I love investing in great entrepreneurs and products, and Qualified checks both boxes. I have known the founders, Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley, for a decade, working together during some of the highest growth years at Salesforce. Having built multiple companies in the CRM, marketing and VoC spaces, the founders saw a unique opportunity to bring all customer data and intelligence together into a single platform, using conversation and real-time customer engagement to capture more business. Kraig and Sean are one of the hardest-working, creative, and driven duos on the planet, and their work has always been on my radar.
When I first took a look at Qualified about a year ago, the world was a very different place. No need to get elbow deep in the details (we’re all living through this together), but there were many more channels through which sales and marketing staff could operate. In-person meetings, happy hours, dinners, conferences, and all of the other touch points that connected interested potential clients to the real live people who could help them. Back then, Qualified was one of the most useful and effective tools in your top-of-funnel Swiss Army knife. Today, it is essential.
While it didn’t take a pandemic for the world to move more and more towards digital, its presence has irrevocably altered our way of doing business in record time. Now, with limited opportunities to connect, companies have a renewed focus on their websites and its ability to convert visitors into paying customers. Qualified not only helps qualify new leads, it actually helps your sales team move those leads through the sales funnel to ultimately drive conversion.
So, here’s a typical scenario: let’s say these visitors (a.k.a. prospects or leads) went to your website – how did you engage with them? Were they forced to fill out a lengthy reply-to form just to get a demo or call from a rep? Or…maybe a chatbot chatted them up until..it led them to a lengthy reply-to form to get a demo or a call from a rep. Even worse, what about those that come to your website and then leave – without you ever knowing?
Enter Qualified, the world’s first enterprise-class lead capture and qualification platform. Obviously, Qualified isn’t the first sales and marketing platform on the market, but it is one of the few that can deliver on the understanding (revelation?) that the sales process is a two-way street. It’s not only about companies being able to qualify leads and shuttling them through their sales funnel; it’s also the ability for companies to provide the best, white-glove experience to its visitors while on their site (as they guide them through their sales funnel). The more personalized the information you are able to receive about the visitor, the more personalized the experience you can provide them.
How do they do this?
- Deep integration with Salesforce Customer 360: Because Qualified is built natively on Salesforce, reps have instant access to the Salesforce Customer 360 platform through the Qualified product. This provides reps with up-to-date information culled from a broader database which enables them to immediately jump into asking deeper, more informed questions, fast-forwarding past all the basic background information and into discussions that connect with prospects and ultimately accelerate the sales lifecycle.
- Integration with your own marketing and customer data platforms: This provides your SDR’s and BDR’s all the context they need to handle enterprise leads like existing customers, with context and real-time intelligence to make conversations more engaging.
- A suite of engagement tools built-in throughout the site: Real live reps can utilize video, chat, voice, and screen-sharing to directly engage with each visitor.
- AI: What makes Qualified really special is their ability to determine the optimal moment and method with which to engage a visitor on their site. It also provides reps tools for engaging with the brand’s products on the spot, in real-time, delivering demos and connecting prospects with solutions to their most common pain points.
What does this look like?
That’s just a general snapshot of how the product works. Because it’s an enterprise-class platform, Qualified speaks the same language as Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot and other critical systems of record, and is robust enough to handle the complexities of large sales organizations, with a heavy-duty routing engine to ensure website visitors are connected with the perfect rep every time.
The bottom line is, Qualified helps your top line. If your sales team is sitting idly by wondering where their next verified lead is coming from, if you are wondering how to fuel your funnel during these low-touch times, if you are trying connect to potential customers in a more personalized and helpful way, or, ultimately, if you use your website to generate any kind of pipeline whatsoever, I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t check Qualified out to see how it can work for you (no lengthy reply-to form required!).
