Chili Piper Growing ACV

In one of our biggest success stories so far, Chili Piper increased ACV by over 25% all while freeing up reps 20hrs a month. 

Being a demand conversion platform, any company with an inbound our outbound strategy could theoretically use them. (That’s a broad market.) 

And they had 100,000 records in their CRM. 

They needed to distil their “good fit” accounts, scale outbound without increasing headcount, and implement a fast way to get new hires up to speed when SDRs got promoted out of the team. 

Using GoodFit, this is how Chili Piper… 

• Increased ACV by over 25% 
• Automated removal of 20-30 unqualified accounts from the pool per day 
• And gave their SDRs 20 hours a month back to spend selling rather than digging through thousands of Salesforce records. 

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Unique Requirements 

Sales leaders will know there’s a few ways to go about qualifying accounts in and out of your market (industry filters, employee count, etc). 

Traditional measures have their pitfalls (we speak more on that here), so we like to focus on each companies market and GTM Motion: 

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Step 1: Unique Requirements:

Chili Piper target companies where the growth strategy focuses on driving traffic to the website, and converting that traffic onsite. Elements which we all know you can’t filter by on Linkedin or traditional tools. Maybe you can make some assumptions by industry but the qualification rate is abysmal for any high growth sales team. 

Not to mention the volume considerations where Chili Piper needs companies to have inbound traffic that they’re willing to spend money to improve conversion rate. 

So we assessed every website that they’ve recently closed and discovered two key variables:

• Each of their customers had specific CTAs used on their websites (Demo, Contact Sales etc.)
• They all were above a certain volume of web traffic 

This meant we could qualify their market as “everyone who could be inbound-focused” uniquely to Chili Piper. Pulling data out of their markets website to qualify the CTA and verifying the web traffic to determine size. 

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Step 2: Pricing Model Fit:

Chili Piper’s pricing model is based primarily on seats. The Annual Contract Value (ACV) correlates directly with the size of the sales team using Chili Piper. So we qualified companies by identifying those with sales teams within their organizations. 

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Step 3: Geographic Targeting:

Lastly, we made sure to target Chili Piper’s core focus areas - specifically Europe and the US - where their sales teams were concentrated. 

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Scoring 

Talking about those 100,000 CRM records - clarity was needed on good accounts, bad accounts, and what needed to take priority. 

Building out an initial account score is always iterative, which means some guesswork, gut-feeling, and polling the team on what makes a great customer. 

“We started with internal talks and polling different divisions about what makes a great customer. Sales development, Sales, Post-Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing all had valuable, unique insights. This informed the data we’d eventually need from a provider, the evaluation process for deciding on a provider, and gave us a starting point for testing our hypotheses.” 

Coming to GoodFit, Chili Piper was able to access 300+ account level data points, including: CRM, Industry, Website CTAs, Geography, Team Size, and Tech Stack. 

We ran an analysis to see how often factors occurred in a Closed Won set versus all other companies in Chili Piper’s TAM. For each data point, we calculated the number of companies with that factor in the Good set versus Bad companies that also had that factor. 

“We don’t just want to pay for more meetings, we want to pay for meetings that are going to turn into customers, and customers who will have high LTV for us and be good, long term partners of Chili Piper.” 

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Segmentation 

Account distribution can place a burden on reps before they even start the work.

“It takes a psychological toll on SDRs when they're digging through 100,000 Salesforce records. We always had a mix of a named account model and open prospecting, but also a pool of accounts that’s like a free-for-all. The GoodFit data has given us a lot more direction in rethinking that approach.” 

At Chili Piper, reps were getting accounts shuffled in out of their names every 3 months or so, but they didn’t know if they’d be quality, and couldn’t view their scores. 

In July of this year, around 50% of Chili Piper’s accounts had been scored by GoodFit’s algorithm, and it's now sitting around 90%. Adoption has (in the team’s words) “skyrocketed” significantly accelerating the teams ability to hit targets quarter on quarter. 

The ACVs are higher across each scored prospect compared to the random selection from the past and the time spent to qualify those prospects drastically reduces. Driving reps' confidence in the scoring as they know it’s the fastest route towards their quarterly attainment is no longer digging through web pages themselves to spend critical time wading through accounts in SFDC 

to discover the account that ‘feels’ like the one they should target. 

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Layering in homegrown tech

Being Chili Piper, the team took the work we’d done on scoring and ran with it. They: 

• Tiered accounts from 1-6 based on scoring criteria, and prioritized highest scored accounts 
• Built triggers in Distro (a lead routing tool) to boost account score when a prospect buys relevant tech, has an uplift in account traffic, or is hiring SDRs/AEs 
• Set up a Routing Rule to route Accounts with a Goodfit Score between Tier 1 and Tier 6 then distribute them to the team via Round Robin, updating ownership in Salesforce. 

Sounds technical, but it’s easy using the software - read how they did it in depth here.

Another way Chili Piper wove in Distro was automatically routing a replacement account when one gets marked as ‘unfit’ or ‘unqualified’. 

We all know the flux state of startups and scaleups - layoffs, pivots, acquisitions. Human eyes/ears sometimes pick things up faster than data providers. So when an SDR unqualifies an account, Distro automatically sends them a new one to work (also a nice incentive for Salesforce hygiene). 

Then triggers are built for reasons to reinstate those accounts - e.g. if a prospect doesn’t have a relevant CTA on their website (meaning they may not be inbound focused), an SDR can disqualify them. But the moment GoodFit has identified that they’ve added a relevant CTA to their site, watches for a CTA change on the website the account is brought back into play. 

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Marketing 🤝 Sales 

Finally, Chili Piper started using GoodFit data to derive their Fit score, using Linkedin marketing to target the top Fit accounts, tracking clicks, and essentially warming up accounts for the outbound team. 

When accounts start engaging with the marketing, their engagement score increases, at which point you can identify a combo score of high Fit + Engagement, and get sales and marketing working in harmony… 

A feat so few lean GTM teams actually manage to achieve.

‍SpicyOps: Read the case study in Chili Piper’s own words

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Focus + adoption = momentum 

Getting into the weeds of strategic ABS is the polar opposite of “just get on the phones and dial”. 

It takes time, but when you start to see the ROI, it’ll all be worth it. 

For Chili Piper, that ROI was highly tangible - improved sales team efficiency, ACV increasing by upwards of 25%, no more manual assigning, way less manual research... 

And a dramatically reduced chance of hot leads slipping through the cracks.

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