Meet Cassie 👋

Cassie joined our QSA team last year after over a decade of experience as a marketing leader, bringing her marketing skills and perspective to our customers to help make their Qualified program as successful as possible. Not only does she have a background in marketing, but she was a Qualified customer before making a career switch and joining our team. 

We talked with Cassie about how her customers are doing, what she’s hearing in the field, and how we can better help serve the teams in our community in these challenging times. 

Tell us about jumping from marketing leadership to customer success. 

Cassie: I ended up at Qualified actually as a user of Qualified. I was a marketing director at a SaaS company and at the beginning of the year we were evaluating different technologies and we were introduced to Sean Whiteley through our Salesforce partner. Myself and our sales leader just fell in love with the tool.

It wasn't in our budget, we hadn't planned for this tool in particular, but once we saw it we had to have it. Going through the experience using the tool, we just loved it. Our sales team loved it, marketing loved it. 

And so when I got to the point where I was starting to think about transitioning outside of marketing, but not sure how I could use those marketing skills with a different role, I saw the listing for this QSA role and thought what a great opportunity to be able to merge this desire to have a different career and still use my 12 years of marketing experience. 

I love being able to work with customers and show them all the great things they can do with Qualified. Everybody gets excited getting to onboard it. I get excited for them getting to onboard. 

So to me it was a great and easy transition and fit.

How does you marketing background help you have a better understanding of what your customers need? 

Cassie: Being a marketer in this role is hugely beneficial for a number of reasons. One, you speak the lingo, which may seem like a small thing, but you know what your customers are talking about––you've been through it before. I’m able to use my own experience to help guide them and help give them ideas because it's a brand new technology space for them. 

They know that they love Qualified and they know that they want it, but they're not even sure what all it can do and how to incorporate it with other campaigns that they're working on.

I love being able to make some of those suggestions of, “do you have this going on?” or “In the future when you're doing this, did you realize we can do this?”

I think having that as an added tool that they're provided through a QSA can be hugely beneficial. Really understanding some of the technologies that they're already using gives me a little bit more of a foundational knowledge, I think when jumping into implementations. Each one is unique and new, and we’re never going to go into it knowing everything, but having a little more knowledge helps us set them up for success.

What are some of the biggest pain points you’re hearing from customers right now?

Cassie: Some of the struggles we hear are having lean teams who have a lot of expectations put on them. They've got quotas, they've got revenue numbers that they're supposed to hit and they're not quite sure how they're going to do it. They're running all their day-to-day like they've been doing, and now they have another tool that they can add on, which they're excited about, but it's more that they have to do and they're trying to understand it all.

Our motto is Whatever It Takes, there's a big emphasis on how can we help our customers. Being able to jump in and be an extension of their team and give them kind of that comfort that not to worry, you don't have to know how this all works right out of the gate–you have us to help with that.

We are an extension of your team and if you look at our reviews, there's a number of them that talk about their QSA almost being like a team member of theirs. 

The other struggle we’re hearing is everybody always wants more pipeline and they want more revenue. But, now more than ever, it is getting more difficult between the climate of where we're at with the economy and the fact that people don't want to necessarily give up their data. They don't want to fill out a form, so we give them a solution to that and they can go on our own site and experience.

I love hearing customers saying, “I was just on your site and I just did this, and it was so easy to do–I want that for our implementation that we're working on.” I love being able to give them that new way of doing something as well as being able to help them through it. 

Let’s talk about data privacy–it’s a hot topic in the B2B community and for good reason. How are we able to help our customers ensure their privacy is a top priority? 

Cassie: We all know data privacy is important–we've all gotten the “your data has been compromised” emails before.

It’s especially important since we have customers that have global customers with different rules and laws in other locations. We released the ability to put your privacy policy linked directly within our Messenger experience, and our customers loved it. Everyone is adding it to their experiences. 

I love that it's as simple as you can put a link in here and they're excited, but so are their other teams. You have your legal team that is now happy that you have it, so I love that we can extend beyond your sales and marketing team in that sense. 

Our team is staying on top of all the data privacy laws to ensure that we are not compromising any of our customers in any way when it comes to how we collect the data and what is done with it.

This is all working within their Salesforce instance and it's not us creating a database of information and customers. They love being able to alleviate concerns from their other teams whether that’s InfoSec or any other teams.  

We have the flexibility to customize how we collect information based on our customers' preferences, because each of their customers is unique. It's important to understand how their customers and visitors interact, what makes them comfortable, and adjust accordingly to maximize ROI for everyone involved.

What are you and our other QSAs doing right now to go the extra mile for our customers?

Cassie: One of the biggest ways we’re able to show up for our customers is providing the reassurance that they don't have to know everything about Qualified. They don't have to get in there and build all the things out. Especially those that are going through implementation–they don’t know how all of it works and they don’t have to. We’ll get there.

We want to make sure that you're launching successfully. We want to continue to help you optimize as new features roll out, making sure that we're able to communicate that with our customers. We love getting on calls with them however often that may be to go over new updates and walk through them so they know what’s happening. 

Also, we're coming to you with suggestions that we have for how you can use those features based on what we know about what you've already been doing, what's been successful, what your audience is like.

It's less work for them to have to try to figure out, because again, they have lean teams. They have so much that they're just trying to wrap their head around on a daily basis. If we can just alleviate that and take one thing off their plate by coming to them with suggestions and what others are doing. 

We’re able to come to you and say here’s where we’re seeing success, we think you should try it, give me the green light and I’ll go ahead and get this ready for you. I loved that as a customer, it was great, I was leading a marketing team and I was onboarding two or three people at the time that we were also onboarding Qualified. I loved that I had a QSA that would take care of that for me.

And it's a simple matter of, “I've built this. Please just go review it, make sure it's on brand, it's on message. We can make this live for you not to worry.”

Something else that’s important is communication. Doing check-ins, even if it's not a time that we're having a meeting but just sending an email or message over to them, “End of quarter is coming, is there anything that we can help you out with as you're planning for next quarter?” It makes all the difference. 

It’s not just emailing them when renewals are coming around. Our customers know who we are and they know that they can reach out to us.

Want to learn more about the implementation process with our rockstar QSA team? Read a full breakdown of go-live with our QSA, Steph, here.