San Francisco, California-based startup Qualified has announced its latest funding round, which it said would help it develop its products and expand its team.
The conversational sales platform offers features such as alerts for important buyers arriving on corporate sites, allowing sales teams to address them with live chat, chatbot and voice calling functionality.
Last month, the company launched a new flagship platform known as Qualified X, including features such as sales leaderboards to pinpoint those in need of coaching and integration with Salesforce data to route visitors based on that information.
“In today’s remote selling environment, it’s no longer enough to sit back and wait for buyers to initiate inbound conversations. That’s like expecting to hit a home run without ever taking a swing,” said Kraig Swensrud, co-founder and CEO at Qualified. “Through every digital channel, proactive engagement increases the number of conversations with buyers. Qualified X arms today’s virtual sales reps with the knowledge and the tools they need to execute proactive conversations, right on their corporate websites.”
Since its foundation in 2018, the company has raised almost $70mn across three funding rounds. Its latest Series B round, announced yesterday, saw the company raise $51mn from lead investors Salesforce Ventures alongside Redpoint and Norwest Venture Partners.
“Conversational sales and marketing is no longer a ‘nice to have.’ It’s mission critical for fast-growing businesses, and table stakes for modern buyers,” said Kraig Swensrud. “The world’s top CMOs and demand gen leaders are turning to Qualified as a new way to meet with their most important buyers the moment they arrive on the website. There’s no better partner than Salesforce Ventures to help us accelerate Qualified’s growth and bring this solution to Salesforce customers around the world.”
The Conversational Sales Revolution
The investment from Salesforce was said to reinforce Qualified’s status as the only conversational sales platform purpose built for the Salesforce Sales Cloud. Salesforce CMO Sarah Franklin recently joined as a board of directors observer and former Salesforce SVP Dan Darcy joined Qualified as Chief Customer Officer.
“Qualified represents an entirely new way for B2B companies to engage buyers,” said Bill Patterson, EVP of CRM Applications at Salesforce. “When marketing and inbound sales teams use this solution with Sales Cloud, the #1 growth platform for sales, they see a notable impact on pipeline. We are thrilled about our growing partnership with Qualified and their success within the Salesforce ecosystem.”
Qualified said it was aiming to double its headcount by the end of the year, and would invest funds in expanding its engineering, sales, marketing and customer success teams.
