Every missed opportunity costs Refine Labs half a million dollars.
We chatted with Carl Ferreira, Director of Sales at Refine Labs, about their sales playbook and the key to their inbound success.
They learned the hard way... you can create all the demand in the world, but if you don’t capture it in that critical moment, you risk losing that opportunity for good.
“This is an area where, as a sales leader, I want to minimize risk. This is not where I want to play games — right before someone is going to talk to sales.”
Refine Labs helps B2B software companies create an unfair advantage through their demand gen strategy.
Likewise, Carl discovered that using Chili Piper creates an unfair advantage when it comes to their inbound experience and demand capture playbook.
The old inbound experience
When Carl first joined Refine Labs, they were using HubSpot Meetings, but it wasn’t cutting it. Carl wanted a solution that they could grow into and not grow out of.
“Our demand capture playbook involving our inbound buying experience before Chili Piper… it was okay,” Carl said.
It followed your typical pattern: Form on the website, HubSpot Meeting link, calendar availability, book demo.
But Carl quickly realized there were some missed opportunities around routing.
“Someone would convert on the form, and it’d show them a calendar,” Carl said. “The problem is, it only showed one person’s calendar. And our sales team was growing and we needed to be able to route.”
For all its great qualities, HubSpot wasn’t built to handle complex routing.
“The problem we ran into was that if you want to add one, just one, layer of complexity to that router, it doesn’t work anymore,” Carl said.
Building the playbook
With HubSpot out of the running, Carl needed to build the sales process from scratch. His main goals were to improve Refine Labs’ inbound process and accelerate their growth.
The No. 1 reason Chili Piper was a no-brainer for them?
Demand capture.
Refine Labs does a lot of demand creation both organically and socially. But when it came time to capture and convert those leads, they kept falling short.
“Just thinking through the investment you make and getting those buyers to come inbound, it’s absurd to think that you would try to cut corners right here, right at the very end, before someone wants to talk to sales,” Carl said.
His advice?
Always roll out the red carpet for your customers — whether you’re generating demand or capturing it.
“Once it comes time for them to say “hey, maybe I want to talk to someone from Refine Labs,” that demand capture piece is really important,” Carl said.
Chili Piper vs. HubSpot Meetings
Carl had two main pieces of advice for companies choosing between Chili Piper and HubSpot Meetings:
Think long term
Calculate the risk
Think long term
“My advice for businesses trying to decide between Chili Piper and HubSpot is to think long-term,” Carl said.
While he acknowledges that HubSpot is a great tool, there’s only so much you can get out of it.
“You can probably get by for a few more weeks, maybe another quarter, but you will hit a wall,” He said.
Carl knew that to be successful, they needed a solution that would work whether they were a five-person sales org, a 10-person sales org, or a 150-person sales org. A solution that they could trust to take care of their customers and their buyers coming inbound.
He didn’t want to take any chances.
“This is an area where, as a sales leader, I want to minimize risk,” Carl said. “This is not where I want to play games — right before someone is going to talk to sales.”
To him, the decision to buy Chili Piper was pretty easy. It was just a matter of when.
Is it today? Or is it a quarter from now?
“Unless your business doesn't grow, it’s just a deferred decision,” Carl said.
Calculate the risk
“The second bit of advice is to calculate the risk,” Carl said. “Do the math. lf you create friction in one deal and you don’t respond fast enough to somebody, they’ll go and submit “talk to sales” to two more people.”
Now you’ve turned a deal that could’ve been yours alone into a competition with four more companies. All because you were slow following up.
“If we miss one opportunity it costs us almost half a million dollars,” Carl said.
All those little friction points add up very quickly, Carl noted. When you don’t have people sitting for demos, or when you have to follow up and chase them, you lose out on so much potential revenue.
“I do all that math and this is a no-brainer, like, we need to go buy Chili Piper,” Carl said. “We made our decision very quickly because it just made all the sense in the world.”
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