The Challenge

Greenhouse was experiencing challenges many marketing teams are facing today: dips in organic, inbound traffic to the website, and the need for higher quality leads to hit aggressive pipeline goals.

Prior to using Qualified, Greenhouse was using Drift on their website for several years. Senior Growth Marketing Manager Kristina Finseth owned the Drift program, but became frustrated with the overall experience for four reasons:

1. Inaccurate visitor routing: Greenhouse’s marketing team ran into challenges rebuilding routing rules within Drift to match website visitors to owned accounts in Salesforce. This led to misrouted visitors and impacted overall pipeline. Drift’s technical limitations made Kristina and her team wary of even trying to build routing visitors to unowned accounts, since it seemed like Drift struggled to match and route based on Salesforce data effectively.
2. Poor rep adoption for live chat: Misrouted leads through Drift also sowed a lot of distrust from Greenhouse’s SDR team in its accuracy, leading to low adoption across the sales team. 
3. Erroneous meeting booking from web forms: Kristina and her team explored getting Drift Fastlane up and running to book meetings from their website forms, but again ran into issues with routing that made success challenging.
4. Lack of support: Despite raising flags multiple times to Drift’s support team, Kristina and her team at Greenhouse felt the support process was painful and made it challenging to optimize their Drift instance in a strategic way. “We were also paying Drift for additional services, and we needed more of an extension and true partnership to our team to help us optimize and drive more adoption.”

The Solution

Greenhouse looked to Qualified for a more optimized conversion engine across their website. Going through the evaluation, Kristina noted what made Qualified the better solution for their needs:

1. Deeper connection to Salesforce: “Qualified has a much deeper connection into Salesforce down to the custom field-level, which gave us a lot more flexibility.” During the evaluation, the Qualified team helped prove out Salesforce routing to help validate the connection to Salesforce in a technical workshop. 
2. Enhanced live chat UX: With Qualified AI Conversations, Kristina could see sales reps leaning into real-time engagement with website visitors: “We knew Qualified would give our inbound and outbound reps more visual context and a better way to engage with the right visitors in a meaningful way.” 
3. More meetings with Smart Buttons: With Qualified AIMeetings, Greenhouse would gain functionality to remove friction for visitors from owned accounts to easily book meetings from their website CTAs and meeting links.
4. Support & onboarding: Qualified’s approach to implementation and onboarding sealed the deal. “Qualified takes a much more consultative approach to serve as an extension of our team. During the evaluation we met with our dedicated Qualified Support Architect (QSA) to extensively walk through implementation timeline and ongoing optimization.” 

The Results

Kristina and the marketing team at Greenhouse worked with their dedicated QSA to come up with a bespoke phased rollout to ensure success from the start - crawling first with Qualified AI Meetings, then walking and running with Qualified AI Conversations.

In just two months live, Greenhouse has seen the following quantitative results on Qualified compared to Drift:

• 91% increase in meetings booked 
• $4.2M influenced pipeline 
• 2X ROI

Key Learnings

As a growth marketing leader with a ton of experience in implementing new technologies, Kristina has advice for other marketing leaders who may be interested in making the switch from Drift to Qualified. 

• Leverage your network, peer reviews, and references to validate: “Talk to other leaders who have made the switch, read user-verified reviews like on G2, and take the opportunity to do reference chats to help inform your decision.”
• Spending time troubleshooting support issues can hinder overall success: “In my experience, escalating your concerns to Drift will result in a lot of short-term attention (account health audit, switching of strategists, etc.) but it’s just that –short-term attention that still didn’t feel strategic or useful.”
• Making changes to any part of the marketing tech stack can be daunting, but choosing a platform that can act as a technology partner yields fast results: “Don’t beat yourself up by thinking, ‘maybe I’m just not utilizing this to its fullest potential, so switching might not make sense.’ I wasted multiple months working directly with Drift to try and get very simple strategies stood up and never actually solved for it. We went with Qualified and immediately were able to stand up key use cases in a matter of minutes.”