At this year’s OpsStars event, we teamed up with InsideView to discuss why Conversational Marketing is such a growing trend, how to get started with a Conversational Marketing program, and which of their Conversational Marketing plays have the biggest impact on their pipeline.

InsideView’s AI-based B2B data and intelligence platform helps businesses drive rapid revenue growth by empowering business leaders to discover new markets, target and engage the right buyers, and manage customer data quality. It’s only logical that they would embark on a Conversational Marketing journey to put their data into action by delivering tailored, personalized website experiences for their buyers.

For the session, we were joined by Tracy Eiler (CMO), Jyothsna Durgadoss (Marketing Manager), and Kelsey Carricato (Sales Development Manager), who each brought their unique perspective to represent InsideView’s sales and marketing teams.

Let’s dive in to their story!

Why is Conversational Marketing so important today?

Buying behavior has changed forever, especially in the last year. Most buyers are already halfway through their purchase journey before you get to know their name. You spend a lot of time and money driving traffic to your website, but even when those visitors fill out a form (which is happening much less frequently) it initiates an asynchronous dance of missed calls and ignored emails.

Conversational marketing has emerged to scale conversations across the funnel. It allows you to identify qualified visitors on your website to engage with them in real time.

Why did InsideView move to a Conversational Marketing strategy?

According to Tracy Eiler, CMO at InsideView, their first impression of Conversational Marketing wasn’t all that great. They thought it was just a chatbot. They even had a mediocre experience with another product that just didn’t work very well. But now with Qualified, Conversational Marketing has become the front door to all website visitors. InsideView taps into their Salesforce CRM data—enriched using their own intelligence platform—to power personalized real-time conversations with website visitors.

Buyers expect personalized experiences and quick access to information

When you think about how our world as consumers has evolved, we’re getting seamless experiences from the best B2C brands and we’re increasingly expecting similar experiences in our B2B engagements. If businesses don’t evolve, they will be notably behind compared to their competitors.

In fact, InsideView has heard directly from their buyers that InsideView’s competitors aren’t using conversational tools, and the information and experience they received from InsideView in the purchase process was far more quick and helpful. Research shows that you have a much higher chance of closing a deal when you address the buyer in a rapid way. 

Advice for getting started with Conversational Marketing

Tracy Eiler, InsideView CMO, recommends three areas to think about when considering a Conversational Marketing program:

1. You don’t need to hire more Sales Development Reps (SDRs) to manage the tool, but you do need to train your existing SDRs on the platform. 
2. You should have someone on your demand gen team tasked with owning the platform and thinking about the buyer’s experience with a chat platform across the entire website.
3. Make sure your underlying CRM data is ready for Conversational Marketing. You’ll want to make sure you don’t have duplicate records, that your account hierarchies are accurate, and that you have proper lead-to-account mapping.
   

How InsideView achieves ABM success with Conversational Marketing

Armed with their list of ABM accounts, InsideView set up custom chat experiences for visitors who work at a company on their target account list. These top-tier visitors are welcomed with personalized greetings, and their sales rep is alerted the moment they land on the website. This enables the rep to start a live conversation with the visitor and give them a white-glove experience. 

Since launching a Conversational ABM strategy using Qualified, InsideView has been able to increase the number of known contacts across ABM accounts and generate high-quality interactions with these buyers.

“Qualified has been a game changer in terms of identifying known and unknown website visitors from our target accounts.”

How InsideView increases sales velocity with Conversational Marketing

Before launching their Conversational Marketing program, it would take a minimum of six minutes for a website visitor’s demo request or sales inquiry to reach a sales rep. With Qualified, sales reps are immediately  notified when an interested visitor is on the website and the rep can connect with the lead instantly. This rapid engagement — also called “Speed to Lead” — is making a massive difference on their business.

Engaging with buyers earlier in the sales process allows InsideView to create pipeline faster, and with higher success rates. Opportunities sourced from Qualified’s Conversational Marketing platform are 3x more likely to close than opportunities sources through other channels. InsideView is also able to ramp Sales Development Reps (SDRs) faster than before — from five or six months down to two or three months.

"[Conversational marketing] allows us to create pipeline sooner, and the prospect to get information they need much more efficiently."

How InsideView converts anonymous visitors into instant opportunities with Conversational Marketing

InsideView started noticing an interesting trend after launching their Conversational Marketing program. Anonymous website visitors became highly-qualified opportunities in a matter of minutes.

Thanks to Conversational Marketing, the SDR is able to get the visitor exactly what they need, answers to all of their questions, and even hop on a phone call — all within Qualified’s platform. This rapid, seamless experience has made it possible for InsideView to “flip” anonymous visitors into eager buyers unlike ever before.

The rise of the anonymous buyer, and how to put your data to work to engage unknown visitors

As more buyers choose to stay anonymous longer in the sales cycle, it’s an opportunity for sales, marketing, and operations to stitch data together about unknown visitors — things like intent and behavior — to arm themselves with the relevant data to engage these leads in personalized ways.

Tracy’s recommendation is to go through your funnel and evaluate your data hygiene and ensure all your martech systems are properly working together. Here’s a map she uses to see this in action:

Ready to learn more?

• To take a closer look at how a Conversational Marketing platform works, check out the Conversational Marketing for Salesforce ebook
• To learn about real-life examples of Conversational Marketing in action, check out the Speed to Lead ebook or visit our catalog of Strategies
• If you want to dive into your own sales and marketing data audit—which is important for a successful Conversational Marketing program—InsideView has a great guide for getting started called 5 Steps to Improving Data Integrity