Qlik and Salesloft: The Ultimate Sales Power Couple

Why a top data and analytics technology company found Salesloft’s platform to be a perfect match for their ambitious demand generation vision.

Ever been in a relationship where you felt held back? Somehow, your partner just didn’t inspire you to greatness – or worse, even brought you down? Now compare that to a connection with someone who is supportive of your growth – someone who allows you to become the best possible version of yourself.  

Before finding Salesloft, Qlik's BDRs used an email-only solution; however, it lacked important features such as prescribed steps to take, customized templates, ties to social media activities, and a dialer. BDRs also had to record activity manually. The overall lack of cohesion created inconsistency in the messaging and assets being sent out — impacting Qlik's prospecting efficiency. "We were averaging way above the industry's standard of # of attempts per opportunity because the BDRs were just going off of memory where to call," recalls Jim Melton Director. "We knew we had to use our CRM and outbound efforts in a way that could provide more benefit to us."

Qlik was confident in the value its solutions could bring to customers, but needed better tools and processes to power a global demand center.  So it was no surprise that once they implemented Salesloft, Qlik would leverage every scrap of available functionality and information to take their BDRs’ demand generation prowess to the next level of team productivity and performance. Now four years into a very healthy and productive relationship, Qlik and Salesloft have achieved enviable power couple status — and are looking to deepen their relationship even further — in the wake of 2024 Q3 results such as: 

• 96% BDR adoption rate, with 80% of these being highly engaged users
• 67% faster (from 21 days to 7) for new reps to qualify a lead
• ~1.7k increase of accounts touched by reps (Q3 2023 vs Q3 2022)
• ~14.0M influenced opportunities (those with at least one Cadence step completed) in pipeline for a single quarter, with $800k of closed-won revenue

That kind of magic only happens when each party is supportive of helping the other be all they can be. Here’s the origin story of this beautiful partnership — when Qlik broke up with the typical fragmented sales tech stack and started experiencing #Saleslove.

#PowerRelationshipGoals:

1. Decrease ramp time for new reps and deliver value from day one
2. Create accountability and continuity
3. Establish continuous sales excellence
4. Continue expanding user success post-onboarding
5. Deliver value and prove ROI

1. Decreasing ramp time for new reps and delivering value from day one.

Even the best sales tools are of little value if no one uses them. One of Qlik’s top goals was to make the most of their investment, beginning the moment new team members started their onboarding. Prior to Salesloft, reps were on their own when it came to figuring out what to say to which prospects at what point in time. Resources for new hires were scarce and what did exist was an unorganized patchwork of processes and documents. It was very much a sink or swim experience — and no one wins when reps sink.

Julianne DeVincenzo, a former Qlik BDR now turned Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Analytics, recalls that when she arrived at the organization, “We changed our Salesloft Onboarding process from the ground-up.” Jessica Buzink, Martech Operations Analyst at Qlik, sheds light on the change. “Now, not only do we use Salesoft’s excellent, recommended new user training, but we have been able to build on that by adding SharePoint onboarding centers, video libraries with training videos, and Julianne’s cadence library (more about this later). We’ve custom tailored our Salesloft onboarding experience with what BDRs need, and most of them find it very easy to catch on — they love the platform and resources.”

Because Salesloft is powerful but easy to use, those in roles like Julianne and Jessica are able to spend more time on strategic, impactful initiatives like elevating the overall sales rep onboarding process instead of getting lost in the day-to-day distractions and hand-holding of onboarding reps with multiple, less intuitive tools. The result? Time to first MQL or SQL for new hires has evaporated, shrinking from 21 days or higher to a mere seven days.

Julianne DeVincenzo Product Marketing Manager at Cloud Analytics

How Salesloft has powered her career advancement: “I'm now using the experience and insights learned in my Demand Center days with Salesloft in a product marketing role. I work with customer and persona journeys in relation to the Qlik product portfolio.”

Quick take on the heart of Salesloft for her: “The data helps you sell better, and you can only get that data by using the platform that helps you sell. Salesloft is the easiest way to gather all that information, and retain it for both prospecting use as well as internal growth and design.” → Make the Salesloft connection

2. Create accountability and continuity in a busy environment.

At Qlik, the Demand Center is a hub of high-volume activity. It’s the first line for both inbound leads and outbound prospecting. But managing and tracking such a huge amount of activity with multiple tools often leaves gaps, such as accountability gaps and knowledge gaps when a BDR or SDR moves on and someone new picks up their accounts. By using a single sales engagement platform from a single partner, Qlik has the visibility and control to easily create, organize, evaluate, and evangelize the content needed for their Demand Center team to succeed from their very first day.

Julianne explains why the Salesloft platform was a game changer for accountability. “Before, it was hard to tell if the emails being sent were getting past certain firewalls or calls were getting through in certain ways. With Salesloft — even though we’re sending such a high volume of emails — everything is being tracked and you can actually go back and check on them to make sure that’s happening.”

Julianne also reflects on a second benefit of the instantly available, detailed account data that’s tracked, something that is of particular importance in high-turnover roles like BDRs. "I think it's nice as a rep to go in and see everything that's been done right. If a new person takes over someone’s territory, they can see all the past conversations that have been had plus whatever cadence they are in.” 

What do the experts say?

In 2022, Forrester Consulting conducted a commissioned study, The Total Economic Impact™ of Salesloft, on behalf of Salesloft to reveal how enterprise customers benefited from its platform over a 3-year period. Here are just a few of their findings:

• 394% ROI
• 60% improvement in response-to-opportunity rate
• 30% improvement in closed-won deals
• 50% increase in annual prospecting activities
• $744k savings by consolidating sales technology

Download the full study

3. Increase revenue by establishing continuous sales excellence.

Signing up for a trial is a key component of conversion for Qlik prospects. However, convincing prospects to take that step can be a challenge. The key to maximizing valuable revenue opportunities is finding out what actually works and then being able to easily templatize, package, and redeploy the best-performing work across the entire organization for repeatable results. Salesloft’s single platform enables both the visibility and collaboration options needed to do just that.

“Our goal is always following best practices to enhance our use case,” explains Jessica. “We went in and looked at every single thing to see what was working — and what wasn’t. We did a mass cleanup of cadence libraries, tags, and snippets upfront. The English-version of our Inbound Trial Cadence is now our best-performing cadence and has seen reply rates as high as 39%.”

The Cadence product in Salesloft enables the Qlik team to manage, monitor, and keep a pulse on the content and success of all emails sent. As power users, the Qlik team likes to take things a step further. In Julianne’s case, she undertook the creation of a massive Cadence library, where Qlik’s Salesloft users can easily find high-performing series of content for nearly any prospecting activity, and deploy them in an optimal order at the ideal pace.

To boost adoption of the Cadences she has carefully created and curated, Julianne also created Qlik’s Creative Cadence Club committee, based on a suggestion from Salesloft Customer Service Managers Patrick McGill and Nate Harris. She selected a BDR from each geography to encourage the team  to put some skin in the email game. After presenting a theme, she encouraged each region’s “Club rep” to make it their own, customized in format and tone for their particular area’s audience. The ability to collaborate and experiment this way is why Jessica considers Salesloft to be, “a tool that is designed to help managers teach prospecting best practices.”

Best-practice spotlight: Adding value by understanding differences

Keeping things hidden is never good for a relationship, which is why Qlik used Salesloft to break their Geo groups out of silos. Powered by analytics and surfaced in their quarterly business reviews with their dedicated Salesloft CSMs, the Qlik team uncovered new insights to improve performance across regions:

• Different regions prefer different forms of communication (email vs. phone vs. LinkedIn)
• Language nuances are real - and important to adhere to for best results
• Involving Geo BDRs led to higher cadence adoptions
• Top performers disposition much more quickly than those with less opportunities

Jessica describes the outcome of the discovery work between her team and Salesloft as this: “We realized that there are unique outcomes for each Geo, each team functioning in a different way. Now we're trying to support those unique approaches rather than putting everybody in one bucket.”

4. Continue expanding user success and revenue impact post-onboarding.

Stagnation is the enemy of ongoing success. Because buyers and the market are always evolving, sellers musttoo. Two key concerns when it comes to making that happen are (1) is the developer of your sales tech solution committed to evolving as well, and (2) how do you roll out changes and new features in a way that excites users instead of overwhelming them?

With Salesloft, both the initial deployment and rollout of new features are segmented for optimal success. As users quickly become experts and see results from their adoption, new functionality is introduced. Qlik used automation rules for years, but the recent feature updates to the user-friendly automation builder has helped them  streamline their automation in Salesloft — moving from over 80 to just 10 rules while maintaining all functionality. They’re using the automations builder to touch hot leads faster. When a prospect triggers the new hot leads automation, they are immediately enrolled in a hot leads Cadence that flags reps to call these prospects right away. Jessica loves the recommended rollout process, believing that, “Rolling out these additional features as they come out is a huge and yet simple way to improve the day-to-day functions of what our folks are doing.”

At this very moment, Qlik is experiencing what might be their most exciting rollout yet, Salesloft Rhythm. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Rhythm turns buyer behavior into seller action. By creating prioritized workflows for every seller, Qlik’s Demand Center reps can book more meetings, close deals faster, and hit their numbers every time. According to Jessica, the new capability has been very well received. 

“The feedback from our reps has been positive,” she reveals. “Rhythm is a perfect example of how we see AI shaping the future of companies using data we already have to prioritize day-to-day actions in a way which will make the most of our investment in Salesloft, and our outbound efforts,” Jessica continues. “The filtering of due steps based on time zone, account, and type allow individuals, teams and companies to focus strategically. As an example, managers have seen the value in prioritizing tasks from key accounts in alignment with ABM/S strategies.”

In addition, the flexibility of Salesloft's open API allows Qlik to use data from Salesloft within their own product. As industry leaders in data integration and analytics, Qlik's internal teams are building applications to allow analytics sharing with BDRs, their account managers, and managers to help guide the BDRs’ professional growth and training. The API functionality also allows Qlik to make strategic decisions relating to content and automation.

We’re not jealous of your other technologies

At Salesloft, we get that you have other important relationships. For Qlik, our ability to play nicely with 6Sense, Lean Data, and Salesforce was particularly important. But a sales platform only works for everyone if it’s integrated with *your* other revenue and marketing investments. That’s why we’ve developed more than 160 integrations across customer lifecycle technologies, your systems of record, and your communications tools. If your technology isn’t among them, you’re still covered with our open API. Best of all, it’s all built on a secure, easy-to-govern platform — click here to learn more.

5. Deliver value and prove ROI.

A lot of companies that grow quickly often have tools and processes that grow haphazardly along with them. When it comes to a sales tech stack, that can cause deep issues. For Qlik, having many different processes and ways to do things prior to Salesloft made it difficult to understand how to optimize the return on all the time spent prospecting, tracking, and logging activities. Salesloft’s visibility and rich data — accessible in one single system — provided transformational answers to that important question.

“A solution like Salesloft makes each and every single one of those individual actions three times more valuable,” explains Jessica, “in large part due to the reduction of the time it takes to record actions in the CRM such as email, calls, and integration steps.  She continues, “It helps you prove the ROI of your time and your efforts — that was one of the original big draws (for purchasing Salesloft).”

The time that Salesloft gives users back is also an important way to reinvest in the business to deliver even more value. Instead of agonizing over creating a long email from scratch that may or not be effective, Qlik’s BDRs can instead focus on something like making Linkedin Sales Navigator lists — actual prospecting efforts that can generate revenue — plus have time to learn, believe in, and focus on the data, analytics, and integration they’re selling. There is internal value delivered as well — Jessica is quick to point out that time back gives her end-users a chance for more one-on-one engagement for training, and coaching too.

This power couple’s story wouldn’t be complete without a deeper look at what makes the platform that brought them together so special. Just as a series of dates doesn’t necessarily make a real relationship, a bag of parts or collection of capabilities doesn’t bring to your business what a true platform can. Here’s the difference — and why it matters:

1. A true platform offers integrated workflows. This makes it easy to use and saves time - which also saves money.
2. A true platform offers enterprise governance. It is global, and scales with you.
3. A true platform contains AI in the workflow. This not only saves time, but it delivers better outcomes.

Don’t settle for bits and pieces — your connection with buyers deserves to be whole, and your business will be the better for it. Salesloft’s authentic platform delivers enduring best outcomes to every seller, buyer, and prospect. It also gives you plenty of room, as Qlik has done, to grow and shape it to fit your unique needs and be your best self.

Selling is hard, which means happily ever after doesn’t just happen by accident. At Salesloft, we want sellers to be loved by the buyers they serve. Over seven years ago, we created a slightly nerdy but endearing little concept called #saleslove — a welcoming, intentional approach to celebrating our customers and sharing in their successes. It’s a genuine fusion of commerce and caring that means listening to your goals, your hopes, and your dreams of a better way to sell, then working with you to craft solutions that lift you beyond your obstacles. With a partner who’s all in on a successful, long-term relationship, you can act with certainty — and the way you sell will never be the same.

While there’s no end in sight for this #saleslove story, here’s a peek at what lies ahead in this power couple’s future:

"Our demand center runs like a very tight ship. We use our sales tools, we prospect hard, we use Salesloft because it works. It's the heartbeat of our global demand center. And now we're taking those best practices and applying them to other parts of our business."

— Julianne DeVincenzo, Product Marketing Manager, Cloud Analytics

Are you ready to feel the #saleslove? Make your connection with Salesloft today.