After less than a month of using conversational marketing and already seeing a 300% increase in MQLs year-over-year, Natterbox was sold. Natterbox is one of our newest customers, and as the only cloud voice solution fully embedded in Salesforce, they feel like family to us at Qualified, since we’re the only conversational marketing platform that runs natively on Salesforce. 

Their instant success is really exciting, so we’re thrilled to have them share their best practice tactics for engaging prospects on your website and driving pipeline through personalized buyer experiences. 

A bit of context: Natterbox uses Qualified on their core site Natterbox.com and is also part of the Salesforce AppExchange Chat Pilot Program, which is also powered by Qualified. As part of this program, AppExchange visitors can have real-time conversations with Natterbox experts, just as they would on their core site. Natterbox has been an enthusiastic part of this program.

So we’re excited to introduce Steve Holton, President and Chief Business Officer, along with Sophie Winter, Senior Marketing Manager, from Natterbox. Let’s hear how the last few weeks “have been game-changing” for them!

Can you tell us a bit about Natterbox and the audiences that you sell to?

Steve: Natterbox is a powerful CTI solution that’s fully integrated inside the Salesforce platform. We’re the only native telephony provider for Salesforce. Our customers can make and receive phone calls while automatically capturing valuable data within Salesforce. So our customers’ callers have personalized caller journeys and as a result, our customers see significantly increased sales and contact center productivity. 

Our main target audiences are Salesforce customers, and in particular, any company that relies heavily on sales and customer support. We have a few focus industries, including financial services, retail, manufacturing, but we serve many more. 

As a company that focuses heavily on the Salesforce community, what role does the AppExchange play in your go-to-market efforts? 

Steve: The Salesforce AppExchange is a core channel in our go-to-market strategy. We have a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, based on SEO, SEM, social media and content marketing, all designed to draw customers to our website and draw them into our instance on the Salesforce AppExchange. The more traffic we have on the AppExchange, the more leads we’ll get.

Sophie: We do have ABM as part of our strategy, with tools to help with execution, such as Qualified. Qualified helps us understand the accounts that are looking at key pages on our site and landing pages on the AppExchange. By using enrichment tools to understand the makeup of those accounts, such as vertical, size, revenue and other key criteria, we develop targeted campaigns towards those accounts, with personalized experiences and messaging on ads, for example. 

What prompted you to explore conversational marketing? 

Steve: Last year we reinvented our digital marketing strategy. We went looking for ways to significantly improve our lead generation, and chat was a part of that. Because we were successful in this effort, we started sending major traffic to the website, and lots of traffic to the AppExchange, so then we knew we needed to be able to proactively engage with customers to generate leads when they land there. We were using a chat tool, but it was quite passive, not good at really engaging customers. We knew there were more feature-rich alternatives out there so we went exploring, looking for something that could significantly increase productivity, given all the traffic we were bringing in. So we started using conversational marketing, with Qualified, in early December. 

What criteria were important to you in evaluating a conversational marketing tool?

Steve: We evaluated a few tools, and it came down to two providers, Qualified and Drift. We chose Qualified because it gave us the ability to engage proactively with customers looking at content, and we could personalize a meaningful message based on how they were trafficking our website. Qualified was chosen also because of the integration with Salesforce, which is powerful. So we had instant information about the visitor that we could utilize to make a more meaningful message. We know if they’ve been on the site before, or chatted with us before, because that information automatically gets integrated into Salesforce. We are also fully integrated with Salesforce, so that made things a lot easier. We are generating a lot of leads and building a big pipeline as a result of Qualified. 

Sophie: Even before we came across Qualified, our main criteria had been “how can we get this channel to generate a lot more pipeline and revenue for us.” as well as offer features that enable our BDR team to be a lot more efficient. So having that calendar integration, to be able to instantly book meetings as opposed to the back and forth it takes with a basic web chat tool in order to book a meeting, that was critical.  

But also the people - your team is great. From pre-sales to post-sales, the process and the people, the experience we had with Qualified was great. So I would really recommend your team, regardless of the product! Blake, the account exec, was great, and Joe, the solution engineer on the call too. And the demo blew us away, everyone was just great. 

You’re part of the Salesforce AppExchange Chat Pilot program, supported by Qualified. How has that been going?

Steve: Being involved in the AppExchange program with Qualified has been a game changer for us. By that I mean that prior to working with Qualified, we relied entirely on prospects engaging with us on our AppExchange instance through filling out forms. Sometimes that can actually be a barrier, especially for potential buyers. Qualified enables us to proactively message them while they’re on our instance. They don’t necessarily have to fill out a form, they don’t have to give us information, but they’ll give it to us in a chat conversation. That’s because we are having meaningful conversations using Qualified and engaging proactively right when they’re interested and on the AppExchange. So it’s made a remarkable difference in the leads that are coming through. Now we’re having a chat conversation about their specific interest, and we’re scheduling and carrying out a live meeting with them, all while they’re on the AppExchange. 

Now just a few weeks in, how are you using conversational marketing, what are some tactics that work especially well for Natterbox so far?

Steve: Qualified is very significant in our go-to-market strategy right now. We use pouncing, for example, all the time. So it’s a tactic that we have refined; we know that certain messaging is very engaging, so we are having really meaningful, personalized conversations through chat. Our prospects are engaging on a very regular percentage, so this is a very successful tactic for us. 

The previous chat tool would open with “Hi, how can I help you today?” And now with Qualified, it can be specific: “Hi, I see you’re interested in voice recording, I’d love to help you with that.” That’s exactly what the website visitor is looking at - they’ve just watched the video on our site. It would be hard not to engage, for prospects, after that! It leads to a conversation, and more importantly, leads to a meeting. 

Sophie: Some of the experiences we have set up where we see success is on high intent pages, such as the pricing page and the demo request page. These are further down in a buyer’s research journey, and we are able to proactively engage with them quickly to make sure they convert on the page. We engage with them so they can “skip the line” for those pages, so that instead of filling out a form we proactively book that meeting immediately for them. It decreases the time it takes to be able to get that initial meeting and conversation started. Those tactics have definitely worked well for us. 

Qualified helps us understand who the customer is. In our previous chat tool, the burden was on the website visitor to tell us who they are. Now we just know. This cuts out quite a lot of the initial Q&A so that we don’t waste time, and can focus on the personal aspect, knowing who they are and answering their question. 

What results have come from your conversational marketing program so far?

Steve: We’ve seen significant results since rolling out Qualified. We’ve had over a 300% increase year-over-year in MQLs, so a material difference in pipeline growth. One of the best data points we have is that now 44% of all our MQLs at Natterbox come through Qualified, vs with the chat tool we had previously, it was less than 5%. That’s a really material difference. It’s changed how we go to market. 

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We never get tired of hearing these kinds of stories from our customers. Thanks to Steve and Sophie for sharing Natterbox's early results and favorite tactics with us!

If you want to see what else is possible with Qualified's conversational marketing and sales platform, check out more customer stories here.