163: Turning your Website Contact Form into Instant Profit | Nicolas Vandenberghe of Chili Piper 🌶

163: Turning your Website Contact Form into Instant Profit | Nicolas Vandenberghe of Chili Piper 🌶

Background on Nicolas Vandenberghe of Chili Piper:

Nicolas Vandenberghe is the Co-Founder and CEO of Chili Piper. Nicolas began his career selling newspapers in the streets of Paris in high school, studied Maths at Ecole Polytechnique and then received his MBA from Stanford GSB. He started and sold 3 tech companies with up to 65 employees and $11M in revenues, and also ran sales for a $2B telecom firm negotiating billion-dollar deals with companies like Google. Most recently in 2016, he co-founded his 4th startup and presently is the CEO of Chili Piper – a pioneer in Buyer Enablement.

In his spare time, Nicolas re-reads the 27 chapters of “Neuroeconomics, Decision Science & The Brain” by NYU star professor Paul Glimcher, in the hope of bringing its findings to the science of Sales & Marketing.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[1:08] Nicolas Vandenberghe is the founder and CEO of Chili Piper, which is his fourth startup company. He talks more about what Chili Piper is all about.
[5:38] Checking and qualifying prospects is another solution that Chili Piper is offering to their clients.
[7:30] Nicolas was born in France and moved to the US in the mid 90s.
[9:45] Steve Jobs and his company NeXT was a source of inspiration for Nicolas when he was still a student in Stanford.
[10:51] In 1994, Nicolas started his first business, which offers software that edits and manipulates photos.
[16:30] At 31 years old, Nicolas sold his shares of the first company for millions of dollars and started another business involving eCommerce.
[21:49] On his second company, Nicolas was supposed to sell the company and have a $42 million dollar payday. However, the deal didn’t pan out as what Nicolas was expecting.
[24:34] Nicolas took a trip to Nepal to get away from the business and tech scene for a while. He says the trip had a positive effect on him.
[30:12] He started his next business venture with no money at all.
[32:39] Nicolas shares an interesting story about how he was able to prove that their facial recognition technology really worked.
[38:50] After selling the facial recognition company, Nicolas offered to join a startup with a $2 billion funding. However, everything went up in smoke and the startup collapsed.
[45:35] His number one partner became his number one competitor. Nicolas considers this as one of the lows of his entrepreneurial career.
[48:41] When they started focusing on providing solutions for scheduling and booking meetings, his company took off in the right direction and eventually became Chili Piper.
[53:36] The Mom Test, which is a product development book, is a big source of inspiration for Nicolas. He recommends checking out the Mom Test.
[58:12] Nicolas provides some final tips and advice for new entrepreneurs.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

📖 📚 Favorite Book(s)? War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy
🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? Travel – friendly foldable bed for my newborn
🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Chili Piper of course
💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Educating the market about how letting your prospect wonder after filling a form is not ok

Key Point from the Interview:

“What I found that works really well is, when you get into a space, you want to pay attention and talk to a lot of your customers, to understand all their problems. And that’s what has worked for me.”