We just launched our newest customer story with Korn Ferry, a Qualified customer using Qualified Chatbots to find high-quality leads among huge volumes of website traffic. Since go-live, Korn Ferry has seen huge success—including a 60% increase in web conversions and $3.7M in closed/won revenue. The case study breaks down their approach to conversational marketing as well as Korn Ferry’s challenges, integrations, and key learnings.   

Behind Korn Ferry’s success are two marketing powerhouses: Alex Long (Manager, Marketing Operations) and Heather Green (Sr. Manager, Business Operations). Together, this duo has built a program that benefits their entire revenue team—and they’re just getting started. Tune in below to learn more. ⬇️

First things first, why did you decide to implement a conversational marketing strategy? 

Alex: Last year, it was my number one tech ask. I knew that a lot of companies were starting to implement chatbots and I thought it was one of the ways that we could best utilize our website to help drive lead generation and to capture people while they're online without making them fill out a form...or going to a specific page to fill out a form...or scrolling all the way down a page. It's there. It helps them find more information more easily. And it's really helped us drive lead generation. So that was really the big objective for us.

So, why did you choose Qualified?

Alex: I really liked the level of Salesforce integration that you guys have...and the Marketo integration as well because we are a Marketo / Salesforce house. We actually leveraged the Marketo integration to a pretty heavy extent around what we need to pull in as far as being able to route leads to our sales team because right now we have zero live agents. Zero live conversations happening through the platform, we only do bots. So we really have to be able to make sure that we're getting certain things and it was just perfect the way that you guys can set it up. So all of those kinds of integrations work together really well.

Tell us about your use cases and how you're using Qualified. 

Alex: Basically we use Qualified as a way to engage people into completing—essentially a lot of our flow when it's coming to the point of a hand raiser, it's mimicking the form. But it's presenting it question by question and in a more conversational manner, which people seem much more at ease with. Because we get tons of leads. We've already had just shy of 1900 leads since November. And we spent the first two months with just six or seven of our low value pages where the bot was showing up, not even on our homepage. So that's really incredible numbers for us to see. As soon as we did start launching it wide our site, those numbers went up exponentially.

What kinds of results have you seen since you started a conversational program? 

Alex: So we have had amazing results so far. In general, we have a pretty long sales cycle. We've actually seen leads that come in from the chatbot take less time to close than leads that come in from other methods that we send out to our sales team. We've already closed over $2 million in revenue and we still have another $5.5 million in our pipeline right now directly related to people who have had conversations with our chatbot. It’s pretty incredible.

What are some of your key learnings after implementing this program?

Alex: We've definitely learned what our sales teams want to see from people who are providing information and who are raising their hands. That's been something that's helpful. We've also learned more about where people are when they visit our site—as far as the funnel of awareness versus ready to interact with one of our sales folks. Also, who's coming to the site. Like I said before, we have so many different solution offerings and one of those is talent acquisition. So we help organizations find mid-to-high level candidates for their open positions. So we also see a lot of candidates come through. We've found that we're able to adjust the chatbot as we learn how people are engaging with it to intercept those from going to our sales teams and directing them to our candidate pages to submit resumes. It's helped us learn how to redirect people who are not intended for sales out of that sales funnel and into the right places.

Lastly, what are some of the biggest surprises you’ve had along the way? 

Alex: Honestly, how effective it was from the get-go. I was very surprised to see the numbers that we were getting in pipeline and opportunity closes as quickly as we did. That was a big surprise for us. I know when we first started looking at these numbers and we were like, “oh, we're not going to see...maybe we'll see some pipeline. We're not going to see closed opportunities.” And within, I think it was like six weeks, we had a closed opportunity and we're like, “that doesn't happen around here.” Our sales cycle is so much longer usually. So that's been a huge surprise for us. It's just seeing how much it's affected the length of the sales cycle.

Alex and Heather—thank you so much for taking the time to share your story. We can’t wait to see how Korn Ferry continues to expand the program. Want to learn more about their strategy with Qualified? Cruise on over to the Korn Ferry case study.