🤯 Daniel Cmejla: Chili Piper, Director of Partnerships, Community & Social Media

Market-to-Revenue

Market through your customers. A bad-ass, true social media presence. Your customers are on social? You're on social. Fire your social media consultant and stop producing super basic boring stuff. Nobody wants that corporate version of you. They want an authentic version of you. Invest in community. Dark funnel. Customer referrals and user-generated content. Theory of leverage. Self-determination theory. Emotional withdrawals and deposits. Building a customer advisory board. Read Robert Cialdini's book, Influence.

Here’s what Arthur Castillo said about Dan:

High leverage principles. I was taught this by my manager, Dan, as I moved into Marketing. So in trying to explain it, a high leverage activity is maybe something that you create once, a system or a process, and that you can reuse it. So we're not starting from scratch. Whereas a low leverage activity will be, I'm doing it once, so I'm having to recreate it from scratch. I'm really not building any systems or processes. So it's helped me understand, “How do I create this so I'm going to be scalable? How do I do things maybe once or twice and it serves me for a longer amount of time?”
—Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper → Listen

What are 3 ways that your team converts your market into revenue?

Let's say, “How do we take our TAM and convert that into customers?” I'll take a segment of that right now. Two of our primary buyer personas at Chili Piper—we’re a tool that basically manages inbound lead flow amongst other things with complicated lead routing, and all kinds of cool stuff—but our primary personas are 1) Demand Gen, because they want the ads that they bring traffic to the website to convert, and 2) Revenue Ops, because they don't want to deal with this manual lead-routing situation. So the first question you need to ask yourself is like: “Where are these people? Where do they hang out? Are they at events? Are they in communities? Are they on social? Are they grabbing beers with their peers?” And then from there it's like, “Okay, how can we be there, too?” So three areas that we focus on to convert these folks into customers:

1) Community. We look across a lot of the top communities. For us, for the RevOps persona, it's like WizOps, Marketing Operation Pros (an excellent community run by Mike Rizzo and Co), Pavilion, Modern Sales Pros, Demand Curve. There are a bunch of them. So you're like, “Okay, this is where ICP is. They're active here. How do we be active too?” Well, the solution isn't: when your solution comes up to be like, “Oh, pick me! Chili Piper! Right here!” It's to have your customers and advocates authentically want to engage in those communities. So one way we convert our market into revenue is by ensuring that our customers are supported, active, healthy, and receive gratitude whenever they evangelize for us. Within PlanHat, which is our customer management system, we have information on what communities certain people are active in. Then, across all these communities, many of which we’re sponsoring, we have social listening mechanisms in place using a tool called Charla, and also in some cases, the founders of these communities are contracted to alert us when our solution comes up. So, when our solution comes up, naturally now, a lot of customers chime in organically. If not, maybe we'll give them a little bit of a nudge. So, that's one space that we do it. Community. We surveyed all of our Closed Won customers from 2021 and 20% said they heard of us first from a community. So shout out to all the communities out there. RevGenius. There's a new one launching soon, which we can't tell you about, but it's really, really exciting. Sales Assembly, they're just awesome.

2) Social Media. Maybe you've seen us on LinkedIn. When I joined the company in 2020, over two years ago now, wow, we had about 37,000 organic impressions per quarter. Last quarter, that number was 2.7 million organic impressions. Just from the company account. Not from employees. Not from customer advocates. You can look, actually, in a granular level, and see what percentage of your audience is in different personas. We brought our rev ops component up from 3% to 8%. So it's being active there. Your customers are on social? You're on social.

3) Customer referrals and user-generated content. You'll realize they all have a theme. So within social media, I do three real types: you have your company page, you have your employee evangelism, and then you have user-generated content. A while back, a friend of ours, Sara McNamara, who's not a customer, and she's not paid to do anything, she’s just a bad-ass marketing ops leader, made a post about Chili Piper and how we can do really complex lead routing, all kinds of cool stuff. Got like 40,000 impressions. So then we were like, “Maybe this led to revenue.” We actually went into the post, took all the people there who were mentioned, who liked or commented favorably, enriched that using LeadIQ, and then uploaded it to Salesforce as a campaign. We can now see the influence of social media user-generated content on our pipeline. It turns out that the dark funnel is still dark. We don't really know what's going on there. But we do know that 80% of our inbound, and last month was our best ever month for inbound, just comes from people Googling chilipiper.com. We believe that comes from organic user-generated content and just a bad-ass true social media presence.

What are 3 hard problems that you recently overcame?

1) Dark funnel. Looping back to the first one, it's this dark funnel thing. I feel so lucky. I report directly to the CEO. I manage PR, community, social media, events, customer marketing, and then a bunch of other random things, including our foundation, but a lot of these areas where we're putting a lot of effort into, it's not trackable. It's not like when someone mentions our solution in a community, we're going to be like, “Hey Rebecca, please comment. And then tie this UTM link to your comment with a demo.” That's so inauthentic. It just seems slimy to me. We want to keep it organic, want to keep it real, but when you do that, you sacrifice tracking. So, being able to operate in the dark funnel and get buy-in to take these activities, to spend this money, is a big problem we're focused on. Fortunately, we have two co-CEOs, Nicolas Vandenberghe and Alina Vandenberghe, who just get it. They get marketing. They understand it. So, they've allowed me to grow this team out to around 8 now, where we operate in the dark funnel. But, it's tough still. One easy way to solve this is just to put on your demo requests form, an attribution, not a dropdown, but, “How did you hear of us?” Leave it open-ended. That way you can get credit for dark funnel activities. Alyce does an amazing job at this, where they have Nick Bennett, like a mega influencer, who’s also like the nicest guy ever, who's able to just go out there and produce content without tracking it, because when folks come inbound, they're saying, “I got brought here by Nick Bennett.” Those are a couple of ways you can overcome them. We're still working to overcome them, and candidly, I want to get more hard data on the dark funnel, so I can hire more of a team to just do user-generated content. Our senses are that this is really working for us, but like, it's not in the CRM, you know?

2) Building our customer advisory board. Like many t...