Totally, which is kind of, I don't know if we'll get this, it's changing the world of, I think, CS as well these days. It's like you're not just seen as signing something, you're seen as getting them to value the bar for how people see their vendors is going up a lot.

Precisely, precisely.

Well, let's get into some of the details. Where do you think agents do a better job than humans in the B2B? It sounds like more top of funnel in the pipeline. What are the specific things that you're finding that you're able to replace human beings for technology? So

one of the areas that is gaining most significant momentum, especially for companies mid-market and enterprise, is the ability to get to their account lists a lot faster to identify which customers are more likely to be interested in talking to sales based on all sorts of signals. called account scoring with agents is very top of mind for many people, especially identifying not customers that necessarily close fast, that could get to a closed one contract fast, but identifying the accounts that have high LTV. Because as a business, you don't want a leaky bucket. You want to just acquire the kind of customers that stick.

Best fit customer list building. Is it at the account level or is that also at the persona, like specific person level as well? So

it goes on both dimensions. So first step is being able to have all the data in one place. I think that's critical to kind of do that kind of analysis because you want to have product data, you want to have customer data, you want to have prospect data, and you want to have the top of the funnel and the customer data all in one place to start understanding the inherences between which accounts you're putting in and which ones are sticking. How

do you do that? So

the way we do it is we have more than 300 characteristics of an account that we analyze. And it's not a static score because things are moving and things are changing. We might be losing accounts for a particular competitor and then we have to just fix our... Oh, so this

is not just public information. You're also ingesting your own ChilliPiper CRM customer usage data on top of whatever else is out there through data providers. And then you're putting that together into... So

we look at the characteristics of the customers that stick with us, the ones that don't churn. And we look at all sorts of pieces to the puzzle, the integrations that they might have. And we have a hundred integrations. We look at their sales team. Are they increasing the number of sales reps? Are they decreasing? We also look at traffic to their website. We also look at the campaign that they may be setting up, advertising campaign. We look at whether they're buying tools that are ideas and two hours. Are they buying tools for webinars? Are they buying tools for us? So we are looking at all these signals and it's 300 signals that we're looking at and scoring our accounts on tiers. So we have six tiers for the way we look at our accounts and those tiers keep adapting based on the profiles of our customers that stay with us and have high contract value and expand. Well,

that's very scientific relative to how I've seen some other teams prioritize. How do you store that and sort through it? In

our case, we store our data in Snowflake. Yeah.

So you're using Data Lake to manage all of the heuristics.

Currently, we're using a company that's called GoodFit. And in GoodFit, we can set up agents that can check other attributes that we might not store ourselves. So for instance, it can go on somebody's website. It can check if it's a B2B, because in our case, we don't sell to BCC. It can also go to their website and check if they have a form, because we sell better tools that do have a form. And they're thinking about how to improving that process and so forth. So we're deploying agents to triple check on the account data that we have. And that's what gives us priority on the accounts that are more likely to get interested in our product. And then based on their size, the campaigns that we have to target them differ a lot, because if it's a large account, they're more likely to get an email from me and the meeting with me whereas it's for the other accounts we might organize a group dinner where a different kind of event or a different kind of approach to how we open the door for sales awesome

so the first part right is icp we're looking at what accounts based on historical data all that stuff amazing the next step we're talking about right now is okay how do we engage with them? It's not just the company level, it's who and how. So I'm curious to hear how AI can continue to not just identify the folks, but be high leverage. Or is that when humans come in? Like now we're past the first data layer. What's the mix between sellers and technology there? All

right. So we do top of the funnel, mostly threading as well. So we prepare the buying committee before we give it to our sales team. And the way we do that is we gather the data on our ICP. In addition to the account data, we also prioritize the more likely personas to be champions. In our case, it's quite complicated because we have five SKUs. So we have five products and each product has a different champion. So as a result, we do nurture that happens before we even ask for a demo. So we start educating the different seniority of personnel and depends on the company size on things that on use cases that they might want to start thinking about when it comes to optimizing their B2B buying experience. I'll give an example to be more precise. So let's say that someone just bought a webinar software and they want to optimize their webinar funnel. We would send them an article that says, hey, this is how you should think about following up with your prospects after webinar. This is how you should hand them off to sales. This is how you should do the preparation. And there are ways in which you can also book demos from webinars. Here's how we remove the friction from that because look, instead of getting them to another landing page where they have to fill out the form again, you already know who they are, get them in touch with sales immediately from that email and remove friction there. That's one example. We have hundreds of signals that we can use for nurture and different ICPs for five different products by company size. So it gets very complex.

Is that automated? Are you able to automate that? A

lot of it. A lot of it is automated. A lot of it is automating and we're automating more and more because there's no point in using humans in that process because you know when they buy webinar software and you know which is the person that bought it and you know some of the problems that they're going to encounter and just creating a delay between the nurture but but it's easy to accommodate.

Got it got it so there's not people yet so we found the right accounts we're looking at these signals we're reaching out to different we're multi-threading even before we're asking for a demo so people know about us because obviously the classic marketing saying you need to see us whatever, seven times or whatever the number is. I'm sure it's changing all the time.

A hundred times before

you'll take a call, whatever it is. What's next when, say they respond, they say, this seems interesting. Is that a human coming in then or?

You have the hand raiser. So people who want to find them. Yeah, this looks interesting. Talk to you. Well, you don't want to send hand raisers to sales if those hand raisers are going to waste your sales team's time so sometimes there are errors into the process so even if you might have a list of accounts to target you might have hand raisers that are coming outside of those adult scoring and it might mean that they're a company that you might not close but it might mean that you have errors in the data and maybe there are accounts that you can close. So when that moment of high intent comes, that's like the most critical moment in time. You have them, you have their interest picked. And it's similar to in B2C when, for instance, TikTok is super well optimized for the buying, B2C buying experience. Like when you see the product, you click on a button, boom, it's like arrives at your doorstep, right? You don't even, it feels like they know what you want to buy before it arrives at your home. And it's similar in the B2B space where you have that intention. That's the most critical moment. So in that case, real time, you have to check if they're the right person and they're good to talk to sales. And if they are, then you meet them with their preferred choice of communication. Some of them might feel more comfortable to book a meeting in advance. might be more comfortable to talk on the spot on the phone. Some might be more comfortable to just chat or some email. And understanding how to give them that option is also important because not everybody operates the same. And putting them in front of the rep that is more likely to close them as well. And the assignment of account to the right person is super critical because if you have two leads that are coming from the same account and you assign them to two different sales reps, or you have a customer that gets assigned to a sales rep, there are a million rules that can break in the system. So those are two critical points to meet the customer at the right time. Well,

let's go back to, you just mentioned customer preference. Everyone's seen the stat of X percent, 80% of customers would rather not talk to a seller or not do something live. But then you look at, Gartner did this amazing study on the outcomes of those purchases and the regrettable purchases that come from not talking to a seller in considered purchases are like outrageously high, almost the exact same percentage as the people that say they would prefer not to talk to someone. So that's where my mind goes is like, you don't know because how many times have you bought Chili Piper? How many times have you bought Accord versus how many times have we made customers successful? So I'm curious to get your take on how you think about customer preference on the B2B side and successful outcomes with customers, because it seems like those sometimes are the opposite.

It's a problem that's specific to SaaS because in services and in other places, you obviously have to talk to sales because you can't self-serve rental equipment. But when it comes to SaaS, the ability to try the product and get your hands dirty with it is obviously removing friction. And it's very good idea for certain type of people that are more comfortable with hands-on experience. So I think that ungating the product is a trend that every SaaS company is just going to move and eventually everybody's going to have that hands-on experience. The question is, when do you introduce, even in that PLG process, in that product-led motion, when do you introduce the ability to talk to a human so that you can be of help? Because even with the best PLG process, even with the best self-service process, there are always complexities. Tools are so flexible.

The best tools can be used in a million ways. And how is this random person that's stumbling upon this great product and technology going to know exactly what their organization, what their types of sellers, buyers, whatever, are going to be successful? It's like rolling the dice versus being able to guide them more prescriptively, right?

Yeah. So ideally, in the PLG process, you give them something to value that gives them a hands-on experience with something that's specific to their particular use case. But when it comes to team deployment, nobody can figure that on their own. The training, the enablement, the setup, the internal tools, the change management, there's a lot that goes into it. And introducing the steps that allows you to talk to sales is critical. And that's why we do very well in partnerships with self-service software, like for instance, Chameleon. And the founder was here somewhere. He was visiting earlier. So starting with tools like Chameleon, the right step at the time where it says, hey, we've seen that you are in restaurant businesses. Some of our customers in the restaurant businesses do these three things with us. Let me show you. Let's chat now. And you don't appear as somebody who's trying to push you a product. You appear as someone who's helping you figure out the process for your team because we've seen many restaurant companies or we've seen many companies like yours. And I'm going to be here advising you on how to optimize the tool experience for you.

Got it. So you think for the evaluation part initially, people should be able to use the product and get to value. But when it comes to a real deployment, it should be guided. Real

deployment or more complexity outside of the first step where there are that aha moment. Yeah.

Yeah. Got it. Got it.

Actually, Monday.com is super good at that. Monday.com is super good at that. And they use us in product as well. Yeah,

and they just crossed the, what, billion dollar AR milestone recently, which is

very cool to see. Yeah, it's so amazing, so amazing. I'm so amazed at what they've done.

Yeah, pretty incredible. Well, let's wrap up. So we talked about the top of funnel account level identification using both public, but also your own LTV and other heuristics. We talked about the next, how do we get in touch first with a human or a technology? What about, let's say you have an amazing process, right? You've identified the right accounts. You've multi-threaded and added value to all the key personas. They've maybe touched your product if it's PLG or maybe not yet. And they've been interested for sales and they raised their hand. What does that ideal handoff look like to the seller from that entire marketing experience? We talked about how blended it is. Now, what does a seller need to do to come in and make sure that they can optimize closing that deal?

Well, it helps a lot if a seller understands what the buyer journey was prior to them having that conversation, understanding which kind of materials that prospect might have consumed, whether they've already tried the product or not, whether they follow you on social or not, whether they've been to an event already, whether they've been in touch to your CEO or that information is very valuable as you're going on a call and forming that first impression. So meeting prep is critical in that conversation. It might also help to know that they've been a former customer, for instance, and then you get on a call and you surprise them. Oh, I know that you've used the Accord before. It's an amazing experience if you can do that. Yeah, I know that you've been in touch with the Rossa Center. So those are the kind of inheritances that you can only make if you have the data in one place. And I think that's one of the most critical steps that companies are starting to understand that you need to have that in a central data point. And even further than that, the ability to potentially arm the salesperson understanding the competitive landscape for that particular person that you're speaking with, because they have unique challenges to their sector and speaking the right language around the way they even, like in your case, the way they call a sales rep. They may use different terminology and understanding that a certain industry might struggle with velocity or whatever they might be. And filling that gaps with customer data and saying, these are the benchmarks for a company like yours. This is what the kind of results we're getting. This is a company, an example of a company that we've closed recently, and they've got that and that. And this is the champion, and I can put you in touch and so forth. So being able to have that entire landscape mapped, but also try to already have the information of who the buying committee is. So when you're talking to, in your case, for instance, from sales enablement, you already know who the CRO is. You already know who the VP of sales is, you know, who the head of the SDRs and so forth. So you can start asking questions where will Joe want to be involved in this? Will Sam be part of the process as well? Who's going to be the blocker in this deal? Who's going to be afraid that you're going to move from another software? What will be there? Et cetera, et cetera. So all these things, if you already have access to that data, you're going to have a much better call for sure.

Totally.