Have you ever gone to a baseball game without a scoreboard?
No?
Well, you should never buy software from a company without a scoreboard either. You need to know if you are winning or losing – in other words you need to set clear goals and the company needs to exceed them.
At Drift, we think a lot about measuring success for our customers. Our best customers are either very clear about what numbers they need to hit or they are very clear in asking for help in setting those metrics.
Before setting those metrics though, successful Drift customers begin by committing to three things:
- Staffing chat. They understand that the customer experience matters. Dedicating at least 1-3 people (depending on the size of the company), connecting that person or team’s calendars and interacting directly with website visitors from the get go is critical.
- Starting fast, experimenting regularly and learning quickly. They go live with Drift in less than a month. Early on, that a-ha moment is to get a bot up and running and communicating with customers directly. More experiments lead to more learnings which means they exceed their goals faster.
- Sharing wins early and often. They know that change doesn’t happen overnight. Small wins, medium wins and big wins all are celebrated on internal communication/social channels (at Drift we’re big fans of Slack!).
Once customers are committed to those three things, they then set metrics that are relevant to their team. If there are clear existing benchmarks to go from, then we work off those benchmarks.
Here’s a view of a standard customer’s key metrics prior to Drift:
Here are the goals we can set based off the above example:
- “We want to double the number of leads we’re getting and go from 200 to 400”
- “We want to 3x the number of qualified leads and go from 20 to 60”
- “We want to increase our meeting conversion percentage from 20% to 50%”
- “We want to 10x our win rate on opportunities”
- “We want to close deals in half the time we’re currently closing deals”
If there aren’t clear existing benchmarks then our Customer Success team here at Drift will guide you based on data we’ve observed from high performing customers and by evaluating your existing funnel and metrics.
We’ve noticed that customers who are able to create exceptional experiences never set more than two goals and one of those goals is focused on the chat experience – either chat response time or chat quality. If the response time is too slow or the quality of the chat is poor, then it’s next to impossible to meet sales and marketing goals.
Ultimately, measuring the success of your Drift experience is a team effort. Our commitment is that we are singularly focused on making you, your team and your business highly successful. If we are exceeding goals, we will celebrate and aim higher, if we aren’t hitting goals we will call it out and course correct. We’re also very aware that every team and company is different, but we lean on learnings from onboarding and educating thousands of customers on Conversational Marketing to tailor an experience to you. This helps us align around the right goals for your business and build a great foundation for lasting success.
Ready to get started? You can take Drift for a test drive without installing a single line of code here.
