Hi everyone, I’m Nick.
I’m a member of the Drift marketing team. A big part of my job is to create content that helps educate, motivate and showcase the amazing agencies, consultancies, and technology companies that we have partnered with at Drift.
For the last several months, I’ve had a chance to meet all sorts of talented marketing and sales professionals who are helping Drift customers achieve their revenue acceleration goals.
And it got me thinking. I wanted to do more to shed light on these great stories and learnings. So today, I’m starting a brand new series.
Each month we’ll introduce you to a Drift Solutions Partner that has shown quantifiable success in implementing revenue acceleration best practices for companies while putting the customer at the center of everything they do (one of our Leadership Principles). In this way, you can learn from their experience and also get to know a potential partner in your own organization’s conversational marketing and sales efforts.
First up, we have a conversation with Andrea Lechner-Becker at LeadMD. I ask Andrea how her team has crafted and delivered professional services that have helped Drift customers drive transformation and accelerate revenue – and how that’s increased LeadMD’s bottom line in the process.
Now let’s get to it.
Editor’s note: The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Nick Salvatoriello: First, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at LeadMD?
Andrea Lechner-Becker: I’m Andrea Lechner-Becker and I’m CMO of LeadMD. I love, love, love MarTech. If it’s new, shiny, and helps a marketer do something more efficiently or better, I’m all about it. I host a show on YouTube that’s all about MarTech, comparing different tools in a way that everyone can understand like, “How is this technology actually going to help me in my job?” That’s what I try to bring to the market in all sorts of different ways and that’s what we try to help customers do at LeadMD.
Nick: How do you help your clients to form goals around their utilization of Drift?
Andrea: Our value as a consultancy and implementation partner is to connect our client’s technology investment to business outcomes. We do this by creating a roadmap of how increasing mastery with Drift leads to better and more impactful business outcomes. What that means is that there have to be certain outcomes that are achieved in phases as the customer’s adoption of a platform matures over time. For the Drift customers that we support, that might typically start out at the implementation phase with focusing on qualified leads generated and meetings booked through the platform. By the time we get customers to achieve mastery of Drift a few months down the road, they’re ready for goals like personalizing conversations by account and incorporating conversational conversions at every stage of the buyer journey.
Nick: So what are some examples of success that you’re seeing with implementing Drift successfully at different companies – both at the beginning and perhaps after they’ve had it for a number of months?
Andrea: This first example is a client in the FinTech space. They’re about 150 employees and under $50 million in revenue. They’ve been a client since 2015. We started focusing where a lot of our work starts, in marketing operations. This involves us consulting and executing on marketing automation support, CRM support in sales ops – things like that. Throughout our time working with them over the past six years, we have transitioned really to function as a strategic advisor for the CMO. So one of the big markers of that shift into a higher strategic advisor role was that we got asked, should they even buy Drift? They asked if we could help them understand if and how it might fit into their sales and marketing tech stack. After we indeed recommended they buy it, we have helped support them with a support service retainer after they onboarded with the platform.
Part of that retainer’s scope is we have weekly strategy calls where we’ll be on with our marketing operations counterpart directly at the client. She would be asking us, “Hey, how do I do this in Drift?” The thing is, you don’t really need a services provider to tell you how to do something in a technology like Drift. There’s not a lot of value that comes out of that how-to conversation. You could go to Drift’s help documentation or training content for the answers. You could Google it. This was our team’s opportunity to turn that conversation from a less value-adding “So how do you do this? Oh well, you click this button and you do this thing” to “but should you even be doing that?” conversation. We would ask this client, “Does your buyer at this stage in their journey really want to talk to a rep? We can add the button to call a rep, but is that what they really want? And is that the best experience for you to be putting forward with your customer?”
That shift to more of a strategic focus to the partnership led to the client contracting with us for audience research and messaging products, as well as crafting playbooks for them. To do this, we held discussions around, “what is your sales offer? How do we communicate that to target prospects in email, on LinkedIn, and yes, via Drift when they get to our website?” By utilizing this strategic focused messaging and offer, their conversion rate of the Drift playbooks that we worked on with them increased by 230%. And it came as a result of taking that more strategic, “should you?” focus to our conversations. Higher quality, higher performing playbooks gave this client a much stickier Drift customer experience, which was good for them, good for Drift, and good for us as their partner.
Nick: You also work with a lot of SaaS companies on Drift, what is an example of a successful Drift implementation you’ve done in that vertical?
Andrea: Indeed – we have a lot of SaaS customers that we work with. One example client is about 400 employees, about $100 million in annual revenue and they’re a project-based service buyer for us. We have done buyer research projects with them and as part of that work, we also did buyer journey mapping. Through that exercise, we uncovered the need for an interactive calculator about mid-funnel for their target buyers. When you talk about creating a calculator, there are lots of ways to do it. However, one of the things that we try to do is be as thrifty as possible with our customers’ budgets. We’re very high emphasis on driving top-line value, very low emphasis on creating some really fancy HTML thing that costs $300,000 to do.
So, we suggested that we actually build out this calculator right within Drift because they were already investing in Drift as a platform – and we had proven we knew how to build it for them on the platform in the way that they wanted. It was a good opportunity for us to merge Drift’s technology with their instance of Marketo, Salesforce CRM, and get all of these systems talking together in a way that helps their buyer.
To produce a really integrated calculator within this buyer’s journey, that meant auditing. We included the audit of a couple of related Drift playbooks and suggested optimization for them. This called for an integration of the journey for the customer, between Marketo, Salesforce, and Drift, taking the conversations and the answers that we were getting from Drift, pulling them into Marketo, serving them up personalized emails, making sure that conversation goes over to Salesforce, making sure the sellers know what’s going on, that whole lovely vision for how these systems all integrate together.
Our audit uncovered they also needed a deeper training for their sales team on how to leverage Drift. I think a lot of times people get their ADRs/SDRs/BDRs involved in Drift, but we really saw a gap in the client’s ability from an account-based marketing perspective to get their sellers directly in Drift – engaging, interacting with prospects, and making sure that they knew how to leverage Drift (plus Marketo, plus Salesforce) for their entire selling process.
So the calculator as a mechanism to move people through the funnel is a super valuable resource for them. This kind of a project and the innovation around it is why customers pay us to be their Drift Partner. The plus side is the integration of Drift with at least two additional systems like Marketo and Salesforce, just makes Drift stickier for the customer – and makes the customer stickier for us.
Nick: Impressive stories, Andrea, I love how you take a strategic approach with your clients that allow you to deliver really valuable implementations, integrations and optimizations for your clients on Drift.
Andrea: Thanks Nick. Our philosophy at LeadMD is that it’s our job to make our customers love Drift and that, if (as their strategy and execution partner) we can make them love Drift, they will love us.
Nick: Sounds like a winning philosophy! If anyone in our ecosystem would like to learn more about what you do at LeadMD and to communicate with you folks, where’s the best place for them to go?
Andrea: They can head to our blog. Search for Drift on there and all of our Drift content will come up. You can actually chat with me right there on the blog. I am a big proponent of everyone in the organization having some responsibility. We’re a smaller organization with 50 people. So, a lot of us are on Drift, exploring what people are asking and engaging there. So, just ask us some questions on our Drift bot. I’ll likely be there.
Nick: There you go. Andrea Lechner-Becker, thank you so much for sharing this story with us. We really appreciate it.
Andrea: My pleasure!
Interested in working with a Drift Partner? Check out our directory here.
