Welcome to Season 3 of 10/10 GTM: The Podcast for Revenue Leaders!
Our guest for Episode 63 is Alina Vandeberghe, CEO at ChiliPiper. Alina is a serial entrepreneur with over two decades of experience. Prior to founding ChiliPiper in 2016, she held leadership positions at Sharecare, Pearson, and Bloomberg.
In this episode, Ross and Alina discuss how to build a more productive revenue organization with AI agents.
Listen to the episode here, and get the key takeaways from our conversation below.
Building a billion dollar business
Alina and her husband sold their house in 2016, betting everything to realize her vision for ChiliPiper. “We aimed to improve the B2B buying experience. Today, our products are used by major companies like Verizon, Meta, and Gong,” Alina says.
By 2022, ChiliPiper reached a valuation of close to a billion dollars. Alina credits the company’s success to several factors: collaborating with her husband as her co-founder, her obsession with optimizing the buying experience, and embodying her ideal customer profile (ICP).
I’ve been in product for a long time and thought I was adept at understanding my persona and building the right products for them. But when I pivoted to become the head of marketing, I realized the persona was so different from what I had assumed,” explains Alina. Now, her focus extends beyond simply understanding her ICP’s needs — it’s also about being an expert in how they think and communicate.
Automate everything with AI agents except last mile
AI is disrupting the sales process. Manual tasks like lead scoring and data entry can now be automated, enabling more personalized customer interactions.
“I'm completely obsessed with AI because it’s blurring the lines between sales and marketing. Historically, personalized interactions were the domain of sales, handled one-on-one. Now, marketing can achieve a similar level of personalization but on a much larger scale, effectively opening doors for prospects before passing them to sales. What’s more, AI is starting to automate significant portions of the sales process, especially in SMB contexts.”
By automating everything with AI agents except for the last mile, such as product demos and real-time competitive analysis, companies can significantly enhance operational efficiency, freeing up time for reps to focus on closing deals and building more personal relationships with prospects. Ultimately, it’s this human touch that can make or break the sales process.
“One of the most important skills left for a salesperson is the ability to build trust and form a connection with the prospect and customer,” says Alina. “And that’s not something AI is ever going to replace.”
When it comes to replacing humans with technology, AI is ideal for:
- Centralizing data: AI agents can quickly centralize data by aggregating and integrating information from various sources into a single, accessible repository. This enables seamless analysis and accessibility across the organization.
- Identifying high LTV accounts: AI agents can analyze patterns and trends to forecast which accounts are likely to have a high long-term value (LTV). By leveraging predictive analytics, they help prioritize and tailor strategies to engage these valuable accounts.
- Account scoring: AI agents can quickly analyze large volumes of data to score accounts based on their potential to engage and convert. They utilize machine learning models to identify key signals that indicate readiness to buy, optimizing the focus of sales efforts.
“White-glove personalization is essential, especially with enterprise accounts," emphasizes Alina. "The initial interaction has become increasingly vital as it captures the limited attention of potential clients. With the sales cycle extending and buying committees getting bigger, the quality of meetings has never been more crucial. In-depth preparation, augmented by AI agents, can make a significant difference by enabling reps to customize each client interaction based on detailed insights, ensuring that presentations and proposals hit exactly the right notes.”
About Alina
Before finishing high school, Alina started a company to fund her education by selling lipstick and tech skills. Realizing the limited potential in cosmetics, Alina pursued a master's in computer science and later developed innovative mobile products for Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, and Pearson.
In 2016 Alina founded Chili Piper, a demand conversion platform that has doubled inbound conversion rates for clients like Spotify, Airbnb, and Shopify, driving the company towards a billion-dollar valuation.
