‘We’re passionately curious, so we always have our ears to the ground – paying attention to what’s happening with our customers, both inside and outside of the industries we serve’: Jacqueline Saleem, Founder & CEO of Qualified Digital

“Our goal is to continue growing organically over the next several years—50% + per year.”

Qualified Digital, or QD, is a full-service digital agency focused on customer experience, using data technology to drive positive outcomes for our customers including growth, agility and loyalty. Jacqueline Saleem founded it in 2017.

As a journalist, I find Qualified Digital quite striking. From the emotional branding standpoint to the high energy and motivation I felt just talking with the founder and CEO, Jacqueline Saleem, Qualified Digital stands out. Her sense of pride is infectious - and left an impact on me throughout the interview and as I learned about the company.     

Interview Highlights

Q. How did you create the brand? And please brief us about the history so far.

From a brand perspective, we began by defining clear values, and connecting those values to the purpose we wanted this business to serve. Having a high EQ drives us, and has from the very beginning. This resonates with the highly talented people who join our team, and the select, like-valued clients we pursue. We also focus on codifying growth thinking, which has allowed us to scale at a tremendous rate, onboarding more talent and clients, while staying true to our mission.    

As branding specialists, it should come as no surprise that we managed all of our branding internally. Along with QD’s Creative Director, we went through a mission, vision, and value exercise and carefully designed a branding strategy specific to QD.

Q. What makes – and keeps – Qualified Digital relevant?

We’re passionately curious, so we always have our ears to the ground – paying attention to what’s happening with our customers, both inside and outside of the industries we serve. Moreover, we constantly explore ways to upskill and create synergies within and across our practices, and are always on the lookout for opportunities to create innovation. The QD team as a whole is remarkable – they are truly passionate about what they do, and that allows us to be at the forefront of what’s happening in the market.

Q. What is your vision for the company? And what strategies do you implement to ensure a culture of innovation at your company?

Identifying and understanding our values was an important exercise. We are through and through human-centric. Whether it’s the teams we work with or partnering with our customers, we focus on human values. What we are talking about is humans and being tied to what they care about and what they need.

Since the beginning, we have always been a horizontally-built company; we are always thinking about how to maximize multiple practices operating together. That has allowed us to scale within accounts and not have to focus on a project here, or a project there, but in a real, true partnership with our customers to help them grow. And we hope to continue growing organically over the next several years—50%+ per year.

Q. How skilled is the Qualified Digital team of experts, and how do they bring value to the company?

This is a great question. Yes, our team is masterful. There’s one thing we are careful about—it is making sure that every single person that we bring on, train, and spend time with is absolutely at the top of their professional capabilities.

More importantly, we are an extremely senior-level team of practitioners and will continue to hire new employees at this level as we grow. This way, we can provide more cost-effective solutions by ensuring speed and quality. From a rate perspective, we may not always be the cheapest, but from project, initiative, and value perspectives, we are far more cost-efficient by virtue of having more senior talent. I never worry about having to go to a sales meeting and sell something that’s not going to be delivered at the absolute highest quality.

Q. What are the various services Qualified Digital offers?

We are a business strategy-led company, with emphasis also in experience strategy and technology strategy. Within these core strategic offerings, we provide everything from user experience design, visual design, and branding.

Our content strategy and content writing services are fairly new but have so far exceeded client expectations. In addition, we offer data services – that’s everything from large master data management and CDP strategy, to website data and optimization and personalization. Our technology services bring great ideas to life with strong teams of architects and engineers and a proven track record for high-quality delivery.

Q. In what industries are your clients? Can you provide us with one or two success stories describing the challenges your clients faced and how your solutions helped them overcome those challenges?

We work across a few different sectors, including B2B, high tech, and SaaS. We also serve a handful of healthcare, manufacturing, and consumer companies.

I would like to share a success story about one of our clients—CommonSpirit Health. CommonSpirit is the second largest healthcare system in the United States and is a parent company to many hospitals such as Dignity Health (among others that would resonate depending upon your region). 

CommonSpirit was struggling to roll out its marketing automation platform and work with some other partners as well as Adobe to try to get communications out and run their revenue modeling from within Marketo. To address this, we created the business strategy as well as the people, process, and technology strategies for them to not only roll out the platform but also to be able to maintain and grow it. Also, through this partnership, we started to scale out into helping them with their optimization and revenue-creating strategies.

Q. Will Qualified Digital be expanding, bringing on any new services that we should be aware of?

We are always bringing in new services. This year, we will be investing in many areas, including master data management, CDP, real-time personalization, content strategy, and content writing services.

Q. About the future, where do you see Qualified Digital a couple of years from now?

I see us working with more and more large brands, solving more of their holistic ecosystem, and experience strategy challenges. From a size perspective, I would like QD to be two to three times bigger than what we are today, with over 150 employees onboard.

Importantly, in terms of market sentiment, I would love for people to identify the name of our brand and know us as an independent Customer Experience company that delivers value to customers.

Q. What is your final message to The Silicon Review readers; your current and future clients and partners?

What we see all too often is people investing in solution integration partners or getting consultants that are independent of the actual deliverable work. When selecting partners, it’s important to think about the ecosystem and experience system as one connected experience. You want to have a partner who will help you think through how it fits into the business, not just how to turn on certain engines or machinery. 

At the end of the day, there are lots of technologies out there and we work with all of them, but their magic comes to life when it’s founded on a really strong strategy. A strategy that not only considers the experience for the customer, but also the impact on the internal teams and the processes that they need to have in place to be able to continue to deliver with all of that great intelligence and technology.

Jacqueline Saleem | In Her Own Words

My initial background was creative, but interestingly, growing up I was going to school for mathematics and art. I kind of laugh at that now because art and mathematics are a lot of what comes together in a Customer Experience ecosystem strategy. And so for me, I started in creative, and very quickly in my first few roles, I got into EduTech, driving the cutting edge of technology at the time, building flash websites, and burning CD-ROMs. Over the years, I continued my journey with some of the values that we bring to QD today. I have worked through many different digital consultancies with a consistent theme of often joining places that are smaller and helping them scale and grow into bigger consultancies. I like being a builder and a grower, so that has been a consistent thing for me throughout my professional career.

“Yes, our team is masterful. There’s one thing we are careful about—it is making sure that every single person that we bring on, train, and spend time with is absolutely at the top of their professional capabilities.”

“We work across a few different sectors, including B2B, high tech, and SaaS. We also serve a handful of healthcare, manufacturing, and consumer companies.”

“I see us working with more and more large brands, solving more of their holistic ecosystem, and experience strategy challenges.”