Qualified

What is Qualified?

Qualified is a San Francisco sales-and-marketing platform built around Piper, an AI SDR agent that engages inbound website visitors in real time, qualifies them against a buyer's ideal-customer profile, and books meetings with the right rep without a human writing each message. Founded in 2018 by former Salesforce executives Kraig Swensrud and Sean Whiteley, it raised $163M and became one of the best-known Salesforce-native pipeline tools before Salesforce itself acquired the company outright on April 1, 2026 for roughly $1.2 billion, folding Piper into Agentforce.

What does Qualified do?

Piper lives on your website and in your inbox rather than doing outbound prospecting: when a visitor lands on a page, Piper Conversations starts a real-time chat, asks qualifying questions, checks the visitor against your ICP using Salesforce CRM data and website-visitor intent signals, and either books an instant meeting via Piper Meetings or hands the lead to a rep. Piper Email keeps unconverted leads warm with automated nurture sequences, Piper Offers serves personalized content or an outbound offer mid-conversation, and Piper for Slack lets a sales team watch and jump into live conversations without leaving Slack. Two solution modes sit on top: Agentic Nurture works top-of-funnel leads that aren't yet sales-ready, and Agentic Product-Led Growth is built to convert free-trial or freemium users into paying customers before a human ever engages. The whole platform is Salesforce-native by design, it reads and writes CRM data directly rather than syncing through a generic integration layer, and is sold as one of three custom-priced plans (Premier, Enterprise, Ultimate) via a sales demo, not self-serve signup.

Key features

• Piper Conversations: Real-time website chat that qualifies a visitor against your ICP using live Salesforce CRM and intent data, then routes or books the meeting.
• Piper Meetings: Instant, no-back-and-forth scheduling straight out of a qualifying conversation.
• Piper Email + Offers: Automated nurture sequences for leads that aren't ready yet, plus mid-conversation personalized content/offers.
• Agentic Nurture / Agentic PLG: Two purpose-built modes, one works cold top-of-funnel leads, the other converts free-trial/freemium users into paying customers autonomously.
• Native Salesforce integration: Reads and writes Salesforce CRM data directly rather than through a generic sync layer, which is also why it requires Salesforce.

What are Qualified's use cases?

• Convert high-intent website traffic: A B2B SaaS company with real inbound volume but not enough reps to chat every visitor deploys Piper to qualify and book meetings with the visitors worth a rep's time, 24/7.
• Turn free-trial signups into revenue: A product-led-growth company routes trial users to Piper's Agentic PLG flow to identify buying signals and convert them to a paid plan without a human touch until late in the funnel.
• Nurture leads that aren't sales-ready: Marketing hands Piper a list of top-of-funnel leads; Agentic Nurture works them over time via email and on-site engagement until they cross the qualification bar.

What does Qualified integrate with?

• Salesforce CRM (native, required)
• Slack (Piper for Slack)
• Website — embeddable chat widget

Why use Qualified?

• Backed by real, named enterprise proof: Qualified's own case studies cite Asana (+22% pipeline) and Greenhouse ($27M in pipeline, 2,000+ meetings booked).
• Deep, purpose-built Salesforce-native integration — reads and writes CRM data directly instead of a bolted-on sync, a real edge for the many B2B teams already running Salesforce.
• Validated by the largest possible acquirer: Salesforce bought Qualified outright for ~$1.2B (closed April 1, 2026) specifically to fold Piper into Agentforce, rather than just partnering.
• Five distinct Piper products (Conversations, Email, Meetings, Offers, for Slack) cover the whole inbound-engagement motion, not just one channel.

Pros & cons

Qualified pricing

• Premier / Enterprise / Ultimate (custom)Custom

See current pricing on qualified.com ↗Compare Qualified alternatives →

Qualified review

Qualified earns its place in this category by being genuinely differentiated from the outbound-first AI SDRs that dominate it: Piper works inbound, live, on your website and in your inbox, deeply wired into Salesforce rather than treating the CRM as just another integration. The named case studies (Asana, Greenhouse) and the fact that Salesforce itself paid roughly $1.2 billion to acquire the company outright in April 2026 are real, verifiable signals of substance, not just marketing claims. The honest catches: Salesforce is a hard requirement, not an option, pricing is entirely custom (independent procurement data puts the median deal at $61,000/year), and — now that Salesforce owns it — the product's future is tied to Agentforce's roadmap rather than an independent vendor's. Pick Qualified if you're Salesforce-native and your bottleneck is converting inbound traffic; skip it if you need outbound prospecting or run on a different CRM.

The inbound counterpart to this category's outbound-first AI SDRs, genuinely Salesforce-native, and now literally owned by Salesforce after its April 2026 acquisition.

Frequently asked questions