The Challenge

Korn Ferry employs a diverse marketing mix of email campaigns, paid digital advertising, thought leadership pieces, television spots, and the Korn Ferry PGA Tour to drive massive amounts of traffic to their website—about 500K unique visitors each month. Despite this huge amount of volume, the Korn Ferry team struggled to convert visitors into leads for their sales team primarily because they relied on buried web forms and lacked visibility into website traffic. With an average lead conversion rate of 0.17%, they knew they had a problem.

Lead generation became Korn Ferry’s biggest objective. They set a goal of reaching a 1.00% conversion rate within one year and identified conversational marketing as the #1 tech solution to get there. This meant they would be able to proactively greet website visitors, capture their information, then segment and route them accordingly—which would not only increase pipeline but also improve the visitor experience.

The Solution

Korn Ferry selected Qualified as their conversational sales and marketing solution for the customizable Salesforce and Marketo integrations, the user-friendly UI, and the flexibility of the Qualified team to accommodate new feature requests. Before launching their program, Korn Ferry worked closely with their Customer Success Manager, Katie, to assemble a strategy:

• Use chatbots on low-value webpages to greet visitors and ask qualification questions.
• If a visitor is qualified, the chatbot will mimic the web form to capture contact information in a more conversational manner then create a lead in Salesforce for the sales team. 
• If a visitor is not qualified, the chatbot will divert visitors with helpful content to meet their needs. 
• Expand to high trafficked pages once the tech is implemented and showing results.

Within the first few months, Korn Ferry received 1900 high-value leads from the chatbot. Once the program expanded to high trafficked pages, this number increased exponentially.

The Result

Six months into the program, Korn Ferry saw concrete results. They increased their conversion rate by 60%, generated $5.5M in pipeline, and closed $3.7M in new business. This translates into 99x ROI.  

Moving forward, Korn Ferry plans to expand their program with a full-funnel marketing approach. This means building custom landing pages and Qualified experiences for individual marketing initiatives—like email campaigns and paid ads—that align with key touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. From there, they can nurture each prospect and focus on handraisers who are interested in a sales conversation. With Qualified, Korn Ferry is poised to continue driving performance to achieve their 1.00% conversion rate goal.

Key Learnings

For Korn Ferry, conversational marketing has been eye-opening. They now have more insight into where visitors are in their journey when they opt to speak with sales plus they can segment website traffic to ensure sales is focusing on the most qualified leads. This has helped the Korn Ferry team be more effective and efficient with their time. In fact, one of the biggest surprises was how drastically Qualified would impact their business.

In terms of advice, Korn Ferry says the best thing you can do is plan ahead; specifically, how and where to use Qualified on your site. Also, be comfortable with a crawl, walk, run approach. Build a roadmap and implement it in phases but don’t be afraid to experiment, optimize, and adapt. Once you find your rhythm, your sales and marketing teams will be unstoppable.