Qualified, the conversational sales and marketing platform for Salesforce, ushers in new era of digital-first selling, directly on the corporate website
Latest funding round is led by Salesforce Ventures with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures
Qualified, the conversational sales and marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce, today announced $51 million in financing led by Salesforce Ventures, with additional participation from existing investors including Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. The investment reinforces Salesforce’s commitment to Qualified as the only conversational sales and marketing platform purpose-built for Salesforce Sales Cloud, and comes shortly after Salesforce CMO Sarah Franklin joined Qualified as a board of directors observer and former Salesforce SVP Dan Darcy joined Qualified as Chief Customer Officer. The funding will be used to fuel product innovation and expand the Qualified team in all key functions including engineering, sales, marketing and customer success. Qualified plans to more than double its headcount by the end of the year.
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Since its Series A funding in August 2020, Qualified has:
- Closed a record-breaking fiscal year with 800% revenue growth
- Recorded an unprecedented 175% net customer revenue retention rate
- Launched the tenth major version of its groundbreaking platform with Qualified X
- Seen industry leaders like Adobe, Matterport, Poly, Sodexo, SurveyMonkey, Talend, Tech Data and VMware join its growing roster of enterprise customers
- Announced new and expanded partnerships with Salesforce, as well as Slack, Microsoft Teams, 6sense, Demandbase, Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle Eloqua, Clearbit, ZoomInfo and Outreach
Virtual selling is here to stay: By 2025, Gartner expects 80% of B2B sales interactions to occur in digital channels. As companies doubled down on digital engagements this past year, they realized the untapped potential of their biggest digital channel — the corporate website. Qualified alerts companies the moment an important buyer arrives on the website, arming sales teams with the tools to meet with them instantly via live chat, chatbots, voice calls and screen sharing. With Qualified, the corporate website is no longer only marketing real estate; it’s now the place to have sales conversations with important buyers. Qualified customers report massive ROI: Within months of go-live, OwnBackup generated over $6 million in pipeline, Gamma generated over $13 million in pipeline and Bitly reported a 6X increase in pipeline.
“Conversational sales and marketing is no longer a ‘nice to have.’ It’s mission critical for fast-growing businesses, and table stakes for modern buyers,” said Kraig Swensrud, co-founder and CEO at Qualified. “The world’s top CMOs and demand gen leaders are turning to Qualified as a new way to meet with their most important buyers the moment they arrive on the website. There’s no better partner than Salesforce Ventures to help us accelerate Qualified’s growth and bring this solution to Salesforce customers around the world.”
“Qualified represents an entirely new way for B2B companies to engage buyers,” said Bill Patterson, EVP of CRM Applications at Salesforce. “When marketing and inbound sales teams use this solution with Sales Cloud, the #1 growth platform for sales, they see a notable impact on pipeline. We are thrilled about our growing partnership with Qualified and their success within the Salesforce ecosystem.”
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