alina outlined 38 growth plays. Some work faster, some cost more, some require external expertise, some work better at different company stages – but all of them are complicated.
The key is trying multiple channels and investing more heavily in what’s working. For example, Chili Piper invested more on seven growth plays including:
| Name | Cost | Speed | Experts | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cold email/call outreach | 💵 | Fast | Cold emails experts | Any |
| Linkedin ads | 💵💵💵 | Fast | Paid agencies | >$3m |
| Community | 💵💵 | Slow | N/A | Any |
Find out more on Alina’s Notion.
Orchestration: The mechanics of your campaigns
After picking your strategy, you still have to distribute your campaigns to make sure they’re seen. For Alina, this is an 8-step process that includes:
- Tiering your accounts. Prioritise accounts according to their propensity to close and renew (i.e. high LTV accounts in Tier 1) and do whatever it takes to be in their sphere. E.g. Chili Piper consolidates all its data – i.e. from product, marketing and sales – in Snowflake, which produces around 3000 data points enabling them to see which prospects are most conducive to high LTV.
- Pinpointing your buyers. Be precise about who you’re targeting (‘your buying group’) and make it as easy as possible for them to make a confident purchase decision. E.g. Chili Piper automates this process, so marketing and sales don’t waste time figuring out email addresses or company roles. (Read more about how Chili Piper uses automation)
- Creating and distributing offers. Identify what will get your buyers to move (‘the offer’) and try to make it consistent across all your growth channels to minimise effort and maximise usage. E.g. Chili Piper partners with Gong. Whenever someone buys Gong, they automatically see an offer saying: ‘with Chili Piper and Gong, you can do XYZ’.
Measuring impact
Measure each marketing campaign according to KPIs, such as conversion rates at different stages through the funnel, velocity and time to close.
- Conversion rates. Are prospects booking meetings, but not showing up? Are leads being ‘qualified’, but not getting to sales?
- Velocity. How fast are they converting? How fast are they moving through the funnel?
- Time to close. How long does it take between first touch (marketing) and closing (sales)? Are sales and marketing working together seamlessly?
The ‘biggest learning’: SDR & marketing alignment
“Stop with this nonsense where SDR takes credit and marketing takes credit. It’s all bound. We work together. It doesn’t matter who takes the credit.”
Shorter sales cycles = lower CAC. To reduce sales cycles, Alina’s ‘biggest learning’ was to treat sales and marketing as one entity. By combining SDRs and marketers, Chili Piper cut the time to close by up to 36%.
To combine sales and marketing successfully, Alina recommends you:
- Pay SDRs and marketing the same (i.e. don’t separate their bonuses).
- Give them cross-functional responsibilities (i.e. Marketers are also responsible for increasing an NRR and cross-selling).
Go deep on your GTM strategy at SaaStock Europe
Alina’s keynote talk was one of many highlights at SaaStock USA and we’ve got a stacked line-up of amazing speakers across our GTM track at SaaStock Europe in Dublin in just six weeks (14-15 October).
You only have until 22 September to register for tickets – so be quick!
