The best way to sell? Don’t sell at all. Instead, you need to build a relationship with your buyer. In other words, act as a consultant and show your prospects how you can help solve their pain points.
That’s exactly what Sarah Ouyang and the team at Lattice, a people management software provider, set out to do with Drift and conversational marketing.
Sarah, who is part of the sales ops team at Lattice, joined the company six months ago. Her first task? Implement Drift to enable the sales team to have better conversations with customers and prospects on the Lattice site.
For Lattice, it’s all about sparking conversations with potential customers – that could be with a chat through Drift or with direct mail. Or a combination of both.
Through analyzing the data patterns of our most successful customers, we’ve learned that companies with more than 7 conversations per business see the most success with Drift. Since joining in January 2018, the Lattice team has had more than 2,500 conversations. That averages to about 48 conversations per week, and a little over 9 per day! Talk about nailing the art and science of a conversation.
“One of our best campaigns is a virtual coffee chat,” said Sarah. “Marketing sends a few key accounts mugs and then our sales team follows up with our prospect via Drift inviting them for coffee with a $5 Starbucks gift card.”
That’s the essence of conversational marketing – it brings people back into the buying process to start real conversations.
And these conversations turn into real pipeline, with over 130 leads captured for Lattice since Q1.
“It’s all about getting someone’s attention in a very personalized way,” Sarah added.
And this goes for chats, in-person meetings and when the Lattice team uses Drift Video.
“Every time anyone on the sales team uses Drift Video, they’ll always have a whiteboard behind them with the prospect’s name,” said Sarah. “It’s an easy way to show that every touch point is customized.”
With Drift, the Lattice team is working to remove friction from the buying process.
“We’re trying to create as little friction as possible,” said Sarah. “So if someone is interested, we want to be sure they’re sent to an SDR right away. We pull in SDRs really early on in the buying journey so we’re not forcing prospects to go through some nameless, faceless form.”
It’s all about connecting a site visitor to a human as quickly as possible.
Personalization Is Key
Sarah and the entire Lattice team take personal interactions seriously. So whether that’s online via chat through Drift, over a virtual coffee meeting or in person, the team is always looking for new ways to engage with prospects in a way that’s personalized, engaging and real-time. Take the following for instance.
“With conversational marketing, it’s best practice to make everything as personal as possible,” said Sarah. “So if someone went to the same school or has similar interests to you, you’re going to mention that.”
But when it comes to outbounding, you can’t get more personal than this:
“An SDR was grabbing a coffee the other day and he overheard two HR people complaining about a competitor,” said Sarah. “So he said, “Sorry to interrupt, but are you guys looking for HR software?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And he they picked up the conversation over email as soon as he was back in the office.”
That’s the definition of real-time marketing.
An Opportunity To Capture
When Lattice found Drift, they were looking for a solution to replace Intercom – one that would help them capture lost opportunities.
“Drift gives our team the perfect way to engage with site visitors in real time,” said Sarah. “Without Drift, it’s impossible to see who’s on our site at any given time. That’s an opportunity lost, right? The real-time engagement Drift provides is a gamechanger.”
Now fully onboarded with Drift, the Lattice team is seeing success after success.
“SDRs are hitting and exceeding quota,” Sarah said.
One Platform To Rule Them All
As far as their switch from Intercom to Drift, Sarah prefers Drift’s all-in-one platform approach that encompasses chat, video, email and automation.
“Drift’s all-in-one platform is very helpful because you buy it all and then choose what you provision for certain SDRs,” she noted. “Sure, reps could use Vidyard to record something, but then they couldn’t chat. So, from a sales op’s perspective, the fewer tools you have to buy, the better – the less you have to keep track of.”
