Crisis situations force us to strip away any excess so we can identify the things that matter most. It’s an unpleasant experience, but a necessary one. This is happening in our personal lives as we learn to live without many of the niceties and “normal” routines that we once took for granted. It’s also happening in our business lives as we take a good, hard look at our organizations to assess what we really need to keep them running.
In addition to identifying opportunities to tighten our belts, this in-depth assessment also helps us recognize the resources and assets that are delivering the most value to our bottom lines. And when we identify these people and tools, we have the chance to maximize their contributions to our company’s success.
When you find what’s working well, it’s time to double down.
Stretching budget dollars isn’t just about reducing expenses, it’s also about ensuring the highest ROI on every dollar spent. Especially now, but really in any situation, there are five key objectives every company needs to address to stay ahead of the competition:
- Improved productivity
- Increased business agility
- Ability to generate more leads
- Personalized customer experience
- Shortened sales cycle
Delivering tangible value is one of our main goals at Drift.
We understand that it’s often difficult to quantify if or how a piece of software is driving specific business outcomes. That’s why we spend so much time talking with our customers about exactly how Drift has influenced key metrics like length of sales cycle, time to value, sales productivity, and so forth.
We’re proud of the transformations Drift has delivered for our customers. Here’s just a sampling of some top-line results:
Using Personalization and other ABM Strategies to Convert 150% More Leads for Demandbase
As the world’s leading account-based marketing platform, Demandbase has always had a heavy focus on ABM in their own marketing. With Drift, they set out to create the most personalized buying experience possible so that they could connect high-value site visitors with the people and answers they needed.
In their first six months using Drift, Demandbase:
- Converted 33% of total conversations to leads
- Converted 37% of Drift leads into opportunities
- Converted 150% more leads into opportunities than their traditional web forms
Decreasing Response Time from Days to Seconds for Bottomline
Bottomline Technologies is a complex enterprise business — 37 different products and more than 10,000 customers. They used Drift to deliver a better customer experience (more relevant information and shorter response time, all with a more human touch) and improve their targeting for live chat sales conversations. They accomplished all that and were also able to test and iterate quickly, resulting in Drift becoming the sales team’s preferred lead source.
In the first 18 months of using Drift, Bottomline saw:
- 156 opportunities and more than $4.3M sales pipeline generated by Drift, another $8M influenced by Drift
- Average response time to leads down to 40 seconds
- 5,500 conversations over the course of the year
Partnering with RapidMiner to Drive 4,000 Leads and $1M in Pipeline
Lead capture forms and gated content became a thing of the past at RapidMiner after they implemented Drift. The company’s former CMO, Tom Wentworth, called Drift “the most productive thing I’m doing in marketing.” Drift helped Tom create a much better customer experience that’s based on their ability to scale helpfulness and bring humanity back into marketing.
In the first six months:
- RapidMiner captured more than 4,000 leads using Drift
- Drift influenced 25% of RapidMiner’s open sales pipeline (worth more than $1 million)
- Drift served as the source of 10% of all new sales pipeline created
And contacts that engage with RapidMiner via Drift:
- Are 30% more likely to remain monthly active users of RapidMiner
- End up having a 20% higher NPS score
Improving Sales Productivity for SalesRabbit
By replacing an inefficient form-based demo scheduling process with Drift for lead qualification and meeting scheduling, SalesRabbit was able to cut out a lot of unnecessary conversion steps and streamline their lead creation process. They were able to:
- Increase sales meetings by 40%
- Increase qualified leads by 50%
- Increase sales productivity by directing customers to the right resource by 84%
Delivering 5x ROI and a 10% Increase in Pipeline Value for TreeRing
TreeRing’s biggest challenge was connecting with sales-ready leads more quickly. Drift helped them automate the lead qualification process, leaving the sales team free to focus 100% on what they do best: closing. With Drift, TreeRing saw:
- 10% increase in the value of TreeRing’s opportunity pipeline
- 15x return on investment in 2 months
- Sales meetings scheduled through Drift connect on the first try 88% of the time
Delivering $1.7M in New Business in Five Months for Aventri
Using Drift, Aventri was able to get a lot closer to their goal of having a frictionless buying experience. Drift’s LeadBot and Meeting Scheduler gave Aventri the ability to qualify leads and book meetings in real-time, while Drift Intel allows them to roll out the red carpet with personalized welcome messages to their high-value target accounts. With Drift, Aventri:
- Decreased response time from 1:30 to 0:50
- Saw a 270% increase in lead conversion
- Increased meetings booked 20% month-over-month
- Generated $6M in pipeline created
- And $1.7M in closed-won new business
When making hard decisions, it’s critical to see the whole picture.
One thing our current crisis has made clear is the importance of digital connections and tools that keep the world running. Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to ensure you have the right technology in place – technology that delivers actual value while playing a critical role in maintaining business continuity, delivering the best possible customer experience, and improving overall efficiency and productivity even in the most challenging circumstances.