Qualified with Maura Rivera

In this conversation, Stacey Epstein interviews Maura Rivera, CMO of Qualified, discussing the evolution of the company, the integration of AI in marketing, and the role of AISDR agents in enhancing pipeline generation. Maura shares her journey from Salesforce to Qualified, the importance of marketing in early-stage startups, and how AI is transforming the marketing landscape. The discussion also touches on the future of AI in marketing and the potential for more autonomous marketing solutions.

Transcript

Stacey Epstein:
I’m very excited to have a CMO on the show today—Maura Rivera from Qualified is here with us. I think Qualified might be one of the most advanced companies in AI for marketing and sales. And I’ll let you explain it better than I can, but I know you’re no longer a scrappy startup. How many employees are you at now?

Maura Rivera:
We’re at about 220.

Stacey Epstein:
Still feels small, I’m sure—but you’re making a big impact in the AI space. So let’s dive in. Maura, tell us a little about your background and how you ended up at Qualified.

Maura Rivera:
Thanks for having me, Stacey—this is such a fun break from the usual chaos. I’ve been at Qualified for six years now, and the company’s about six and a half years old. So I’ve been here basically from the start. Before that, I was at Salesforce and then at a survey company called GetFeedback. It’s been a really fun ride.

Stacey Epstein:
Amazing. I actually know Craig, the founder of Qualified, from my ServiceMax days when he was at Salesforce. I’m guessing that’s where you met too?

Maura Rivera:
Yes! My first job out of college was actually working for Craig when he was CMO at Salesforce. It was a total marketing bootcamp—I learned so much just by observing. Then Craig and Sean, our other co-founder, went on to start GetFeedback. I joined them there to lead product marketing and customer marketing. And when they started Qualified, I was all in. The vision was: how do we help marketers generate pipeline in a better way?

We’ve pivoted with the rise of AI, but pipeline generation has always been core to our mission. Craig asked me to join the startup, and I jumped in. Now we’re a few hundred employees, fully remote, with about a thousand customers. And many of them have hired our AI SDR agent to automate the pipeline gen motion. It’s been a blast.

Stacey Epstein:
So you’ve basically only ever worked for Craig!

Maura Rivera:
Pretty much. I had a brief stint as a recruiting coordinator—but otherwise, yeah! Craig left Salesforce, and I stayed on different teams there, like the broadcast team and the creative team. But I kept following Craig and Sean because once you find a team you trust, why fix what isn’t broken?

Our whole founding team has worked together across multiple companies, and a lot of our exec team is ex-Salesforce. That level of trust is rare, and I realize how lucky we are. I talk to other CMOs building new relationships, and it makes me appreciate what we have.

Stacey Epstein:
Totally agree. I’ve followed some great leaders myself, and when it works, it works. So you were truly part of the early days—like, were you literally in a garage?

Maura Rivera:
Close! It was an apartment near the ballpark in San Francisco. The five co-founders plus three of us as first hires—me in marketing, Brandon in engineering, and Tony in sales. I was the only woman at the time. It was not glamorous at all. But it was exciting. You could hear every sales call and engineering discussion—there were no silos. And that original crew of eight? We’re all still here.

Stacey Epstein:
Let’s just pause and appreciate the fact that one of the very first hires was a marketer. That says a lot.

Maura Rivera:
Yes! That came from Craig being a CMO—he understood the value of brand and content early. And Sean’s a product marketer at heart. So they totally prioritized marketing from day one, which isn’t always the case at startups.

Stacey Epstein:
Definitely. And things are so different now. I remember when I joined ServiceMax as employee #13—totally scrappy. But with AI now, it’s a whole different game. I mean, even this podcast—I've been able to produce it all on my own thanks to AI.

Let’s use that as a segue. Qualified has evolved a lot. Tell us what the original vision was and where you are now.

Maura Rivera:
We started as a conversational solution. The idea was: you're driving traffic to your site, asking people to fill out a form, and then… what? You send them away and hope someone follows up.

We evolved from there into an AI SDR solution focused on inbound. Qualified is all about making sure you get ROI from all the demand you’re generating. So instead of sending qualified leads to a human SDR and hoping for the best, now you can have an AI SDR agent work those leads in real time.

We call our agent Piper—because she generates pipeline. But what’s fun is that our customers rename their agents. Box named theirs Bella. Brex has Brexton. Greenhouse named theirs Daisy. It makes it feel more like hiring a teammate than using a tool.

Piper can have live conversations, send emails, and schedule meetings. Her whole goal is to automate that pipeline gen motion—and solve the pain marketers have always felt: wondering if leads are being worked properly or quickly enough. Now, an agent can do it—at scale.

Stacey Epstein:
So cool. So you started out helping marketers capture and qualify inbound interest. Then AI came along and made it all even better.

Maura Rivera:
Exactly. It’s almost like Chapter 2 for us. Craig saw what was coming and pushed us to rethink everything—our product, positioning, pricing, packaging. It was a whirlwind. I had just come back from maternity leave when ChatGPT launched!

Our roots are still in conversation and pipeline gen, but now AI agents are at the center of it.

Stacey Epstein:
It’s fascinating. I was in the industry during the shift to cloud and then again when mobile and tablets changed everything. But those were mostly about how software was delivered. AI actually lets us reimagine what the software does.

So let me ask you this—how far does Piper go in the funnel? Is she replacing nurture too? Or is it just handraisers?

Maura Rivera:
Great question. We were born to handle the MQL-to-sales handoff—those high-intent folks filling out forms or clicking “contact sales.” But about six months ago, we launched email capabilities for Piper. Now, she can follow up with all of your leads—including those further up the funnel.

Where we saw a big unlock was with event leads. You spend huge budgets generating them, and then they often sit untouched. Our customer Greenhouse told us 60% of their leads weren’t getting worked by humans. Now Piper follows up on all of them.

At Qualified, we doubled down on using her for event follow-up this year and saw 3x pipeline from events in Q1 versus last year. All because the leads were being worked—quickly and intelligently. So yes, she’s replacing both nurture and that SDR handoff.

Stacey Epstein:
That’s huge. Nurture is often just automated emails, and they don’t account for context—like what event someone went to or what you demoed. Adding a human-like element at that stage is really powerful.

Maura Rivera:
Totally. And it’s not cost-efficient to have humans work those leads. They’d be miserable doing it, and the ROI wouldn’t be there. With Piper, it’s scalable and smart.

Stacey Epstein:
Okay, I have to ask. I was driving up the 101 yesterday and saw your billboard. And I was like—Piper? White Lotus? Was that intentional?

Maura Rivera:
Ha! There are definitely a lot of White Lotus memes in our Slack. But we actually designed Piper to be modeled after our best real-life SDR—her name is Blake, and she’s now one of our top sales leaders. She was fast, personal, thoughtful—just the dream SDR. When she got promoted, I was thrilled for her but sad for me. Piper is our AI version of Blake. The White Lotus resemblance was just a funny coincidence.

Stacey Epstein:
Love it. I have a puppy named Piper—so I’m surrounded by Pipers too!

Last question. You've already pivoted once in a major way. What’s next? Where is this going?

Maura Rivera:
We’re working on a big launch in a few weeks that will show the “brain” behind Piper—how she builds her sales strategy for each buyer.

But what really excites me longer term is what this means for reporting. Imagine asking Piper, “What did you do today?” Or having voice-prompted dashboards for CMOs that answer: “What’s working? What’s not? What campaigns are generating pipeline?” That’s the future I’m excited about.

We’ve gone from AI tools to copilots, and now to fully agentic marketing. We’re just at the beginning—and I can’t wait to see what 2025 brings.

Stacey Epstein:
It’s such an exciting time. I can’t wait to keep watching your progress. You’ll be part of the first batch of podcast episodes when we launch, so I’ll let you know when it’s out. Let’s check back in six or 12 months. Thank you!