How AlphaSense drove $3M+ in Pipeline with Qualified
Learn how AlphaSense creates contextualized, tailored visitor experiences to drive more pipeline with the Pipeline Cloud.
(upbeat music)
- So hi, Tim.
So thanks so much for joining us today.
It's always so fun to talk with a qualified customer
about all things pipe, Jen.
Can you go ahead and introduce yourself to the world?
- Yeah, absolutely.
And thank you so much for having me on today.
Yep. So like you mentioned, I'm Tim Osmina.
I'm over here at AlphaSense.
I'm one of our senior demand-gen managers
and I help run our COE, which is our center of excellence.
A lot of my role pertains to a lot of our different channels.
So email marketing, our different content syndication
and top of funnel spend, as well as certain things
on the website like chat.
So this is where conversational marketing comes into play.
- Awesome.
And so before we go into the website and all things chat,
let's take a step back and let's learn a little bit
about AlphaSense.
So you guys are this global market intelligence platform.
What is AlphaSense?
And I'm sure a lot of people kind of see pieces about it,
but they don't actually know they interact with it.
What is AlphaSense and what do you guys do?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So one of the first things you'll notice,
we have like AI all over our website
if you ever go to alfSense.com.
But basically we are the leading market intelligence platform
that we leverage the power of AI to really cut through
the noise and the chaos that is information
in the business world today.
We help all of our different users find some really good insights
in the key information that they're looking for
through a very extensive universe of content.
So we have everything from SSC filings, broker research,
expert call libraries, news outlets, regulatory documents.
So just so many pieces of information
that can actually be found,
we help you sift through all that.
It's kind of like we're the Google for a business person.
So like whatever you're looking for,
you can find it really easily and quickly.
So we have over 3,500 corporations
and different financial institutions that use AlphaSense
and it's a lot of big names.
So 85% of the S&P 100, 97% of the DAO 30,
all of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies
and just so many different businesses
across a wide range of industries.
So a lot of awesome, amazing customers.
- That's awesome.
So a ton of customers, a ton of data
that you're serving these customers.
Can you tell me a little bit
about your buyer and kind of the persona
that you as a demand-gen professional
are trying to get into a sales cycle?
Can you tell me about who those people are
and kind of what your sales process looks like today?
- Yeah.
So one of those things is that AlphaSense
can reach such a wide range of people.
We have everyone from life science companies, tech companies,
financial institutions, energy and industrial folks.
And that's just at a very high level industry level.
From there, we can then break it down
into corporate intelligence folks,
different investor relations, our different analysts.
And so we have such a vast range of personas
and people that we go after
that we need to make sure that we're really customizing
all of the language we put out there
to make it a personalized experience
whenever someone comes to the website,
whenever we put any marketing material in front of them.
So needing some sort of technology
to help personalize things
when they make it back to the website is key.
And that's where qualified comes into play.
- That's awesome.
And so we're kind of at the time of the year,
but which is kind of the connective tissue
between you talking about your customers
and where qualified comes in,
where we're talking about planning for next year.
We're talking about pipeline generation
and what our targets are for next year.
In your world right now,
where does pipe gen sit on your priority list?
And are these conversations,
I know you're newer to AlphaSense,
like you've been there for a little while now,
but like is this process and this planning process different
than maybe it was a year ago
with everything kind of going on in the world?
What is the life of Tim look like today
from like a 2020 planning perspective?
- Yeah, okay, I'm kidding.
Where it's definitely top of mind,
pipeline gen is something that we think about every day.
At AlphaSense we have quicker sales cycles.
So a lot of the pipeline we generate in quarter
also closes in quarter.
So we can't have something where, you know, like,
oh, we had a softer Q2, so that's gonna impact Q4.
It's, no, we have a lot of levers that we can pull on our end
to try to help increase conversions,
get more names through, generate more opportunities
and actually influence pipeline and revenue in quarter.
So obviously we have a lot of planning
that goes into place now for 2023,
but we also have kind of the pieces on the board
to make the move and impact in quarter money.
- Awesome.
- Q4 frame of mind right now.
- Oh yeah, and 2023 planning.
- Oh yeah, both of the team time.
And so you're talking about the website earlier
and how like you're driving all these different personas
to the website, you're making sure
that you guys have really thoughtful language
for those people.
Tell me about the website.
How do you view, before we go into qualified,
like how do you view the potential of the website?
How does it kind of fit in to how you think
about pipeline generation?
We always talk about the website being this untapped channel
and everything you do drives people here
and then you stick people with forms
and you're not ready to interact with them
and you're missing on this magical moment.
Like how do you think about the power
of the corporate website?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So I think in a perfect world,
it would be someone shows up to the website,
they fill out a form,
they talk to a sales rep and they buy from you.
But we all know that does not happen like ever.
So like you were mentioning,
not everyone just comes to the website,
not everyone fills out a form.
We wanna make sure that there's an experience
in between for every user.
So the pandemic obviously impacted a lot of the ways
that businesses work.
And nowadays, you're not just gonna go walk into a store,
you're not gonna go always call up a business.
You're gonna start doing a lot of research on your own.
And if all we're doing is pushing bottom of funnel assets
and things in your face the entire time,
you're just gonna disengage with the website.
So we need to make sure that depending on
whether it's behavioral or just your demographics,
demographics, everything like that,
when you're coming to the website,
we provide the correct experience
that's actually going to help you and educate you.
There's a lot of the give and the take
in the overall marketing motion and sales motion.
So we definitely don't wanna have our website
be one where all we do is take.
So we wanna help leave these people on
kind of the choose your own adventure,
but backed by data.
So they come to the website,
we are helping serve up more top of funnel, blog assets,
educational thought leadership pieces
to people that might be really new to alpha sense.
But then as they keep coming back to the website,
as they engage with more of our pieces of content,
that's when we start pushing them a little bit more
and closer to sales to actually get those conversions,
make sure that they know that we're here
if they need to speak with anyone,
if they need to ask any questions.
And that's really when in my mind,
conversational marketing comes into play
is like the one place where we're not being pushy,
we're answering any question that the site visitor may have.
But at the end of the day,
we're trying to drive towards outcomes
that we want as a business, but also just being helpful.
- I think you nailed it.
It's all about personalization
and those custom experiences.
Like I think what might have worked a few years ago
one size fits all chatbots, like that will no longer cut it.
You have unique people with unique needs
and you wanna give them those unique experiences,
whether it's top of funnel content or a live sales rep.
We've been talking a lot about the importance
of personalized experiences.
And in order to deliver that personalized website experience,
you need to basically connect your website
with your other systems of record.
And for you guys, it's Salesforce
and for most customers, it's Salesforce.
And then you guys also have this Marchetto layer
and you wanna make sure that your website
and Salesforce and Marchetto
are all working really well together.
So you know who's on the site,
you can serve them up with experiences.
Why is it so important that those three things
and platforms are talking to each other
and working together?
- Yeah, absolutely.
I think the reason why it's so important
for all these different platforms to speak to each other
is at the end of the day, we need connected ecosystems
within our technology.
We can't have silos that, you know,
this platform understands this information
while this platform can't.
So if we're trying to, let's say for instance,
target the same people,
we'd have to build multiple different lists.
We wouldn't always have, you know,
exact apples to apples matches.
And that means we're missing out on certain,
on showing proper experiences to certain people.
So when it came to Salesforce and qualified,
obviously we all know the relationship there
is extremely strong.
The integration sync everything is very powerful.
But then adding on that Marchetto layer
is kind of a new thing that was a really fun experience
that the qualified team
and getting the Marchetto integration built out was,
like as marketers, we're living out of Marchetto.
We're living out of our marketing automation platform.
Our sellers are living out of Salesforce and CRM.
And then our website, kind of the core of the website now
has qualified there.
So we want to make sure all these different technologies
could speak to each other.
So as we're targeting folks out of Marchetto
for the list we pull to send to certain emails
that we're sending for different PPC ads,
basically all these dollars that we're putting into market,
we target these specific folks.
But now when they come back to the website,
we can target those exact same people
without skipping a beat.
Qualified's now reading all the information from Marchetto.
It's writing information on Marchetto.
I can read anything from Salesforce,
can push anything to Salesforce.
So it's really cool to see this kind of one to one to one
experience that's now happening between the three systems.
And especially since we live out of them all day.
- Awesome.
And so fun fact for the audiences,
you were really instrumental in helping us build
our Marchetto integration.
What did you need as a demand-gen marketer?
How did these systems work together?
What was that process like?
I just kind of heard about it through the grapevine,
but like what was that like as kind of a user?
- No, it was awesome.
I love seeing when customer or actually when businesses
listen to customers.
And this was something that as we were evaluating qualified
and looking at everything, it just kept saying like,
wow, this would be really cool if we could just also
target the same people that were like pushing toward
digital ads and all that fun stuff.
So shout out to Logan.
He's our QUSA.
He helped facilitate a lot of the conversations.
But it was a really cool experience.
I think having the back and forth just how much
qualified listened to what we had to say,
put some feedback out into the market to a couple of businesses
saying like, hey, what does this look like?
Is this kind of what you thought this would be?
And when sometimes we'd say just flat out,
you're like, no, this is not actually what we were expecting.
We kind of wanted this to be like, oh, that's perfect.
This is amazing.
We needed this feedback.
They'd then update it the next week.
We see a running working piece of it.
So it was really cool to go from ideation all the way
through the execution and going live with the integration.
- Well, that's awesome.
You're so grateful because you're helping shape
that product for a bunch of other customers.
So it's awesome.
And it's so important to your point
that all these systems work together seamlessly.
Your marketing source of truth, your CRM, your website,
that's what allows you to know who's on the site,
deliver those personalized experiences.
We call that qualified for advertising or qualified for ABM.
And it's all about, I think, especially right now,
the payoff, if you're spending all this money,
if you're putting all these programs in market
and you get them to your site
and then you can't engage them, what a waste.
And in this moment where like, we need to be efficient,
we need to maximize dollars, you have to have
that kind of communication between those platforms.
Can you tell me a little bit about just like overall
reception to the qualified application from your team?
Like how does sales and marketing view this application?
How has it made your lives easier?
Like how does the AlphaSense team feel about qualified?
Is kind of part of your tech stack?
- Yeah, so this was one of those things
where depending on where a business is at
in the maturity level of all the different technologies
that they use, sometimes it takes a little bit more time
and effort to get something like conversation marketing
up off the ground.
It doesn't fit into the normal like email ads,
just like the general website and like social type channels.
So the initial conversations at AlphaSense,
they started a little slow, but then as soon as people
actually saw what the platform can do, what the experience,
what, how it can change, how we're pulling
in all this personalization and really making people
understand that, oh no, like they're walking into
our digital storefront, which is our website.
And instead of just, you know, we spent,
like you were mentioning all this, these dollars
to get them to the website and then we just leave them there,
we don't answer any questions,
it's just a blank experience.
We're now actually proactively having conversations
with these people that we want on the website.
Our sellers, they're getting notified when,
hey, this account that you own, it's a target account,
it's now on the website, they can start that conversation
right now in real time in the now when they're on the website
not hoping that they fill out a form,
not hoping that they call the sales line
and then risking the drop off of between filling out the form
and the sales are reaching out.
It's, they're on the website, our sellers can now
just talk to them immediately.
And they also know that it's not always gonna be,
hey, we're booking a meeting from this call,
it's at least, let's start a human interaction
and start building rapport with this company.
It's owning that relationship from the second
a prospect comes to the website,
our sellers can now put a face to the name
and actually just help steer the conversation early on
instead of only being reactive and waiting
for like an inbound lead to come in or just doing
just cold calls, no one likes cold calls, right?
So if they can have those much warmer conversations,
our sellers absolutely love it.
And then when it, sorry.
- That's fantastic.
(laughs)
- Keep going.
- Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm just on the marketing side then.
So obviously our sellers love it,
the amount of conversations they can have
and just own that relationship is huge,
but then jumping to the marketing side,
this is where kind of the the aha moments started happening
where with the ABM team, when they're gonna be putting
on this very specific event that goes to the, you know,
creme de la creme of all customers and everything like that.
What happens when they come back to the website?
Oh, well, now we can actually ask them,
"Hey, did you catch that email inviting you
to this really cool event?"
Well, also our sellers can then jump into that conversation,
answer any questions that they have.
So it adds kind of the final element
to all of our different marketing campaigns
where instead of just, "All right, email sent,
we'll maybe add a triggered email if they respond
or if they engage with that email."
Now no campaign is complete without thinking,
okay, since we're driving them back to the website,
we're taking all this effort to actually, you know,
put something really good in the market.
What happens next?
What is the next best thing?
And that's what we use Qualify for.
- That's so great.
It's no longer an afterthought.
It's now kind of baked into your process.
You touched on something we talk about a lot,
which is like, hope is not a strategy.
Like this whole, like used to cross your fingers and say,
okay, once they get to the website,
will they fill out a form?
Will they respond to my follow up?
There are all of these like opportunities
for missed connections, if you will.
And it kind of puts you as the business
a little bit more in the driver's seat of like,
"Okay, we can try and engage them
and we can have this conversation
and we can generate pipeline in real time."
And that it's good to feel like you have control
of that versus just hoping all the time.
- Absolutely.
- So we're calling our solution the pipeline cloud.
It's built on the foundation
of the Salesforce Connected website.
It's all about conversations.
It's all about maximizing your ad dollars.
It's also about two other things that we talk about,
which are maximizing your outbound efforts
and then gathering signals of buyer intent.
Are you guys using Qualified in conjunction
with kind of what you're doing from an outbound perspective?
- Yes and no.
So internally, this is one of those things where,
if we look at the crawl, walk, run type approach,
we're like, in my mind, I would consider
we're like starting to jog.
I think we still have so much room to go on.
And part of growing more is getting
all of our account executives,
all of our account managers within Qualified.
So when it comes to outbound motions,
we definitely have a team of what we call internally DGRs
or demand generation reps that can definitely help out
with that.
Whether it's, you know, they're sending different outreach
emails and they come back to the website,
well, guess what?
They can get that specialized notification that says,
hey, someone that you're currently emailing,
engage with one of your emails, came back to the website.
And so they have all that context
to start those conversations.
So we do have a lot of plays going.
I don't think we're quite where we wanna be yet,
but we are definitely getting there.
- Okay.
Well, it's like for us, when we kind of turned that on,
we call it the one to punch the outreach email
or the sales off email to a greeting, hey, like,
so you just clicked through my email,
you're interested in learning more about this
than this like wow moment.
I like to watch it 'cause I've always logged into our app
and watch our reps interact and feel those.
And those have such high conversion rates
'cause it's like, okay, you've peaked their interest.
So I'm excited to see what you guys,
where you go with that.
And then I also know you're excited about kind of this ability
to harness all of this buyer intent from website behavior
for what they're researching on the web
to kind of get the flywheel spinning.
Where's your head at with regards to signals
and the buyer intent product
and how you guys can potentially use it in the future?
- Absolutely.
So this is signals is another one of those things
where I feel like qualified in your team
and everyone did a really good job
of listening to kind of the customers
and adapting the feature itself.
So when it first came out, you know,
we could see all the web data who's trending,
who's, you know, ice cold, who's warmer
and like some of those engagements on the website.
But now I think where signals is really shining
is in context.
So you're understanding in one place,
all right, do they care about what you're doing
by coming back to the website more?
But not only that, like where are they going on the website?
Based on all of that, like what can we start providing
like in from the ABM lens?
Where can we start driving these people
from these ABM accounts based on their previous activities?
When they click on digital ads,
when they click on emails, when they're sent something,
it all shows up in that view.
And so that just keeps providing more and more context.
And in my mind right now, when partnering with sellers,
context is king.
So if we tell them, hey, someone was on the website,
they'll be like, okay, that's cool.
I'll reach out to these people.
But if we can say, hey, this person click the ad
that looked exactly like this,
these were the exact words on it.
It was actually a trial request ad.
Like this was very bottom of funnel.
They came back to the website,
you can see they filled out this form here.
And then the seller can sit there and be like,
oh, no, this is more powerful.
I actually have context.
I know exactly what it is.
And it gives them more insight into how they should start
this next conversation.
So you can use it from the seller side,
from the marketing side, like I mentioned with the ABM lens.
But then overall too, one of my favorite things
is actually within signals you have in sales force
and not in sales force.
So I don't know about you, but if I can grow my TAM
based on people that I didn't know
we should even be targeting, but see that, hey,
this company that does not exist in sales force yet
has been on your website six times in the last week.
They've been looking at the pricing pages, case studies pages.
Like these are all very bottom of the funnel piece.
Like, hey, guess what, outbound?
Call this person 'cause they don't exist in sales force yet.
We didn't know we should be calling them,
but now we know.
So it helps you answer the question of like,
you don't know what you don't know.
- Yeah, well, it's so fun to see you guys
utilizing kind of every part of the pipeline cloud.
You're all in on the connected website,
you have Marketo and Salesforce to make your website smart.
You're all in on conversations.
You guys are starting to really double down on the people
who are coming back to your site
from your marketing efforts and your up on efforts
and then using that intent data to fuel the rest, right?
To prioritize your up on efforts, your ad efforts,
and then drive people back to the site
to have a conversation.
That's like the magic.
That's the beauty that we want all of our customers.
So let's talk about, you've mentioned Logan a few times.
So I know it's your best friend, QSA or qualified success architects.
These programs are living, breathing programs, right?
You always have new events, new initiatives, new targets.
How has having kind of a dedicated partner,
how has that gone for you guys at OfficeOps?
- Yeah, I think there's so many different added benefits
to having a QSA.
So I think right off the badges initially,
in terms of implementation,
it helps for basically making it
so you don't have to rebuild things in six months.
'Cause you know,
Alphasense, we're still a startup.
We're growing like crazy.
Our business is, every three months,
our business looks completely different.
We're just growing and scaling.
So if we had to keep rebuilding things,
every three to six months, that would just be a headache.
But having Logan in,
he's able to equip us with a lot of the best practices
across all qualified customers, understanding like, okay,
so as a business, we wanna scale and make it
so we don't wanna have to jump in and rebuild.
So this is how we should set up
a lot of these different experiences,
different than what we had originally thought.
So now instead of going in and changing,
if you have 50 or 100 experiences,
updating 50 or 100 experiences every time
that we update our form language or update,
our value props or our mission pieces,
now all we have to do is change it in like one spot
and everything gets updated.
So the scalability that Logan was able to bring is awesome.
Also just, yeah, I'm a huge data guy.
So being able to understand, okay,
what actually is best practice for not only
what Logan has seen for all of the different customers
that qualified has, but he's able to,
he has kind of a financial service background as well.
So he understands our business really well
and he's able to kind of dive in and be like, actually,
so this is the average for all of qualified,
but when he thinks about what he would do
if he were looking at our customers
and who we engage with, he's able to kind of also apply
like best practices there, like, hey,
this might be best to everyone,
but for your customer specifically,
we wanna go this route.
So then we can A/B test that obviously
'cause we still wanna double check on our own,
but it's a really, really good starting point.
- That's fantastic.
He's awesome, team is awesome.
- Absolutely.
- And on the thread of data,
let's talk about the numbers that matter most,
which are results, pipeline, revenue, ROI,
how things have been going for you guys at AlphaSense
with qualified in terms of business impact.
- Oh, so bad, just terrible.
- No.
(laughs)
- Yeah?
- No, we've, so that's why I'm on the call.
- No, no, no, no.
- So we've had some really good results.
I know there's, I've spoken to a lot of folks
and I'll get to that,
actually answer that question here in a second,
but I've spoken to a lot of folks that have,
you know, with the way the economy is right now
and with how funding is going for businesses,
they've turned off chat.
And my first initial thought is,
you were not using chat correctly
because there is no way it should ever be
on the chopping block with us internally,
like we've generated, I believe over like 3 million
in pipeline over a million dollars in attributed bookings.
So it's not just like influence like it showed up
on the website, but this is full on using our,
our custom weighted attribution model,
multitouch, all the fun buzzwords going in there,
but over a million dollars in close one revenue,
it's a lot, it's when we look at our overall ROI
for qualified, it's like over 4100%.
So like not like 400% or 40%, like 4100%.
Like it's over that.
So like that's, that's something where
if you can get that much return on marketing spend,
like you should never chop that.
- That's fantastic.
And I think that's the name of the game right now
as marketers is how do you prove ROI?
How do you make sure that you're maximizing your investments,
your website being kind of your number one
sales and marketing asset?
That's awesome.
So I know we're nearing the end of the time, Tim,
any advice you have for demand gen marketers
looking to 2023 and looking to kind of invest
in conversational marketing,
where would you, where would you get started?
It can be kind of intimidating at the beginning.
Where would you, where would you begin?
- Yeah, I would start by first off just asking
the what if questions like what if when we drove people
to the website, we could continue the exact same conversation
with whatever marketing material
they were engaging with prior to coming to the website?
Like what if we can continue that?
What if we could steer them to what the actual outcome
we want when they land on our website?
So just even thinking about that, like it's so powerful
to think of like we target them with specific language
to come back to the website, we continue that exact
conversation, but not only that, we then have the ability
to keep pushing them forward, how we want them to move forward,
but also answer any questions that they have in real time.
So just thinking about the possibilities, huge what if.
The next piece is start small.
The best thing you can do when you're first investing
and getting some sort of conversational marketing,
like if you're gonna qualify to stand up,
just get the at bats, start collecting data.
So you start with your big umbrella experiences
that are will eventually turn into your default
and general experiences, but at least you're getting
the at bats, you're starting to collect data,
see what types of conversations people actually want
on your website.
And then from there, you can start leveraging some
of those different conversational pieces
and the different verbiage that you're using
on your more higher intent pages.
So then that's when you move to your pricing pages,
your contact desk pages, your case studies pages.
All these things were like, cool,
if they're on like resource pages, downloading a high level
guide or the reading the blog, they have the general experience,
but for all the really high intent folks that are wondering
about pricing that wanna contact the business,
you have that direct line to sales
to make a really, really big immediate impact.
And then from there, you just start working out
all of your different lines of personalization,
whether you wanna start with your different web pages
or personas and different things like that.
But for sure, just start small crawl.
You know, you can always crawl first,
understand the data, start walking.
Like I even mentioned, I think we're like,
more than power walking, we're kinda like,
like slow jog mid jogging right now.
I just think there's so much more opportunity
where we can just keep leveling up internally.
But the sky's really the limit.
And I think end game for conversational marketing
is every campaign you put out in the market
should have some sort of chat experience.
It should have the way to follow up in real time
when people land on the website.
So you basically just stop burning dollars.
- I love it. Well, I can't wait to see you guys sprint
into next year.
Thank you, no pun intended.
Thank you so much for the time to join us today.
It's so cool to see how you guys are using qualified
in the pipeline cloud in this fully baked motion.
It's not this one off effort.
You're thinking about your tech stack,
you're thinking about your personas,
you're thinking about how you can evolve it.
So you guys are such an inspiration
and we're so grateful to have you as a customer
and to have you kind of drop your knowledge with us today.
So thanks again, Tim and we'll see you very soon.
- Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.
- Yeah, thanks.
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