How Emburse Influenced $2.7M in Closed Revenue with Drift Fastlane

$6.7M

influenced in pipeline

$2.7M

influenced in closed won revenue

780+

opportunities influenced

About Emburse

Emburse is a global leader in spend optimization. Their expense, travel management, purchasing and accounts payable, and payments solutions are trusted by more than 12 million business professionals, including CFOs, finance teams, and travelers.

The Challenge

In 2020, Emburse set out to find a solution that would help actively engage and capitalize on their organic website traffic. While the team had seen success with converting opportunities using Olark — a free, basic live chat tool — they wanted an even better solution. The solution was Drift, and it helped the Emburse team successfully reach their engagement goals.

But, in 2022, Emburse ran into a different problem: Karah Rogers, Marketing Director of Demand Generation at Emburse, noticed that demos weren’t converting and the meeting booking process was prolonging days to close or resulting in prospects ghosting SDRs entirely. Seeing this, the team began hunting for ways to improve their marketing qualified account (MQA) to marketing qualified opportunity (MQO) conversion rate.

The Solution

Though the team initially looked at Chili Piper, they didn’t have the funds or buy-in to adopt a standalone product. For Karah, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to leverage a tool they already had: Drift Fastlane.

With Fastlane, the Emburse team saw a way to enable buyers to skip the form queue and book a meeting or live chat right then and there.

INCREASED CONVERSIONS WITH FASTLANE

While Emburse doesn’t have reps chatting live in Drift, they deployed Fastlane on the demo request page of their various brands. This was a game-changer, as it enabled visitors to book meetings instantly, at their moment of highest intent.

As Karah explained, “Fastlane automatically references the account owner’s calendar so it only provides times available for the SDR team. This eliminates that back and forth that everyone hates dealing with.”

Fastlane has been hugely successful for us. It’s decreased the days to close and increased our MQA to MQO conversion rate.

Karah Rogers

Marketing Director, Demand Generation at Emburse

A SUPERIOR BUYER (AND SELLER) EXPERIENCE

By alleviating the back and forth that bogs down the typical buying process, Emburse was able to cut down their deal cycles. Their deal cycle for Fastlane-influenced deals is now down from over a month to an average of 27 days across business units.

For Emburse’s prospective buyers, this shortened buying cycle has led to a better sales experience — one that Kara sees as a competitive differentiator. “We’ve definitely impacted the buying experience. I don’t think any of our competitors are doing exactly what we’re doing.”

The buyer experience is better — there’s no back and forth where they’re spending all their time just trying to get the meeting scheduled.

Karah Rogers

Marketing Director, Demand Generation at Emburse

The Solution

This improved experience hasn’t only been a positive for Emburse’s buyers though. By adopting Fastlane, Emburse’s sales reps have freed up more time, which they can now spend on higher-value activities, like outbounding or working on target accounts, rather than completing busywork.

The Results

In just over a year of using Fastlane, Emburse has seen:

$M
influenced in pipeline driven by Drift this fiscal year
$M
influenced in closed won
+
opportunities influenced

The Future

With the adoption of Fastlane, Emburse has a solid chatbot strategy under their belt. That’s why the Emburse team is now looking to expand their use cases by training the SDR team on Drift for outbounding. As Karah concluded, “We’re spending quite a bit of time on personalization, intent signals, and relevant content, so I think outbounding will be a huge area of opportunity for us with Drift.”

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