Carta is a San Francisco-based financial technology company that tracks ownership of shares, options, valuations, and dilutions for over 29,000 startups including Robinhood, Classpass and Rothy’s. They're on a mission to create more owners. By building the global ownership management platform, they're changing how companies, investors, law firms, and employees manage equity. Carta has a valuation of more than $7.4B and is on Forbes’ 2022 Fintech 50 list.
As a leader in the ownership management space, Carta understands the importance of identifying valuable visitors, instantly starting sales conversations, and shaping sales and marketing campaigns. They leveraged the Qualified Pipeline Cloud and its suite of pipeline generation products, including Qualified Conversations and Qualified for Outreach, to arm sales reps with actionable data and maximize their sales and marketing efforts. In doing so, Carta was able to drive pipeline and increase their success rate on conversations.
Anna Centrella, Director of Sales Development at Carta, oversees a team of Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) whose primary role is to capture and qualify pipeline for the sales team to convert into revenue. She understands that Carta’s website is the storefront to Carta’s business because it is where buyers come to learn more about their products and solutions. In fact, roughly 30,000 potential buyers visit Carta’s website each month. Anna knew the site could do more to drive pipeline.
Initially, Carta was using Drift to power their conversational sales and marketing program. However, Drift wasn’t providing enough information about who was visiting the site, their purchase intent, or if they fit Carta’s ideal customer profile. At the same time, Drift’s passive interactions with site visitors weren’t capturing the critical information needed to generate more pipeline.
What’s more, Drift had a brittle integration with Salesforce, Carta’s CRM platform. Data from Salesforce wouldn't pull into Drift in real time so Anna's team had to jump back and forth between the two platforms to get a more complete view of their visitors. Doing so hurt both rep efficiency and the visitor experience. As a result, chat dropoff rates were high and the success rate of reps engaging in actual conversations were low. “We were losing these amazing opportunities when someone was actually engaged and interested,” Anna said. “I felt like we were leaving deals on the table.”
Anna turned to Qualified and the Pipeline Cloud: a set of technologies and processes that help B2B companies generate pipeline quicker. The Pipeline Cloud helps companies identify their most valuable visitors, instantly start sales conversations, shape sales and marketing campaigns, and uncover signals of buying intent. Having used Qualified at a previous company and seeing the power of the platform firsthand, Anna presented a business plan to her Revenue Operations team and persuaded them to make the switch from Drift.
From kickoff to go-live, Qualified provided Carta with a dedicated Salesforce-certified implementation consultant, Logan, and together they developed the following strategy:
Once their program strategy was established, the Carta SDR team was thoroughly trained on Qualified to maximize success. “Qualified hand-held us through the process, which I'm so grateful for. It's been tremendous to see how their input has been helping our team grow,” Anna said.
The sales reps also took advantage of Qualified for Outreach since they were already using Outreach for their prospecting efforts. With this integration, reps could prioritize their outbound efforts and instantly greet buyers from an Outreach sequence when they clicked an email link and arrived on the site, delivering a seamless buying experience across channels.
Carta's inbound team can tell when a visitor was driven to the site by an outbound SDR’s outreach. That inbound SDR is then able to reach out to that visitor right away to continue the conversation thereby reducing speed to lead. It also reinforces the outbound SDR's sense that the Outreach emails they're crafting are having an impact. With Drift, outbound SDRs weren't able to tell if the emails they sent were actually driving people to Carta's website. "As a leader, I can tell that it is working and the outbound SDRs are excited to keep doing that kind of work,” Anna said.
Since implementing Qualified, Carta has increased their success rate on conversations by 900% in just six weeks, generated $1.9M in pipeline and achieved 687% ROI. That’s possible because Qualified enables the inbound team to quickly and efficiently recognize visitors who are on the website and greet them in a personal way. “Visitors feel welcome here and know that we really want to do business with them,” Anna said.
Being able to see what visitors are viewing on the site (for example, a particular blog post) pays off in a couple of big ways. First, it becomes a starting point for conversations. “We're speaking the language that they care about,” Anna said. “So it's been extremely powerful.” Second, Carta now has a much clearer sense of what attracts visitors to their website. “We're able to provide our marketing team with amazing data,” she said. “It's enabling folks on that side of the team to create new platforms and new ideas.”
It’s also a lot easier to track how chat is performing. “Before, we would have to pull multiple streams of information together to try to figure out the impact of our chat feature,” Anna said. “Because of the Pipeline Cloud, I'm now able to see exactly the impact Qualified is having on conversion rates, speed to lead, and our revenue a lot faster.”
“What has caught me the most by surprise — in a really good way — is what we didn't know before,” Anna said. She relishes having her team’s performance information at her fingertips that Carta either was not able to access before or that required multiple people to track down.
With this new world of information opened up to them, Carta better understands what’s succeeding in both their inbound and outbound efforts—and what’s driving the most pipeline. “That helps them work smarter, and it keeps team members fired up,” Anna said. “I get so jazzed and so do our people.”
For Carta, another key learning was that their use of Qualified will continue to evolve. “The advice I would give a new Qualified customer is to break it down in phases,” Anna said. “The tool is phenomenal and there's so much you can do with it.”
She also stressed the value of Qualified’s ongoing support. “I have never experienced — ever — customer support like I get from Qualified, and I’ve been in tech sales for over 20 years,” Anna said. “We're seeing every week our team get better and better and it's because of the continued training.”
If you’d like to learn more about how Qualified can drive more pipeline, revenue and ROI for your business, feel free to chat with us anytime.
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