How Higher Quality Drift Leads Helped Gigamon Drive $7M+ in Pipeline
About Gigamon
Gigamon is a network visibility and monitoring solution that helps users get more out of their traditional network observability tools. They deliver unified network visibility and analytics on all data-in-transit. And if that sounds complicated…well, it’s because it is.
This is why Gigamon needed a way to quickly inform website visitors about what they do.
The Challenge
As Heather Alter, Senior Director of Global Digital Experience, explained, “If people come to your website and they don’t understand what you do, they’re going to just leave and go to the competitor. We really needed to be in the right conversations to help people understand what we do quickly because it’s a complicated solution that we provide. We knew having direct conversations with immediate impact to our visitors would help us, not only educate and engage buyers, but also to be more strategic and more quickly influence time to pipeline.”
When it came to deciding which solution was right for them, Drift was the top contender from the beginning. “The director of our sales business development team had used Drift at previous companies and they knew Drift was best in class. It was a slam dunk,” Heather said.
2023 STATE OF MARKETING AND SALES AI REPORT
Heather Alter
The Solution
Gigamon deployed Drift with some big goals in mind: 90 opportunities and $4.5 million in pipeline all influenced by Drift in their first year. This meant that the team didn’t want to waste a moment getting Drift up and running.
“We knew that we needed that jumpstart and someone who really understood how to partner with us to set up and best manage our playbooks,” Heather explained. “We wanted the expertise of the professional services folks, and it absolutely blew all of our expectations out of the water. Our professional services partner is awesome; he’s creative, innovative. He helps us to really optimize and improve everything we’re doing.”
Heather Alter
AN ALWAYS-ON APPROACH
In the first year of partnering with Drift Professional Services, Gigamon made some serious progress.
“Professional Services was instrumental in helping to get us onboarded and working with playbooks. In the first year, we launched over 30 different playbooks and we onboarded and trained 14 business development reps (BDRs) from around the world. We have folks in Asia Pacific, France, Germany, the UK, and here in the US, so we have a ‘follow the sun’ BDR model,” Heather explained. This means that, no matter what time a prospect arrives on their website, a BDR somewhere in the world is ready to engage with that visitor.
While the follow the sun approach means someone is always available for live chat, Heather explained that the Drift bot — which is available at all hours of the day — has helped support the team’s goals.
“A lot of chats can be handled by the bot and don’t require people behind them,” Heather said. “Our Drift bot, Gigabot, was actually recognized for an award by our CEO as our most productive team member. Gigabot had more meetings than anybody else, and they had more conversations than anybody else. People love the engagement, opportunity, and cool factor that our Drift bot brings.”
Heather Alter
A more efficient sales process
Beyond live chat, Gigamon leverages Drift to book demos and meetings at live events — both Gigamon user conferences and third-party events. “We use Drift for our own user conferences to get the word out and help users register from our website,” Heather explained. “We also fast-track users to help accelerate the middle of the funnel. You click a button, and instead of filling out a form, it gets you to Drift chat and you can instantly chat or book a meeting.” The Gigamon team uses this tactic for both trade show attendees and for high-value asset pages on their website.
Heather also shared that the quality of leads coming through Drift tend to be higher than other channels — much to the delight of the sales team.
“Our sales teams and sales BDR teams love Drift. When a chat comes in, they know that it’s high quality, so Drift has really upped the game,” Heather shared. “And the sales BDR teams really feel that it’s one of the highest-quality leads that we can get. They know that Drift leads typically turn into pipeline or turn into an opportunity faster.”
Heather explained that, not only does Drift create a better experience for the sales and sales BDR teams by supplying higher-quality, higher-converting leads, but it also creates a better buying experience for their website visitors.
“Drift helps from our perspective,” Heather said, “but it also gets website visitors where they want to go, faster.”
A B2c EXPERIENCE IN A B2B WORLD
According to Heather, the majority of buyers who land on Gigamon’s site have already done a fair amount of research before deciding to chat with a BDR. This means that when they’re ready to chat, it’s important that their experience moves quickly and seamlessly.
“There’s an expectation from customers and prospects that they’ll be able to self-serve and get answers themselves, and then be able to transact and talk to a live person. They don’t want to fill out a form. The expectation is that they should be able to have the similar experience in B2B that they would in B2C.”
And when visitors aren’t looking to live chat with sales, Drift helps them navigate a pretty robust website. “Drift provides shortcuts to the most common tasks on our website. We can get [site visitors] to support faster by connecting them with the phone numbers or emails of the people internally who can help them. It’s been a real value-add,” Heather said.
Key integrations mean that Gigamon can target customers with an experience tailored specifically for their business or needs. “We can promote lead generating content and events, and we can target by industry or company using Clearbit data,” Heather said. “We’ve started to personalize and include more timely information.”
The Results
To reach that $4.5 million pipeline goal, surely the Gigamon team would need to generate a ton of meetings, right? Not quite.
In that first year on Drift, Gigamon flew past their pipeline goals by pulling in higher-quality, higher-converting leads:
As Heather explained, “What we found out was that our leads were higher-quality, so we didn’t need as many conversations and meetings, but those meetings were able to translate into pipeline.” When it comes to driving pipeline, lead quality really is better than quantity.
The Future
So what’s up next for Gigamon?
Heather is excited to continue experimenting with personalization to increase Gigamon’s engagement rates, accelerate their quote process through Drift, and bring on service capabilities by piloting a knowledge base integration — all with the goal of hitting 30% year-over-year growth with Drift.
Heather Alter
