Getting your target accounts on your website is expensive. And, regardless of the size of your BDR team or how many account-based ads you run, it can still take a long time.
So when you’ve driven one of your target accounts to your website, you don’t want to serve up the same generic experience as the thousands of other people who land on your site. Because target accounts are special. Instead, you should give these accounts a fastlane to your sales team and give your sales team real-time notifications when they’re on your site.
That’s exactly what Algolia’s Alexander Araujo wanted to do. So he turned to Drift ABM.
Alex and his team identified forty of their top accounts and made custom videos to welcome each account to their website. The video, shot by the sales rep who owns the account, would pop into the Drift chat widget when a person from the target account visited the website.
How did they do that?
Drift ABM.
Drift ABM helps you start conversations with the right buyers at the right time. Whether they’re anonymous first-time visitors on your website or open opportunities in your pipeline, Drift ABM helps you connect with them now.
Because your ABM strategy shouldn’t just be about driving the right accounts to your website. It should also be about creating personalized, frictionless buying experiences once these accounts have reached your website.
Using Drift ABM, Algolia started more than 900 conversations with their target accounts this year. And that’s translated into opportunities for their sales team. As one of Algolia’s account executives mentioned to Alexander recently, “I think Drift was my entire pipeline this month.”
Here’s how Algolia was able to get these results and how we’ve recently rebuilt Drift ABM to help you start conversations with the right buyers at the right time.
How Drift ABM Works
There are three parts to Drift ABM: targeting, personalization and routing/notifications.
Targeting
This is the most important part of Drift ABM. There are two types of targeting that’ll help you talk to the right buyers at the right time.
- Drift Intel is powered by data providers like 6sense, Clearbit, Demandbase and others. It helps you identify anonymous website visitors using a reverse IP lookup.
- Your Marketing Automation Platform integrated with Drift. If you’re using Marketo or Pardot you can sync contact lists into Drift and use your MAP’s contact cookies in Drift to identify those contacts when they visit your website.
So whether you’re targeting anonymous traffic or known traffic, you can use Drift ABM.
Personalization
Once you have your targeting set up, you can build custom experiences using Drift Playbooks.
For instance, if you want to target your ABM accounts with a personalized greeting message when they arrive on your website you can do that with the ABM Playbook.
You’ll also be able to personalize messages with account tokens like the company name. So when Whitewhale ends up on your website they know they’re in the right place talking to the right people.
Routing & Notifications
With Drift ABM, when you sync or upload target accounts into Drift, you’ll also assign an owner of each account. So if you’re syncing a target account list from Salesforce, you can simply sync the corresponding account owner field – whether you want that to be a BDR, account executive or someone else, routing is flexible so it works how your team works.
Drift ABM also includes real-time notifications for the account owner. So when one of your sales rep’s accounts visits your website, they’ll be notified and can immediately jump into a conversation with them.
Algolia Uses Drift ABM To Target Their Ideal Customer Profile Too
Even if your marketing team doesn’t have an ABM strategy today, but you do have an ideal customer profile, Drift ABM can help with that too.
One of the biggest objections to live chat by sales teams is “we don’t want to waste time with unqualified leads” and that’s fair. Most live chat products were not built for sales conversations.
But with Drift ABM you can target accounts based on information like location, company size and even revenue. That way, your sales team is only engaging in conversations with your ICP.
In fact, this is exactly how Algolia got started with Drift ABM.
Algolia’s SMB team doesn’t have SDRs. So once they’re assigned a new lead, they start working that lead, usually by email.
At the same time that the lead is accepted by the AE, the lead is also added to the targeting list for a Drift Playbook so that when they do end up back on Algolia’s website, they get a direct line to the account executive who’s trying to reach out to them.
“Often times we’ll see the lead respond to the rep through Drift: ‘Hey, got your email, let’s set up a meeting’” Alexander explained.
Alexander talks about this approach as “full funnel” since Drift conversations happen throughout the buyer’s journey. This fastlane approach even works for open opportunities.
Create A Fastlane For Open Opportunities In Your Pipeline Back To Their Account Owner
Now Alexander and team are thinking beyond just getting their target accounts into conversations with their sales teams. They’re thinking about how Drift ABM can decrease their sales cycle too.
“We’re currently in the process of setting up Drift ABM to offer a fastlane for open opportunities in our pipeline so we can say ‘Hey, you don’t need to go through this qualification flow, you can skip that and go right to the account executive you’ve been working with,’” explained Alexander.
But how can you target open opportunities with Drift? Sync lists from your marketing automation platform.
Here’s how you do that.
If you don’t already have this list in Marketo or Pardot, create the lists of contacts from accounts with an open opportunity and sync that list into Drift. From there you can create a Drift Playbook to target those contacts with a personalized message and route those conversations to the right sales rep on your team.
Drift Customers Have Identified Over 2 Million Target Accounts Visiting Their Website
When we launched Drift ABM two years ago, we were focused on helping customers welcome their target accounts to their website for the first time. But after working with customers like Algolia, we’ve rebuilt Drift ABM to work the way you want to market and sell to your target accounts – whether you have an ABM strategy or not. Drift ABM helps you connect with the right buyers at the right time.
Drift ABM is part of our Premium and Enterprise plans. If you’d like to join hundreds of Drift customers that have identified over 2 million target account visits, sign up for a demo today.
