Our Investment in Qualified: A Conversational Marketing Platform
As sales and marketing teams evolve, we continue to look for partners who share our interest in making the pipeline more efficient. To that end, we’re excited to announce our investment in Qualified.
As the roles between traditional business teams blur, our tools need to follow suit. This is especially true with sales and marketing, where interested parties must be converted into leads and then customers. To do this quickly, accurately, and efficiently — and constantly — makes all the difference in the modern business environment.
Our Salesforce ecosystem supports many of the tools to integrate these teams. The math is pretty simple: Better information from marketing equals more closed deals for sales. Hopefully, this happens fast. Ideally, this happens instantaneously.
As sales and marketing teams evolve, we continue to look for partners who share our interest in making the pipeline more efficient. To that end, we’re excited to announce our investment in Qualified. Qualified’s conversational marketing platform turns any marketing website into an instant online meeting, allowing B2B sales teams to meet qualified buyers in real-time, using a full stack of online meeting tools including live chat, voice calls, screen sharing, chat-bots, and automated meeting scheduling. Because Qualified is built natively on Salesforce and works closely with Salesforce CRM & Salesforce Pardot, it’s a natural fit for our ecosystem.
Reaching customers at speed means meeting them where they are. Historically, “meeting them where they are” required customers to fill out forms online that were then passed on to sales reps to follow up later with a phone call or email. This has proven to be inefficient for sales, who contact leads after a potential customer has already moved on.
Now, we’re seeing a huge rise in omnichannel communication with prospects: text, video, chat, and email. This is the space Qualified occupies; enabling sales reps to have conversations with sales-ready prospects while they’re on a company’s website — in real-time. All of this happens through an app embedded in the customer’s website. Prospects get routed directly to reps, who can immediately engage in a high-fidelity sales conversation using a full set of meeting tools, including chat, screen share, and voice calls. Qualified accelerates the timeline from lead to opportunity.
Our history with the Qualified team runs deep and we’re thrilled to be working with Co-Founders Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley again. Kraig and Sean previously founded GetFeedback, a customer survey tool for Salesforce and a Salesforce Ventures portfolio company. Before that, the two worked for search-engine marketing firm Kieden, which Salesforce acquired in 2006. Kraig and Sean have been instrumental in shaping the integration of sales and marketing, and we see Qualified as the next step in that evolution. We are excited to partner with them once again and welcome them back to the Salesforce Ventures portfolio.
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