“By 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision making, using technology that unites workflow, data, and analytics.”
👆That’s from a recent Gartner press release, where the research firm highlighted the growing importance of buyer insights.
Our take? It’s clear that B2B companies want a way to ensure their sales reps are always taking high percentage shots.
That’s why we’ve taken the already popular Drift Engagement Score and supercharged it with AI. Backed by our proprietary machine learning model, the new AI-powered Engagement Score helps sales reps outbound with intentionality, improve their response rates, and build quality pipeline.
We want our customers to get the most out of the tools they use daily, and that starts with knowing how they work. So today, we’re pulling back the curtain on how AI powers Drift’s Engagement Score, why your sales team needs it, and how they can use it ⚡️
Introducing Drift’s AI-Powered Engagement Score
Imagine, you’re a sales rep with 50 target accounts and you’ve got just 30 minutes to spend on outbound prospecting. You know that prioritizing your outreach is crucial to making the most of your time. So how do you make sure you’re going after the accounts that will actually convert?
Drift’s AI-powered Engagement Score tells you which of your accounts, target or not, are the most engaged and most likely to buy based on their interactions with your brand’s marketing and sales motions.
Drift alerts sales reps about highly-engaged opportunities by signaling activities that demonstrate high intent to buy based on your specific organization’s model. This enables sales reps to then accurately prioritize personalized outreach to the accounts (and contacts) that are showing the most intent.
3 Reasons Why Your Sales Reps Will Love Drift’s Engagement Score
Today, the average sales rep uses six selling tools and sees hundreds of buying signals in a single day. Now more than ever, it’s important that reps have visibility into activities that highlight buying intent.
Drift’s Engagement Score shines for sales reps in three key areas:
- Surfacing warm accounts to engage with in real-time: We’ve all been there. Your sales rep is distracted by a different chat or misses a form submission — and then they spend the next month playing phone tag with the person that contacted them. Drift’s Engagement Score ensures reps don’t miss out on hot accounts by allowing them to strike while intent is at its highest.
- Using AI to highlight high-intent actions that accounts are taking: Your sales reps aren’t omniscient, but AI can help them better understand their account’s activity. With the Engagement Score, your sales reps will be able to find the needle in the haystack, gain valuable context on their contacts, and create personalized outreach that lands meetings.
- Doing a pulse-check on accounts that are already engaged: Keeping up momentum is key to driving accounts down the funnel. Our Engagement Score helps sales reps build out an account snapshot and informs them when another touch is needed, if there’s an opportunity to multi-thread a deal, or when specific messaging is resonating with a prospect.
That’s Great — But How Does It Actually Work?
Drift’s AI-powered Engagement Score is based on not only a prospective account’s engagement (number of activities) but also the relevance of those activities (assigning weights to activities based on level of intent).
Because none of our customers’ businesses and prospects are the same, we create a custom model for each of our customers to give their sales reps the most accurate score possible. We do this by training a machine learning model that looks at which activities have historically led to an opportunity and assigns a custom weight to those activities. These activities include site visits, email activity, conversational intent, video views, job titles, and meeting data.
So whether you sell HR software to enterprise companies in the US and Canada or you offer point-of-sale software to mom-and-pop restaurants in Western Europe, our custom models are designed to understand the nuances of your business — your target buyers, your website structures, your sales cycles, etc. — and highlight what is relevant to you and nobody else. In fact, the custom model ensures none of your data is shared with other companies.
When an activity is labeled as “High Intent” and highlighted in the Engagement Score tooltip, it is because that activity’s weight has exceeded a certain threshold specific to that organization’s model.
Plus, the Engagement Score model continuously analyzes activity and opportunity data as your business evolves, which means your predictive insights are always becoming more and more accurate — without needing any intervention from your sales ops team.
How Can Sales Reps Use Drift’s Engagement Score?
The new AI-powered Engagement Score is integrated throughout Drift’s product so sales reps can access scores at their convenience and make their prospecting more efficient. Here are a few of the places you’ll find it:
- Activity Feed: As sales reps look through a filtered list of accounts, they can access a detailed Engagement Score where they can see recent high-intent activities and determine if they should take action on that account today.
- Account Engagement Page: Sales reps can use this macro view to get a lay of the land on their book of business, see the fruits of their labors in the Engagement Score Activity Graph, and make strategic decisions such as re-prioritizing accounts based on which accounts are heating up and which accounts are cooling off.
- Daily Digest Email: The daily digest lands in your sales rep’s inbox every morning so they can review it with their cup of coffee. Here, they can see what their list of targeted accounts did in the past 24 hours. With Engagement Score, reps can better understand which accounts started showing high-intent overnight and which need to be re-engaged.
- In Your CRM: High-intent activities are pushed into your CRM of choice and displayed alongside all other activities so reps are able to get a full snapshot of the activities that matter without needing to hop into the Drift app.
Learn more about how sales teams are using Drift here.
6 Reasons Why You Should Invest In Engagement Score Today
In recent years, we’ve seen the B2B buying process become more complex due to larger buying groups, less time spent with sellers, and longer sales cycles. With a tool like Engagement Score, your reps will be able to evolve with your buyers, optimize their prospecting blocks, and hit quota. However, if you are still on the fence, here are six reasons why you should invest in Drift’s Engagement Score today:
- It’s ready out of the box. Leave the configuration, data analysis, and display up to us. Setting up Drift’s Engagement Score is as easy as installing the Drift widget on your website and connecting your CRM integration.
- It incorporates conversational intent. Not every email, chat, phone call, or Zoom indicates somebody wants to buy — some could be saying “I’m not ready” or “We aren’t interested.” Our AI analyzes your conversations and surfaces the ones that matter in the Engagement Score, maximizing rep efficiency.
- It replicates your top reps. With the Engagement Score, reps who are new to your company can be put on the same playing field as the vets when it comes to identifying high-intent actions and taking thoughtful, personalized next steps.
- It removes bias from the equation. Our machine learning algorithm beats heuristically calculated scores because it avoids human bias and relies solely on statistics to surface high-intent accounts.
- It’s built for your reps, and your reps only. Our customers are all different and that’s why we train a custom model for each of them. Generic, heuristically calculated scores are useful in some instances, but having a score personalized to your unique business brings data for your sales reps to a whole new level.
- It’s always improving. As businesses, go-to-market strategies, and customers evolve, our AI ensures that your scoring system is constantly adapting so that your sales reps will always get the most important, relevant signals.
