🌶 Arthur Castillo: Chili Piper, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community

Market-to-Revenue

15 minutes with Arthur Castillo, Senior Manager of Field Marketing & Community at Chili Piper. Turn champions into raving fans. High leverage principles. A sales rep that broke into marketing. Bypass the SDR qualification. 83% show rates on first inbound meetings. Keep your brain activity as fresh as possible. Scaling the team and delegating. Ask about “where they're trying to get to.”

18 insights. 6 rapid-fire questions. Read the transcript here.

Here’s what Carl Ferreira said about Arthur:

Arthur Castillo. Over at Chili Piper. They're a great team. We're a customer. Arthur is a dear friend and he just has such a unique perspective. He actually comes from sales and now is in marketing. So he's a fantastic resource. He really understands the entire revenue org, the entire customer journey, and is a big, big resource there for thinking innovatively about how those two teams can work together.
—Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs → listen

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

1) Inbound, for sure. Our marketing is responsible for driving over 60% of our pipeline, or more than that, and part of how we do that is we get our highest intent leads to book a meeting right there. So, instead of focusing on the classic “speed-to-lead, let’s get in touch with them in under five minutes,” although I think that's important, I don't think a lot of people are thinking about “speed to meeting booked,” or “speed to first meeting booked,” and we make that happen within minutes. So it really helps capture a lot of those high intent buyers, and for those of you that may or may not know, in B2B tech, less than 40% of those demo requests make it to the first meeting. So, you're leaking out 50-60% inbound pipeline, and we, last I checked, had an 83% show rate to first meeting, so pretty high there.

2) Next, our outbound model. So, I think our SDRs do an incredible job at multichannel, specifically mostly on email and LinkedIn. We get praise every day from the outreach that they send, as well as some people people try and poach our SDRs. So that’s a good sign there. The difference in what they do there: it's not necessarily as personalized as maybe some people think, but it's very contextual to how they do their job, and highlighting, “Hey, are you going through these changes? If, so this is how a customer in your space solved it.” So very contextual to the specific person they're targeting.

3) And then lastly, we turn Chili Piper champions into raving fans. So we're highly active and engaged on our social networks, specifically LinkedIn. We're always trying to give shoutouts to champions. One of the things that I thought was really cool: we did a thought leader series recently on marketing leaders. The prize for that was a trip for two to anywhere in the world. They obviously enjoy that, and we've used a lot of these distribution network effects of our Chili champions. We've noticed that when these referrals come through, they're closing at the highest rates, much higher than inbound or outbound.

So I'd say those three are inbound motion, our outbound motion, as well as turning Chili champions into raving fans.

What are 3 hard problems you recently overcame?

1) I am a sales rep that broke into marketing. It kind of happened by chance, but what I've noticed is that since I've been a little bit more vocal about this, I've actually had quite a few sales reps reach out to me and say, “Hey, your article really resonated with me about breaking into marketing. I'm trying to find my footing here in sales, but I think maybe I'm a creative and I'm better equipped to be in marketing.” So that's been pretty cool. And I've been trying to share a lot of how I've done that. I've wrote an article on my LinkedIn, so feel free to check it out to any of those creative sales reps looking to potentially break into marketing

2) Sticking with that theme, I will say project management is an ongoing problem that I'm trying to overcome. I didn't really have to manage a lot of projects as a sales rep, and now coming into marketing, you have to look at content marketing or product marketing, marketing operations, all of these different things to make sure that you're able to get things through. So that's been a change, but I also noticed that this was part of my skill set that maybe I was a little too afraid of, or didn't see a fit for it, and now that I'm doing it, I can see how it would actually be super useful for really anybody, sales reps, marketers, anybody, to better understand your project management.

3) Saying “no” to people. I'm still pretty guilty of not doing this, but I've noticed as I'm becoming maybe more of a public figure here at Chili Piper, I try and think of myself as a brand advocate, a lot of people would approach me before in terms of trying to apply for a role or maybe trying to pick my brain about something. As much as I want to do that, I am getting more and more responsibilities, and if I say yes to something that means I'm saying no to something else. I really have to push back a little bit. One tip I have for that, something I've been doing, is saying, “Hey, I can't do it right now. I get quite a few of these calls every week, or these asks every week, but let me know maybe what's top of mind or what position you’re interested in. I’ll create a five minute video trying to answer their calls and send it to them. It’s much more effective than hopping on a call with them, spending 20-40 discussing things that are top of mind fo them.

What are 3 roadblocks you are working on now?

1) Attribution model. We are last-touch attribution, but we are starting to shift that, and that was a little bit of a roadblock for us here in the Field Marketing and Community because it's not as direct response as maybe Demand Gen or Outbound Sales. So, just because they attended an event doesn't necessarily mean they're ready-to-go right after it. And, because we’re last touch attribution, a lot of what I’m comp’d off is kind of those qualified held meetings coming through events. So we are starting to change that more to an engagement model, and getting all revenue departments going after engaged accounts, I'm really looking forward to that.

2) Scaling the team and delegating. Coming into marketing, I'm actually a first time manager. So, I’d put scaling the team and delegating. I think being a new manager, I recognize where my strengths are, and sometimes I want to hold on to certain things, but at the same time, having those priorities, I do have to delegate certain things that maybe in the past I would have wanted to do. And with that, understanding how I want to scale my team here at Chili Piper from a Field Marketing side.

3) It’s funny, what probably got me into marketing was my LinkedIn presence, and I hadn't been putting as much time into that. So I'm trying to find a balance between executing on my job and my responsibilities while still staying top of mind...