Have you ever thought about this?
There’s a disconnect between how people like you and I want to talk to businesses — and how those businesses want to talk to us.
We’ve all been there. It looks something like this:
There’s nothing more frustrating than having a question, going to look for an answer, landing on a website — and then everything comes to a screeching halt.
Here’s a form to fill out. We’ll be in touch soon.
See as people, we expect responses in real-time. That’s what we’re used to now since we use messaging apps like Slack and iMessage all day and can get answers on-demand.
But as businesses, when we’re in our jobs in marketing and sales, we do the opposite.
We make it so complex for people to buy from us.
We spend all of this time, effort, and budget, getting people to our websites with the goal of generating leads — but then once we actually get the people that we want to show up, we leave them to fill out a form and wait in line until we’re ready.
In our recent lead management study where we looked at the lead response times of 433 B2B SaaS companies, we found that 93% of sales teams failed to respond to new leads within five minutes — and 55% of sales teams didn’t respond within five days.
As a marketer, those are stats that keep me up at night (and in most cases, would result in an argument between sales and marketing).
And it’s not because we don’t want to respond to new leads — it’s that we can’t. The traditional B2B marketing products that we’ve all been relying on aren’t made to handle real-time selling.
But at Drift, we’re focused on reinventing marketing and sales using messaging, and we have something new for you today: LeadBot.
LeadBot is an intelligent sales assistant that sits on your website and helps you qualify leads in real-time.
Introducing LeadBot: Qualify Leads Without Forms
Let’s face it. Following up with someone hours after they come to your website is like ignoring a person that came into your store — and then mailing them a postcard hoping that’ll they come back.
And before LeadBot, that’s exactly what the recipe for qualifying leads looked like: throw up more forms, add more form fields, gate more content, and then hire more BDRs to make more calls.
Because LeadBot runs on conversations, not forms, all of the lead qualification you need to do can happen in real-time while someone is live on your website — without requiring them to fill out a form.
But the goal of using LeadBot on your website isn’t to replace humans. As Tom Wentworth, Chief Marketing Officer at RapidMiner puts it:
“The bot isn’t about replacing a human. It’s about augmenting [our team] and taking a user down a journey, so then we can jump in at the right moment.”
Easily Control Volume And Quality
Here’s something that you don’t get with traditional B2B marketing products: control.
The only way to truly control the volume and quality of leads that you’re getting has been to throw up more forms, gate more content, and tighten up the numbers behind your lead scoring formula.
But now with Drift, you can have complete control over both the volume and the quality of the leads you’re generating from your website — and it doesn’t require a single line of code.
It’s easy to fine-tune LeadBot so you only interact with the best leads based on the rules that matter to your business, and that can be as simple as using the same questions you currently ask on forms — or using the questions your sales team asks on an initial qualifying call.
Here’s Matt with more on how LeadBot works:
Plus LeadBot will capture email addresses for you so your team can follow up after — or you can hop in at any time and schedule meetings for your sales team in seconds right inside of the conversation:
So instead of spending all of that time and effort getting people to your website only to hurry up and wait, your funnel will now look like this — and the best leads will be taking the fast lane right to your sales team:
And here’s the best part: this doesn’t require a big change. You don’t have to change the way you do marketing and sales. In fact, it’s as simple as adding a second net to capture leads to your website.
You’re already fishing with one net (traditional forms) — now it’s time to see how much of an impact adding a second net can have on your sales pipeline.
Just check out what Guillaume at Segment did.
A 5% increase in selling time can lead to a 20% increase in revenue — so just imagine what can happen if your BDRs and sales reps don’t have to spend all of their time qualifying leads and waiting for more form submissions?