Great AI tool to assist with Account Executive follow-up
May 16, 2017

Great AI tool to assist with Account Executive follow-up

Vinny Poliseno | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Conversica

We are currently using Conversica to handle inbound request for all leads that aren't considered to be an MQL. A little over 3 months and we've pushed over 9,000 leads through Conversica to engage with these low-quality leads. Early success of 22 SQLs generated and 6 deals closed with help from Conversica. Without Conversica these leads would have just sat in SFDC and would not have been touched by our account executives. They would have been included in our marketing automation nurture programs but those look marketing fluffer and Conversica appears to be a sales rep. We've focused primarily on using Conversica for new business deals but plans are to leverage the tool for upsell and re-engagement as well.
  • When Converisca reaches out to prospects the message look like a rep actually constructed these messages instead of looking like a marketing generated HTML email
  • Never gets discouraged from no responses from prospects
  • Daily alerts to keep responsible reps in line with Hot, Reviewable or At Risk Leads
  • Never stops working
  • It took use roughly a month to get our assistant to learn our prospect's response language to correct mark the lead as Hot or to be Reviewed. This was enforced by our sales manager for reps to provide feedback to the tool.
  • When we were first on boarded we would have to reach out to our CSM to set up conversations for Conversica to have with our prospects. Since then we've been included in their Beta version for us to have full control of the conversation making our team quicker at getting these turned around and built into the marketing person's checklist of items to be completed before starting a new campaign.
  • Outreach to top of funnel leads
  • Checks and balance of rep follow up on hot leads
  • Reviving of leads or lost opps where the prospect stop responding to a rep
Actually we didn't really vet any competitors out in the market place after we saw and trialed Conversica for 90 days. Their tool was easy to get launched within our SFDC environment and begin pushing campaigns through the tool. Had we spent more time vetting others we'd probably just be starting our 90 trial and would have missed out on the deals we've already closed using Conversica.
For any organization where sales cherrypicks MQLs and ignores all other marketing leads this tool is great to get built into your lead follow-up process. For us, we are placing all inbound lead requests for our top of funnel marketing into Conversica's queue. From there Conversica works this lead until either 3 things happen:
1. Lead agrees to talk to a sales rep
2. Lead just never responds
3. Lead asks to not be contacted
When #1 happens our rep jumps on this lead and treats it as if it is an MQL now. If #2 happens we then throw this lead into a marketing automation nurture program for roughly 45 days then throw it back into Conversica's queue as a re-engagement follow up. If #3 happens we at least tried to engage this lead.

Using Conversica

4 - A mixture between sales, marketing and management.
1 - This falls under my in-house support since it connects to our Salesforce environment. There isn't a whole lot of skills required to support this app as it is pretty well self-contained within Converisca's SFDC package.
  • Outreach out to low quality or top of funnel leads
  • Reviving old MQLs who stop responding to our account executives
  • Upsell outreach to fill potential upsells for team
  • We sell primarily to non-profit organizations. When we get inbound demo requests we are thinking about having Conversica reach out to all non dot org email addresses before passing along to account executives
Tool is extremely powerful but comes with a heavy price tag. As long as we close more than 30 deals with year with Conversica's assistance it will be an easy choice to renew. If we don't we will have to figure out if these funds are best spent in other lead generation places.

Conversica Implementation

Conversica has the implementation very well documented. In addition, to the documentation we were provided with a technical resource on the Conversica team to assist with getting the tool up and running within SFDC.
Change management was minimal
  • There honestly weren't any