Leica Geosystems Increases Conversions 300% with Conversica for 23x ROI

The Challenge

• Keep new leads moving through the pipeline
• Reconnect with untouched group of aging, dormant leads

In 2020, Leica Geosystems took a deeper dive into their lead analytics to try to understand why their net new leads were not converting to MQLs at expected rates. While the data was not able to prove 100% that their Pardot lead scoring methodology was flawed, there was enough evidence to warrant trying a new tactic to nurture and warm up leads.

The Solution

• Holly Hudson, Revenue Digital Assistant™ for Marketing
• Skills: Cultivate Early Interest, Reactivate Dormant Demand

As Kerry and her team investigated Conversica, they started to see the bigger picture of what was possible.

“We saw that we could not only cultivate the early interest with our net-new leads, but also work on this big database of leads that had been dormant for the past three to six months. The Sales team had only reached out once or twice to most of them with no further action, so we knew there had to be nuggets of interest in there.”

Enter Holly Hudson, Revenue Digital Assistant for Marketing.

Initially, Hexagon identified a group of leads that were unworked to run a four-month pilot campaign.

With the success of the trial run, Hexagon moved up the timeline for full adoption and quickly integrated Holly with Salesforce CRM.

“The real power of the solution came through that integration with our CRM,” Kerry says. “Using Salesforce to set up all of our conversations and campaigns with the AI really helped us scale. From there, the volume of leads we give to Holly has just gone up and up.”

Holly now initiates personalized conversations with all leads who engage with content to surface hand-raisers and nurture those who have not yet indicated they are ready to talk to Sales. Holly also autonomously circles back to older leads, using relevant dialog tailored to the lead’s last action to reignite their interest.

“We’ve been able to prove that we really don’t know what we don’t know. Our buyers get information in lots of ways and may have intent to buy, regardless of what we see in their digital activity. Sometimes we have people who don’t have any buying signals, but when Holly reaches out, we learn they’ve done all of their research, and know exactly what they want to buy. And then there are those that didn’t stay engaged with sales because we stopped trying to engage them. Having Holly check in on these dormant leads has really uncovered a lot of opportunity that could have been missed.”

The combined power of immediate follow-up for new interest plus circling back around with older leads means no lead gets left behind and every opportunity gets worked.

“As Marketers, we know so much of the buyer’s journey is online, but it is also influenced by offline activity, like conversations with colleagues, trusted advisors, industry peers and thought leaders,” Kerry says. “So being able to have a way to send personal outreach to both warm up that new interest right away and also consistently follow up on older leads is a huge value-add.”

Advice for New Conversica Users

1. Integrate with your CRM as soon as possible so your Revenue Digital Assistant can turn all that data into solid gold—no human intervention required.
   “Plugging Holly into Salesforce opened a whole new world of possibilities for automated conversation triggers, segmentation and message tailoring. Just as important is that Holly can feed the insights from the conversation back into our CRM for our Sales reps to leverage. It changes the game in terms of scalability.”
   
2. Prep your Sales team for an onslaught of new hand-raisers delivered by their new digital coworker.
   “We really humanized the AI internally. When our Sales teams talk about working with Holly, they really mean it. It catches on like wildfire when you’ve got ambassadors within the Sales organization saying, ‘Holly sent me all these hot leads last week!’ Now everybody wants to work with her.”  
3. Don’t underestimate the potential in your aged lead stock—make sure you’re combing through everything to find the hidden pearls.
   “When the AI engages with someone who has engaged with us before, we know there’s interest there, but the timing might just be off. So when you circle back to those older leads, you’ll find new opportunities—especially if you use what you already know about them to really target the messaging.”