Demand generation is as much about building trust as it is about driving pipeline. This week on Demand Bites, we’re thrilled to welcome Tara Robertson, Head of Demand Generation at Chili Piper, to share her insights on creative approaches to marketing, scaling personalised strategies, and aligning with sales teams to achieve shared goals.
In this episode, Tara discusses the importance of empathy in marketing and why marketers should “market how they wish to be marketed to.” From building trust through transparency to leveraging innovative tools like GoodFit for account scoring, Tara highlights what works in a fast-changing landscape. She also provides actionable tips for scaling personalised campaigns and balancing creativity with measurement.
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Whether you’re looking to break through the noise, align with sales, or reimagine demand generation, Tara’s expertise will inspire you to think differently about your approach.
Demand Bites is the podcast where B2B demand generation leaders share strategies you can use to identify, educate, and convert your ideal customers.
Key moments:
[00:01:27] Meet Tara Robertson: Journey into Demand Generation
[00:03:07] Creative Demand Gen Tactics That Work
[00:04:15] Scaling the Unscalable: Outbound Success Stories
[00:05:56] Using GoodFit for Target Account Scoring
[00:06:48] Building Trust in B2B Through Transparency
[00:08:16] The One Takeaway for Modern Demand Generation
[00:09:33] Lessons Learned at Chili Piper
[00:10:34] Where to Connect with Tara Robertson
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Tara: But I always try to remind people to market how they wish they would be marketed to. And that can apply in so many situations, but often we’ll talk internally of we really want to launch this thing, but how will we measure results from it? And we get stuck in that measurement piece before we’re able to actually launch something new and creative.
So I know it’s tough because we have to measure things at the end of the day, but just throwing up a form in front of everything to just so that you can say you’re able to measure it isn’t always the answer, it’s often not. So really just trying to think like, if I was buying this tool, how would I, what would I want to know, trying to answer those FAQs for people, but also how would I want to be sold and marketed to, and trying to keep that top of mind.
Intro: Welcome to Demand Bites, the podcast where B2B demand generation leaders find the strategies they need to grow. I’m your host, Ross Howard, Director of Insights at Inbox Insight, and in just 15 minutes, my guests and I will uncover what’s broken in the B2B buyer journey and provide real world strategies you can put to work right away.
So whether you’re looking for an innovative demand generation technique or expert advice on accelerating sales, this podcast gives you the tools you need to succeed. Ready to identify, educate, and convert your ideal customer profile, or at least learn how other people are doing it? Let’s dive in.
Ross: Hello everybody, and welcome to the episode. Today I’m joined by Tara Robertson, Head of Demand Generation at Chili Piper. Tara, hi.
Tara: Hi, thank you so much for having me. Excited to do this.
Ross: Thank you so much for coming on the show.
So we talked ahead of meeting today a little bit about your journey as a marketer through revenue marketing and demand generation. How’s that experience shaped your approach? And what are some of those lessons?
Tara: Yeah, it’s funny because every company I’ve been at defines demand generation differently and you mentioned revenue marketing.
I feel like that was one of those terms that was hot, maybe eight years ago-ish. It’s coming back around now, but really it was the same role. My role has always been focused on inbound pipeline, regardless of the source, the channel, and I think that’s one thing that has kind of been not intentional, I would say, but has kind of guided me through my roles as I haven’t been super picky of what my title was, what team I was on.
I was just always focused on what can we do to bring in pipeline and just kind of having that as the north star metric.
Ross: That’s awesome. I mean, you sort of said this already, but in terms of that, not worrying about job title or ego, being there for the mission to drive that inbound pipeline. What aspect of marketing do you find most rewarding?
Tara: I think the biggest thing for me is I just love the variety and creativity, especially I’ve always been lucky to be on very small, lean marketing teams, which maybe some people wouldn’t consider that lucky, but for me, it’s been lucky. Where I’ve been, I’ve had a lot of trust and I’ve been able to try things that are really out there, really creative.
And not everything works, and a lot of that obviously comes from who your execs are, who your founders are, but if you’re given that trust, you can do so many fun, creative things as a marketer. So I think that’s my favorite thing.
Ross: When we spoke before, you sort of mentioned in this role at Chili Piper that does do those creative executions compared to previous stuff that you’d shifted away from, you know, ebook downloads.
What are some of the tactics that you use, at the moment, that you think are hot, or that work well for you?
Tara: I would say the biggest thing that’s successful for us is we try to find things that aren’t easily replicated by others, which is very broad I know. But it’s kind of going back to when people speak to ABM, anything that you can fully automate, to me, that’s not ABM anymore.
It has to have some kind of personal touch. And a lot of people don’t want to hear that. They want to be able to automate everything, but I just think especially with how easy it is to get AI to draft your emails, have an AI team doing your whole SDR function now, I mean, the only way to stand out is with that human touch.
And so anything that we can do that has a human touch, we just, the results we know will break through the noise. So it’s often more work up front, but worthwhile.
Ross: That’s brilliant advice. Are there any examples where you’ve had to scale up something personable that should be unscalable?
Tara: Yeah, we’ve done some great experiments on the outbound side of things.
So our outbound SDR team works really closely with our ops and data team. And they’re brilliant people on that team. And they’ve been able to help them automate some things that at first I thought, like, there’s no way they could automate that.
So one example is they built, helped them build an automation to take screenshots of our prospects demo forms, because obviously our solution helps you convert more demos, so that they helped automate that piece.
But then the whole rest of the email content is super personal, super custom to that prospect, but just that kind of annoying piece of like going and grabbing that screenshot, making a GIF out of it. That part is done for them.
Ross: That’s really cool. Let’s talk about that sales marketing alignment piece then.
So you’re supporting the team with their productivity through, you know, how can you speed up outreach? Are there any other ways that you stay aligned with the sales org?
Tara: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just knowing what the other team is working on, which sounds so simple, but especially because at Chili Piper we’re fully remote.
So you can’t assume that people know what you’re working on. You have to over communicate. So just things like we have bi-weekly syncs with our SDR leaders so they can tell us things like, for example, that automation that our ops team built. I didn’t know how successful that had been from them until I heard it directly from our saq
So just having recurring syncs, even if you might not feel that you need them at first, we now have, we have a huge list of topics that we cover every time we meet up.
Ross: That’s awesome. And the more strategic sense, like how are you going to tap the market together? What’s the go to market strategy?
Do you guys do an account based marketing approach or a target account list? How do decisions like that get made?
Tara: So we brought in a tool, this was actually a project run by our SDR leaders, but they brought in a tool called GoodFit. And the way that our account list got made was kind of working backwards from our existing customer list.
And GoodFit analyzes all of your data of your existing customers and goes and essentially finds patterns and things that we hadn’t realized ourselves. And then it scores new accounts based on that.
So instead of us just coming up with like, here’s a list of our dream customers. We wish these were our customers, which I’ve been in rooms like that before, but instead we’re saying these people have a higher, or these accounts have a higher propensity to close and here’s why.
And we know it’s because of the size of their sales team, because their sales teams are hiring and growing the tools that they have in their tech stack. And a bunch of other factors that GoodFit takes into account. So we first piloted that just with the Outbound team. And now we’re using that account list across our marketing efforts as well.
Ross: That sounds fantastic. So one thing we, you know, seen from your previous content we had a brief chat about is the importance of trust in B2B. We did a big research study earlier in the year around, how people, you know, the buyers that we want to sell to will trust a brand more if they read their content and they engage with it.
But they’ll also read the content more if they already trust the brand, which was a huge unlock for me because I was like, okay, this is a flywheel of the more engagement you get, the better you’re gonna perform in the market.
What are some ways that you, through your mix, generate trust with a buyer?
Tara: I would say we just try to get in front of our customers, call them customers, prospects, whoever we get in front of them as much as we can.
And we also share as much as we can share transparently, not just how we’re using our products, but also just how we think about marketing and how we think about go-to-market in general. And that just starts really interesting conversations. And I think even if, even if you don’t agree with everything that we post on LinkedIn, even if you still have MQL targets every month that are in the thousands and that’s your goal and you’re happy with that, hopefully it at least sparks you to think about something differently or how you’re approaching things.
And I think just having that transparency of, “hey, we’re going to share what works for us.” Just because we did these posters at an event doesn’t mean that you should go do it, but it’s an interesting learning and you can share that back with your exec team.
So I think those, over time that builds trust, just getting that exposure and exposure to, again, not just how we’re doing things, but kind of the approach and why.
Ross: What’s one thing that you wish people in the space, marketers that you are selling to as Chili Piper, also people in maybe your team or others, what’s one takeaway that you wish modern demand generation did that would make it better for everybody?
Tara: I feel like this sounds simple, but it’s simple in theory, but I always try to remind people to market how they wish they would be marketed to, and that can apply in so many situations, but often we’ll talk internally of, we really want to launch this thing, but how will we measure results from it?
And we get stuck in that measurement piece before we’re able to actually launch something new and creative. So I know it’s tough because we have to measure things at the end of the day, but just throwing up a form in front of everything just so that you can say you’re able to measure it isn’t always the answer.
It’s often not. So really just trying to think of like, if I was buying this tool, how would I, what would I wanna know? Trying to answer those FAQs for people, but also how would I wanna be sold and marketed too, and trying to keep that top of mind.
Ross: That’s an awesome answer. I think we could all do with more empathy for the customer.
I think because your customer is so closely aligned to you, that’s a huge way to shift the conversation towards like how people are actually buying.
So how’s that shaped your approach at Chili Piper? What’s your biggest lesson from working there so far?
Tara: Before Chili Piper, I was that marketer that was, I would I mean, it’s kind of weird to think about now, but I was that person that would say like, “Oh, I’m a serious, I’m like a spreadsheet demand gen marketer. I’m not like a fluffy brand person.”
And I really thought they were two ends of the spectrum, and by being actually with such a strong brand, you just see how having that strong brand recognition makes everything easier. It makes all of our campaigns more successful. It makes the conversion easier through the funnel because we have gone, I hear sales calls and I hear half the people that go on calls don’t even really need to be pitched.
They just want to see the product. They’re excited. They already are excited about Chili Piper because of all the work we’ve done on the marketing side to build that brand. And they, they just want to sit, they just want to get in there and see it.
So just seeing that shift has been really interesting for me as someone who, I just didn’t think of myself as a creative marketer before joining Chili Piper. And now you realize like everyone in marketing is creative in different ways, but having that freedom to do creative things really shifted my mindset.
Ross: Brilliant advice. Where can people find you?
Tara: So I’m trying to post more on LinkedIn. I’m not consistent at all. You’ll notice I’ll post three times in a week and then not again for three months. So give me a follow and encourage me to post more on LinkedIn. I’d appreciate that.
Ross: Awesome. Thanks so much, Tara.
Tara: Thank you.
Outro: And that wraps up today’s episode of Demand Bites. Thanks for listening. I hope the insights provided today are able to help you power up your own demand generation efforts. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, make sure to hit subscribe so you’re always up to date with the latest strategies.
If you’re looking for more insight, stay connected with Inbox Insight on LinkedIn and join a network of marketing leaders driving the future of demand gen.
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