A few months ago at Drift, our sales and marketing process looked kind of. . . traditional.
If you were interested in Drift, you might signup for our newsletter, download a piece of content or attend a demo.
After that, a lead would get some nurturing to make sure they were a good fit, and then sales would reach out, and so on.
Pretty traditional.
And it stings to write that — if you know anything about our backstory and our goals, traditional is the last thing that we want to be as a company.
But after a few weeks, we thought about it, and something clicked.
If we’re building a customer-driven company, our sales and marketing process needs to live up to everything that being customer-driven stands for too.
So we put our new free live chat on our website and made that the new front door to Drift. This puts conversations first, and it’s already had a huge impact on our go-to-market strategy. Here’s what has happened.
Click here to get Drift’s free live chat software on your website.
Inbound Leads Have Gone Way Up
With a traditional form on our site, we were converting roughly 3% of our website traffic into inbound leads (meaning someone came to our website and reached out to us with a question about Drift).
Once we made the switch and put our new free live chat on our site, inbound leads started to climb — and today, 6% of visitors start conversations while they’re on our website.
Just by making the switch from an email to chat, we’ve been able to double our conversion rate and get more inbound leads without doing any more work. And with inbound leads historically costing 60% less than outbound leads, we’ll take more of them any day of the week.
More Potential Customers Get The Help They Need
Put your consumer hat on for a second.
When was the last time you wanted to pick up the phone to talk to a sales rep or call a support number because you had a question?
Never.
With live chat, our customers (and potential customers) don’t ever have to do that. Whether they have a question about pricing, want to know how we’re different than a competitor, or need help setting up something in their account, all they have to do is send us a chat message.
But this isn’t like email: on average, we try and respond to chat messages within one minute, and often times it’s even quicker than that.
Live chat has also given us the ability to truly do all hands support. If someone writes in with a bug, one of engineers or product managers will pick up the chat. If someone writes in with questions about pricing or certain features, sales will hop in. We’ve even had PR opportunities come in through our live chat.
We’re Able To Get Instant Customer Feedback
There’s one thing that can have a bigger impact on growing your business than anything else: talking to customers.
But sometimes, it can be hard to get conversations going because you have to find people that want to talk.
Enter live chat.
People are writing in on their own to ask us questions when they have them, which gives us the opportunity to ask important questions back to try and figure out what they’re trying to accomplish, how they heard about us, or why they would want a particular feature. It’s like instant customer development.
Plus, this is one of the best ways to pressure test your messaging, positioning, and any new features. If people are live on your site and confused, they’ll tell you.