Demandbase
How The World’s Leader In ABM Used Drift To Convert 150% More Leads Into Opportunities Than Traditional Forms
Here's how Demandbase uses Drift to convert more leads into opportunities than their traditional forms.
Mimi Rosenhiem is the Senior Director of Digital Marketing at Demandbase, the world’s leading account based marketing platform. Demandbase offers the only Artificial Intelligence-enabled, comprehensive ABM platform that spans Advertising, Marketing, Sales and Analytics helping maximize marketing performance.
For Mimi, the idea of using Drift stemmed from the need to add a Conversational Marketing channel to better engage their top prospects and convert them into opportunities. Demandbase is a very innovative company in the way they think about engaging with prospects – specifically target accounts.
Their goal is to create the most personalized buying experience possible so that they can connect high-value visitors on their site with people who could answer their questions.
They realized that Drift could easily fit into this strategy and help them achieve their goals. In just the last six months, Mimi and the Demandbase team have seen their pipeline continue to grow with leads directly influenced by Drift. Overall, they were able to convert 33% of total conversations into leads, convert 37% of those Drift leads into opportunities, and as a whole, converted 150% more leads into opportunities than their traditional web forms.
Why Drift?
So why did Mimi decide to choose Drift in the first place? There were four main reasons:
- Drift ABM allows Demandbase to give their top tier accounts an amazing experience by greeting their site visitors with a personalized message and notifying their reps when target accounts are live on the site.
- LeadBot gives Demandbase the ability to qualify leads in real-time and connect site visitors with a human.
- Meeting Scheduler allows site visitors to instantly book a meeting on a sales rep’s calendar to learn more about their offering.
- Live Chat allows Demandbase to ensure that all of the website visitors have someone to talk to and can get them the information they’re looking for.
How Demandbase Used Drift to Convert More Leads Than Traditional Forms
Demandbase was the pioneer in all things account-based marketing. So naturally, everything they do from a marketing standpoint supports this strategy.
The problem is that, when all of your marketing is centered around ABM, your approach can get a bit, well, complex. But that wasn’t the case for Demandbase. Let’s see how they navigated their way to success:
The Problem 👎
For Demandbase, a large percentage of their opportunities and pipeline are generated from their website. This means that they need to find new ways to significantly increase the number of opportunities they create. One way they identified that could achieve this was to give sales an immediate way to connect with site their visitors.
However, given their marketing strategy is completely centered around account-based marketing, it was crucial for them to be able to identify the target accounts that were coming to their site and ensure that those conversations were prioritized since they convert at a much higher rate than the rest of their site visitors.
Many of their visitors aren’t ready to contact sales or request a demo, but they do have questions. Mimi and team felt it was important for them to be able to provide answers – whether it is through the content on the site or through a conversation with one of their experts.
The Solution ⚡
If there was any company who could tackle the roll out of a completely ABM-focused Drift experience, it was Demandbase. From the very beginning of their implementation, they were able to apply ABM best practices to their playbook builds including:
- Offering different experiences for each target account segment
- Connecting accounts with their sales reps in real-time, and
- Immediately alerting sales reps when their accounts were actively researching content on their site
Demandbase has built out some really effective playbooks to leverage these best practices. The playbooks they’ve built all serve a different purpose including getting site visitors in touch with the right sales team, targeting event attendees, or targeting visitors from specific companies.
The Results 📈
So what were the results of this all-ABM Drift experience? Demandbase now converts 33% of all of their conversations into leads. Of those leads, 37% turn into open opportunities for their sales team. But what really stood out to them was that they were able to convert 150% more leads into opportunities than they could with their traditional web forms.
As Mimi explained:
“The cost per opportunity is much less than some of the more traditional marketing channels.”
In addition the above, there’s also the added benefit of leveraging conversation intelligence to optimize their site by giving them insight into what information visitors are looking for.
The Future 🔮
Demandbase has seen a ton of success since implementing Drift. Their plan is to continue to optimize their use of chat, experiment with bot-based playbooks for specific use cases, and build out more playbooks to support other marketing channels including search, advertising, and video calls to action.
Results Recap
Here’s a quick summary of the results Demandbase has been able to achieve using Drift. Over the last six months, Mimi and the Demandbase team have…
- Converted 33% of total conversations to leads
- Converted 37% of Drift leads into opportunities
- Converted 150% more leads into opportunities than their traditional web forms
Final Thought:
Personalization Is Everything
For Demandbase, account-based marketing is the foundation of what they do. They know that if you really want to differentiate and separate yourself from the pack, it’s more important than ever to provide the personalized experiences visitors expect and deserve.
Using Drift, Demandbase has been able to add another high-performing channel to drive more qualified leads to their sales team. And in just six months, they’ve already seen great results.