Hexagon Embraces Conversica Revenue Digital Assistants™ for Marketing and Sales

Hexagon Tests Out Their Revenue Digital Assistant™

Hexagon AB started using Conversica for one of their subsidiary companies in late 2020, which was obviously a difficult year for Marketers and Sellers—and everyone else—due to COVID. The company had previously invested in participating in a number of events and tradeshows. But when in-person gatherings were shuttered, the team had to figure out new ways of attracting customers.

“We have a very active Sales force because we’re in a lot of different industries. So, usually, we would be attending a lot of events,” says Kerry Trivers, VP of Marketing for Geosystems at Hexagon AB. “And so when they went away, we actually had the opportunity to shift a lot of our focus and investments more into the digital world.”

The team needed to shift focus away from in-person events to digital events, webinars, and paid social media campaigns. But these virtual events didn’t offer the same ability to engage contacts as in-person interactions. That presented a great challenge for Hexagon—and a great opportunity, if tackled properly.

The team decided to take a deeper look into their numbers and found that only 10% of the leads they brought in were passed to Sales.

“That became our benchmark,” says Trivers. “And so at that point, I started looking into, ‘What else could we be doing?’ And that’s when I started researching AI. And that’s where we found Conversica, because we really had a need to warm up leads that we were bringing into the organization that were net-new.”

The Hexagon team started by using a Conversica Revenue Digital Assistant to autonomously engage leads—generated via content on their website or third-party media—in two-way conversations. Since these contacts were considered “early stage,” it wasn’t the most valuable audience for Salespeople to target. The Marketing team knew that it was simply too early to pass these leads along to Sales. But the team still suspected there was some value hidden within this swath of leads, so they sent their Revenue Digital Assistant after them.

“Literally, as soon as we hit go we had people responding as hot leads within the hour,” says Trivers. “We had opportunity value that we didn’t even know was there, just by having an AI do some outreach on those existing leads.”

The team was delighted to bring in so many conversation-qualified leads. Quickly, Trivers’s team discovered value beyond just cultivating early interest from net new leads with digital event attendees. With their Revenue Digital Assistant “Holly,” the team could deliver a personalized touch to large swaths of leads who had been dormant for 3 to 6 months to elevate handraisers.

This became a prime opportunity for Trivers’ team. Realizing that some golden nuggets of interest were hidden in there meant that the team could use Conversica Revenue Digital Assistants to scalably and autonomously discover sales-ready leads.

Learnings Along the Way

Marketers are learning all the time. Testing out new strategies and improving over time is part of the job. First things first, the Hexagon team learned to tailor their messaging to make two-way conversations delivered by the Revenue Digital Assistant more relevant to the specific parties they were contacting. This was especially useful when grouping people in their CRM into various campaigns. Luckily, this improved lead engagement with their Revenue Digital Assistant.

By persistently reaching out to leads, Hexagon was able to free up their Sales staff while simultaneously engaging leads and identifying hot leads. The team discovered seven touches was the magic number to determine who was ready to talk to Sales.

Additionally, Trivers stresses that humanizing the AI internally helps build confidence in the technology.

“It is truly important, once you bring on an AI, that you start thinking of that AI as human. We’ve really humanized our AI. Our Sales teams always talk about working with Holly,” Trivers says. “It catches on like wildfire. Your Sales organization is going to be like, ‘Oh my God, we love Holly.’ Everybody wants to work with Holly.”

Lastly, Trivers’s team loves working with Conversica’s Customer Success team as they provide advice on how to best use the technology.

“I can’t say how much we appreciate working with our Customer Success team at Conversica,” Trivers says. “They’ve been instrumental to our success and keep us continuously improving in not only the conversations, but how we leverage even the new features that are coming out in the platform.”

The Results of Working With Holly, the Revenue Digital Assistant

All in all, the results Hexagon saw from using a Revenue Digital Assistant are astounding. The company has closed thousands of dollars of opportunity value, directly attributable to the Conversation Automation solution provided by Conversica.

“Our engagement rate was 20% plus, even on old leads, which is way above our average,” Trivers says. “A lot of the people that we were engaging were actually becoming hot. And hot lead rates coming in were 10% plus.”

Trivers says the real power of the solution came through when integrating Conversica into their CRM.

“It makes it easier for anyone in the organization, and for Holly, or your AI, to actually work whatever leads you need,” Trivers says. “It’s just growing and growing and growing every single month. We are so excited about Conversica.”

Are you ready to start your own Revenue Digital Assistant success story? Read about more of our amazing customers in our eBook: Conversational AI Heroes: Legendary Marketing & Sales Customer Stories.