All right, James. Hey, how’s it going man? It’s good to see you. I am super stoked that we are gonna have this no bullshit demo with you. No doubt so many of us have heard about Drift, . So yeah there’s a lot that happens. And I think there’s even some recent talk about what’s going on with chatbots today.

Are they valuable? Are they not? I certainly have someone calling me right now in real time who’s actually had great success. With chatbots. I personally have had varying degrees of success, but gosh, there’s so much more as you go to unpack what is this product really all about and, how can you leverage it?

So I’m super excited for you to take us through our favorite thing, the no bullshit demo and . And if you don’t mind, introduce yourself and then let’s kick things off. And why don’t you share a little bit about what the product is, what it does, why it exists today. And then we’ll go from there.

Fantastic. Yeah, thanks. Having me on Mike. I’m James Austin. Marks, you can probably see from the name tag. I work at Drift as a senior solution consultant, which essentially means I’m responsible for showcasing some of the capabilities of Drift across a variety of different kind of companies and different use cases.

So that’s why I’m gonna be walking you through that demo today. And it’s interesting what you said there about chatbots, I think in the last five to 10 years, where we’ve seen this explosion of chat. Before there was one definition of what it is, and now there’s so many different definitions, so definitely keen to clear that up and where Drift can differentiate from some of those in the market as well.

Yeah, I love that. Cool. Now I’m going to say that the worst words at the start of the demo, I’m gonna show some slides, but I promise they’re brief. So I will just to help illustrate what I’m talking about when I talk about Drift. So I’m gonna share my screen. I’m personally a visual learner, so I appreciate slides.

And okay. Even as a marketing ops professional, I still appreciate slides, but if you talk to some of our community they’re, they’ll be like, like Naomi, for example. Founding member of our community, she’ll say, yeah, I want you to present your deck backwards. Just to throw. Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah. I’ve seen done a lot of sales methodology like.

Just like slides for 20 minutes doesn’t work, but it’s okay’s a brief visa, a brief. Yeah. So Maurist I’m pulling this up essentially is to clear up that first point exactly, what is drift, how does it differentiate from those chat bots and what does it offer really? So the top of the screen there perfectly outlined what Drift is, right?

We call it the conversation cloud. Now it’s got three kind of branches. It will go into over marketing, sales, and service. But all it’s really about is engaging with those visitors when they come onto your site, trying to work out why they’ve come. And giving them the content that they want. Now, the way it does this is through our conversational ai.

You can see at the bottom there to have that intelligence that maybe lacks in some of the other chatbots where, certainly you can have a chatbot pop up and give you a generic message, but really where does that get you in terms of engaging with that audience Now with that value, why we see it being helpful for these different branches.

I’ll break it down via these kind of three boxes in front of you. From marketing. The primary case here really is that, a hell of a lot of money is spent to drive people to your website, whether that’s through search engine optimization, through paid ads, and all this effort goes into driving people through those campaigns to the site.

And once they get there, they’re usually left in devices, right? And they’re navigating themselves. And if nothing comes out of that, all of that money you’ve put before that step is essentially wasted. If you’re not coming out of that with some more information on who they are getting them to go for a certain call to action, that investment’s not been made the most of.

So that’s where we see that kind of benefit for marketing. Now, on the sales side, it’s a little bit more direct, right? When people are landing on the site. How are we going to engage with them? And this is a variety of ways to do this. Traditional chat bots, as we’ve discussed, will be completely automated where it’ll serve messages to them, see why they’re on the site and maybe give ’em some content, et cetera.

But drifts gonna allow real-time engagement with individuals as well. So it’s not just gonna be fully automated there. And all this is with that aims just generate more meetings from connecting with buyers, where they are on the site and kind of our most recent addition into the cloud.

It’s that conversational service piece, so this is almost in tandem with the other three, right? If you’ve got a dedicated sales team waiting for people to jump onto the site and engage with them what you don’t want is all of their time, clogged up with support requests, FAQs, you wanna deflect ’em away from any of those sales reps for service pieces, all around leveraging knowledge bases, ticket creation software to essentially allow all of those FAQs that come up to be answered quickly and move those people down the funnel or just help those that are existing customers.

So all this essentially is just engaging with people across all these different channels in one place. I love that. And one of our core questions is really thinking about, how the product really shines, right? And we try to get our no B, no BS demo. , participants to talk about three key examples of where the product really shines.

I think this is obviously three key examples right here. Why don’t we dive into like, why does a marketing operations professional, use your product or how do they interface with your product? Because at the end of the day there’s a number of people it sounds like that would probably touch this, not the least of which you just mentioned, right?

Which are sales, potentially support and marketers. But maybe if we could dive in on like, why do Mo Pros use the product and what could they gain out of this demo today? Absolutely, and that’s where I’m gonna show off what Drift can do, right? So it’s a really good question. Essentially, what does this look like?

And I’m gonna cover two sides. I’m gonna cover, first of all what it would look like, force one coming to your site, the experience that they deliver, and then from that side, internally, what can you see and how do you leverage that? So in this case today, what I’m gonna start with is an example that, market operations professionals will be familiar with, engaging with that paid ad that you’ve got in a place.

So I chose LinkedIn here and I’m gonna actually go for an example on the Drift website to make things really clear. So if we start with this point, this is where somebody, who you’re trying to reach out to is first gonna touch your company. So this is on Drift LinkedIn page, and this is an ad calling out particularly marketing executives to say, how’d you make your marketing dollars?

So in this case, if I pick an individual, let’s say I’m a digital marketing manager from Adobe, for example. They’re actually a Drift customer, but I’m gonna talk through how they would interface with the software. So at this point, you’ve first, engaged with Drift. You’ve maybe not heard of Drift before, but this adds piqued your interest and you’re gonna head over to the site.

Now, as mentioned before, a lot of investment been put into that first part to get them to the site. . But now once we’re on the site, how are you going to then continue that? What Drift is gonna allow you to do is leverage that information you have based on that ad click to serve a personalized experience once they land on the site.

So this is the page I’ll be greeted with, but in terms of the bottom I’ll have this bot pop up. And the idea here is that based on the information we have on this individual, And it’s totally new. At the very least, we know that they’ve clicked on one of our marketing ads, so they’re interested in that topic.

We’re gonna continue that language within our chat bot. I know at best case, if we have an idea of who they are based on enrichment, we’d be able to understand maybe more about the business and serve an even more personalized experience. But in this case, let’s take it as a top of funnel, right?

Someone we don’t know too much about, they’ve expressed an interest in learning more about how Drift can make the most marketing spend. Now traditionally chat bots will have this kind of setup where you will click through buttons and you’ll get to some answers that you’re looking for.

What really sets Drift apart? And the first point I wanna raise here is the AI capabilities of drift. And it’s all available and obvious here where you see this free text box, right? So this is where a lot of chat Botts will trip up essentially, when you’re providing someone with a free tax box, anything to be typed in there.

And the job of the chat bot is to essent. Understand that and then serve back the experience that they’re after. And this is harder than it seems in terms of actually understanding what intent is in that visitor. And Drift is gonna do that through its AI and natural language processing capabilities.

Now, if we come here and say, what’s your biggest challenge in doing this today? I’ve got a nice copy and pasted response here just so I don’t have to type it out. I always find our mess up typing when I’m live. So understanding who is on my site. Now, as soon as they put that in, what Drift is gonna do is it’s gonna look through our kind of algorithm that we have on the backend.

It’s gonna look through a range of topics that we have information on, and that it’s gonna serve back the most appropriate topic to this individual. And this is kind of subtlety should not be lost in terms of traditional chatbots. As I say, usually what will happen is there’ll be almost like a tree of responses where if they click down a certain path, they’ll be taken down a certain route and they might get the answer they want.

Now what this is within 30 seconds of landing on the site, you’ve gone from being engaged, talking to a chatbot, and getting some information you’re after. So here, for example, We’re gonna surface back one of our FAQs here to talk about how we help understand who is on your site. So it’s a bit of inception here, drift within drift, but this is essentially how we would engage with business on our site itself.

I love, I just wanna make a comment here too. I really love the sort of, at least in this example, right? , the immediacy with which you’re presenting the opportunity to try to connect with a human, like an analytics expert. I just, I know that’s very specific about the approach to the campaign itself, it’s not lost on me that.

You are in, you are using the technology to drive, a potential outcome. And one of which it, it recognizes, it sounds, seems that as though the bot recognizes there’s a chance, you still want to talk to somebody more specifically a person about this. So I, I appreciate that. Absolutely. And this is again, this is all on the backend where you can tailor this right.

Time. This particular campaign, because this person’s expressed interest and maybe based on some of the keywords we’ve pulled out here, we can see, okay, they’re not just here for, random information searching. They’ve got a clear goal in mind. That’s why we give ’em the option. Say for example, they said, watch your biggest chance today.

And they said, I’m just researching. Maybe we wouldn’t give ’em this option. So it’s all about that flexibility and that’s suit that AI is really good at providing because. Rather than tying into a, say a fixed tree of kind of steps where you take step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, this can be pivoted at any point. So if suddenly this person had a support query and said something like, do you connect with Salesforce?

We can pivot straight into that as well. So that’s what AI’s gonna allow you to do as a fundamental difference there. Very cool. Now, just to continue down this tree, I won’t exhaust all of the bot, but to look what that would look like, right? So in this instance, this individuals from Adobe’s come to our site.

We want to grab an email. So I just type something in here. We’re gonna catch that email. This is all this kind of bot was intending to do just an unknown visitor. Let’s grab the email, let’s create a contact. Let’s understand who they. And from this then we’re able to share a calendar automatically.

It’s gonna pull up my calendar here and give them an offering for a meeting. Now the. Part to realize here is this has all been done in an automated way. So if I’m a BDR, sat there or an executive trying to speak to this customer, all I see on my end is a meeting booked. And I actually haven’t had to do much at all to generate this meeting.

We’ve had that initial, pulling them into site qualification and then rooting through to a meeting all in a matter of minutes. So again, it’s not making that experience better for the individual. Now. Yeah that’s . I’m like, I’m processing like the streamlining of that sort of equation is, like speed to lead is really important, right?

And the fact that they can get a meeting on the books super quickly is wonderful. I assume, just as a point of clarification. Yeah. I assume that it’s Sends over maybe a link to the log of this person’s activity on the site, or like the way in which they engage with the bot.

So the rep can reference that. Absolutely. , hopefully, figures crossed they reference that in the conversation that they have coming up. , I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but you’ve led me on perfectly to my next topic, which is around I wasn’t doing that on purpose. , it’s around those integrations, right?

So all of this information, right? We’re seeing this in Drift right now. We see that someone’s come on Grace Smith from Adobe, and we know she’s booked a meeting with us, and that’s fine. Now, where this comes really powerful, it’s through our integrations, right? So if I click forward to the next step, imagine this person’s had this meeting, maybe looked around more information over the last two weeks.

Two weeks later, they come back and they’ve landed on the site and they’re looking at the pricing page. Based on this, because we have strong integrations with, CRMs, maps sales engagement softwares, all of that information in the terms of engagement, who they are, the profile, the business, every step they’ve taken with us, there’s been synced between Drift and these platforms.

Let’s say Salesforce, for example, this contact’s now been registered in Salesforce Based on the engagement, we’ve gone and done our. And maybe now Adobe, because of their engagement and the size of the customer has found its way into one of our target account lists. So let’s say this is right, they’ve identified themselves as a hot customer.

We really wanna get ’em involved. We wanna talk to them. When they come back to the site, they’re can be served a totally different experience to a generic user, right? Immediately, like we say, speed to lead, right? They’ve been given an immediate route into a wrap. So rather than saying, Hey, can I help you?

Why are you on the site today? It’s, Hey, Adobe, hope you enjoyed speaking the other day. Let me know if you wanna talk pricing. I’ve got five minutes, and this is really vital in terms of meeting that individual where they are when intent is highest, because that’s where we see the most value, right?

Someone on the pricing page, they’re not messing around, they know exactly what they want from the product. In this case, drift. They know what they wanna take in next steps. They just want some quick. So through doing something like this, you’re just making it even easier for them to engage with you.

That is so cool. I, by the way, the hook there Hey I hope you enjoyed speaking the other day, talk about validation, , I know, again, I know it’s just like the output of this particular approach. , which continues to drive me back to this idea that as a marketing ops pro, like it is not our responsibility to figure out how to come up with creative messaging to put into these things.

Typically don’t get me wrong, we probably fancy ourselves a good growth hacker marketer every so often, this kind of stuff really matters, right? The technology’s there and enabling it and seeing the examples really matters cuz gosh, that anchor of, if I’m a person at Adobe that I see, oh wow.

Someone, it wasn’t me, I didn’t talk to them, but somebody else looks like they might have talked to them. . Yeah, exactly. Maybe I should reach out . Exactly. That’s a. There’s all of these different ways to engage, right? And I call it dialing up the creepy in terms of we have the information here to say, we could even say, Hey Grace.

But I kept it as, hey, Adobe, right? We can recognize as individuals in some places, like we see markets in Germany, for example, where they don’t like that personalization. So you go a bit further away, maybe wouldn’t say, Hey, Adobe, you would say, Hey, a Dody, you would just. Hey, don’t reference a name, but still give them this call to action because on our end we know that’s Adobe and we know what we wanna talk to them about, but they don’t like seeing their name popped up.

So it’s definitely a preference thing and it’s, drift probably can help you do the analysis on whether or not certain tactics are working. I would, I saw the analytics piece of that first slide you shared, so I imagine you could probably do some understanding there.

Absolutely. Let’s keep going down the integrations path. We talked about Salesforce and now we’ve got this great hook. Absolutely. So this information, essentially when this is landing on the site, it’s gonna through us several integrations allow the rep to take action here. So first of all, the reason it’s picked up at all is because we integrate with Salesforce, we see it’s on a target account list, so that’s fine.

That integration will exist, and we’ll be passing information between Drift and Salesforce throughout that entire customer life cycle. Now, where this rep might see this, they might see it in the Drift platform, whether on mobile or on the desktop, or if they’ve got it integrated with Slack. They’ll just see a Slack notification pop up and say, Hey, do you know Grace from Adobe is on your site right now?

And immediately they can jump into a conversation with them. So that integration’s definitely. And I think what sets Drift apart as well from some of the kind of other spaces in the market is that a lot of our competitors will say, our software’s great. It’s fantastic. Come live in our software. You don’t need anything else.

And that’s the last thing someone wants to hear, who’s already working in five or six different softwares. So a differentiator with Drift is that. If I’ve got my reps or individuals living in something like a sales loft or an outreach, for example, they can live in that and they can still get my notifications and the benefits of Drift.

They don’t have to sit logged on, sat at their computers every day. Drift will essentially through very little input, just add value on top of what they’re already doing. So even if they don’t touch Drift, maybe it’s a couple of extra meetings a week. The risk just generat. If they do engage, they can go into what you talked about earlier, analyzing customer trends and working out, okay, maybe if I’m a bit stuck this quarter, how do I go and engage more effectively with my audience?

I love that. That’s awesome. Cool. So to dive into that point, right? So if I’m maybe slightly outside the marketing operations space, but if I’m an individual using Drift, there’s several levels that people will use that maybe they create the playbooks, these experiences. If you’re just a rep trying to understand who this person is on your site.

We have all that information surfaced as well. So if I jump across here, This is like an activity feed almost like you’d have in LinkedIn or Facebook, where you scroll down and the most recent events appear at the top, right? . So as an, as a kinda a backend user drift, an individual. I can go and see you right?

Adobe over the last two days who’s been on the site, I can see here that grace is on the site. Fine. Now, Ryan and Hannah, I don’t know who they are, but I can see also because I know what Adobe’s domain is, I’ve picked up when they’ve landed on the site, I recognize it as the same as Grace is. And I can say these people have been engaged too.

And to dive a level deeper, I can say what’s it mean to be engaged with Drift? I can go and research, first of all, Adobe, if I didn’t know who they were, will tell me who they are. There. That’s through some. Third party integration. So with clear bit French base and 6 cents, we form a package known as Drift Intel, to essentially give you that information.

In the case of Adobe, most people know they are. When you get to some of these like SMBs, it’s gonna be harder to pull out who is this person, where have they come from, what do they do, how do I engage? So scrolling down here, we can see all of the engagements, the number of site visits, chats they’ve had this month, for example.

And we also have this engagement score to essentially. Get the cream to rise to the top. If somebody is extremely engaged, I wanna see them first. So again, going to user experience for kind of an individual on the back. End of Drift, I’m a rep. I log in and immediately first thing I see is that Adobe’s been hot on my site of the last few days.

I really need to talk them. So that’s one element of Drift that’s really valuable in terms of understanding your audience and what they’re doing, because like I said, that whole feed will come up across all of your target accounts, different segments. You can tailor this to whatever you like. But the idea here is that if I’m, pushed for time and don’t wanna spend a lot of time trolling through a list of accounts, I’ll just see the best ones right at the top.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. As I think a little bit more about this idea of integrations that, I imagine there’s a few others. You mentioned briefly marketing automation platforms, right? And if you don’t have anything to show, that’s totally fine. Maybe you could just talk through it a little bit.

But, what are some examples there? Would, do you typically see like lead scoring being influenced in the map? Do you see email triggers happening? What’s happening with the Drift chat to marketing automation platform environment? Yeah, absolutely. I’m gonna pull up this slide to think did a really good job just like this trinity of, drift plus map plus crm.

And there’s a couple named here like Salesforce and the CRM side and some of the maps we work with. And really it’s this kind of sync between all three that makes drift powerful bites. So the a data flow might be that someone lands on the site. Some information now they’ve been copied by one of your kind of softwares like Marketo or a par.

That cookie will be picked up. We might be able to spot that they’ve attended a webinar, so we reference that in our engagement. If not, again, they’re in that new customer, maybe they’re totally new to the site. That information on the contact that we gathered there, that they clicked on this page of that page they gave their email their name, their job title.

That will be passed through as a lead to your marketing automation platform, where there’s rigorous processes as all businesses have in terms of lead scoring, working out attribution, that kind of thing. And that process will then take place as it normally should, scoring to then pass over to Salesforce when they’re ready, when they’re ready to be engaged by your sales reps, making sure that only that high quality leads are passed forward.

Now to complete that in this top left corner. And what we’ve got is a kind of an activity sync, right? So you know, 24 7 with Salesforce, what we’ve got there is if someone comes onto the site, they click on the page that’s logged as an activity and pushed over to Drift and you can register kind of high intent activities, particularly things like pricing pages, right?

If someone lands on that, you can flag that as an event that again, if you want Engager rep, if there’s a customer that maybe isn’t on the target account list. Come to the site, immediately, gone to the pricing pages, looking through maybe a rep onto Tortin for various reasons. So all of these activities are in that three three cycles.

They’re all gonna be synced between all the softwares and essentially make sure that all of information is up to date and readily accessible by Drift whenever it needs it. I hope that’s clear enough that this diagram, I think there’s a lot going on there. No, I think it’s, I think it’s very clear.

Yeah many mo pros are familiar with the diagramming out flows like this. Yeah. And I, yeah, our marketing operations Playbook template that we offer has something that looks almost identical to this , maybe drift stealing it. I’m not too sure. Dunno where we no. It’s but it’s certainly, I think it just illustrates the point that visualizations of data flows are important.

And understanding how data can flow between these tools is incredibly important. As it relates to the sizes of your customers and who’s using these products and integrations, different maps for different, company sizes often happen, so I get the sense that you probably work with a lot of, larger enterprise.

But really who would you say Drift is for? What’s the average size of the customer that’s using Drift today? Yeah, I’m gonna give a vague answer, which is the worst kind, right? I’d say Drift is in a nice way it’s agnostic to customer size. We’ve got over 5,000 plus customers today using Drift.

And I’ve seen operations with like businesses with 10 employees and businesses with 10,000 employees, and that’s a strength in itself. It helps you boil down what a business needs, right? So nearly every business has very similar goals of their website, right? They wanna have more meetings booked or more kind of demos booked through their site.

They wanna have automated support for anyone come into the site to make sure they get their questions answered. And then they also wanna do that last piece, which you called out, is Analyze, who is listing my site? What do they want, what those demographics. And because those three things ring true across all of these different sides of customers, that makes things effective and drift.

At any point, you can be adding value, essentially Drift. The way I think of it is like a toolkit, right? So I, you’re given the toolkit to be successful by having something like Drift and what works your business essentially dictates what you do with it. And the size of business is one of those things, right?

Some people are looking to just start personalized outreach. Some people don’t do a b M and they’ve dived into that world, and Drift is really good at taking people to that next level, regardless of size or where they are in terms of their kind of journey. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna curve ball you a little bit.

And maybe blend a few of these questions and, obviously we’ve worked together on preparing for trying to get to the no bullshit part of this entire presentation. Yeah. As you think about who really needs to be involved, we like to talk about the pricing model, the average time to completion.

, whether or not other teams need to be involved, but tying it into this concept of it doesn’t really matter what size company you are. You can get value outta drift. I love that. . But really at the end of the day, one of the things that, that everybody talks about, and I certainly did, five to seven years ago, is look it’s not a magic switch, right?

You don’t just turn it on and it just works. You do need help. And so as it relates to those core questions, It’s time to implementation. , on average to see roi. Are there any additional costs? Do you have professional services to help do this? Or do they really need to think about contracting at work or having somebody dedicated to owning this tool?

I’m gonna just let you tackle the questions, but that’s where my head goes. Great. It could work for everybody. . Yeah. But gosh, who really needs to own this thing to make it success? No, absolutely. I think I’m gonna talk through the process of so if today, Mike, you were to say, I love Drift.

Can I buy Drift? Maybe after the call I’ll say you some drift. What we’ll see, . But essentially what that looks like is a couple of things. So in the first instance when you’re gonna buy Drift was essentially a very simple pricing model. Sell, tackle that part first, I think if I jump forward here, right?

So we have different tiers. I’m not gonna ask you to read everything on this slide, but essentially going from premium to enterprise is gonna increase the certain features that you. And pricing’s broken down into three parts, right? The platform, the bit you see here, what am I actually buying? What features do I have?

The number of seats I, who do I want on this? Do I want PDRs on this? Do I want marketing up on this? Who do I want to have a drip seat? And then the onboarding, which is vital, right? That piece you mentioned, no one just sits there, opens, drift, and goes, great. I’ve suddenly doubled my pipeline from this.

It’s definitely that’d be so nice. I know. It’d be great. I think we could charge a lot more if it did. Yeah, great. . But I think what it does do is it’s putting your best foot forward in terms of having Swan from Drift to help with that onboarding, right? So you’ll have on your onboarding team a dedicated manager, right?

So someone that’s sole job is making sure your business meets the goals you outlined through that purchase to say, look, I wanna have. Salesforce integrated. I wanna have five campaigns linked into this from my map. I wanna. Automated kind of FAQ answering, and I want this by this date. And that’s what our onboarding team will do.

And on outside of that, you’ve got the, I mentioned the manager, but you’ve got a technical side. The professional services engineer, they’ll do that configuration for you. So I know with Salesforce and large kind of softwares like that, everyone’s looks different, right? So it’s someone dedicated to working out what works for you and what you want.

And then the final piece, right? Like you mentioned, maybe people aren’t comfortable with getting started themselves, or to be honest, a lot of people might just say, look, I think this is great. This could work for us. Having a tailored experience for all these different individuals, but I just don’t have the time to actually dedicate to this, to build out these playbooks.

We also have a professional services consultant that can build those experiences for you and ongoing from that, that could be an ongoing relationship where you can check in, critique playbooks, make sure it’s working right. . So that’s the onboarding stage. And beyond that, like with professional services there’s external agencies, people use, it’s not needed.

Certainly. I think a good analogy I like to use is like a personal trainer, a PT at the gym, right? , I don’t go to gym that much, but I’ve heard it’s quite good . So essentially, if I walk into a gym and I go over and I say, I wanna lift some weight today, I can certainly do that and I’ll work things out slow.

But if I’m after results and I say I wanna be beach ready in 60 days, I’m gonna get someone like a, a personal assistant or like someone like that to essentially tell me what’s the fastest way to do it. What’s the things that other people are doing, how do I get the most success? How do I improve the quickest?

And that’s what a professional services external agency may provide for you. . But that said if I sit there for kind of 90 days and lift weights, I’m still gonna get to where I wanna be. It just means maybe it’s not as tailored or as quick as, I’m needing for that timeframe. Yeah, I love . I love the analogy.

I, I have to say as I’ve implemented Drift before in my career and most recently in the last few months interacting with the product again. One of the, one of the things that’s tremendously helpful for anybody watching this is really understanding the architecture of how those playbooks work.

Yeah. So like when you go as a marketing operations professional, I may not be writing the content, but. teaching somebody how the content can flow together will dictate how much material actually needs to be written. And the, I think the prime example of that I experienced was we had this wonderful, talented marketer write out some branches of logic.

Yeah. And there was an outcome for like almost every branch. , but at the core of the way that Drift worked from when I looked at the product is I can jump somebody to a typical sort of off offloading branch, so to speak. Yeah. That like I don’t have to write a tailored response to end the conversation every single time.

I can center on a couple of outcomes. Exactly. Exactly. If you don’t know that going into it, you might overproduce content and then. The person implementing marketing operations professional may end up having to re-architect the thing based on like where you are headed first and the whole thing starts over.

And so I think that’s really important to just like capture that hey, that know-how of how this product. Is architected actually influences those playbooks that you build and the content that goes into them a hundred percent. I basically made the, that exact mistake, right? So when I joined Drift from two fronts, I wanted to learn the product as quickly as I could and also thought, being lazy, I wanna have a single playbook that does everything so when I show off it can do anything that anyone would want, right?

And kind of that approach quickly falls down. It said, in maintenance and understanding what the outcome is, the best way to use drift is essentially to have that clear outcome in mind. In that onboarding process, it probably is working with someone. Yeah. From marketing ops to maybe say I want our, a campaign to achieve x.

I want someone, if they go and attend a webinar, for example, I want a webinar pickup where they come back to the site and I offer them a meeting with one of our reps. That clear, clearly outlined is what makes Drift successful. It’s having that jump off point to say it’s done its job, and now I can hand it over to something else, or even you.

I can deflect this person away because they’re exactly what we don’t want to be talking to. So it’s interesting to hear you’ve had that experience as well, . It’s definitely true. Yeah. I was so bummed. I was like, man, I feel like I have to re-architect this entire flow now cuz it’s, it was written so beautifully, but like it was actually overly complicated.

And so we could have simplified it further. And it’s actually a good point, right? I mentioned AI at the top of the call because that’s in the last year become really prevalent and it’s become more common in terms of an ask for our customers that, that are building these playbooks out.

And it saves exactly what you’ve just said there, right? So if you’ve got a playbook, like I said, you have to go through a series of steps. So if I’m trying to answer a question, let’s say I’ve got a question on, yeah, what software does Drift integrate with? You can have a playbook that says, hi, how can I help you?

Click button. I’ve got support. What support do you need? Product support. Click the button. Which part of our product integration? Click that button. What specifically do you need? Salesforce. What about Salesforce? Do you have a question on? I’ve just gone through several steps and then maybe at the end of it, the option that I wanted isn’t there, where something like ai, a lot of our playbooks are much shorter, much smaller, but what they do is they give the route to go into any direction.

So rather than going in specifically for those steps, you just say, Hey, how can I help you? I need to learn how Salesforce integrates and how it passes over lead information. And because you build these kind of knowledge bases within the software, you, your playbook’s become a lot shorter and a lot easier to maintain.

Cause it’s about maintaining the kind of knowledge and drift versus maintaining all these sequences of steps. So it’s definitely a change subject. Super. Yeah. That’s super interesting. So does it require, just diving in just for a second on there, yeah. Does it require that it has to be built in the Drift knowledge base or can it scrape and understand knowledge from other knowledge bases?

Yeah, so we integrate with other knowledge bases to, to allow that. So if that’s something you’d look to do, we can definitely integrate and have that information pulled from external sources. If you don’t, then it’s as simple as just building these knowledges into Drift itself. Got it. Both options are, Very cool.

Very cool. So let’s dive in back to that question, so we get a clear sense, lots of teams involved, understanding the core infrastructure can actually influence the outcomes and the production time to launch. Let’s talk a little bit about average time to complete an implementation and and what goes into that.

Like who, who do you typically find needs to be involved in getting let’s say start to finish. You engage marketing operations in a demo like this, and then who else usually ends up going into that committee of decision makers as in, from the customer side? Yeah.

Yeah. As you go to implement do you find that it typically has to be involved sales customer success, or does it usually just start and in one department and eventually grow ? So typically, yeah, we’ll try and go to the more senior kind of, In the department rights, we might be a marketing director, for example.

It might be a digital marketing manager that’s gonna see the benefit. But usually if we can speak to a director, understand what the vision is, to then get into the tactical pieces, because I think you can very quickly try and build a point solution with something like Drift and say, I want to solve this.

I’ve got a campaign running. I want, like I said before, like maybe I wanna have a follow up. If someone attends a webinar based on this campaign and you build a drift bot for it, and then it gets forgotten about because you’ve built it and it’s solved, that one thing, take a step back and look at, right?

What are we actually trying to do strategy wise from a department on the website talking to like the marketing director is definitely gonna put us in the right space. And from the kind of technical side, It’s not a very technical product. Like I’ve got a background in data analysis that I used to work at a company called Alteryx, and it was very technical, right?

You’d have to go through huge proof of concepts, engage with it, solution architect, that kind of thing. But in this case, the integrations are very simple, so it’s not even engaging with it, it’s engaging with the owner of kind of that Salesforce access or who manages the lead scoring in Marketo or something like that.

Those were technical people we talked to. It wouldn’t be going much further. Very good. Cool. And then, so let’s go ahead and just I think you’ve pre-answered a couple questions on a few more slides. I would imagine. So let’s dive into those so we can give people a sense of what it really takes to get Drift going.

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve got a slide here just in terms of the support plans that we offer. Mention a question, you called out earlier and I, and I. Breezed over by accident. What’s average time’s completion? So with our different onboarding plans, you can complete your drift installation and have it up and running within 30 days.

So you’re able to have that in what we call like an expedited plan, where essentially you’ve got, everything you need to be successful to build that integration and to have that running in 30 days. Now typically it falls around a two month mark. So if. Give you drift to date. We’ve worked with those onboarding people I mentioned before, the manager the consultant, the engineer to help, through that integration, the setup.

And that would take, yeah, maybe around 45 days to two months. So that’s what we typically see in terms of a lifetime for that onboarding. Yeah, I think that’s it. Sorry, I’m just like, no, you’re, no, you’re good. No, that’s perfect. Yeah, the implementation time. I love that. It can be quick.

. I think, quality begets ti like time begets quality, I should say. Yeah. And there’s, there might be an outcome where you can get up and running pretty quickly, but those little hooks and those things that go into the details of the actual program, the content that’s delivered really matter.

So I, I think people should have an expectation that, more comes. From a product like dress for sure, . Yeah. I had a couple go ahead. Examples of kind of companies and seeing success, right? Because I think it’s all about defining, like you called out earlier, it’s defining an outcome that you’re looking for, right?

By understanding where you are, what you want your marketing department to be in the next kind of 12 months. So understanding where you want your, pipeline generation to be in the next 12 months. You can look at something like Adobes, like I said, they’re one of our customers and it’s a good example to talk about, right?

So they implemented Drift in late 2020, I think it’s September, and by the same time next year, made influenced over 45 million in pipeline just through Drift chat bots alone. They touched that much. That led to a conversion rate of about a look things about a quarter, if they’ve essentially ended there with 11 million in revenue over that time as well, and 5,000 plus meetings booked.

And that’s just from someone in a year of using Drift. So if their success metric was driving pipeline, which it was, then we can see clearly that’s been achieved based on what they’ve seen as an outcome. But it all depends on having that clear kind of outcome you’re looking for from suite light drift.

Because what it won’t do is, like we said, put it on your website, take care of all your problems, and suddenly you’ve got meetings flying in. It takes, building it, understanding why you’re building it, and then iterating on that, testing it, improving it, understanding your audience, how it resonates, and it’s definitely more successful and more engaged you are with.

Wow. Yeah. That’s incredible. Cool. I’m just trying to think of anything else that we might not have covered here. Seems like we, we talked about average time to success. I think you even mentioned briefly earlier that you don’t necessarily need an external agency or consultant to be successful.

So it feels like we probably covered anything else. Is there anything else you wanna share that I’m forgetting ? No, the one thing I wanted to call out, which I think, it’s definitely worth mentioning is I’ve just described a lot of aspects of Drift and I’ve described on, how amazing love support is and this kind of thing.

And I think that’s all down to our dedicated team of, support reps that we have on our side, right? Again, going into the market right now, there’s plenty of chatbots that will offer kind of those features of, oh, we help talk to your customers and book meetings and this kind of thing.

And it’s work from memory, that kind of drift as a business created this conversational marketing, conversational sales space, right? So we’ve got the luxury of, now our support team is usually bigger than a lot of our competitors, entire companies. So what we really see as a third arm in terms of the what makes Dr.

Drift kind of a differentiated. It’s the ability to support this, right? So we are not giving you a piece of software that you turn on, run away with, and we don’t speak to you having a dedicated support team to, to run with you through the first 90 days of onboarding, engaging every quarter if necessary, to actually have those kind of check-ins, provide trainings, have that 24 7 access to, support with us.

That’s really what makes our customers successful. Outside of a software, outside of kind of the features of Drift, I think the people behind it are what makes it successful and differentiates us for sure. I love that you call that out. And it’s something that we talk about often in, in marketing operations in general and Mo pros, the community is, at the end of the day, this stuff requires people.

Someone on LinkedIn recently asked a question about the core pillars of revenue operations and my response to the post on LinkedIn was people. Yeah, like people are a core pillar to the success of a lot of organizations. And I could see definitely that having a strong support team for Drift to continue driving the engagement and adoption, that can be a really clear differentiator.

So I appreciate that you called that out for sure. Absolutely. Always like to give people credit where it’s due. Good stuff. Hey James, I appreciate you doing a no bullshit demo with us. I think that this will be super helpful for everyone. So thank you for taking the time and we will talk to you on the other side.

Thank you. It’s been really good speaking, Mike. Thank you.