In this episode of Marketing B2B Technology, Mike sits down with Collin Crowell, VP of Growth for Kameleoon North America, an experimentation platform. Collin discusses the evolution of Kameleoon as a global player in the MarTech industry, emphasises the importance of data-driven decision-making, and explains how Kameleoon enables teams to easily build and test digital experiences.
Collin highlights the challenges B2B companies face in adopting experimentation and the need for curiosity and a willingness to explore new approaches. He also offers advice for aspiring marketers, stressing the importance of understanding their audience and leveraging AI tools to enhance productivity.
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About Kameleoon
Kameleoon is an agentic experimentation platform built for modern product and marketing teams. With Prompt-Based Experimentation, any team can turn ideas into live tests in minutes. Once ideas prove their impact, Kameleoon delivers accurate results and gives teams the control to roll them out safely. Trusted by brands like Lululemon, Toyota, Mayo Clinic, and Canada Goose, Kameleoon makes experimentation simple, fast, and scalable across the organization.
About Collin Crowell
Collin Crowell is VP of Growth for Kameleoon North America, where he leads sales, marketing, and partnerships. He helps experimentation teams design and run tests their way, secure executive buy-in, and get the most out of their tech stack. Based near Whistler, Canada, he spends his free time skiing and mountain biking.
Time Stamps
00:00:43 – Colin’s Background and Journey to Kameleoon
00:03:05 – Overview of Kameleoon and Its Experimentation Platform
00:06:11 – Multivariate Testing and Its Complexity
00:10:28 – Challenges in B2B Experimentation
00:15:05 – The Importance of Incremental Gains
00:18:02 – Growing Kameleoon: Balancing Brand and Leads
00:21:06 – The Importance of Being Present in Target Channels
00:23:09 – Innovative Campaigns: Hot Ones and Qualtrics
00:26:00 – Best Marketing Advice Received
00:27:29 – Advice for New Marketers: Embrace AI
Quotes
“”If you can make that process as easy as possible for all of those teams, then the company becomes more data driven.” Collin Crowell, VP of Growth for Kameleoon North America.
“We all need to just work together to build better digital experiences. If you can make that what was really technically hard and difficult easy, then you’re enabling those marketers to build out those digital experiences.” Collin Crowell, VP of Growth for Kameleoon North America.
“If the company or the team is not interested in being data-driven or has some executive that refuses to acknowledge that there could be a different way of working, then we probably aren’t going to play well in that space.” Collin Crowell, VP of Growth for Kameleoon North America.
Follow Collin:
Collin Crowell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/collincrowell/
Kameleoon’s website: https://www.kameleoon.com/
Kameleoon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kameleoon/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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Transcript: Interview with Collin Crowell at Kameleoon
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Collin Corwell
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today. Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I’m joined by Colin Crowell. Colin is the VP of Growth North America for Chameleon. Welcome to the podcast, Colin.
Collin: Hi, Mike. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike: Thanks for joining us. It’s great to have you on, Colin. We always like to start off by letting you introduce yourself a little bit, talk a little bit about your career and why you decided to join Chameleon.
Collin: Well, thanks for asking. I joined Chameleon almost about five years ago. Chameleon, for those that don’t know, is an experimentation platform. It helps companies build any type of experiment or some may know them as like A-B tests. I got into the space because I was helping build a joint venture between a German consultancy dedicated to experimentation and a Canadian agency dedicated to experimentation. And we formed what was called Go Group Digital. Go Group Digital essentially built experiments for large enterprise companies across the world. And that’s really how I got to know the experimentation space and how I got to know all the tools and the experimentation space, including Chameleon. So when Chameleon reached out to me to say, hey, we’re getting big enough that we want to start to build out our business in North America, I was intrigued.
Mike: That sounds really cool. I mean, one of the things I’ve got to ask you, though, is Chameleon’s actually a French MarTech company. I mean, France is not really known as a hotbed of marketing technology. So what’s it like working for a French company? Are there pros or cons of doing that?
Collin: You know, it’s an interesting thanks for the question. And it’s an interesting one. I think it’s a tale of two worlds. I disagree. I think there are a lot of interesting French based companies in the tech space. What they’ve done very well, though, is sort of shed their skin, their French skin when it comes to becoming a global player. So I think we have to be really careful at Chameleon to say, like, listen, yeah, we were headquartered or founded in Paris and, you know, as long ago as 2010. But today, the company is very global. And we don’t really cast ourselves as a French technology company, because I think there’s something disparaging about that. when you bring it up to, say, the Americans, they’re always, you know, going to have some sort of odd bias against it. But there’s a lot of like big companies that you would just never realize were actually French. So there’s Chameleon, there’s Content Square. There’s others I could rattle off that you just be like, oh, wow, I had no idea. So what’s it like? It’s really something we don’t even acknowledge anymore. It it is nice to visit Paris a few times a year.
Mike: That certainly sounds like a good advantage. I know we’ve had a couple of French companies as well on. So I think Send in Blue, which now Brevo is originally French. So I may be being a bit cheeky talking about France and portraying those stereotypes. So anyway, let’s talk about Chameleon. You mentioned briefly what the company does. It helps people run experiments. Do you want to expand on that and explain how people would use the product and what it would give them?
Collin: Yeah, well, you know, experimentation on paper is something so intriguing, at least it should be. I mean, the whole idea is that you should be able to make data-backed decisions about what your customers want. And experimentation just simply is a way to help you make more informed decisions about what those target audiences would like to do with you. So Chameleon basically provides a single unified platform to companies. We really are specializing in mid and large enterprise companies. And these companies have realized that if they give their teams, growth teams, marketing teams, product teams, data engineering teams, the ability to essentially say, what would happen if I did this instead of that? Would it create a behavior that my target audience or customer would find enjoyable? Well, let’s test it. That can be as simple as, gosh, I really hate this message. This copy just doesn’t seem to work. What would happen if I said X instead of Y? Again, you test it. You validate that Y is in fact better than X. And lo and behold, that metric that you were trying to juice or improve gets better. So that really is experimentation. As I said, that’s a simple test to build, but it goes far down the rabbit hole. Product and engineering teams are essentially releasing features and they don’t know what’s going to happen. And so what they do is they’ll progressively release a feature or they’ll target a specific segment of an audience and they’ll see how that audience behaves. And when you’re measuring that behavior, you’re able to essentially say, like, this is working. This is not working. Let’s do more of this. Let’s do less of this. And that’s all experimentation is. And if you can make that process as easy as possible for all of those teams, then the company becomes more data driven. And it’s crystal clear that if you’re data driven, you’re going to have a much higher chance to be a leader in your category and growing this year.
Mike: I think data is really interesting because a lot of people, particularly in marketing, they get data, they use it all the time. Running an A-B test is pretty straightforward. But if you’re running a multivariate test, and I know you support those, how does Chameleon help people deal with those more complex things where maybe you’re changing two or three different elements on the page?
Collin: Yeah. I mean, again, I think for all the marketers listening, one of the stereotypes in the industry is that you’ve got two camps, the technical camp and the non-technical camp. And poor marketers just get lumped into the non-technical camp. And so we’re always trying our best to understand how well do they understand the science behind the experimentation. which really comes down to like the methodologies around the statistics of it all. Gosh, Mike, is it boring? It is, I think, the technology’s job to really take all of that statistical methodology, which is very important, but yet put it in a, behind the scenes and in a way that it really surfaces the insights that the marketer is actually looking for much more easily. So we can get into the weeds about how Chameleon builds multivariate tests and how it controls what we call cross or concurrent testing, where you’re running multiple tests at the same time or you’re running multivariate tests. But at the end of the day, no one should care about that. You should feel like, hey, I want to go in and make sure that I’m building a digital experience that works for my target audience. And I just want to pump out a dashboard that lets me decide, yes, this is working. No, it isn’t working or I don’t have enough information to make a decision. So I can rattle off all the different incredible features that Camelia will have. One of them, again, would be what we call our multi-stat engine. It’s going to provide those teams with Bayesian, Cupid, Frequentist, Sequential. I mean, you name it, all the different kinds of statistical methodologies. But at the end of the day, what we’re really trying to do is make experimentation super accessible for any type of team, because if you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter how amazing your stats engine is.
Mike: I love that, we don’t care, we just want a dashboard that tells us what to do. I think that’s a great approach in terms of product philosophy. And maybe I think one of those follow-on questions is, so who really benefits from this? Because you talked about such a range of complexity, from introducing new features into a web app, all the way through to just changing a message. I mean, where does Chameleon really play well?
Collin: We play well where teams realize they have a crystal ball and they want to be able to look into this crystal ball and see around corners as to what their customers want. So if the company or the team is not interested or and being data-driven or has some executive that refuses to acknowledge that there could be a different way of working, then we probably aren’t going to play well in that space. But if the company, or like I said, those teams inside of the company are curious, just simply curious and very aware of the interests of their customer, then it starts to become interesting because then they are looking for a solution that basically does a few things. One, can it help them build a new version of the digital experience? So the build part is, you know, I think half the battle. And we often in this industry get stuck in the build part, which is an important part, because if you can’t build the new digital experience, well, then how could you test it? But to get to the next part, which is, okay, well, now that I’ve built that digital experience, can I target the right audience? Can I choose the right goals to measure the experience I’ve created? Can I roll out the experience or what we call traffic allocation in a way that makes sense and saves me time and stress? That’s that configure part. And again, Chameleon is really designed to support those teams that are looking for, hey, I want to be able to build quickly a new variant. And I want to be able to validate if it’s moving my customer on the right or the wrong direction. And so, yeah, if they’re curious, then we should dive in and start helping them. But if they’re not prepared to even just be curious, then they’re not ready to start experimenting.
Mike: And do you think that’s a bit of a challenge with B2B? Because I think, you know, in consumer, quite often, marketers are very data driven, very results driven. Whereas in B2B, there tends to be a lot of this, it’s got to be the right corporate voice, it’s got to look right, it’s got to be on brand. I mean, do you think that holds back B2B sometimes?
Collin: Yeah, I think there can be. I mean, fortunately, I think it’s starting to change. I think people are realizing that, again, we do some research every year. It’s called more or less chameleon all team experimentation research. And essentially what we do is we look at about 150 something companies across the US and the UK, and we ask them, hey, Do you think you are a leader in your category and do you plan to grow this year? And if they answer yes to those questions, then we deep dive into like their behavior when it comes to like their work. And a couple of things pop out. Number one thing is they see experimentation as critical to their business. Just nine out of 10 of them are saying we have to experiment if we want to be if we want to be a leader and if we want to grow. And then again, I think all those biases or impediments or obstacles, they’re still there, but they’re able to be sort of pushed aside and manipulated and massaged like, yeah, of course, the brand’s important. But are we really going to not even explore whether or not this new messaging could help us move deeper into this category? I mean, Who is against growth here? So that fortunately is beginning to, I think, grow in momentum. And I think that’s healthy for B2B. It’s healthy for B2C. It’s just healthy for every business to think that.
Mike: I think that’s very positive. I mean, you’ve suggested, Colin, that maybe some of it is culture, I guess is what you call it. The company’s not really looking for those opportunities to grow. Are there any other things that hold back people from doing experimentation? What are the things they find difficult?
Collin: One, let’s just start with like, you may not have the technical resources, like a lot of teams. And this is why experimentation platforms like Chameleon are helpful, because some of those teams may want to be data driven, and they want to experiment, but they may not have the technical capabilities to build something new, right. And this is where tools like Chameleon can come in, because we help those non technical teams build new digital experiences, most recently with what we call prompt based experimentation. Your audiences may know that you can chat with Gen AI today to create any kind of new digital experience. What Chameleon does successfully is it allows you to chat with Gen AI to build a new digital experience of your existing web products or websites. And if you can make that what was really technically hard and difficult, easy like Chameleon can now, then you’re enabling those marketers to build out those digital experiences. Now, but on the flip side, if you go over to the engineering team or the product team that are far more technical, if they’re pressured to just simply pump out product, pump out releases, then Again, I’m not sure that we’re the right fit for them. But if the company is saying to themselves, like, gosh, is this feature good for my business? Is it good for that customer? Well, how do you determine good? Well, you essentially let the customer tell you. And how does the customer tell you? Well, through some KPIs or some metrics that you’re tracking. So if they want to be really customer centric and data driven, Then those product and engineering team say, well, you know what? Let’s flag this feature. Let’s assign a couple KPIs to it. Let’s see whether or not the customer or the users behave like we think they’re going to behave. And if it’s working, let’s do more of it versus just like, okay, everyone, we’ve got our quarterly roadmap. I mean, some of the enterprise companies I work with, they’re planning like, H2 2026 features. And if you look at the companies that are successful in that chameleon, all teams research report, they are not working on a semestrial basis. They’re working on like a sprint like a couple of weeks basis. That’s how fast these companies are able to react to what their customers are doing. So, again, you have to want to be customer centric. If you if you were not there yet, it’s going to be hard for you to really leverage experimentation.
Mike: I think that’s a great point. I love this reference back to research. I mean, you know, it’s really interesting. Do you have some examples of what kind of uplift do people get when they do testing? I mean, I guess it varies very much upon the situation and what you’re changing. But if you could give us some examples as to where people get the benefit from doing it.
Collin: Yeah. I mean, again, We all love the, you know, I’m going to pull out my American reference, you know, the home run. So everyone should sort of have a portfolio of experiments. Some of your experiments are going to be designed to like, go for big home run swings. All right. And those uplifts can be enormous. And they’re the ones that everybody likes to talk about and promote and put in their case studies and success stories. They’re important, but, you know, they’re few and far between. When you look at some of the world’s leading agencies and experts and teams dedicated, I mean, wake up every day and just do conversion rate optimization experimentation. They are wrong up to 80% of the time. So this idea that you can just hit home run after home run after home run and get uplifts all the time that just are business transformational is a complete myth. And so avoid that pitfall and trap. So your portfolio can’t just be composed of home runs. It has to be composed of like Incremental gains. And this is where experimentation really comes into play. Those incremental gains are quite small, frankly, and we’re talking about, you know, a percentage uplift. But if you can move the needle steadily by a percent, a half a percent. over time, these compound in such a way that not only is the team thinking about being data driven, they’re also getting the compounding effects of creating a better optimized digital experience that your customer likes more than the other competitors. and this transforms into business impact. I think another thing you want to be careful of is you don’t want to go off into a board meeting and tell your CFO that this test that you ran three months ago is going to generate a million dollars for the next quarter sales. The CFO is smart enough to realize that’s complete BS. There are so many things that affect whether or not that test will actually generate revenue that you want to be wary of saying my tests generate X dollars and instead say my experiments generate these insights that guide our leadership, guide our teams on what’s the right way to be working. And again, that overall net effect is just transformational in a positive way that you are almost statistically certain to be a leader in your category if you do so.
Mike: I love that. I love that focus on the compounding of small gains rather than find that magic bullet. I think that’s a great analogy.
Collin: Well, again, look at it as a portfolio. You need to have big, medium and small swings. If you are just swinging for the fences every single time, you’re just going to burn out quickly. Everyone’s going to not trust you. This will just be seen as a boondoggle and it’ll be discarded. But if you only do marginal tests like, you know, little tiny things, people like, what the hell? This isn’t going to transform my business. I don’t care about message tests or button color tests like this stuff is just little tiny things that don’t mean much to us. Show me the bigger plays. And so that’s why I always advise companies and teams to really think about their portfolio versus, you know, a certain one type of test.
Mike: I mean, that’s really interesting, Colin. Just moving forward a bit, I’m interested to know how you approach growing the business at Chameleon. So how are you dealing with, for example, this issue between building a brand and kind of that top of the funnel stuff versus driving leads? What’s your approach?
Collin: Well, you know, I always tell my team that, you know, there’s no I always look at marketing as a face. You can’t have just a pair of beautiful eyes or gorgeous mouth. You know, if you really want to be a face, you need to have a complete package. And for me, that transforms into like, OK, we need to get content marketing right. We need to get event marketing right. We need to get paid marketing. We need to have our social media all organized. So again, what I like to do is make sure that we’re firing on all cylinders and those key channels are on those key mediums for the entire funnel. Like so everything from tofu down to like bofu or bottom of the funnel. What I am finding is more and more important, especially after you’ve established your own internal like owned channels and your own mediums. What you really need to do is, well, here at Chameleon is what we call the eat our dog food or drink our champagne, which is OK, great. We’ve now got folks in place to manage those channels and execute those campaigns and strategies. But Are we really customer centric or reader centric or audience centric? I am now a big believer in, and once you’ve got your owned channels understood and controlled, you need to quickly move over and start making sure that you are at the watering holes where your target customers are getting their media, their news, their information. and interacting with other your competitor brands or your your space. And so if you can really understand those watering holes and be present in those watering holes, then your own channels can get better. But until then, you’re just coming up with ideas on your own and in a vacuum. And that has a very short shelf life.
Mike: I mean, it’s an awful lot of sense. And I love, you know, one of the themes coming throughout this whole interview seems to be it’s about balance. You know, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t focus on, you know, those big swings for the fences. But, you know, balance out what you’re doing. I think that’s a really interesting approach. Does that reflect your approach to marketing?
Collin: Yeah, I think so. Again, There are, of course, other strategies where you can put all of your eggs in and events marketing. And, you know, this is there’s probably a thousand LinkedIn posts that will tell you, you know, do this strategy versus that strategy. Listen, I don’t want to come across as like we try to be everywhere all at once. I mean, there is some balance. There is some excuse me, some commitment you have to make just for practical resource purposes. But yeah, I think this ability to not only take care of business internally, but be present in what we call external channels here at Chameleon and our team, we say rob the banks. Why do we say rob the banks? It’s a bad joke about how a bank robber said, you know, answered a question. Why do you rob banks? And he says, that’s where all the money is. Well, This is the same. Go to those watering holes. Rob those banks. That’s where your audiences are. That’s where your target customers are. So we really want to, I’d say, be 60 40 robbing the banks versus just taking care of our own channels. I think the other thing we all have to acknowledge is that search is changing. And so I think a lot of what we built inbound marketing wise was predicated in the idea of like search being successful and search blessedly, painfully is changing. Now, more and more people are turning to, you know, AI for getting their news or getting their information. And we have to be able to react to that. And one of the best ways to do that, I think, is, again, to be present in your owned and your earned channels.
Mike: I love it. Colin, it’s been fascinating. Before I let you go, just a couple of questions we’d like to ask everyone. The first is, can you give us an example of a campaign that you’ve seen that you think is really innovative or creative recently?
Collin: Gosh, you know, I always come up with like two and they tend to be a bit more brand centric. The first one has nothing to do with us, but it’s a fun one. I’m not sure people appreciate it, but hot ones.
Mike: Are you familiar with this show? Never seen, I think it’s an American one, an American show.
Collin: Hot Ones is this brilliant show that is built to sell hot sauce. And it started, gosh, I want to say, you know, maybe 10 plus years ago. But essentially, they bring on celebrities and steadily feed them hotter and hotter hot sauces. And then they ask them really poignant, interesting questions. And the celebrities that are so well trained to respond to the BS PR questions, are flummoxed by the hot sauce and they give really interesting answers. And these shows, Mike, have hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. It’s an incredibly popular show and it’s now like I think reached mass market, certainly in the US or a lot of folks know about the show. And again, that’s just pure content marketing designed to sell hot sauce. You got to tip your hat. Good job. The other campaign that I remember that I always thought was smart and I I guess I liked it because I’m in the customer experience space. Qualtrics did one. I think it was something along the lines of like chief apology officer. I’m not sure if you remember this one, but there was a really slick video campaign where they had this Sleazy executive basically gifted in the art of apologizing for crappy digital experiences and I just thought that was a smart way to draw attention to the idea that. Do you really want to have this culture in your company where you’re just constantly trying to, you know, smooth out horrible digital experiences? So that one stuck with me and I wish I had always done it. And again, I think that video format, people are just glued to their screens. And so if you can just scroll with your thumb up and touch them and all those channels, then I think you have something good there.
Mike: Love it. I can just imagine everyone listening to the show still shaking their head going, I can’t believe Mike hasn’t watched Hot Ones on YouTube. I will go and have a look. I’m a little bit older than probably a lot of the listeners, so maybe that’s the issue. Next question, Colin. I’m really interested to know, what’s the best piece of marketing advice that someone’s given to you?
Collin: The best piece of marketing advice that someone’s given me I think going back to this idea that you need to understand the person you’re trying to reach better than yourself or your product. I think we get so wrapped up in our campaigns in our amazing products and services and technologies that we forget what we’re really trying to do is solve someone’s problems or help them with their opportunities. And if you can really drill down and understand what it is that they want to achieve, Lo and behold, magically, all of the solutions on how to reach them and engage with them, interact with them, come to light. I know it’s not the sexiest or maybe even the most original answer, but I think if we turn back to these tried and true practices, They deliver results.
Mike: Love it. I mean, obviously, we’ve had people say similar-ish things before, but I think it’s super important. You’ve really got to understand things from your customer’s point of view rather than from your point of view, and don’t fall in love too much with your product. Learn to love the customer. And then the last question, we’ve mentioned it a couple of times, marketing is changing incredibly quickly at the moment. So if you were talking to someone that was just starting out on a career in marketing, what advice would you give them?
Collin: If I was just starting my career in marketing, the first thing I would do would be to explore AI agents. AI agents, for the audience, are essentially tools or robots that you send out to do something specific for you. And what is so interesting today is that you can essentially assemble a team of these AI agents to probably boost your productivity by 50. It’s astonishing how productive you can be. Now, what they’re not going to do is be very original in what they’re pumping out. They’re going to default to like the lowest common denominator best practices. The language is going to probably be pretty AI bland. But the fact that you get to have the ability to correct versus create all of that content and all of that copy and messaging that these agents can bring to you is astonishing. So you can just essentially multiply your presence by 100 through agents and then have the ability to curate it and correct it in a way that fits whatever you’re trying to achieve. So, again, I would really make sure that if I was into marketing, I understood those two key points. Who am I trying to reach? and how can I use AI agents to make sure that I am reaching them faster than the next guy? Because if you can put those two things on a nice looking CV or resume, you’re gonna be golden. People are gonna pick you up in a heartbeat.
Mike: Love it, I think that’s great advice. Colin, it’s been fascinating. It’s been a great conversation. If people listening to this would like to learn a little bit more about CRO or perhaps they wanna find out more about Chameleon, where’s the best place to get a hold of you?
Collin: Oh, gosh, well, the easiest way to learn more about experimentation or what we call all team experimentation, where everybody can come to one single place and find a way to build experiments, whether you’re technically gifted or have technical resources available to you or not, is our website. I would just visit www.chameleon.com. You’ll see it probably in the copy below how to spell it. You can always find me on LinkedIn. I’m very happy to chat with anybody about where they’re at with their experimentation program. And again, we all need to just work together to build better digital experiences.
Mike: That’s amazing. I think it’s been a fascinating conversation. I’ve learned so much. Really appreciate you being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Collin: Pleasure to be here. Good luck to everyone out there. Start experimenting.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
