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Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, hosted by Alan Zhao, Co-Founder of Warmly.ai.
We feature B2B SaaS revenue leaders who have challenged traditional methods to achieve remarkable results.
In each episode we cut through the fluff and dive deep into modern tactics used to achieve success: intent-based outreach, social selling, B2B Netflix, video marketing, warm calling, customer led sales, influencer marketing and more.
On the show you can expect episodes with those who create demand - marketing experts, partnerships gurus and social media superstars and those who capture demand - outbound and inbound sales experts, leaders, and practitioners.
Our goal is to shine a light on modern, effective and unique revenue generating methods and equip you with the insights you need to unlock your next strategic advantage.
We're huge proponents of signal-based selling and signal-based, data-driven B2B go-to-market as a whole. Ask us what "Autonomous Revenue Orchestration" means and we'll be more than happy to shine a light on our vision of what the field of B2B revenue will become.
For more content, check out our YouTube page and LinkedIn newsletter!
Karen Chi: [00:00:00] My specialty really is around scaling revenue with the experiences that I had at LinkedIn and Cameo were around helping businesses grow from one to 15 million the scale from 40 to 120 million. And all of that go to market expertise, both in operations and sales leadership have been incredibly helpful as I've been working with startups in helping to.
Karen Chi: Take what is working for them and to build their revenue engines. One of the product led sales organizations that I built at LinkedIn goes around how to introduce product led into an organization that has been traditionally sales led, right? We can talk about alignment all we want, but the rubber really hits the road when you hit go and you try to figure out who's a lead, who's a product qualified lead, whether sales agrees or not.
Karen Chi: Our experience, I would say, in the early days at LinkedIn was that it was a little bit of a no, and I think I've spoken with you and the Warmly team about this as well. [00:01:00] Treating your self service channel as a glorified lead gen channel is a losing situation for everyone involved.
Alan Zhao: All right. Very excited to have Karen Shi on the show today. She's been a growth mentor of Warmly's, especially as we're navigating how to run a product led sales motion here. She's had 15 plus years of experience building sales and revenue operations organizations. Most recently as VP of B2B sales at Cameo and head of SMB sales and account management at LinkedIn.
Alan Zhao: What's Karen currently up to net right now? She's taking a leap of faith. She started her own business, Karen Chi Consulting, where she helps early stage B2B companies unlock their next phase of growth. And also on the side, she runs her own small venture fund as well. The main topic today is going to be a product.
Alan Zhao: Let's sales, how to do it, how to introduce it and how to be successful. Karen is great. Do you have in the show today?
Karen Chi: Thank you thrilled. [00:02:00] It's nice to see you again too, Alan.
Alan Zhao: Great to see you as well. No, it's been a couple months, but excited for this one. So let's dive into a quick background about yourself.
Alan Zhao: Tell me about your upbringings. How you got to where you are today?
Karen Chi: Oh my goodness. Child of immigrants. My parents are both from Taiwan. And I think there's a whole bunch of baggage and honor and pride that comes with that. Growing up, the career advice I got was you pick a lane and you work your ass off.
Karen Chi: And you expect to be recognized for that hard work, right? Having a career that was much more of a portfolio or had a lot of diversity and expertise really wasn't something on my parents generation. My career path was twisty. I really started as a systems consultant and probably did the biggest 180. If that's possible, I guess a 180 is a 180 and made my way into sales leadership and go to market executive roles at both LinkedIn and Cameo coming out of my career break after Cameo, I made the decision to really start my own [00:03:00] thing.
Karen Chi: I wanted to be much more deeply rooted in the world of venture in the world of startups, in particular, investing my time with early stage founders.
Alan Zhao: And why did you decide to make that leap? We dive in a little bit deeper there.
Karen Chi: Yeah, I, when I was coming out of my career break from after leaving Cameo, I, I think I thought that I had spent a good amount of time being incredibly thoughtful and intentional about what I wanted this next chapter of my career to look like.
Karen Chi: For me, it was very much around what are the types of problems I want to solve? What are the types of people I want to work with? And, but I just jumped right back on the, I'm going to get a full time job train. And as I was having conversations with various companies, incredible people, incredible companies, I still didn't feel that sort of pull.
Karen Chi: And what I started to realize late last summer was that I think having had such an incredible time at LinkedIn, I'm gonna Amazing role [00:04:00] at Cameo. I had the expectation in my head and I also thought others might too of me was that I had to have the most amazing next role to continue on that same trajectory, like the hot company that was growing the big ass job, earning all the right dollars.
Karen Chi: And as I was having conversations with these various companies, I don't know. It didn't gel when I think those perceived or imagined expectations of me led me astray. And so late last year, I really put a stake in the ground and worked on shifting my network. I networked like it was my full time job meeting with as many investors, founders, people in the startup ecosystem as I could.
Karen Chi: And I'm pretty happy with the sorts of seeds that have started to sprout in what I'm doing now.
Alan Zhao: Tell me a little bit more about what you're doing right now.
Karen Chi: I am, for the most part, I'm working with early stage B2B startups. My specialty really is around [00:05:00] scaling revenue with the experiences that I had at LinkedIn and Cameo were around helping businesses grow from 1 to 15 million, the scale from 40 to 80 million.
Karen Chi: To 120 million and all of that go to market expertise, both in operations and sales leadership have been incredibly helpful as I've been working with startups in helping to take what is working for them and to build their revenue engines. Um, I'm also running a small venture fund on the side. By the time this podcast episode is live, we will have launched, we're actually launching next week.
Karen Chi: This fund is one that a few former and current LinkedIn colleagues of mine and I are raising from current and former LinkedIn employees. Earmarked for investing in companies founded by former LinkedIn employees. So we're launching next week to coincide with LinkedIn's birthday, because that's cute.
Karen Chi: Invest ventures. [00:06:00]
Alan Zhao: That's so exciting. And you also have this angle of investing and helping underestimated founders. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Karen Chi: One of the most magical things that I've really liked about me taking this path at this point in my career is that I get to choose where I spend my time and perhaps more importantly, who I spend that time with.
Karen Chi: And so one of the areas where I've been really intentional about where I'd spend my time and energy is with underestimated founders, right? So those folks who may not have been given the benefit of the doubt. A lot of that has been my own lived experience, right? A woman in tech, Asian American woman in tech.
Karen Chi: And I'm really happy to be able to help share, provide access, create opportunities for those like me.
Alan Zhao: Do you think it's given you advantage to come from a different background?
Karen Chi: You mean from the, I have a different point of view perhaps to add to the mix? I think so. I think I spent a large part of the early part of my [00:07:00] career trying to be like everyone else and the sameness felt I think perhaps a bit more safe.
Karen Chi: And as I've grown in my career, I think I've embraced the changes and the differences much more. Even me taking this path of going out on my own and shifting the shape of my network, incredibly scary to me. But the initial reaction that I got from friends or perhaps colleagues, even mentors were, do people actually do that?
Karen Chi: Do you really understand the risks involved in that? I had a lot of support too, as well, right? But the path is, non traditional, I would say, but what I found was that actually that the difference is that you do find lots of other people who are doing what you're doing and it somewhat normalizes it for you.
Karen Chi: And so I think back to your question around whether that being a lived experience actually helps to create an advantage. Yeah, I would definitely say so.
Alan Zhao: When the path is not so direct, you have to forcibly make it [00:08:00] work. Like it wasn't laid out for you. And so that in and of itself is a skill to. When you have all these obstacles in place that maybe didn't exist for other people to circum to surmount those obstacles, that is a skill in and of itself, and it probably led you down the path of entrepreneurship.
Alan Zhao: Other like minded people. That makes sense.
Karen Chi: I think so. Yeah.
Alan Zhao: So let's jump into the meaty topics of discussion here. Signal based selling, product led go to market. What are these things? What do people know about them?
Karen Chi: Yeah, having spent such glorious years at LinkedIn, I grew up in an environment career wise, right, where data was plenty, data scientists were plenty, although perhaps they were always and will continue to be the most scarce resources on earth.
Karen Chi: And so the idea of selling with signals, it has been around for a long time. Right. What I think is interesting is that and what I mean by signal based selling, it's who's opened your emails, right? Who is prowling around on your websites that [00:09:00] that stuff I think has been around for quite some time, right?
Karen Chi: And so the modern sellers these days can talk about I've been selling with signals for ages. I say that. Product led, I think, is incredibly interesting. I don't think of LinkedIn as one of these companies that is known in the circles of the great product led companies like a Notion or a Canva. It's product led is entirely around interpreting how your customers, whether they're free or paid, are engaging with your product and figuring out, what can I actually interpret from those sorts of behaviors?
Karen Chi: How are they using the products? How are they not using the products? What might the onboarding experience feel like from their perspective, based on how successfully they are using our products. I just spent the early part of last week in San Francisco at a conference that I think is becoming more well known.
Karen Chi: It was the second year of a conference called PLGTM. So shout out to Dave Bregladi and team for hosting amazing two days of [00:10:00] thought leaders and speakers from some of the best known product led companies. It's incredible that there is a community large enough that is passionate about PLG, that there's an entire conference around it now.
Alan Zhao: We actually had him on the podcast not too long ago. Very big fan of what he's doing as well.
Karen Chi: Amazing. Yeah. Big fan.
Alan Zhao: Yeah. He's great. So tell me a little bit more about how you're supposed to set up product led growth motions, product led sales motions. You've done it at LinkedIn. You've done it at Cameo.
Alan Zhao: They're implemented in two different ways. The results were pretty different too. Can we walk through one of these examples or both?
Karen Chi: Yeah, for starters, right? I think product led in the areas that I worked in most closely were leading and building sales organizations that were product led sales. But I guess for starters, just for basics, I think a lot about who needs to be involved in helping to make something like product led successful cross functional alignment, which is it.
Karen Chi: An [00:11:00] area of, I would say, leadership and just business acumen that I particularly love. Perhaps that's why I'm so attracted to product led stuff. It requires the buy in. So the alignment and the buy in of, I would say, 3 functions, product, marketing and sales. So I talk about these as the holy trio, but there's really a 4th.
Karen Chi: The fourth that is all around all the time, everywhere, all knowing, and that is the data that you're able to glean from how your customers are interacting with your product and your marketing as well. I think one of the big learnings that I took away from one of the product led sales organizations that I built at LinkedIn was around how to introduce product led into an organization that has been traditionally sales led, right?
Karen Chi: We can talk about alignment all we want, but the rubber really hits the road when you hit go and you try to figure out who is a lead, who is a product qualified lead, whether sales agrees or not. Our experience, I would say, in the early days at LinkedIn was [00:12:00] that it was a little bit of a no, and I think I've spoken with you and the Warmly team about this as well.
Karen Chi: Treating your self service channel as a glorified lead gen channel is a losing situation for everyone involved. For the customer, it's for marketing, it's for sales, it's for product. And what I mean by that is, in our early days at LinkedIn, we actually started it. Doing product with sales before the self service experience was robust enough to help customers who were onboarding themselves to feel like they could be self sufficient, right?
Karen Chi: And to feel like they could really understand the value of the platform that they were using. So I talk about this as being your self service experience should be 1 where you're thinking about taking the customer from 0 to 1, right? Ideally more than that, but perhaps sales can pick up the baton at 1 and take them to 100.
Karen Chi: When we think about a self service experience as a glorified lead gen channel, meaning let's get as many, attract as many [00:13:00] users as we can and mine that data for perceived high potential or upmarket upselling, what you actually might create is an experience where you're taking that customer from a zero to a negative one.
Karen Chi: And we experienced this a bit in the early days at LinkedIn, right? So these users who are coming onto the platform were actually so confused, had no idea really how to use the platform, much less how to get value from it. And we had our salespeople calling them and rather than being able to take that customer from a 1 to 100 sort of journey.
Karen Chi: Our salespeople were actually providing a ton of customer support, right? And, and then zooming out from a business perspective, it looked like sales was actually failing at upselling. And so when we really dug in, it uncovered so much goodness around the importance of having a really robust self service experience.
Karen Chi: Onboarding and activation, I would say, are do not pesco. If you don't do these things well, you won't have a successful [00:14:00] PLS organization.
Alan Zhao: Yeah, we, we definitely saw that for warmly as well. There was a point where we had the sales people reach out Derek, our head of product led sales and product like growth at the time, he had a lot of friction with her head of sales and was like, you can't do this.
Alan Zhao: You need to make sure that they're able to experience the product for themselves. It's like the moment they added a script, I have, they get sales emails and we would never really could figure out the right balance. How do you, yeah. When do you know when you've passed go when they found success, when you should introduce a salesperson?
Alan Zhao: Were there signals? Was there a process? How did you figure that stuff out?
Karen Chi: I would say stop gaps we put in place as the self service experience was catching up to what we thought would be good to great for our customers was we introduced really an onboarding program. So we had people calling. So this is one of those principles of doing things that do not scale right for the sake of all the goodness you're going to get from those learnings.
Karen Chi: And so [00:15:00] we had reps who were focused specifically on that very early part of the customer journey, and they would reach out to those new users not to sell entirely to offer support. And to understand how those new customers were experiencing our platform, a lot of the beauty around setting up a really tightly knit product led organization is that your salespeople, right?
Karen Chi: The humans who are interacting with the customers get so much good feedback that you have to feed back to product marketing, right? If you don't waste. You're learning all this good insight, you should be sending it back into product marketing to make the self service and I guess self led experience even better.
Karen Chi: Those onboarding programs really helped us understand where we needed to be much more robust in product and where we could create more self help materials. The That was our first step, really, before even starting to think [00:16:00] about what are the right signals to help indicate when a customer should be ready for upsell.
Alan Zhao: That's amazing. Yeah, very much resonate with the do things that don't scale and then automate later. The way I see salespeople, as you describe them, it's like customer success. So there's a fifth organization, sales, marketing product, customer success. Very much downplayed. I feel like customer success, a lot of organizations is seen as support, but it's actually the lifeblood to creating the right product that can actually service customers to produce them the value that they need to achieve their salvation of success.
Alan Zhao: So the sales people playing that role makes a lot of sense. And then what happens next? Now that you've gotten the learnings, do you implement them via help articles? Was it through product marketing or? How did you then scale this?
Karen Chi: Really all of the above, right? I remember in those early days, doing a retro on our results, it produced product features, it produced marketing asks, and then it also helped us to think about what should this next generation of the human element look like.[00:17:00]
Karen Chi: As far as I know, that onboarding program still exists at LinkedIn, proud legacy, but then you start to think about how do you, how should these salespeople look right in a product led sales organization? And of course, it depends on the segment of customers you're working with and the ones where I've been, um, operating, um, the longest, these are volume and velocity businesses.
Karen Chi: The salespeople are. Ones that I would say are analytical operators. I've always talked about the importance of hiring salespeople who know what to do with data and can glean insights from it. There's so many tools out there now that can just hop directly to insights, but that hasn't always been the case, right?
Karen Chi: It used to be, here's a massive spreadsheet. What can you do with it? There are now amazing tools, so many amazing tools, to help us glean all of those insights. But I think It's incredibly important in these learnings to think about what's the right type of selling profile that makes [00:18:00] sense for the product led organization that you're building.
Alan Zhao: Could you, for the audience, talk a little bit more about the right selling profile for LinkedIn, the right signals that you guys used over time, and then what you guys did with all the spreadsheets?
Karen Chi: So all of the spreadsheets and the, I would say that spreadsheets married with the insights that we gleaned right from learning from customers was, was built into a homegrown tools that you now see actually having product ties in platforms like.
Karen Chi: Pocus big fan of Pocus for that reason, I feel really near and dear, um, to those sorts of platforms, but the, I mentioned the importance of having analytical salespeople, right? I think that analytical operators in my observation always have been, and they will continue to be the strongest sellers, right?
Karen Chi: Modern selling requires that you embrace signals and you have to embrace data, like all levels of the [00:19:00] organization, all functions. Right. That's, that's doubly. So I would say for salespeople these days.
Alan Zhao: Makes sense. And then the signals that you guys used at what point, like when did the salespeople know what to action on and what to do next?
Karen Chi: I guess it was two parts, right? So the onboarding program that we developed, we started to understand, Hey, actually the, the sorts of best practices that we know on the platform are things that we can start to, to platform eyes, if that makes sense. And so if, for example, Users who performed these three steps.
Karen Chi: On the platform tended to stick around longer, then those were the sorts of signals we started to build into the platform. And this was the business specifically that I'm thinking about in this time is linkedin's marketing solutions business to digital advertising that the ads platform if we know that a customer needs to be spending a certain amount of budget per day.
Karen Chi: They have this [00:20:00] many pieces of creative that they should be rotating in their, in their campaign, then those are the sorts of signals you can look for, right? How successfully have we prodded the customer through the onboarding experience, through the self help, through learning tidbits in the platform to get them to that bar?
Karen Chi: And once they have reached that bar, we know with greater confidence that they're actually seeing value from the platform, right? They're getting results. So therefore, it's a great time for a salesperson to have a much more strategic conversation with that customer.
Alan Zhao: And they have budget because we know how much we're spending or projected to spend.
Alan Zhao: Now that you have all this data points, what is the outreach approach? Is it consults or is it do you want to buy or how do you think about that? Is it through phone? Is it through email?
Karen Chi: A lot of business today is still through email, right? I think the There's a lot of debate that cold calling is dead cold calling is not dead Right that that's always a tactic that salespeople should be using the [00:21:00] So outreach in a product led sales organization, you're the interesting thing is that you are, you're as a salesperson, you are not reaching out to somebody cold, right?
Karen Chi: We know so much about the behavior of that customer already where they're doing well, where they're not doing well in an evolved PLS organization. What I would ideally like to understand is. How has that customer been behaving so far, right? And how do we get that information into the hands of the salesperson?
Karen Chi: So that when they do outreach to the customer, it's totally consultative, right? It's, I see that you've been doing X, Y, Z on the platform. Customers like you tend to see this sort of success when you begin to add this into your repertoire. Right. I'm making it up. But, um, the data and the insights in a product led organization shouldn't just be used internally, right?
Karen Chi: Play that back to your customers, show them how we know them and show them how we know them so well that we understand how to help them reach their next level of success.
Alan Zhao: I really [00:22:00] like that. For me personally, I've actually had LinkedIn reach out to me once I was hitting my ad budget or whatever the case, but.
Alan Zhao: It didn't always feel like it was that it was pretty interesting. It was like, yeah, you're right. I'm doing ads and i'm having some trouble with it, but i'm just so slammed right now I don't know if I want to talk to another salesperson So my my question is is there anything else you can give an example of this is if you talk to me You can, we can sign you up for the special plan.
Alan Zhao: Is there anything like that that you guys did to get these guys on the phone?
Karen Chi: I love that question. No, not necessarily. I think getting responses, right, like outbound prospecting, this is in some ways yet another flavor of outbound prospecting, is forever one of those things where there's so much art and science to it.
Karen Chi: In those days, no, we didn't. What do you all do? I'd love to, give me some hacks.
Alan Zhao: Oh man, it's tough. We haven't really quite cracked it yet, but we're usually like that. If you don't talk to us right now, we're going to turn it off. And sometimes they respond. No, of course not. Of course not. But it's not so good because the way I think about the free tier is, and you're going to talk about this later, I'm sure too, is we don't just see them [00:23:00] as people that we're going to upsell.
Alan Zhao: We see them as this community that has a two way dialogue that they'll talk to other people and bring out other clients and then just continue the echo chamber of using Warmly. And so that to me is way more powerful than just a couple more deals in the quarter. To be honest with you, especially if only like 1 or 2 percent
Karen Chi: I totally agree.
Karen Chi: Yeah, I think it goes back a little bit to the making sure that even for those folks who are in the freemium experience or who are entirely just self service, making sure that they're getting that positive 0 to 1 regardless of what their investment might be with warmly.
Alan Zhao: Yeah, I see the, like you said, you call it the holy trinity or we added four or five more to it.
Alan Zhao: But all these pieces kind of work together, build this category of a company because it's this metagame of not just trying to get to numbers, but you're trying to win the space at the end of the day from like the highest of high level. Attach yourself to a movement in an evolving industry that is you're trying to help to achieve salvation for and you want to be number one in the category.
Alan Zhao: It doesn't just come [00:24:00] down to are we gonna meet sales projections? It's we want to completely dominate. And so the freemium motion is one of the best ways to do it because of course, lowest payment tree. So enablement help products, all that stuff matters.
Karen Chi: I feel like we've gotten a little bit religious, right?
Karen Chi: Between the Holy trio or Trinity, you've used the word salvation a couple of times, I guess product led is religion.
Alan Zhao: It's religion. I talked about this with my Derek there, PLG nice leading at marketing, but we think marketing is building a church. It's a separate conversation, but the religion is the, is the belief system of how you're helping your customer solve a problem.
Alan Zhao: Like they have an existential problem and then there's salvation of what it looks like at the other end. And then your doctrines and your Bible is your playbook to help them achieve salvation. And instead of. Popes missionaries, you have customers, advocates, influencers, ecosystem partners, who are going to preach on your behalf.
Alan Zhao: And so marketing is much more participatory rather than [00:25:00] building an audience and just saying these things It's like people saying it for you and preaching it on your behalf I don't think jesus had a very big budget.
Karen Chi: It sounds like you've been hanging out with my pastor dad And he had somehow, you know infused his work into warmly
Alan Zhao: Yeah, if he did i'm really happy because it's been going pretty well So we must have had a conversation around six months ago because that's when we started adopting this practice but That's how we think about it.
Alan Zhao: And yeah, product plays a really important part. So, Now we talked about LinkedIn. That was one experience. That was the zero to not even one, but negative one to start off with. And then we eventually went to one. Tell me about Cameo. How did that go for you?
Karen Chi: Yeah, I know it's a whole different ballgame when you're talking about users being the product themselves.
Karen Chi: In some ways, right? And so the way that we thought about product led here in a cameo was really with the talent who are on the platform, [00:26:00] right? So the supply side of cameos marketplace. And so 1 of the folks in my team was responsible for thinking about, and every business talks about segmentation. Right in their users and their customers, and certainly in cameos case with our talent.
Karen Chi: And so 1 of the folks on. My leadership team was responsible for thinking about the long tail of Cameo's talent, which was a very long tail, given that at the time that I was there, Cameo had nearly 50, 000 talent who were on the platform. Not all of those folks were active though, right? And the interesting thing about Cameo as a business and the way in which talent use it is that it's to monetize their fame and their influence, right?
Karen Chi: And for the most part, the way in which talent did that was to receive Cameo requests. What was interesting during my time at Cameo was that the world started to reopen and the talent who were previously. At home, not spending as much time working as they had [00:27:00] previously, had lots of time and availability for Cameo.
Karen Chi: The world reopened, people went back to work, right? Shows were being filmed. Movies were being filmed. Athletes were playing sports. Again, we used product led principles and a lot of ways to drive platform re engagement, right? So to get talent back to the platform, share with them that they have requests waiting for them, that they earned X dollars, right?
Karen Chi: With the time that they would spend previously. So those, those were little examples of. Infusing product led principles into the way that we engaged our talent and our go to market, really, at Cameo.
Alan Zhao: Got it. So this is very much like growth hacking. Like automation, bringing them back to re engagement. I'm curious, you said that, you also mentioned VPA of B2B sales, so there's definitely also a sales component to this.
Karen Chi: I had two gigs while I was at Cameo, actually, most of the time that I was there, I spent leading our, [00:28:00] our global talent partnerships organization. So these are the folks who were responsible for acquiring and managing the talent who were on the platform. The other gig that I had was leading B2B sales, right?
Karen Chi: I led the organization that was responsible for matching brands with the talent who are on the platform for the purposes of content. My content sponsored content for marketing.
Alan Zhao: That is a fascinating area. That's only expanding here in the B2B space. B2B influencers pair with companies. Very curious about your thoughts on that.
Alan Zhao: How do you pair the right companies to the right influencers?
Karen Chi: You know what? It's sometimes the ones that work the best were the ones where you're like, really? Because the, it's like the, what is it? It's like the odd couple, right? And that's a super dated reference, but. I don't know, you know, the unexpected combinations, I guess I would say, I think one of the most interesting things that we learned at Cameo, and it's certainly something that I know that a lot of [00:29:00] marketers are embracing, especially big brand marketers, is that, um, in, in the early days of influencer marketing, the ones who were successful were the ones who had the big budgets, right?
Karen Chi: To have brand sponsorships with a list talent. The ones he had a million followers on, on Instagram, for example. What we actually found, and this is totally in line with just general trends around influencer marketing, is that micro influencers and engagement actually make much more difference than size of following, right, to the point where on the talent partnership side of the organization, one of the signals, I guess, we've looked for in who we thought might make great talent for Cameo was actually on the engagement of their comments on their posts.
Karen Chi: So, you might have talent who have a million followers, but a like is cheap. Right? You and I both know that likes are cheap, but actually [00:30:00] taking the time to write a question, share a comment, hopefully it's not trolling that costs more. And it's also in some ways, a representation of fandom and engagement, right?
Karen Chi: What we found and really what we preached at Cameo for our marketing customers influencers, right? Take your budget that you were going to spend on that one influencer with 500, 000 followers and spend it on 50. And the results were almost always better because the micro influencers have a much more tightly engaged community.
Alan Zhao: See this all the time. LinkedIn influencer, a hundred thousand likes, but you look at the engagement and then you see some of these micro influencers, maybe 10, 000 followers having thousands of likes. I've seen this happen all the time. The algorithm just changes and it doesn't necessarily reward you for having the most followers.
Alan Zhao: It'll do it if your content or your.
Karen Chi: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think you and I had an exchange about this, right? Like quality of content is what matters these days.
Alan Zhao: Totally. No, [00:31:00] you can have a million and you can still get 200 views on TikTok. It's better this way. So my last question is, and we've talked a lot about how LinkedIn does PLS, how Kami does PLS, but for the salesperson that you bring on, I get it now.
Alan Zhao: They have to be very strategic, data oriented. It's almost like connecting the pieces of all these puzzles together to something that makes sense and then acting on that. Can you walk me through a day in the life of the best PLS sales rep? What do they do? How do they think about it?
Karen Chi: Yeah, it's, I'll talk about the rep, but then also the ideal environment in which they're operating.
Karen Chi: Right, because I think both are important. So the ideal environment is one in which we're actually serving up these insights to our reps in a way that makes it digestible. And so whether it is a platformized tool or spreadsheets, that those insights are incredibly important, right? So timeliness and depth of information is super important for the successful [00:32:00] PLS rep.
Karen Chi: It's knowing what to do with that information, right? Being able to prioritize and understand, Hey, these were actually customers that let's see, based on what we know of them, their, the firmographics, whether they are in our sweet spot for, um, what we're trying to sell, potential spend all, all of those like old school ways of prioritizing, but then marrying that with the insights around how the user is actually using the product.
Karen Chi: And then understanding how to take that down and share, well, what a natural next step could be that ideally translates into growth, right? Growth and value for the customer, growth and value for the company that you're working for.
Alan Zhao: Got it. So the setup is gather all the insights, make it as digestible as possible, do all the data plumbing and beforehand, and they consume what they can, the strategy to like, how can I curate the best kind of messaging and outreach?
Alan Zhao: That's what they're focused on. And they're just, They should be drowning in these insights so that they can just focus on the ones that have the highest chance of converting.
Karen Chi: [00:33:00] Yeah, hopefully drowning in insights and not just data.
Alan Zhao: Insights, not data. Very different things. Karen, it's a pleasure having you on the show today.
Alan Zhao: I know you got stuff to do. And I really appreciate the time. How can people find out more about you?
Karen Chi: Thank you. I had a blast. I can be found on LinkedIn. I'm usually talking about something product led related or startup related. I also have my website, Karen, she. co I'm not a big tweeter XR. I don't know what we're calling it these days, but LinkedIn is generally where you can find me.
Alan Zhao: Amazing. Please connect with Karen. If you need any help with growth or funding or otherwise, she's a great person to talk to. Thank you everyone.