Salesforce dominates the world of CRM today, but while it\u2019s a popular and well-used tool for organizing contacts and information, it doesn\u2019t have all the answers when it comes to helping salespeople and marketers sell better, especially when meetings are not in person. Today, one of the startups that has emerged to help fill the gap is announcing a round of growth funding on the back of a huge year for its business.<\/p>\n
Qualified<\/a> \u2014 which builds better interactions for B2B sales and marketing teams that already use Salesforce by tapping into extra data sources to develop a better profile of those visiting your website, in aid of improving and personalizing the outreach (hence the name: you\u2019re building \u201cqualified\u201d leads<\/a>) \u2014 has picked up $51 million in funding. The startup will be using the Series B to continue building out its business with more functionality in the platform, and hiring across the board to expand business development and more.<\/p>\n Led by Salesforce Ventures, the funding round also included Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures, both previous backers, among others. As with so many rounds at the moment \u2014 the venture world is flush with funding at the moment \u2014 this one is coming less than a year after Qualified\u2019s last raise. It closed a $12 million Series A<\/a> in August of last year.<\/p>\n Qualified raises $12M to make websites smarter about sales and marketing<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Qualified was co-founded by two Salesforce veterans \u2014 ex-Salesforce CMO Kraig Swensrud and ex-SVP of Salesforce.com Sean Whiteley \u2014 serial entrepreneurs who you could say have long been hammering away at the challenges of building digital tools for sales and marketing people to do their jobs better online. The pair have founded and sold two other startups filling holes to that end: GetFeedback<\/a>, acquired by SurveyMonkey<\/a>, and Kieden, acquired by Salesforce<\/a>.<\/p>\n The gap that they\u2019re aiming to fill with this latest venture is the fact that when sales and marketing teams want to connect with prospects directly through, say, a phone call, they might have all of that contact\u2019s information at their disposal. But if those teams want to make a more engaged contact when someone is visiting their site \u2014 a sign that a person is actually interested and thinking already about engaging with a company \u2014 usually the sales and marketing teams are in the dark about who those visitors are.<\/p>\n \u201cWe founded Qualified on the premise that a website should be more than a marketing brochure, but not just a sales site,\u201d Swensrud, who is the CEO, said in an interview.<\/p>\n Qualified has built a tool that essentially takes several signals from Salesforce as well as other places to build up some information about the site visitor. It then uses it to give the sales and marketing teams more of a steer so that when they reach out via a screen chat to say \u201chow can I help?\u201d they actually have more information and can target their questions in a better way. A sales or marketing rep might know which pages a person is also visiting, and can then use the conversation that starts with an online chat to progress to a voice or video call, or a meeting.<\/p>\n If a person is already in your Salesforce Rolodex, you get more information; but even without that there is some detail provided to be slightly less impersonal. (Example: When I logged into Qualified to look around the site, a chat popped up with a person greeting me \u201cacross the pond\u201d\u2026 I\u2019m in London.)<\/p>\n Qualified also integrates with a number of other tools that are used to help source data and build its customer profiles, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, 6sense, Demandbase, Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle Eloqua, Clearbit, ZoomInfo and Outreach.<\/span><\/p>\n Additional data is part and parcel of the kinds of information that sales and marketing people always need when reaching out to prospective customers, whether it\u2019s via a \u201cvirtual\u201d digital channel or in person. However, in the last year \u2014 where in-person meetings, team meetings and working side-by-side with those who can give advice have all disappeared \u2014 having extra tools like these arguably have proven indispensable.<\/p>\n \u201cSales reps would heavily rely on their \u2018road warrior\u2019 image,\u201d Swensrud said. \u201cBut all that stuff is gone, so as a result every seller is sitting at an office, at home, expecting digital interactions to happen that never existed before.\u201d<\/p>\n And it seems some believe that even outside of COVID-19 enforcing a different way of doing things, the trend for \u201cvirtual selling\u201d, as it\u2019s often called, is here to stay: Gartner forecasts that by 2025, some 80% of B2B sales interactions will take place in digital channels. (So long to the expense account lunch, I guess.)<\/p>\n It\u2019s because of the events of 2020, plus those bigger trends, that Qualified has seen revenues in the last year grow some 800% and its net customer revenue retention rate hover at 175%, with funding rounds come in relatively close succession in the wake of that.<\/p>\n There is something interesting to Qualified that reminds me a bit of more targeted ad retargeting, as it were, and in that, you can imagine a lot of other opportunities for how Qualified might expand in scenarios where it would be more useful to know why someone is visiting your site, without outright asking them and bothering them with the question. That could include customer service, or even a version that might sell better to consumers coming to, say, a clothes site after reading something about orange being the new black.<\/p>\n\n
\n