4 Marketers Reveal Their Top Pipeline Generation Secrets

I love a good story ❤️

And at Drift, we make it a point to celebrate the wins of our customers through storytelling.

(Plus, I think you’ll agree with me: We could all use a feel-good story right now.)

And as digital becomes fiercely more competitive in this uncertain economic climate, marketing and sales need to hyperfocus on creative solutions to break through the noise and generate pipeline wins.

To help in this endeavor, I’ve compiled a list of some amazing success stories from our customers who did just that.

Keep reading to learn how these marketers drove incredible results for their companies ?

RapidMiner Reveals How They Generated 4,000 Leads & $1 Million in Pipeline with AI and Chat

Former CMO of RapidMiner and current CMO of Recorded Future, Tom Wentworth, was an earlier advocate and adopter of two major technological shifts in marketing:

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) as a means to streamline and scale marketing
And using chat to replace dated forms

That’s what turned Tom onto Drift.

Tom and the marketing team at RapidMiner were able to use Drift to automate their lead qualification process and replace their non-converting forms with real-time chat.

The results? Unprecedented growth.

With these changes RapidMiner:

Generated 4,000+ leads.

Created more than $1 million in pipeline.

Increased customer retention overall. People who start conversations through Drift Chat:

- Were 30% more likely to remain monthly active users

- Had a 20% higher N et Promoter Score (NPS)

“Our marketing team now spends most of our time finding new ways to help our users, rather than how to annoy them with more email nurture campaigns and lead collection forms. We use Drift to scale helpfulness, and to bring the humanity back to marketing.” – Tom Wentworth, Former CMO, RapidMiner

RapidMiner was able to achieve these results by retiring dated marketing practices that simply weren’t helping their bottom line.

Here’s how they did it:

They replaced forms with chat to reduce convoluted touchpoints and to speed sales follow-up. The people coming to RapidMiner’s site aren’t looking to “browse.” Visitors are looking to solve pain points. But Tom quickly realized that he was introducing a lot of friction to the buyer’s journey by using antiquated forms that led to long wait times and disjointed follow-up. To remove this friction, Tom and the team replaced their forms with real-time chat.

To keep up with demand and capture leads 24/7, RapidMiner implemented Drift’s AI-powered bot. With this bot, RapidMiner could automate the qualification process and route the right conversations to reps if buyers wanted to talk to a human.

Algolia Started Over 900 Conversations with Target Accounts Using Intelligent ABM

Account-based marketing (ABM) isn’t a new concept. But a lot of marketing teams still struggle to get it right.

First, it’s expensive to drive target accounts to a site. So you want to make sure once these people arrive on the page, that the experience is frictionless and personalized. Second, partnering with sales is key, so you need the routing process for ABM to be seamless as well.

In an effort to optimize the ABM program at Algolia, Global Revenue Operations Associate, Alexander Araujo, knew he needed a scaled, more targeted approach. Plus, Algolia doesn’t have a frontline SDR team to filter leads that come in through the site.

That’s why Algolia turned to Drift ABM.

With Drift ABM, Alexander and his team were able to:

Personalize messaging for target account visitors. Algolia can use company tokens and UTM parameters to greet people in a more personalized way. Like, for example, if someone comes to the site from a Google ad. Plus, with Drift Intel’s reverse IP technology, Algolia can identify accounts from anonymous web traffic.

Route to the right salespeople and notify them when their account is on the site. When a person from a target account visits Algolia’s website, the right salespeople are notified immediately so they can jump on any conversation and engage in real-time.

Since implementing Drift ABM, Algolia’s sales team has had over 900 conversations with high-value accounts and turned those into opportunities and pipeline.

Learn more about how Algolia uses Drift ABM and account-based marketing best practices to grow their pipeline here.

How Park Place Technology Sped Up their Sales Cycle

“If you had told me a year ago that I would be appearing on the stage of our sales kickoff dressed as a chatbot, I would never have believed you.”

?That’s Eric Richardson – chatbot fanatic, and Marketing Operations Lead at Park Place Technologies, a proactive and predictive data center support provider.

The costume Eric is talking about is based on their company’s Driftbot, affectionately named Parker.

Parker has become an integral team member and company culture icon for Park Place Technology since implementing Drift.

Having used live chat previously, Eric and the team were noticing that a lot of conversations were being missed given the lack of bandwidth on the team. They needed a chat feature that would provide an element of automation so they could run the bot and capture leads 24/7.

Enter Drift and conversational marketing.

With Drift’s Live Chat features, Eric could keep the bot running 24/7 and route the appropriate conversations to sales. The impact on the organization was huge. Especially in terms of lead response time and shortening their sales cycle.

On average, Park Place Technology found that Drift leads evolve from lead to opportunity 20% faster than non-Drift leads, and from lead to close approximately 15% faster.

To learn more about Park Place Technology’s success story, visit here. And if you’re looking to fix your own lead response time issue, check out this blog on eight steps you can take now.

Evoque Data Center Used Conversational Content to Increase Conversions by 19% & Engagement by 11%

You’ve created this amazing content and people are downloading the PDF straight from your bot.

Perfect.

Now what?

For a lot of marketers, this is the “sit and wait” portion between the content hand-off and sales conversations. But…what if you could talk to your potential buyers now – as they’re consuming your content?

That was the question that Evoque Data Center and their Digital Marketing Director, Erin Carpenter, had when looking at their own content and demand gen strategy:

“As most digital marketers know, building a quality content engine that will drive a sustainable flow of MQLs and SQLs takes time. With that in mind, I knew we had to select a handful of manageable tactics to engage, connect, and still convert the website visitors we do have from PR efforts and general industry word-of-mouth. Like most companies, leads are a big deal and expected to support the efforts of our sales organization. But here’s the thing. It’s 2019, and we know all too well that conversion rates on gated content are plummeting.” – Erin Carpenter, Digital Marketing Director, Evoque Data Center

To offer a better experience to buyers and add a layer of engagement to their content strategy, Erin implemented Drift’s Conversational Content.

In order to do this well, Erin and the digital marketing team at Evoque ditched the forms on their high-intent content and replaced them with Drift’s conversational landing pages. This feature allowed buyers and Evoque’s marketing and sales teams to interact while visitors were reading the content.

See their approach in action ?

Evoque-convo-content-scroll

To get the most mileage out of their Conversational Content, Erin created three best practices. For each piece of Conversational Content, Evoque:

Added a confirmation email trigger to their bot. This email included a link to the PDF of their content.
Added conversation tags. These helped Erin organize and report on chat conversations.
Used notifications to automatically notify sales reps. This notified reps when someone was consuming content and routed conversations to the right people.

Since implementing Conversational Content on their website, Erin and the team have seen:

A 19% increase in conversions
An 11% increase in engagement

If you’re interested in learning more about Evoque’s story, get the full rundown here. And if you want to include Conversational Content as part of your digital marketing strategy, check out this video to get started.

Looking for some more inspiration?

We’re so proud to share the cool and innovative things our customers are doing to drive success. But, there’s also a ton of other bright marketers out there doing great things.

Luckily, we’ll be sharing the virtual stage with a number of them this April.