Zaius is a B2C CRM built for marketers that delivers relevance in every customer interaction. Zaius’ customers are ecommerce and B2C brands trying to engage customers across email, social media, advertising, and more. The marketing CRM platform provides a unified view of the customer and allows marketers to create personalized and targeted campaigns across channels. Sales in this landscape can be quite different, especially when customers aren’t familiar with the power of a B2C CRM.
We chatted with Veronica Checksfield, a CDR or Conversation Development Representative, at Zaius. Veronica spends most of her workday having conversations with potential customers in Drift. She shares her experience using the product, going through her basic workflow and offering some valuable tips for anyone looking to get the most of out qualifying good leads through Drift.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Akhil Dakinedi: How did you start using Drift at Zaius? What were your first impressions of it?
Veronica Checksfield: We started using Drift about a year ago when we were trying to transform our entire inbound strategy. One of the members on our marketing team walked us through how all of our playbooks were being set up and what all the calls to action were. My initial reactions were very positive. I had never used something like that before and it seemed like a great way to convert site visitors (both anonymous and identified) to actual leads. Overall, I thought it was a very cool tool.
Akhil: How does Drift fit into your day-to-day workflow? What other tools do you use in conjunction with Drift?
Veronica: I’m in Drift during the week between 9:00 AM – 5:30 PM every day. Every morning when I come in, one of the first things that I do is check any leads or conversations that came in during offline hours. A lot of our customers are ecommerce businesses from the west coast, so a good number of them come in during offline hours. I always have Drift open all day so that I can chat in at a moment’s notice. I get notified and am able to jump right into a conversation. Aside from Drift, we definitely use Salesforce as the CRM for the leads we generate. In terms of other outreach, our whole team Salesloft, which is focused on emails and phone calls for outreach.
Akhil: What kinds of questions do people on your site usually have?
Veronica: The most common questions we get are around pricing. Our pricing is tailored to each customer and we currently don’t have a pricing page on our website, so a lot of our potential customers are curious about that. Another common set of questions revolves around email marketing, which is a big piece of functionality within our platform. Our customers are always curious to know whether our platform fits into their overall strategy.
And finally, we get a lot of questions around the CRM aspect of Zaius. We use the term “B2C CRM” on our website quite a bit, and people generally have questions about what that means, how we compare to different CRM tools they may have heard, and what we offer that’s different from the rest of them.
Akhil: How does a conversation with a visitor on your site typically go?
Veronica: I usually keep the chats super conversational. It’s generally a back and forth of me asking them to elaborate on what they’re asking for so that I have more information for the next person that they talk to from my team. The next step is to usually set up a more in-depth call for a product demo, so I need to make sure that the person they talk to next has all the information about who the person is, what their company is, and how they’re looking to use Zaius. My goal is to just get all of that information out of the conversation.
Akhil: How do you have your bots set up in Drift?
Veronica: We have them set up in a pretty robust way. Our overall marketing mission is to assist B2C marketers in delighting their customers at every interaction, and we used that philosophy to set up our bot flows because that assistance starts the moment these marketers come to our site and interact with our Drift bot.
A few of our playbooks are at the very top of the funnel because it’s low-intent – but they get more targeted and more specific as we go to more high-intent. For example, we have an online video series called “Marketing Unboxed” where our content team actually orders a product from an ecommerce brand and they go through their whole marketing strategy. For these pages, we have our bots set up to ask a few more qualification questions before moving on. On the other hand, we literally have a button on our website that says “Get started with Zaius,” and people who engage with that are probably a little further along in the purchasing process than the others, so that definitely routes the high-intent conversation to a sales rep immediately.
Akhil: Do you work closely with the person that builds the bots? How frequently do you update them?
Veronica: Yes, definitely. I work with him in terms of the flow as well as the actual copy within the playbooks. I’m one of the people who’s actually chatting most of the time, so we tend to know what sounds better or what the most commonly asked questions are. We work very closely to make sure that we’re aligned on what the flow of the conversation should be. We’re a very open and communicative team, and I think it makes using Drift that much better for us.
We definitely try and update them based on how the conversations are going on a pretty regular basis. Overall, we’re trying to be as form-less as possible across our entire site, so we’re switching everything over from forms to conversations. We have Drift implemented into a lot of our marketing campaigns, so whether our customer clicks a call to action on a display ad or engages with paid search, they get routed into a conversation in Drift.
Akhil: Do your customers book meetings with you in Drift?
Veronica: Yeah, so my email signature always has a link to my Drift profile, and it’s at the bottom of all my emails. So I do get a lot of meetings booked through that, and I speak to all of them. I try to have at least one meeting with them before pulling in a more senior member of the sales team to really kickstart the opportunity.
Overall, I’ve found that people do show up to the meetings they’ve booked and they tend to go fairly well. Occasionally there’s a time difference with people who are overseas in Europe or Asia, but we try and make it work.
Akhil: Do you have a monthly quota that you have to meet?
Veronica: I do, and Drift has really been helping me meet it. When I look at the reports in Drift, it tells me that this week, for example, there has been a 10% increase in conversations. This kind of data is really helpful because it lets me see where I can improve to reach my quota. Getting high-quality meetings through Drift is also a great bonus on top of that. In terms of all our main sources of inbound leads, Drift has definitely been on top.
Akhil: Are these specific things in Drift that you find yourself using a lot?
Veronica: I like that Drift is able to identify who the person is based on their IP. I also tend to look at the LinkedIn profile of the company or check out their Twitter from the links in Drift to get a better sense of what they do. The Salesforce integration is really useful because it allows me to see whether or not it’s already an account that exists in our Salesforce records. Aside from that, I like seeing the Recent Activity and Conversation Details information, because it shows whether anyone else on my team has spoken to that account in the past and what other conversations the account has had with us in the past.
Akhil: Is there a specific feature of Drift that you love?
Veronica: I like that you guys rolled out Drift Video, which my team has been experimenting with lately. If someone’s a pretty good lead and I haven’t been able to hear back from them, I’ve been changing up my approach and sending them a video in the hopes of standing out a bit. I do like that Drift Video is different from other video services in the sense that it’s actually a part of the Drift platform. It’s great that the customer can just chat in when they’re watching the video, allowing me to respond immediately and talk to them right there or even set up a meeting. It makes a really seamless experience for the prospect and I hope to use it a bit more now that I’ve gotten my feet wet with it.
Akhil: Do you have any best practices or pro tips on how to get high-intent leads through Drift?
Veronica: The biggest tip I have is to just keep it conversational. Drift is built for two-way conversations, and it’s a platform built for conversational marketing. So don’t just list out information to prospects as if it were a form. Instead, try to keep a dialogue going. And don’t be afraid to rely on your teammates for help. It’s intimidating when you’re starting out and you feel like you don’t know the answers to questions that people are asking you, but don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it and you’ll feel right at home.
Know a CDR using Drift on their site to improve the buyer journey? Let us know by tweeting to us @Drift and we might just feature them in this column.
Editor’s Note: Each month, we’ll feature a conversation just like this with a CDR to learn more about how they use Drift to book meetings. This is the fourth article in this series. If you liked this post, catch up on our first, second, and third editions.
