How we go-to-market (GTM) is changing. Not just in the software industry, but across economies.
New technologies are accelerating messages and products to the marketplace faster than ever before.
But there’s a problem: Some internal teams are struggling to keep up.
And this friction is killing more than just their buyer and customer experience, it’s killing their bottom-line outcomes.
For years marketing, sales, and customer success (CS) gurus have pointed to a simple solution: Alignment. If we simply align our revenue teams around the customer, that’ll be enough. But alignment isn’t enough.
When it comes to building a better GTM strategy, actions speak louder than alignment. Your strategy needs both.
That’s why I’m sharing how you can drive action across your revenue teams with examples from Drift and our customers. In each example, you’ll see how these companies combined GTM strategies and technology to align and action marketing and sales.
Looking to solve your pain fast? You can navigate from here 👇
Create Engagement at the Top-of-Funnel
Drive Conversions Through Personalization & Site Coverage
Book More High-Quality Sales Meetings
Fast-Track Opportunities to Close
Create & Grow Customer Relationships
Create Engagement at the Top-of-the-Funnel
Marketing’s job is to generate pipeline for sales. Top-of-funnel marketing is all about engaging with buyers in a meaningful way. To achieve both, marketers must gather the right insight and engage with buyers at the right time.
To collect these insights, some marketers sacrifice real-time personalized engagement in favor of data gathering through antiquated forms – all at the expense of the buyer’s experience. For years marketers have relied on this process for lead generation, coupled with complicated lead scoring and routing happening in the background 👇
To be clear: This process works. But it’s not efficient. And it certainly isn’t buyer-friendly.
According to Drift’s State of Conversational Marketing report, B2B buyer demand for real-time engagement has only grown:
“46% of respondents reported that they expect a response within 5 seconds or less when using a chatbot; 43% expect the same using online live chat; and 33% when using a phone or video call. In fact, this need for immediacy grew across the board averaging an increase of 25%. And expectations even rose 33% over the last year for inherently sluggish web forms.”
Smartling’s Director of Brand Strategy and Communication, Adrian Cohn, recognized how online forms were hurting lead conversion and lead quality across their website:
“I knew a form wasn’t the way anymore. We had to modernize our web experience and make it easier for potential customers to connect with us. – Adrian Cohn, Director of Brand and Communication at Smartling
To solve their conversion and quality issues at the top-of-the-funnel Adrian started by rebuilding and refreshing Smartling’s website. As part of the website redesign, Adrian and his team decided to rip out their forms and replace them with Drift Live Chat.
Using Conversational Marketing, SDRs can now engage with buyers using live chat, and qualify them if they are a good fit 👇
Drive Conversions Through Personalization & Site Coverage
Over the years, customers have come to expect a certain level of personalization in their customer experience. And they’re willing to pay for it. In a study from McKinsey, companies that personalized their buyer experience reported:
- A 5-15% increase in revenue
- Up to 50% reduction in acquisition costs
Once you learn more about your buyers via data enrichment or repeat visits, you can use targeted, personalized communication to increase conversions.
That’s exactly what WebPT did to get more conversions from their paid traffic. A software provider for outpatient rehab therapy services, WebPT occupies a niche, but competitive market. As their digital marketing expert, Josh Golden was tasked with making the most of the company’s online ad investments.
When Josh saw that conversions weren’t where they needed to be, he did some digging. He saw that the drop off was happening once someone landed on the page. That’s when he decided to onboard both Drift and Unbounce.
With Drift, Josh can cater playbooks based on the ad source of the audience using UTM parameters. When a buyer lands on the page, they are greeted with a message that recognizes them and acknowledges their journey.
With Unbounce, Josh is able to transform the landing page based on UTM parameters as well. After appyling this strategy, WebPT tripled their monthly chat leads and increased their MRR from leads coming from ads.
WebPT’s ability to not just recognize visitors, but give them a personalized experience is the future of B2B marketing. Yet, many companies struggle to understand who is on their website and how to engage with those people right now.
Drift Audiences shows you exactly who is on your website at any given time. With Drift Audiences, you can see who is encountering a playbook, who is not, and what opportunities there are to create additional playbooks to improve coverage.
You can learn more about Drift Audiences here 👉 Close Your Pipeline Gap by Unlocking New Revenue from Your Digital Marketing. Introducing Drift Audiences.
Book More High-Quality Sales Meetings
Once you’ve identified your target accounts, you can leverage the power of account-based marketing (ABM) to reach out to them. The best ABM plays are personalized to buyers and considerate of their time. ABM is also a great unifier between marketing and sales.
That was one of the reasons Informatica’s Director of Web Development, Gary Gamitian, reached out to Drift. Informatica was looking to undergo a digital transformation across their website. One that improved buyer experiences and got marketing and sales closer to their customers.
With Drift ABM, Gary was able to build industry-based playbooks with personalized messages. These playbooks change based on known visitor information. Once Informatica integrated Drift with Demandbase and Marketo, they were able to better engage with website visitors.
“The ability to welcome a user back by first name shows that we’re always thinking about the customer first. And being able to leverage intent data to deliver highly relevant content helps increase engagement and encourage consumption.” – Gary Gamitian, Director of Web Development, Informatica
Within the first 18 months, Informatica not only doubled their opportunities and increased the number of meetings booked by 30% – they shortened their sales cycle by 67%.
Informatica created ABM playbooks that include customized welcome messages for contacts under a specific account. When a buyer from a target account lands on a page, Informatica can deliver a personalized message via Drift and notify the relevant sales reps. These reps can then drop in and start engaging with buyers directly.
Fast-Track Opportunities to Close
Sales has a tough (and often thankless) job.
Not only do they have to research and target the right buyers, but stand out among the competition. This means putting yourself out there and being okay with failing time and again.
Like I said, not the easiest job in the world. (Maybe take a minute to shoot a quick “thank you for everything” to your favorite rep.)
Below, I’m sharing how our customers are improving their sales process and accelerating opportunities by giving reps the tools and support they need.
How to Improve Sales Focus and Outreach
Once you’ve identified the accounts that are ready to buy, sales can start identifying the buying committees within those accounts.
According to Salesforce, the average number of decision-makers in a B2B sale has exploded over the years to between 7 to 20 people. Sales reps now spend a ton of time researching who decision-makers are and where to focus their efforts. Unfortunately, more time researching means less time selling.
Drift’s Head of Sales Development, Julianne Thompson, is all about efficiency. She’s exactly the type-A, data-driven leader SDR teams need to stay motivated and focus.
But even people like Julianne need help. That’s why she was thrilled about the release of Drift Prospector.
Drift Prospector helps sales teams accelerate revenue by knowing which accounts to focus on and what to say. Then teams can manage this response across channels 👇
For Julianne, the ability to help her growing SDR team focus was a godsend. But there are still two pressing issues sales teams often deal with on the regular:
- Contacts move and database hygiene takes a backseat
- Breaking through the noise across digital channels has gotten more difficult
Next up, you’ll talk about how to solve both these issues.
How to Stay Connected with Your Most Valuable Contacts
Nothing’s worse than personalizing outreach and realizing your buyer has moved on to another opportunity.
The reality is sales shouldn’t be spending their time playing clean up. But bad data can easily snowball.
It was this exact problem Heinz Marketing faced with their own email database.
Heinz Marketing has seen a lot of success over the years as a thought leader in the B2B marketing space. As a result, they’ve built a database of valuable contacts. But, people move on and manually updating information or sourcing new contacts is a chore.
That’s why Heinz Marketing invested in Drift Email. With Drift Email’s integration to Marketo, Heinz Marketing was able to mine email replies for database updates, automatically clean up contacts, and source new contacts.
“Drift Email enables us to tap into email replies as a data source and improve our database quality without any manual intervention.” – Lisa Heay, Marketing Consultant
How to Break Through the Noise in Sales
Across channels – from chat to social media to email – sales reps are competing for attention. The need for creativity and innovation has never been higher for these folks.
But here’s the thing: Creativity isn’t something found in a product. That’s why I’m sharing two sales resources to help you level-up your sales outreach?
- 7 Cold Email Templates Your SDRs Should Steal
We reached out to our SDR team and asked them to share the best performing cold outreach emails. In this guide, we’re not only sharing these emails with you, but including templated versions you can customize for your outreach. - The Ultimate Sales Guide to Closing More Deals with Drift Video
Video isn’t just a solution for remote selling, it’s also a great tactic for engaging with buyers and grabbing their attention. Still, video creation is an art form. Learn how Drift customers are mastering the art of asynchronous video to drive more business.
Create & Grow Great Customer Relationships
You don’t stop marketing after someone buys. You don’t stop selling your value post-sale.
All three revenue teams – marketing, sales, and CS – must work together to drive ROI across the entire customer lifecycle.
Today’s B2B buyers and customers have options. And if your customer experience doesn’t fit the bill, they’ll move on.
With Drift Video, CS and account managers can create smoother hand-offs, and allow customers to easily chat in with questions.
Revenue teams can even use the Drift Video Bot to answer questions or chats 24/7.
Frontify uses this feature to easily answer buyer questions during the selling process. According to Frontify’s Brand Solutions Manager, Thomas Meichtry, this has proved invaluable for accelerating deals to close:
“If anyone on our customer’s end has a question, they can hit me up instantly in the chat function of the video, and I’m notified immediately through my Drift app. This cuts out a ton of friction in our selling process and allows me to respond to customer queries in real-time.” – Thomas Meichtry, Brand Solutions Manager, Frontify
Check out some more creative examples from companies using Drift Video to improve their CX 👉 5 Video Plays You Can Steal to Save Time (and Deliver Better Customer Experiences)
Final Thoughts
A new report from Twilio found that 2020 accelerated digital transformation by almost six years for businesses. If you’re looking to invest in new technologies now, double down on solutions that will improve your customer experience.
By empowering your revenue teams through automation and GTM strategies, you’re not only prepping them for success – but your current and future customers as well.
Want to create a GTM strategy that converts? The Go-To-Market Playbook For Revenue Teams from Drift and Clari is filled with best practices for aligning and actioning revenue teams. Download your copy 👇
