Marketing Automation 2.0: Our investment in Qualified

Throughout my career as a founder and operator I have strongly believed that teams are the leading indicator of success for a company. This is especially true in the first few years of a startup, when much is unclear and every decision can meaningfully influence the outcome. When meeting companies, I look for founders who are authentic to the problem they are solving, have strong product / market instincts, laserlike focus, intensity around execution and high integrity.

There are few teams I can think of that embody these traits as much as the founding team at Qualified. I am fortunate to have worked directly with Kraig, Sean, Bing, Gopal and Thani at Salesforce and Campaign Monitor where I saw these traits on display first hand.

Today, I am excited to share that our journey together will continue with Redpoint leading the investment in Qualified, with participation from Salesforce as they take the next step in redefining marketing automation.

For many years, B2B businesses have relied on marketing automation software to do the job of qualifying leads and moving them down the funnel. But increasingly, these tools have become unwieldy, burdened by integration-related technical debt and complexity, resulting in industry conversion rates idling at ~2–3 percent.

That’s where Qualified comes in. It frees up companies to actually scale, because it helps them focus on the right prospects — the qualified ones — and effectively nurture them down the funnel through smart automation. To provide focus on the right opportunities, Qualified uses a combination of demographic and behavioral tools: it leverages third-party data, which it layers against info inside of a company’s Salesforce instance to paint a picture of the prospect, and it’s built a machine-learning rules engine to more efficiently track — and drive — leads’ activity. That last part is essential: thanks to the smart rules, it can serve up the right next step for a prospect automatically. For example, connecting a salesperson in real time via a Zoom-like experience with voice, video, chat and screen sharing built-in.

You can read more about what they’re up to here and feel free to message me if you’re interested in joining the adventure.