The Bot Recipe Drift Uses To Book 20 Demos A Day (Swipe The Flow Here)

One of the most common questions we get from our customers here at Drift is: “How does Drift use Drift?”

It’s a great question. The short answer… well there really isn’t a short answer because we use Drift for so much. Drift helps with everything from engaging and re-engaging site visitors to booking more meetings for our sales team to supporting existing customers and welcoming target accounts.

And, like most organizations, one of our primary goals through Drift is booking more meetings for our sales team.

So how do we actually help our customers (and ourselves) do that? By leveraging conversational chatbots of course. We’ve built hundreds of bots here at Drift, but none have been more impactful than our demo bot.

At a high level, our demo bot is designed to:

1. Greet the guest with a thoughtful welcome message
2. Ask two qualifying questions to better understand the prospect
3. Capture an email to send a meeting invite to
4. Schedule a demo with a sales rep
5. Send the prospect off with a confirmation email

This sequence of events takes a maximum of 30 seconds to complete. Not only does the customer get the instant gratification of booking a meeting without any added friction, but we’re also able collect the information we need to have a meaningful conversation and personalize a demo for each prospect.

Now let’s take a look at the blueprint Drift uses to book 20 demos per day.

Welcome Message

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That’s why your welcome message is so important. It’s the first opportunity you get to engage with someone when they have the highest level of intent.

They’ve finally clicked on that “Get a Demo” button. It’s on! This is the beginning of your conversation with a potential customer – your first chance to make a positive impression.

Here’s the welcome message we use:

You were expecting more weren’t you. Some fireworks maybe? There is absolutely a time and place for a funny or provocative welcome message, but we’ve seen the best results when keeping the conversation informal, just like texting with your friend. Because at the end of the day, we’re only human.

This greeting is the perfect place to set expectations. People who click the “Get a Demo” button signal that they do indeed want a demo, and we ease their minds by letting them know we’ll only ask them a few easy questions.

Remember: You can see how many fields are on a form, but you can’t see that with a bot, so setting expectations is key to creating a good experience.

Lead Qualification

Next step, qualification – a sales tactic so important, it can be the difference between closed won and closed lost. Understanding what your prospect’s pains, desires, and drivers are up front allows sales reps to tailor their demos to deliver the best possible experience for potential customers.

Before Drift, getting this information from a prospect usually meant a lengthy form and / or a pre-sales call. But now, lead qualification can be done by our bot, in real-time.

Now, there’s no silver bullet for how many qualifying questions you should use in your sales process. That honestly depends on the amount of information needed to understand the prospect before moving forward with a demo or meeting.

At Drift, we believe that the fastest path to revenue is through conversations. So we decided to reduce the friction that typically comes with lead qualification and build our bot to only ask two key questions. And the answers to those questions give us everything we need to know to move forward with a personalized demo.

1. What are you interested in using Drift for?

With this question, we’re able to narrow down the use case and get a good understanding of the prospect’s pain points. Using your organization’s value propositions and benefits allow the prospect to envision their ideal state.

Because we aim to have as many conversations as possible, we enabled the ability to let site visitors chat in freely. But to ensure we’re having a high-quality conversation, we added expected keyword groups for this question to continue the conversation if any are mentioned. You can manage this when adding a question to your bot by clicking the cog icon in the top right of the node.

2. What website are you thinking of using Drift on? 

This question is definitely unique to Drift (or a company that offers web-based solutions), but the reason behind asking it is to allow our reps to deliver a 100% personalized experience. They do this by showing their prospects what Drift would look like on their own site – without having to sign up for a trial or install any code.

Think of how this type of question would apply to your industry or vertical. Let’s say you’re selling marketing automation software – a version of this question could be “How many contacts do you have in your database?”

The qualifying questions above are unique to Drift. Your goal should be to collect the most information possible, with the least amount of questions to deliver a frictionless experience to potential customers. The quicker you can qualify your prospect, the quicker you can guide them through the funnel and achieve the goal of scheduling a demo.

For more tips on lead qualification, read our Qualifying Flow Best Practices guide.

Now that we have the prospect engaged, it’s time to move forward. Let’s take a look at the most crucial element of the bot flow, the call to action.

Call To Action

The call to action is one of the most important pieces of a bot flow. When a prospect gets to this step, just remember that they’ve already clicked on the demo button and told you what they care about. It’s time to move forward and get the last bit of information so you can officially book that demo.

In our case, we’ve built our call to action around two components:

1. Capturing the site visitor’s email
2. Letting the site visitor book a meeting on their own terms

First, our bot asks the visitor to enter their email.

Normally, people don’t want to give you their email. You need to prove that you earned it before asking for it. This is why we wait until the end of the flow to ask for the prospect’s email. It allows us to add pieces of our value prop throughout the bot flow to build trust. And once we’ve built that trust, we can ask for something in return.

If for any reason we already have their email (for instance, if they are a blog subscriber), we’ll bypass this question altogether and go straight to scheduling a demo.

Once we have an email we can send a meeting invite to, our bot will drop a calendar where the site visitor can book a time at their convenience.

Buyers want to take action on their own terms. They don’t want to be forced down a path, especially one they aren’t comfortable with.

Wrapping Up The Conversation

Now that we’ve collected all the information we need to create a personalized experience for the prospect, it’s time to send them off with a confirmation that the demo has been scheduled.

But before we do that, we found it to be valuable to offer the prospect the ability to add additional notes to the meeting. This way, the rep can cover anything that wasn’t captured by the bot.

Then after the prospect completes this step, they are sent a confirmation email of their scheduled demo.

And that’s it. We can now send the prospect off with not only their scheduled demo, but a completed and frictionless experience.

So there you have it. The bot flow we just covered is the blueprint for the bot we use to book 20 demos per day for our sales team. Here’s how it looks on our site:

By keeping the flow conversational, limiting the amount of qualifying questions, and allowing the prospect to move forward on their own terms, we’re able to build the trust necessary to guide them through the flow and book a personalized demo.

If you’d like to learn about how Drift can help you book more demos and create amazing, frictionless buying experiences, click here!