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See How CloudCheckr Converts Leads With Conversation Automation

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Deliver higher quality leads to Sales
Deliver higher quality leads to Sales
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Published 05/22/20
6 minutes read

Across industries, businesses are augmenting their workforces with an innovative technology to help attract, acquire and grow customers at scale, known as a Revenue Digital Assistant (RDA).

Revenue Digital Assistants operate on a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and intelligent automation to connect with leads and customers in personalized, two-way conversations. In this way, RDAs act as virtual team members assisting revenue-generating teams such as Marketing, Sales, or Customer Success. But what does that actually look like in practice? How can businesses get the most out of their RDA deployments to better resonate with their leads or customers?

To help answer these questions, let’s take a look at how CloudCheckr, a total visibility cloud management platform, uses its Revenue Digital Assistants™ to convert more leads into pipeline.

During the SiriusDecisions Virtual Summit, Rashmi Vittal (former CMO at Conversica) joined Eric Potter (Director of Marketing Technology at CloudCheckr) and Deb Schleede (Senior Marketing Operations Manager at CloudCheckr) to discuss how CloudCheckr uses their Revenue Digital Assistant, their results, and a few best practices they picked up along the way. For those who missed the event or just want a refresher, this blog post summarizes a few of the talking points from that case study presentation.

The Lead Conversion Challenge

When CloudCheckr brought on the Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant for Sales and Marketing in 2018, the team was facing a number of common challenges including leads “stuck” in the top or middle of the funnel and an underperforming email campaign strategy. The goal was to accelerate lead conversion at each stage of the funnel, as well as alleviate much of the sales capacity challenges occupying their team of Sales Development Reps (SDRs) to allow them to focus more on hot leads.

The CloudCheckr team started by bucketing everything into two conversation groups or “skills”. These skills were:

  1. REACTIVATE Dormant Demand to proactively initiate contact with prospects who previously expressed interest, but who went dark for more than 90 days,
  2. And POST-EVENT Engagement to connect with leads as the first point of contact following an event such as a customer conference, trade show, booth visit, webinar, demo request, or virtual event.

The Revenue Digital Assistant hired by CloudCheckr made it easy to connect with every lead (hot or cold) and autonomously match them with the proper action; whether elevating a sales-ready lead to the attention of an SDR or putting non-Sales-ready leads into a nurture stream. The CloudCheckr team used the Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant to hit everyone in their CRM database which resulted in more qualification meetings with SDRs.

Following CloudCheckr’s initial successes with their RDA, the team decided to grow the capabilities of the Revenue Digital Assistant to include additional skills such as PRE-EVENT Outreach to drive attendance to webinars and events, ENGAGE Demand to act as the first point of contact for incoming leads, and CULTIVATE Early Interest to reach out to prospects who signaled potential interest but have not yet requested contact.

Using a Revenue Digital Assistant with Conversational AI

Revenue Digital Assistants are the next generation of intelligent automation helping companies attract, acquire, and grow customers at scale through prompt, persistent, and personalized messages.

At the moment the contact arrives (e.g. through a badge scan at an event or by completing a lead form), the RDA crafts a personalized message to engage the lead and determine their interest in speaking to a Salesperson. If the lead has no interest in talking to Sales, the RDA opts them out of communications and moves on. The time saved by not going after these uninterested contacts cannot be understated.

Research conducted by Conversica finds that it takes seven to 10 attempts on average to determine intent, but that the majority of Salespeople only make two to three attempts. Expecting your Sales staff to reach out nearly a dozen times to each and every incoming lead is simply not reasonable or sustainable, which is why companies like CloudCheckr opt for a Revenue Digital Assistant to better handle lead outreach.

Similarly, RDAs are very prompt in their communications. Conversica research finds that leads touched within five minutes of attending a virtual event or in-person booth scan (once those come back) are 21 times more likely to qualify than leads touched after 30 minutes or longer.

While RDAs are ready for out-of-the-box deployment, they are also amenable to quick and easy customization for specific campaigns. Additionally, the Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant seamlessly integrates into marketing automation or CRM platforms including Salesforce, Marketo, and Hubspot.

Lead Conversion Results

Before bringing on a Revenue Digital Assistant to help attract and acquire leads, CloudCheckr had an 11 percent engagement rate, 1 percent hot lead rate, and .5 percent opportunity rate.

“After using Conversica, everything skyrocketed,” says Deb Schleede, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at CloudCheckr. “Engagement rates have improved, but those are turning into actual opportunities.”

The Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant helped CloudCheckr achieve a 15 percent engagement rate, a 5 percent hot lead rate, and a 2.3 percent opportunity rate. The IVA and team accomplished this increased performance through a combination of personalization, persistence, timing, and offering value in their communications with prospects.

Best Practices for Converting Leads to Sales

The CloudCheckr team learned a lot about how to best use a Revenue Digital Assistant to attract, acquire and grow customers in a scalable and efficient manner.

Here are a few of their best practices and lessons learned:

  • The more specific your message is, the more engagement you will see. People are busy and sometimes they forget even interacting with your company. Give them a reminder. For example, if you are following up after a webinar, you say so in your initial email.
  • Offer content pieces and resources ahead of a call with an expert or Salesperson. CloudCheckr reports seeing a huge jump in engagement after employing this method because it makes messages more relatable and valuable than pushing a Sales call alone.
  • Consider audience segmentation. Be careful not to send messages to everyone in your CRM as CloudCheckr did initially. Your CRM probably contains existing customers and prospects already in conversations with your Sales team. It’s best to develop a set of best practices to reach out to contacts based on audience segmentation, ICPs, and current status.
  • Use an IVA to connect with leads who haven’t yet hit the MQL threshold. While lead scoring is valuable in predicting when a contact might be interested in a meeting with Sales, it is only an estimate. By directly asking “are you interested?” at scale, a Revenue Digital Assistant can help accelerate leads stuck in the funnel.
  • Wake up leads who’ve fallen off the radar. Occasionally, leads will consume lots of Marketing materials before going silent. CloudCheckr uses their Revenue Digital Assistant to continue to politely and persistently chase down these leads and nurture them until they express intent.

After implementing these best practices, CloudCheckr saw even more promising results. This is why they decided to bring on a second junior-level Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant to go after leads with low to no engagement. Already, the team is garnering a lot of positive outcomes.

CloudChecker plans to roll out two additional Conversica segments to help generate demand and retain that demand by targeting net-new cold contacts showing buyer’s intent and contacting within target accounts who have not responded to a Sales Rep in >30 days.

What will your success story be?

See what Conversica customers have to say about how Revenue Digital Assistants enable them to attract, acquire and grow customers at scale.

And listen to the on-demand webinar “Funnel Optimization to ABM: How CloudCheckr Uses Intelligent Virtual Assistants to Convert More Leads into Pipeline.”

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