Alation leverages Qualified Conversations and its robust data-driven insights to proactively target, engage, route, and drive accounts down the funnel. Since going live nine months ago, Alation has seen a 375% growth in opportunities created, 278% growth in new ARR generated, and 150% increase in meetings booked via chat.

If you aren’t familiar with Alation, they pioneered the modern data catalog and are now leading its evolution into a data intelligence platform. Recognized by Forrester as an industry leader in Machine Learning Data Catalogs in 2020 and Data Governance Solutions in 2021, Alation is headquartered in Redwood City, California and backed by venture funding to the tune of $217M. More than 400 enterprises, including Cisco, Nasdaq, and Virgin Australia leverage Alation.

We sat down with Justina Logozzo, Director Of Web Marketing, who heads Alation’s search and website strategy. She is an experienced digital and growth marketing professional and a part-time lecturer at Northeastern University where she teaches Masters courses on digital strategy execution, SEO implementation, and social media.

Justina shared why Alation implemented Qualified, their use cases and favorite features, and the results they’ve achieved so far.  

Here are some highlights from our conversation.

Why did you implement conversational marketing as part of your website strategy?

Justina: We're already sending people to the website so why not continue the experience? To me, it's all about giving visitors another way of reaching out to us. Some prefer to email  directly, some prefer to fill out a form, or to call us. But then there's the nuance of people who say, "I'd rather chat with someone right now.” I know from my own experience, I prefer to do all of my support through the chatbot. 

‍I hate being on the phone, I hate having to call and wait. If I can take that same experience of what I do in B2C and apply it to B2B, why not? Especially since the prospect is already there, looking at our content and wanting to engage with us. Why not talk to them when they're already visibly seeing what we can do? It makes a lot of sense from that standpoint.

I would love to dive in a bit more on your use cases. You mentioned routing, can you tell me more about how you route your visitors?

Justina: We have our SDR team divided into US, EMEA and then APAC. And within the US, we have West, Central and East. Within that, there's a bunch of other segmentations. Same concept within EMEA. APAC is a smaller use case and a bit less messy. Our SDRs have certain territories they work within as well as a certain section of account executives (AE’s). 

We had to say, "How do we route each of the people that come to our chat? Is it based off of whether it's the AE that they report to in the state? Is it based off of the headquarters or is it based off of where this person's living? Is it based off of whether they were previously this account lead but now they switched to a different area?" We've had to go in and build out quite an extensive lead routing, which thankfully we're able to do now. Because before, we couldn’t. 

With our previous vendor, lead routing was set up as a round-robin, creating utter chaos on the back end. But with Qualified, we're able to set up routing correctly, where chats go to their designated SDR. If their SDR isn’t available to chat, it goes to their designated territory round-robin. For example, if they live in Central and they're not online, it'll go to the Central round-robin. Then, if no one from the territory is online, then it'll go to the US round-robin. We've put all of those safeguards in place to enhance the experience of our website.

What is one of the most valuable features of the Qualified platform for you and your team?

Justina: For me, it's the analytics. The data behind everything is one of the biggest things that I enjoy. Now I can understand where things are going awry, where things are going well, and where we can improve. The analytics on the platform and the granularity of it is actually my favorite element. But I think for the team, it's the insight or the view, being able to click onto the chat and see where the visitor is and personalize that conversation. Our team can now say, "Oh, I see you're reading this blog. It's a great blog, check out paragraph three.” Or give them a lot more of a humanistic chat than, "Hi, I'm so and so. How can I help you today?" That was one of the things that I really liked when I went on the Qualified website for the first time. I was chatting with someone and there was a misspelling in their message, and I realized, "Oh, this is actually a real person."

What have been some of the biggest surprises that you've experienced on your conversational marketing journey?

Justina: One of the biggest surprises is how hard it is to actually build out a successful experience, which is one thing that I really appreciate about Qualified. The team is incredibly supportive and guided me through my journey as I was trying to figure it all out. This tool gives our SDRs and our organization power. Now we can move people through the funnel quicker because there is a direct connection. 

There is that immediate response back and we can serve visitors content that is of interest to them in a way that we can't do all the time on the website. We can add personalization tools and serve up content based on a personalized landing page.

Any final words to leave our readers with? 

Justina: I wish that we had had this earlier. I cannot tell you enough how much we’ve absolutely enjoyed this tool. Qualified in general is great, but Cameron, our Qualified Success Architect, is phenomenal. He is downright amazing. The fact that we've been able to have conversations with him on a weekly basis to flesh out our entire platform is awesome. The fact that we've been able to talk with some of your upper level management because we have questions on how to build out some of our stuff internally, we really appreciate. 

Our Director of Global Sales Development is floored by the level of customer service that we've gotten from Qualified. It's something that he's been singing to anyone who's asking about a chatbot. I've been singing it and our CMO has been singing it. We cannot say enough about how much happiness has come from implementing Qualified into our MarTech stack. It's a big relief because we finally have a chat tool in place and it's actually working. It’s making our SDRs happy and it's producing results. Plus, it has the potential to grow beyond this one segment of use. It's exciting!

Justina — thank you for your partnership. We can’t wait to see what Alation does next. Want to learn more about their Qualified strategy? Check out the Alation case study.