Sage generates a large amount of leads from their marketing campaigns and free trials. Many of these leads were not turning into pipeline because the Sales team didn't have the bandwidth to follow up with them.

Aligning Marketing to qualified opportunities, sales pipeline and revenue

Sage is the global market leader for integrated accounting, payroll & payment, and ERP systems for small and medium businesses.

As a modern marketer, Nisha Goklaney, Marketing Director at Sage, had a vision to move away from using Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) as a measure of success. She wanted to align her marketing team to qualified opportunities and pipeline generated for the sales team.

"After talking to my sales directors, I realized we should stop using MQLs as a measure of success. So we realigned the marketing team internally, and squarely focused on qualified opportunities and new business we are delivering for the sales team."

Identifying the bottleneck - low MQL to SQL ratio

The first bottleneck Nisha identified in her marketing funnel was an extremely low MQL to SQL ratio - 2.5%.

The marketing team generates thousands of leads per month from their marketing programs. But the work to convert these leads into actual sales opportunities was tedious, manual, and laborious.

"We didn't have enough SDRs to qualify the volume of leads my marketing team was bringing in. So I decided to look for a scalable and efficient way to help our sales team drive meaningful opportunities."

This created a downstream burden on the Sales team, who had to sift through all the marketing generated leads for sales-ready conversations.

Nisha wanted to improve the efficiency and output of her sales and marketing team.

While researching for solutions, Nisha came across Saleswhale, an automated lead conversion platform. Intrigued, she reached out to Saleswhale's CEO, Gabriel, to set up a pilot for her team.

Leadership is all about experimentation

The goal was to run a test in a constrained, low risk manner-  to see if Saleswhale worked. Nisha and her marketing team worked with Saleswhale to design the trial, and success parameters.

"At Sage, we are always looking for a better way of doing things. There's a lot of trust and faith from our leadership - who are 100% supportive to test new things. This made it possible to experiment with new, innovative solutions like Saleswhale."

Nisha and her marketing team decided to experiment Saleswhale with neglected leads sitting in their database.

Delivering sales-ready opportunities for the sales team

Saleswhale allowed Nisha's team to reach out to leads at scale, with personalized, thoughtful two-way contextual conversations. Her team leveraged existing marketing collateral to design powerful AI Conversation Flows.

When a lead expresses interest, the relevant sales person is seamlessly looped into the conversation. This allowed the sales team to spend less time on tedious follow-up.

Their first campaign yielded over 210 new sales opportunities within 2 months, which was a huge game changer for Sage's marketing team.

When asked about the impact of the results, Nisha shares, “We are now driving more new prospects, and new business for Sales. And doing more with the same amount of money. It's a really good result."