A few months ago, we sat down Joe Leverson, Head of Digital Marketing at Gamma. At the time Joe was a new customer of Qualified, excited about using Conversational Marketing to transform the website experience and generate more pipeline. Joe shared some initial success stats, including a 22% increase in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and a 33% improvement in website conversion. Well, fast forward 6 months, and Gamma is all-in on Conversational Marketing since it has generated over £12 million in pipeline and over 150 new sales opportunities in just a few months. 

So we met with Joe to learn more. Joe shared how they’ve expanded their strategy, what makes their sales reps successful on the platform, and how it’s impacted their sales and marketing relationship. 

Before we dive in, here’s some quick background on Gamma. Gamma is a dominant player in the UK communications market and a publicly traded company with over 1,100 employees. Gamma’s big on Salesforce and Pardot; these platforms are the heartbeat of their sales and marketing organizations. 

Now that you’re up to speed, here are some highlights from our conversation with Joe.

When you first launched Conversational Marketing on your website, you started with a bots-only approach. How did that go for you?

Before we put chatbots on our site, we were driving people to standard forms that had low completion rates. We started off with a pretty simple chatbot approach. We built one bot to serve the entire website, engage visitors, and capture leads. It made for a much more engaging way for visitors to get in touch with us. The bot approach tripled conversion rates just by inviting website visitors to engage in a more authentic way. We were pretty transparent that they were talking to bots, but we had some fun styling the messages, giving them a voice, and taking people down different flows in the experience.  

What made you want to expand your strategy beyond bots and get your sales reps using the platform for live chat? 

The success we were having with the bot-centric approach was enough to convince me that it was time to expand our Conversational Marketing strategy. It was a universal success throughout the core converting pages.  So it was a pretty straightforward decision; I knew we were going to have success if we put a couple of reps on the platform.

Conversational Marketing changes the SDR process. Everything happens in real time, right on your website. How did you get your reps bought into this new channel?

The old role of the SDR was outbound-driven. It was highly transactional. Make 100 calls a day, send emails, see low conversion rates. Conversational Marketing is an entirely new approach, connecting you with a warm pool of leads right now. It doesn’t even compare to the old way of doing things. Some of our sales reps immediately recognized the opportunity of this new channel.

You mentioned some Gamma reps are really crushing it with Conversational Marketing. What’s the recipe to their success? 

Conversational Marketing success is a mixture of getting the right website traffic to our site and our sales reps having the soft skills to be able to engage with people, understand where they have been on the website, what they're looking at, and where they are in their buying journey. 

You have to be authentic. You're a person having a conversation with another person. You can’t be overly formal, like you may be when you’re introducing yourself over email, for example.

We have one Sales Rep who has really taken to the platform. He’s an animal! The amount of people he engages with and has conversations with is phenomenal. He sees the power of the platform and is hyper-focused on using it everyday. He’s dedicated time learning how to talk to people and really understand our visitor behavior. 

His performance has shown the business we have to enable him to be on the platform because of the amount of meetings he's booking per week and the volume of opportunities that he’s creating. The speed from unknown visitor to opportunity is fantastic. People are coming to the website and boom! He converts them and books a meeting, and a field sales rep is having a meeting with them the very same day.

Your sales rep superstar ... how does he use the platform? 

His first step is to engage and ascertain whether it’s an appropriate lead, a qualified lead. Then he will try to get the person on the phone as soon as possible. Quickly capture their contact details, make a record in Salesforce, and get them on the line. 

However, if a chat is going well on the platform, he will capture enough information and book a meeting with an Account Executive right in a chat window.

Who does your sales team prioritize in terms of conversations? 

Beyond focusing on our UK visitors, we’re hyper focused on engaging paid website traffic. We advertise our unified communications product on Google paid search. This traffic is high-intent, bottom-of-the-funnel, expensive traffic. When we know it’s $15-$20 per click, we have to prioritize these visitors and route them to an immediate conversation. 

We’re using a cool feature, Voice Alerts,  to grab the attention of our reps. When someone clicks through a paid campaign, an alert goes off “Hey sales team! A visitor from Google is on the product page right now.” This blasts out and they perk up and it’s a race to see who can engage with that contact. Because once they engage, it’s their lead.

What features are working for you? 

I’ve loved seeing the evolution of the platform. A cool new feature is experience blocks, where you can reuse parts of another experience to expedite the build speed. Or visitor lists, which help our team create specific views of our website visitors. For example, we can have a list of everyone who was on the site last night and looked at a high-value page and is in the UK. This shapes our sales teams prospecting efforts for that day. 

Let’s talk business impact. How has Conversational Marketing helped your business since go-live?

We’ve gotten 150 sales opportunities and close to £12 million in pipeline in less than 6 months, all through the Qualified platform. Plus, we have some really healthy deals in the sales cycle. It’s fantastic.

How has Conversational Marketing shaped your relationship with your sales team? 

It's had a positive impact on my relationship with the sales reps all the way up to the director level. It's me bringing value to the sales team. 

It's giving the reps the opportunity to do a better job. It's a valuable use of their time, which brings them benefit, and brings the company benefit. The reps on the platform get to book more meetings, get more commission, have easier conversations. It's an easier route to doing their job. There's constantly a warm pool of people to target and pursue. The sales directors are happy because they know their reps are performing. 

It makes my boss happy because conversions go up on the website. I'm happy because the conversion rate is looking good. My statistics are healthy and improving. 

I haven’t had to spend months trying to code and deploy something. I’ve launched this platform that sits in the Salesforce ecosystem that we operate in already, and it’s really improved things. 

What’s next for Gamma? 

We’re going to roll out Conversational Marketing to service the partner side of the business. 

It’s going to help generate new partners and generate leads for those partners. We’re going to get more clever with the platform and use it to manage our accounts, versus just generating new leads. Like our inbound efforts, we’ll start with bots, then figure out when it’s best to expand to reps.

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Thank you, Joe, for taking the time to break down Gamma’s Conversational Marketing program, successes, and learnings. To read the full story, head on over to Gamma’s Case Study.