A technical founder who assumed a great product would market itself watched costs balloon with twenty-two marketers on the team and pipeline still stalling. So she did something drastic: stepped in as acting CMO, weathered people quitting and Reddit mockery, and set out to understand why founders and marketers so often clash, and why the work is so much harder than websites and social media.
The answer she found comes down to a simple but demanding equation: attention, the right growth play, and relentless orchestration behind the scenes. She breaks down the three levers for attention (humour, wow, and being genuinely helpful), why no marketer can master all thirty-eight growth plays at once, and how tiering accounts by fit and value, aligning sales and marketing on shared meetings, and automating the operational grind let just two marketers book 1,400 sales-qualified meetings. Her closing argument: hand the data and orchestration to AI, and protect human marketers for the creativity and relationships that break through the noise.
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Good morning, Edinburg. I see some familiar faces. I got to meet a couple of you yesterday. And I'm here because I wanted to share a little bit of my story, one that had me uncover marketing. Before I do, I want to calibrate a little bit to understand how much time I spend on certain sections.
How many of you are in marketing? Wow, I'm impressed. How many of you are marketing at companies that have more than two hundred people? A couple. Okay. And how many of you are founders? Okay. Founders of more than two hundred companies? Alright. Those of you that have not yet the founders that are not yet at that complexity, some of these things probably will take time to build, but it's nonetheless something that I wish I'd known when I started because I had to discover some of these things the hard way.
I thought I understood marketing. And like every naive founder, I thought, well, especially one that comes from product like myself, that you just build like a great product and you focus on that, and then kind of marketing figures it out by itself. But as you all know, the Elon Musk story, it doesn't really work that way.
Marketing breaks or makes the distribution of the product. To give additional background, I was the technical founder. So to me, things like marketing seemed simple from afar. I thought that you just have to hire people that manage your website, your social media, and your events.
So that's what I did. I started hiring a lot of people. We had twenty two marketers in our team. They were covering product marketing and community and all of those things, but it was not working. And the reason why it was not working is because my CAC, my cost of acquisition was way too high, and we didn't quite know what levers to pull to increase our pipeline.
So I did what every crazy founder does, and I thought, let me figure this out. And I decided to be the acting CMO. Well, I can tell you it was some of the craziest adventure I've ever had, but nothing is in life is really worth doing unless you take a big risk.
And boy, a big risk it was because I had people quitting, Reddit was making fun of me. It was not was not fun. I've been told all my life what I can do and I can't do. I've always tried to listen to my gut, and I figured, you know, I've came from Romania to US with nothing.
I got this company so far. I have the builder inside of me. I have to figure it out because I sell to marketers. If I can't figure this out, how can I go in front of them and tell them how it can be done?
Also, I knew that the tenure of marketers in companies is very small, especially of CMOs, And I didn't understand why. I didn't understand where the clash was. I didn't understand why founders fired marketers so often. I didn't understand why marketers hated their CEOs.
There were so many things that I didn't understand. But I figured that with my communist spy lens, I will be a detective, and I will figure it out. It was the hardest job I've ever had. It was literally the hardest job I've ever had.
Not only did I not have the skills for it, but it was a lot more complicated than social media and websites. And also, the reason why it was so complicated is that it requires so many skill sets that are unusual in one person.
You have to be very creative. You have to have a very high IQ. You have to be very good at enablement and project management. Figuring all those things out was incredibly hard. And I came up with this simple yet complicated equation to explain how we managed to use the two marketing resources to get to the pipeline that we got.
And it's a combination of attention, grabbing people's attention, having the right growth play, and I'll explain what that means in a bit, and having the right orchestration behind the scenes so that marketers can focus on what they do best. On the attention front, I found three levers to get people's attention.
One of them is humor, another one is wow, and another one is something that's very helpful. On the humor side, we always make fun of things on the Internet, and this is an example of something that a campaign that we did for April fools.
We said that we're getting everybody in the office. We're remote, and we just made fun of people who get their employees back in the office assuming that they're gonna be a lot more productive. And that got us a hundred thousand impressions. Actually, this year we made another April fools that we made fun of the government pulling back on DEI, and that got us even more impressions as an example.
But humor is risky because you're always on the borderline of upsetting people. So the willingness to take that risk was part of our playbook. The other lever for attention is wowing. And since we couldn't send rockets to space, we did what every other founder knows, which is to gather people's attention with things that are a little bit weird.
So for instance, that's one video that got us one million organic impressions, and it's like a weird combination where you it's a one billion dollar company, but it's a woman, which is unusual, and I have half pants. So it was like a combination of many weird things together.
And usually, I'm a bit of a walking billboard as well because I always have something about my outfit that's not quite right, like my hair is a little bit strange or my boots are strange. So that those are the kind of things that people pay attention because you don't blend in.
And of course, we do a lot of things that we find ourselves helpful internally and we publish those things or we just show people that we understand them. On the growth play side, we found thirty eight growth plays. And what the growth growth plays is just a combination of a channel plus an offer.
And I'll give you some examples. Some of you might be using some of these examples currently, but they're all very, very hard. So I'll take one example from there. Organic SEO, for instance. You can have ten years, you can spend ten years studying just that one growth play.
And you can you can be the top in organic SEO, and you still have a lot of things to learn because things are moving so fast. So just that one channel is incredibly difficult. So imagining that there's a marketer who can figure all these growth plays out and be an expert on all of them is just impossible.
We took some of these growth plays, and we gave more or less attention to them. So in our case, the one with two fires are the ones we paid a lot more attention to, the one with one fire a little bit less. And we went all in on the ones that had two fires.
And I saw that some of you take screenshots of this. At the end, I actually have a QR code that has this presentation. So you can take that. And I have actually more details for each one of these growth plays, what resources we use, and how we went about it.
But that was not the hard part. Where marketers spent most of their time is not necessarily on the offer, is not necessarily on the channel, is not necessarily figuring out on the creative part, but it's the orchestration of the behind the scenes. And that takes probably ninety eight percent of the time.
Instead of working on the creative, they spend on the orchestration. So I'm going to give you a little bit of an example of the orchestration behind the scenes. And that's where most of our impact happened. So you have you identify an offer, then you have the service addressable market for it.
You identify your buying group because you have different messages from different people in the organization in B2B. You have the buying group that's getting larger and larger. You might get the CFO involved, executive team, etcetera. So identifying who what accounts you go after, which personas at every account, then have some proof and some offer.
You want to distribute that offer, and then you start automating it and adjusting and doing a lot of AB testing to make sure that it actually works, measure it, and, of course, enabling the the sales team. My biggest breakthrough came from actually the first step, which was the service addressable market.
We all every time I ask a marketer who they target, they have an answer that's not making them feel confident because what the CEO says that they're going after versus what their head of sales is going after versus what they think they should be going after is usually not they don't have a consensus around it.
And going after everyone never really works because then your crack of acquisition is high like it was for us. So we started tiering our accounts and we found and we started measuring, for instance, for each one of our accounts, how much revenue we can get, which ones are the highest likely to close, and we started tiering.
We had hundreds and hundreds of signals that we were getting from our customers. We knew which one had the high LTV, which was like the contract value, lifetime value, and which ones were not churning to identify which ones are the ones that are gonna stick because no one wants a leaky bucket.
And as a result from the tier one account, we you see that we've identified eight hundred and seventy two, which was giving us a potential so we sell licenses, which was giving us close to four hundred thousand licenses that we could sell, which is a big number.
So you could see it we went from we're targeting every possible company that in our case, that's on Salesforce or on HubSpot to these are our best fit. So then all our marketing efforts reduced to this account list. Together with sales, we would know that we would be in in in in the buying committee.
We would I would be at their door. We would organize dinners. We would organize lunches. We would target them on social media. It was a lot cheaper to just go after this account list. Then for each one of our top tier accounts, we made sure that we understood who our champion was, who who else is gonna help us close the deal.
This was usually a a manual process, but we've automated it with AI agents. This one also the same way, and I I have that explained in my Notion doc as well if you're curious. The trickiest part was then to identify the offer. What are we gonna present to them so that we move them down the funnel?
What would make them interested? What's gonna be something that's gonna for for those that were not aware about our brand, how do we make sure that they have the right impressions, that they're thinking about the right things? And the biggest mistake that I noticed in in other marketing teams and one that I we made as well was thinking that we have to do a lot.
And we had to do a lot of offers that a lot of blog posts, a lot of podcasts, and that's how we're gonna get to it. But we minimized the kind of offers that we got, and that helped us a lot. The biggest mistake that we did afterwards after we identified the offer in the past is that we would be not very precise with our distribution.
What's the point of writing a blog post if it gets only twenty views? What's the point of recording a podcast if nobody listens to it? And the distribution is very difficult. So we started forming a lot of relationships with people in our ecosystem who would help us with the distribution of our offer.
Because it's not only about paid, it's not only about organic. We started focusing a lot on our partners to be able to have the distribution in place. One of our more successful distribution channel, for instance, right now is our influencers, and we go out to recruit them, and I explained that in the Notion doc as well.
And it's not only about paying them, it's forming relationships with them, understanding what they care about, what does their audience care about, and giving them value. So for instance, I organize a lot of influencers events where they meet each other, and that's valuable to them.
That's an example of an offer. The next step after identifying the offer, after identifying your distribution channel is automating it because you don't want to have one trick pony. You want to have campaigns that are evergreen. And you want to make sure that when an account enters in that high tier account, they're going to go through a similar process as your other ones.
And you have to as long as you put that on autopilot and you don't have to think about it, then it's a lot easier and you can focus on the creative side. An example of such an automation is on our ecosystem triggers. I'll give you an example on that one.
We have about a hundred integrations. We have a big partnership with a company called Gong. They are a bit larger than us. They're around three hundred million AR. And whenever there's a new Gong customer, they're gonna be get a targeted ad that says, did you know that with Gong and Chili Piper, you can achieve those results?
And they get targeted again, and not only one persona in that account, but several see that there's potential of bringing and doing more in their team with this particular integration. And that goes on automatic pilot so that we don't have to think about it.
We also have another example from from our CRM when a company gets new CMO, they might get invited to a dinner or a lunch. Hey. Meet other peers in your industry that are not competitive. Let's make sure that we exchange some ideas, and we have those events recurring.
The smaller events are very effective. And the last but not least, we are maniacal about measuring all these things to make sure that we are actually moving the needle. That's something that was very haphazard before. And what I mean by that is measuring all the conversion points between different stages that accounts are in.
You have accounts where what I call cold accounts where there's no engagement. We want to see, okay, are they becoming aware? Am I making progress on these accounts so that they are getting specific marketing touches on them? Are they getting in this particular stage of consideration, are they in decision and optimizing for those conversion rates as opposed to only focusing on new growth channels?
The conversion side is equally important. And not only that, but the velocity. How long does it take for them to go from one funnel stage to another? And something interesting discovered as we became obsessed about the data and the way we get the data right now is we push everything that we have in our CRM, in our marketing funnel, and in our customer base to Snowflake, to our database.
And we do all sorts of reports on top on top of it with Sigma. So we can answer any question really fast. And that's typically a problem that most marketers have. They don't have the data. So that because I'm an engineer, I solved that day in the in the first months because I couldn't operate without seeing things.
So when we started measuring things, we realized that if marketing works alone on account, it takes about two hundred and forty three days from first touch to close. When the sales team worked alone on their accounts, three hundred days. But when we worked together, a hundred and ninety two days.
That was at the beginning. Right now, improved to our one hundred and ninety two is is shorter. But still, it was crazy that we're so focused on outbound pipeline and inbound pipeline and who gets the credit. Is DSDR or is it the inbound channel?
And we stopped the nonsense. We said we have to work together on these accounts. Otherwise, we're losing. So that was a big big change. We didn't we realized that we couldn't send any accounts to our SDRs unless they were touched by marketing, unless we had certain campaigns making sure that they're aware, they knew about our brand, and then our audience would be a lot more likely to respond to our SDRs outreach.
Right now, we have seventeen SDRs. We tried with AI SDRs and the conversion rate is extremely low. And our SDRs last quarter without using any SDRs with the market being as it is, which is very chaotic and unpredictable, they managed to do a hundred and eighty percent of their quota.
And this kind of alignment helped a lot. They book about five hundred meetings every quarter. Our sales and marketing team, even though we're much smaller than them for the full year, and we booked fourteen hundred sales qualified meeting. And the way we measure ourselves is not through pipeline created, but through sales qualified meetings.
So making sure that the sales has the meeting, they marked it as qualified, and they keep giving us feedback on the top of the funnel to make sure that our scoring gets refined and the type of accounts that we send to them are the right ones.
They are also they also have something that other companies don't do. We don't let our team, our sales team disqualify based on budget. And the reason why we don't let our team do that is because budgets usually appear. When someone wants to make something happen, budgets appear out of nowhere because in our case, they might spend, I don't know, seven k or ten k with Chili Piper, but they get double their inbound pipeline.
So I know for a fact that the ROI is there. So if you really want to prove and you have the right data that you're gonna double your pipeline, you're gonna spend the seven k or the ten k. So we don't let them disqualify if the person says that they don't have a budget, which is probably unusual.
So one something that I want to leave you with as a parting gift before I share with you my Notion doc is that I don't believe that in twenty twenty five companies can succeed if they don't automate all these things, if they don't have all the data around what's working and what's not working.
Because marketers are not going to be the best at putting the behind the scenes, all the operations or the orchestrations or the data pieces behind to help them operate. What they're really, really good, the best marketers are the ones who are very, very creative.
The ones who are gonna come up with the right offers, that are gonna get attention, that are gonna be well distributed because they offer value to their audiences. And if you look at Zapier or any of the companies that you admire, it's usually because they're very extremely creative.
And my hope is that the marketers out here can convince the company to invest a lot more in the operations behind the scenes, the orchestrations, the data, the segmentations, the account scoring, and all the type of things that should not take time. And those are the kind of things that are best done by robots, by AI agents.
As humans, what we have now in this strange AI world where we don't really believe what we see anymore is our ability to break through the noise. AI is just averaging what it finds on the Internet, so it can never quite break through the noise.
And the other thing that AI can't do is form relationships and connections with their audience. And that can only be done by being very present to understand your ICP, whether it's at an event, whether it's at a dinner, whether it's a one on one conversations.
Those are kind of things that AI can't do. So my hope is that companies will understand that and they will invest a lot more on these skill sets and hiring the people for those two traits because those are the ones that can't be replicated.
Alright. So I'm gonna share my with you my QR code, but I have to warn you before I share it. There's a Notion doc in there where I share this presentation. I also share the growth plans, how we do social media, how we go about influencers.
You'll find there four links, One that says, b to b marketing, what I've learned, and as you dig deeper, you'll find there. There are some other resources that, I get asked often. And at the very top, there will be a link where you can connect with me on LinkedIn as well.
When you do that, to for me to accept and maybe we have a follow-up conversation on that, please mention how you know me, whether it's from the Turing Fest or something different. Alright. Here we go. And I think that we're not I'm not allowed to take any questions because we have a tape a table roundtable afterwards with discussions.
Is that correct? Okay. And I'm done. Thank you very much. Thank you. That was Bernice.
