15Five had what many would consider a “good” problem:
High traffic and high interest.
“What’s the problem?” you ask.
For Marketing Ops and Strategy Manager, Joe LaGrutta, and the 15Five sales team, it was everything that came next.
Despite the interest 15Five was generating in their content and brand, this traffic simply wasn’t converting into opportunities. They needed a better way to engage with visitors based on these different types of traffic. That’s when chatbots were brought into the discussion.
To be clear, chatbot technology wasn’t anything new to 15Five. For quite some time, the company had been using Intercom on its site for customer support. But, they were noticing more and more visitors coming in asking to speak to sales via the support bot. There were also noticeable spikes in form submissions requesting to speak to the sales team.
This presented two points of friction in 15Five’s buyer journey:
- Intercom wasn’t built for marketing and sales: The only team really using chat at the time was the 15Five support team. So, the tool itself was only positioned for this support function. Realizing this, it soon became clear to Joe that “maybe this tool needs to be a little bit more sales and marketing geared.”
- Forms were creating barriers, not pathways to sales: The company’s “Get Started” page used what Joe called a “Getting Started” form. But the form itself created more trouble than opportunities, causing long follow-up delays and funnel drop-off.
Faced with this realization, 15Five decided to make the switch from Intercom to Drift and replace their cumbersome form process with a Drift bot.
The results?
Top- and bottom-funnel conversions have more than doubled, the sales and marketing teams are more aligned than ever before, and they are creating a better online experience for their customers and buyers.
“Not only is Drift helping to engage the traffic, but those leads that we engage with on the site are converting better down the funnel,” says Joe.
So, how did they do it? ?
Winning The Hearts & Minds Of Sales
While implementing Drift was simple enough, 15Five still had some work to do when it came to getting sales onboard with the switch.
“In the beginning, there was actually some pushback just in terms of the bandwidth that it would take to manage the leads coming in.” However, these anxieties were quickly alleviated, according to Joe.
During this time, 15Five had two inbound sales development reps (SDRs). After onboarding Drift, these reps not only saw more inbound leads, but higher quality leads that were converting more quickly down the funnel.
Since switching from Intercom, 15Five has seen two major conversion improvements:
- Top of the funnel: MQL (marketing qualified leads) to SAL (sales accepted leads) increased from a 20% conversion to 50-60% conversion rate.
- Bottom of the funnel: SAL to SQL (sales qualified leads) increased from a 12% conversion to 53% conversion rate.
What makes this more extraordinary is that, overall, there haven’t been any major traffic changes according to Joe.
“I just can’t say enough about how quickly and how good our funnel is converting based on the leads that come in through Drift now. We did a comparison of our old forms versus the new bot and the numbers are just – they continue to blow me away to this day. Needless to say, SDRs and sales have really come to love Drift,” says Joe.
Removing Friction Across The Buyer And Customer Experience
Replacing forms with chatbots not only improved 15Five funnel conversion, but also the buyer experience across their website.
The original “Getting Started” form process had about a 1-2 day delay from when someone submitted a form to a salesperson following up. As a result, demo requests to sales leads were dropping off the funnel. The bot removed the “middle man” and enabled buyers to speak with sales in real-time.
15Five also started using conversational marketing to better route customers and support issues on the site:
- They now use routing to send existing customers to current account owners
- They offer a support bot to answer any customer questions, provide articles and content to educate customers, and more
Conversational Marketing For High Intent Pages & Intelligent Routing
After getting the buy-in of the sales team and replacing their old forms with Drift, Joe and the team at 15Five began looking into other innovative ways to use conversational marketing across their website.
One of the first pages they started with? Pricing.
A pricing page is considered a high intent page. These pages indicate that buyers are researching the costs associated with your brand and possibly comparing you against a competitor.
To get the most out of the traffic on this page, 15Five created two different bots, powered by Drift Intel:
- One for ICP or larger accounts (>100 employees )
- And one for more self-service buyers or smaller accounts (<100 employees)
For accounts with more than 100 employees, contacts would get routed to an SDR. For anyone below that threshold, the bot would route them to a free trial.
Before this, 15Five relied on a much more manual process to segment these conversations. Today, this process is happening in real-time.
“As soon as we know that they’re qualified to be a sales lead, sales are ready to jump into the conversation,” says Joe.
What’s Next: Interactive Content Powered By Drift + PathFactory
In addition to using chat on their website, Joe is also excited about a new integration that will allow customers to chat with reps while they are consuming content.
Powered by an integration between PathFactory – a content insights and activation platform – and Drift, this bot will work as a live CTA and connection to sales in eBooks and one-sheeters.
Example of Drift + PathFactory Integration
With the Drift + PathFactory integration, 15Five’s marketing team can understand what content is resonating best with buyers, in addition to a number of other key insights, including:
- Where in the buyer’s journey chatbots are used the most
- A transcript of every Drift conversation related to a piece of content
- Specific questions prospects ask through chat about the content they’re consuming
“I’m really excited about the PathFactory piece,” says Joe. “I think it’s so much more powerful than just a normal call to action at the end of a piece of content.”
