How many conversion rates do you have to measure?
For most marketers, there are so many steps between discovery and purchase, that they’ve got to build massive dashboards to measure conversions at each step.
From visit to form submission.
From form submission to email click.
From email click to second page visit.
And then second page visit to second form submission.
But when you cut down on the amount of conversion steps, what do you get?
Growth.
Sales enablement platform SalesRabbit experienced this first-hand. After reducing friction in their buying process, they dramatically bumped conversions with conversational marketing, growing the number of sales meetings by 40%, increasing productivity by as much as 84%, and even generating 50% more qualified leads.
Best of all?
They didn’t have to waste time and money re-training their sales team or redesigning their website. So they made the move to conversational marketing and Drift.
Here’s how they did it.
40% More Sales Meetings Using Chatbots, Not Forms
“Demo requests are a huge part of our acquisition strategy,” explains Ben Nettlesheim, Senior Director of Digital Marketing at SalesRabbit.
But the team was facing some challenges.
To start, their scheduling process was extremely time-consuming. If someone wanted a demo, they’d land on the website, submit a form, and then wait to hear back.
Meanwhile, the form submission would notify the sales rep, and he or she would then email the prospect to find a mutually available time. Several email exchanges later, they’d finally have a meeting booked.
Because of this process, Ben’s team was losing demos because emails would go unanswered, prospects would lose interest, or forget to reply at all.
Using a form and then exchanging emails between the sales rep and prospect, SalesRabbit was able to convert about 25% of all requests into an actual demo.
Ben knew this process could be improved if only he could cut down on the number of conversion steps: form submission, answering emails, finding time in calendar, sales rep looking up their availability and finally sending a calendar invite – with days between each step.
So he turned to Drift’s real-time chatbots that automatically book meetings for sales reps with people on your website.
“Rabbot”, SalesRabbit’s website bot, now runs on their website 24/7. It’s triggered right from the top navigation on their website.
Rabbot asks site visitors a couple questions and once it determines they’re qualified, it automatically displays a sales rep’s calendar with availability for the visitor to book a meeting.
This means no more email back-and-forth for Ben’s team just to schedule a meeting, and way more conversions.
And after switching to the bot, SalesRabbit saw a 40% lift in the conversion rate of requests to meetings held.
“It was a welcomed change. The sales team is now spending more of their valuable time working demos and less time playing phone or email tag to schedule those demos” said Ben.
Bots Generate 50% More Qualified Leads For SalesRabbit
Not only did Rabbot convert more visitors into demos, but the quality of the people that requested demos increased by almost 50%.
“With our forms, we were seeing about 15% of our leads eventually move to a lead status of ‘not interested.’ With Drift, that number dropped to 8%,” Ben explained.
Other Drift customers have experienced similar results with higher quality leads being produced by chatbots or conversations, like Segment. They discovered that Drift-generated contacts were their #1 best source of qualified leads.
For SalesRabbit, this was a pleasant surprise and an added bonus to adopting conversational marketing.
Cutting the Signal-to-Noise Ratio By 84%
Another area where SalesRabbit was having trouble was with customers requesting sales demos.
Customers that wanted training would request a demo instead of reaching out to SalesRabbit’s customer success team. When the team was using forms, about 19% of all requests were from customers.
Those customer requests got sent to the same team as all the other requests: sales. And sometimes those demos would get scheduled, only for a sales-focused team member to start the demo and find out that it was really a customer looking for training, not a prospect evaluating their product.
This was a problem because the sales team is only supposed to sell. SalesRabbit has a customer success team that provides training.
So how did SalesRabbit solve the problem?
Now that they’re using Drift, they’re able to ask if the person requesting a demo is already using SalesRabbit. In fact, it’s the first question from Rabbot.
If the person is already using SalesRabbit, and therefore a customer, the bot will provide them with the contact information for the customer success team.
Now only about 5% of demo requests that come through are really customers, which greatly increases the sales team’s productivity – by 84%.
Now, Rabbot lives on their website booking meetings for Ben’s team 24/7 without any of the extra drop off points where SalesRabbit was losing potential deals before.
“We love how Drift has streamlined our lead creation process. We’re talking to potential customers earlier in the sales process and saving both their and our time by automating the calendaring and support request process via Drift” explained Ben.
Moral of the story? Remove extra hoops for your leads to jump through and you’ll grow your business.
Find out how you can get ridiculous growth like SalesRabbit, book a meeting with our team for a free consultation.