Monograph Cut Routing Complexity by More Than 80% with Chili Piper

The Stack He Inherited 

When Blake Buckley joined Monograph as RevOps Manager, the company was in the middle of a major restructure. They were centralizing their sales org out of Tempe, nearly doubling their sales staff, and building a scalable GTM motion for the first time after a Series B.

Blake inherited the stack. Chili Piper was already in the picture, used for SDR handoffs, while LeanData was handling routing. On paper, it worked. In practice, it was a different story.

The 30-Node Problem in LeanData

The LeanData setup was the first thing that needed to go. A single customer success assignment flow had grown to 30+ nodes, a web of conditional logic that nobody fully understood, documented across a sprawling Google Sheet nobody fully trusted.

"I had an entire Google Sheet of tabs for each LeanData distribution just trying to understand exactly what was happening, and did we really need these things?" — Blake Buckley, RevOps Manager, Monograph

But the complexity wasn't the only problem; it was the fragmentation. Routing lived in LeanData, handoffs lived in Chili Piper, content downloads, web activity signals, customer success assignments — each had its own home, or no home at all. Inbound leads from newsletter downloads or gated content were either manually distributed by marketing ("here's who downloaded this, go tackle it") or not actioned at all. When leads came from web activity signals, they landed in a shared Slack channel that 25–30 reps were all watching. Nobody trusted the feed. Nobody acted on it with confidence.

The inbound process wasn't a process. It was a series of disconnected handoffs held together by manual effort.

The 3-Rule Rebuild: More Than 80% Less Routing Complexity

Together with the Chili Piper team, Blake mapped out what migrating from LeanData would look like. That 30-node customer success flow? It became an entry rule and three routing rules. More than 80% less complexity, overnight.

"We did the switch and I still remember all of us being like, 'That's it? We're done?' And they're like, yes. (..)  Are you sure? This was very quick." — Blake Buckley

That reaction, disbelief, turned out to be the beginning of something bigger. What started as three Distro routers ported over from LeanData has grown to seven or eight active routers.

Across the stack, the full inbound lifecycle now runs through Chili Piper:

• Newsletter & content downloads → Chili Piper routes each contact based on account ownership, open opportunities, or SDR activity. No manual distribution from marketing.
• Web activity signals → Chili Piper routes high-intent contacts directly to the BDR function, not a chaotic shared Slack channel.
• SDR → AE handoffs → Already running on Chili Piper before the migration. The switch didn't change the speed, it meant the whole stack finally lived in one place.
• Inbound demo requests → Chili Piper routes directly to the right AE the moment a form is submitted.
• Post-close CS assignments → Chili Piper assigns the right customer success rep by segment at close.
• Salesforce case alerts → Slack notifications replace manual CRM refreshing for the whole team.

The key shift: instead of everyone watching the same noisy Slack feed, the right person gets the right lead with the context they need: SDRs see accounts they own, and the BDRs see high-intent contacts, not a list of 200

"A lot of people suffer from this: let me buy as many leads as I can and our team will call them. Now they're not calling 200 people. They can say: of these 200, let me call the 10 who have shown the highest interest." — Blake Buckley

From 40% to 100% of Leads Actioned, and in Minutes, Not Days

Before Distro, newsletter signups, campaign downloads, and benchmark report leads had no automated home. Marketing would dump lists in front of the team and hope someone picked them up. 

Blake estimates roughly 40–50% of newsletter and campaign leads were being actioned before Distro. The jump to 100% matters, but what Blake cares about more is how fast they get there. Before, a lead could sit in a marketing spreadsheet or a shared Slack channel for hours. 

Now, every one of those leads routes through Chili Piper automatically, hundreds a month, each landing with the right rep based on account ownership, open opportunities, or SDR activity.

When asked how he'd describe the overall shift, Blake kept it simple: 'A lot of our Distro improvements went from nothing to numbers.'

The SDR handoff flow, which predates the LeanData migration, runs daily without intervention.

The bigger payoff isn't hours back. It's knowing how the stack works. Blake estimates the team saves one to two hours a week just from not having to dig through routing logic, but the real shift is confidence: "We now know how everything is built, enabling us to troubleshoot easily. We can track anything back to where it came from."

"We are pretty much set and forget on that," Blake said. "It just helps us get things to the right people quickly."

Monograph went from three routing flows to seven or eight, and Blake believes there's more to build. 

"I probably don't know all the use cases to tie this into other things. But if I had them, we'd probably just keep building it out." — Blake Buckley

When asked what would happen if Chili Piper disappeared tomorrow:

"I think it would create a lot of extremely manual processes. Scheduling meetings, handing things off, distributing them correctly would be shot. And we would lose any sort of information we have from marketing activity, we could capture it all, but what do we do with it?" — Blake Buckley

For Blake, the measure of a good stack isn't how impressive it looks, it's whether you ever have to think about it. Chili Piper, for Monograph, has become something they don't have to.