Jim Sinai, CMO at Vanilla, sought to take Vanilla’s inbound pipe gen motion into the future by improving website conversion and speed to lead with an AI SDR. With Qualified, Vanilla used Piper the AI SDR to scale inbound pipe gen across their entire website—leading to $5.3M influenced pipeline, 2X increase in meetings booked in the first month live, and a 135% month-over-month increase in leads generated.
Jim Sinai became CMO at Vanilla because he believed in the product and vision to help wealth advisors, planners, and attorneys deliver better experiences to their clients. As a seasoned marketing leader in his years at Salesforce, Procore, and Eventbrite, he saw the opportunity in the market and led Vanilla’s fast-growing marketing strategy from day one in the role. “When I joined Vanilla, we didn’t have a brand, website, or a go-to-market motion. Together with the sales and BDR team, we went out to go build our market together. We hit the right time, right place, other competitors followed us, and now our category is blowing up.”
Under Jim’s leadership, Vanilla experienced explosive growth in both demand and website traffic. This was great news for the business but came with several challenges. Like many other B2B companies, Vanilla’s website offered the same experience for every visitor, with forms as the only way to capture leads. Jim sought to make his team’s marketing spend more efficient by enhancing conversion rates, accelerating speed to lead, and scaling personalized engagement across Vanilla’s entire website. “As CMO, what keeps me up at night is speed-to-lead and delivering the best buyer experience on our website. I want to ensure every prospect and customer we drive to the website with our marketing dollars is having the best experience that will lead to conversion.”
When Jim and the marketing team at Vanilla set out to find the ideal vendor to future-proof their inbound strategy, their top priorities were AI features and product innovation. That’s why they chose Qualified and Piper the AI SDR. “We’re an AI-first company. Our strategy is to build a system that scales, where adding headcount is not part of the scaling equation.” With Piper the AI SDR, Vanilla would unlock more conversion points across the website and scale inbound engagement and conversion with AI, reducing the need for marketing to rely on Vanilla’s human SDRs to engage live with website visitors. “The minute Qualified launched Piper the AI SDR, I knew that was the future of pipeline generation. We cannot rely on growing SDR headcount to scale our pipeline generation. We needed an AI SDR.”
Vanilla leaned into the entire Qualified platform and went live in just a few weeks. Getting Piper trained up like a human SDR was a seamless process. Working with their Qualified Success Architect, the Vanilla team gave Piper all the documentation she would need to answer questions effectively and test her responses in the back-end. The ability to provide Piper with rules of engagement on how to interact with visitors was huge for Vanilla: “We needed healthy guardrails for what Piper couldn’t say due to financial regulations. The training sandbox where you can give Piper feedback, review her responses, see how she interacts, was immensely powerful for trust.”
Now, Vanilla uses Piper the AI SDR to scale inbound pipeline generation across their entire website. She works solo, around the clock, generating pipeline with no humans involved. Piper identifies and segments every visitor to Vanilla’s site, proactively starting real-time conversations with relevant context. Her goal is to drive conversions or seamlessly hand off to a human when needed. Piper can book meetings in a conversation or serve up frictionless meeting booking experiences across Vanilla’s buttons and forms. Piper can also serve up offers in conversations and through pop-ups and banners—such as an invite to Vanilla Academy Live, Vanilla’s bi-annual customer event. The best part? Soon, Piper will be able to nurture Vanilla’s inbound leads from events or demo requests not only on the website but also via email—with personalized 1:1 messaging at scale.
“Before Piper the AI SDR, marketing relied on our human SDRs being available to work our inbound leads, and I’d worry that our ICP visitors weren’t being properly engaged. That’s very manual and time-consuming on the marketing side and distracting for our SDRs. Now, with Piper, we’re able to tackle all of the missed opportunities we couldn’t get to before.”
The impact of using Piper to scale inbound was huge for efficiency. In their first few months with Qualified, Vanilla’s SDR team underwent significant changes, including realigning their go-to-market strategy, adjusting territory assignments, and navigating an organizational shift—any of which could have disrupted inbound pipeline and speed to lead. However, with Piper managing 80% of visitor interactions on the website, inbound performance not only remained steady but improved. Vanilla saw a 2X increase in meetings booked and a 135% month-over-month increase in leads using Piper during this period. “Despite our processes changing, we still had Piper ready to go, 24 x 7, regardless of SDR promotions or shifts. She’s still there to facilitate the interactions, proactively engage, and give a great buyer experience.”
In just five months live with Qualified, Vanilla has seen incredible results—reaching $5.3M influenced pipeline. After hiring Piper the AI SDR onto their team, Vanilla saw even more impact:
For other CMOs considering how they can hit their pipeline targets with AI, Jim’s guidance is to start with an inbound AI SDR like Piper. “Using Piper and Qualified to scale and automate our inbound pipe gen with AI has delivered us real results, and has brought us into the future.”
To learn more about how other companies like Demandbase, Freshbooks, Sendoso and more are automating inbound pipe gen with Piper the AI SDR, click here.
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