Drift: Chris Handy, on Streamlining the Sales Process with Chatbots

IndustrialSage

Chris Handy of Drift explains how companies can use chatbots to enhance the customer experience and accelerate their sales process.

Danny:

Hey, I’m Danny Gonzales, and let’s jump in today’s episode. I got Chris Handy from Drift, and we’re going to be talking about chatbots. What the heck are chatbots? But before we get into that, Chris, hey, if you could introduce yourself to the audience, tell us who you are and what this Drift company does.

Chris:

Right, my name is Chris Handy. I work here at Drift as a customer marketing leader. I was an early customer with Drift on the client side, and then I started a Drift partner agency there for about a year. And then they basically said, why don’t you come do that on over here for us? And so I’ve served a lot of different roles in different companies from leadership to sales to doing everything and marketing and all those things. And I just found that Drift was making a platform that really helped accelerate the sales process for folks. And what Drift is, and what we say about Drift, really, is that Drift connects you now with the people who are already interested now, so you can build better pipeline faster. And we do that in a variety of ways. One, you’ve mentioned already, but we’re tied into all kind of areas of communication, especially for sales folks. So if you’re sending out an email or something like that, and they click on a link back to your website, you’re there. You are there to greet them, no matter who you are in the organization. And we can also automate some of those things so that if you’re not ready to chat with someone right now, we have DriftBot which can take care of a lot of things for you and route to you and book meetings and get support questions out of the way where they need to be. It’s a platform that really helps to get things done faster for folks that may not have had a great way to do that before.

Danny:

Awesome, that’s great. Actually, a quick question on this. Actually, we’re on the client side on there. I’m just curious; was there a particular vertical that you’re involved with?

Chris:

Right, so I worked with a bunch of different companies as a consultant. And we were implementing other technologies before, so maybe your more traditional marketing technology stack. And what we found is that the implementation of those hadn’t changed much, but the results that came in from those old-style landing pages and gated content on everything, behind mother’s maiden name and deepest darkest secret and all the other things that we let those forms build up to be, they just weren’t working as well as they used to. In fact, the lead volume had decreased by almost half on a lot of our different client accounts, so we were looking for, how can we take this to the next level? And so looking at Drift, and Drift was really early on, we started testing this on our own website. And the first moment we put it on, we started to get people that chose that channel over the other contact us-type channels almost immediately. And we also found that there was a greater number of people that were choosing to contact us overall. So this was really early days before there were bots involved and automation, so it was just chat. What chat allowed for was this brand-new channel that people didn’t like the old channel as much but maybe would’ve filled it out anyway, they chose the new channel. But then all these new people that were not really keen on the friction that forms and landing pages would put into place, they opted to contact us when before, they had not been contacting us. And when I saw that, when I noticed that, I thought, man, this is really something, something we need to be paying attention to. We had tried some other chat tools. They were not really focused on customer experience before. There were far more folks on maybe a support-type environment, and they just didn’t have that ease, that look and feel and experience when you’re actually using it on both sides, on the seller’s side and the buyer’s side where it just feels more natural. It feels a lot more like you’re just texting your friend. And so I knew there was something happening with Drift which led us to implement that with more and more clients. And I realized, man, we’ve got to just make this all that we do because there are not that many companies out there that just focus on this. And so we went deep on that. And it became clear that, while I could keep doing that, there were a lot of things about the product that, I was sending in suggestions and other things that they ended up appearing there, like the same day.

Danny:

Oh, wow.

Chris:

They would be there with the product. And that was just amazing to me. I thought, I’ve got to figure out what’s going on up there. How are they able to do something where I just tell them, “hey, I’d like for this to happen,” and then it appears. And it’s the way the product is built here, based on customer feedback and what people are really asking for. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s not where there’s this one, singular thing that it has to be, and that we never stray from that. We follow what the customer wants. I just had to be a part of it. And we found a way to do that, and now I’m here leading customer marketing which is so much fun. I get to have even more influence over that kind of stuff and then see one of the best teams in the world, really, build this thing that’s helping sales teams connect with more qualified prospects.

Danny:

Well, that’s super exciting. So for our audience who might not necessarily—some are familiar with it, and some aren’t. When you’re talking about the concept of chat and chatbots, can you maybe break that down a little bit?

Chris:

Right, I think this is an important distinction. You may have had an experience, and some people think back to some time they’ve bought a car or something, and they had some chat on a car dealership website or something. That’s not what this is. When we talk about chat the way Drift implements it, it’s more like iMessage on your website where you can come in, and you can just have an easy conversation, and there’s no form to fill out—although a lot of people do choose to put in their email address just because they want to—where people can ask questions. And what’s great is that chat, in this case, it’s got bot baked into it. So it’s not just one or the other. So a bot would be an automated action taken by a clearly-represented chatbot on your website. So we know it’s not Chris. We know it’s not Danny. Ours is called DriftBot, and literally, it looks like a little robot. And so we expect that to behave differently than if I were speaking with a human. But what we’ve done is we’ve created a platform that is all-in-one. So there are a few different ways that you can interact with a company. You can interact with what appears to be a bot at the very beginning, and then a human might jump in if you get hung up on something. Or you can type into what we call a welcome message which is clearly me, or it’s clearly a human at the company, and then I’m expecting for someone to respond. Now, we’ve made it so that both work together really well. So if I type in an open question into chat, a lot of salespeople think to themselves, well, I can’t be there to answer all these support questions and other things like that. So we have a way that we hook into your knowledge base. And so what Drift is going to do… it’s going to look into your knowledge base for an answer first and try and surface that answer and get that out of the way right before anyone has to jump in. Then, if it’s not answered, then it’ll grab somebody. And what we find is that people use that moment to upgrade their knowledge base. It’s like, hey, people are asking for this. Let’s figure out a way to automate that. So you chip away at automating support over time. And what the bot does is it allows you to have a fully-automated experience where folks can self-qualify. For instance, you might have a bot that calls out from the corner of the website, it says, “hey, can I ask you a question?” But other than saying something like any question, we say “can I ask you a question?” And we say, “hey, are you looking to do this or that,” and sort of get people down a singular path so that we can identify more about what they’re trying to do. And then, maybe there’s a moment when we should actually pull in someone to talk with them. Maybe it’s a really hot lead that we already know is qualified. But maybe it’s someone that wants to book a meeting for later. And we’ve got that integrated right in, so they can just book a meeting on someone’s calendar right there without having to do the back and forth. So we’re really looking to automate those most common actions that people, on the buyer’s side, are trying to get done. They need an answer to their question. They need to book a meeting. Or maybe they have a question for someone now, and it’s appropriate and the sales team chooses to operate that way. So our platform, we look at it as the new way businesses buy from businesses. We’re far more focused to being a B2B tool than we are a business-to-consumer tool. I find that a lot of folks in this space are definitely in the B2B crowd. So if you’re selling B2B, and you are looking to make that experience better not only for the people on your site but also for you as a seller, you might want to give that a look just because you can walk down the street, you can be at the Walgreen’s, and you can get some of this stuff routed to your phone if you so choose, which is super cool. So that’s the two different things that work together as an overview and how live chat versus chatbots might work. We may go deeper, I’m sure. I’m sure you’ve got questions.

Danny:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s interesting. I didn’t know about the whole, connecting into the knowledge base. From a customer service standpoint, but also from marketing and sales, being able to learn, okay, what are those questions? I would imagine that would be able to fuel a content strategy. Say, oh, we’re getting all these questions about this or that. Oh, well, great, that’s our content. That’s what we’re going to help to be able to create. And it’s being able to do that, which is interesting. The other interesting thing, too, is that you mentioned that it’s a frictionless touch. So one of the challenges I think a lot of people run into, especially with a lot here in our audience, is that you get this data. You find out who it is, and you’re immediately, let’s get them on the horn. Let’s call them. And it’s like, whoa, wait a minute; wait a minute. Let’s just slow down. People are here. Let’s let them buy and self-educate on their terms. And I think that’s a really interesting thing that it allows that opportunity for you to be able to engage, if you want to.

Chris:

Right. We can always let people raise their hand. We’ve got sales reps; they’ll come running.

Danny:

Yeah, exactly.

Chris:

That’s not a problem. But if they’re not ready for that, why introduce this chase that doesn’t need to be there? It allows us to be a lot more conversational in the sales process and just, hey, what are you trying to do today? Let’s get you going, and let’s get you fixed up.

Danny:

Yeah, absolutely. Again, that makes a lot of sense in the world. So what are you guys seeing, just in terms of—what’s your vision in terms of the next few years on how you think this is going to play out as to, from a marketing tactic because, quite honestly, I’ve heard a lot about it over the last year or two, but this year in particular, and definitely seeing a lot of this being rolled out on a lot of different websites, very easy to identify the Drift robot. There we go; I get it. But what are you guys seeing in terms of what it’s looking like in the next six to 12 months?

Chris:

Yeah, what’s awesome is that we don’t have a product roadmap. We literally, and I touched on this before, but we follow what the customer needs. And so I can talk to that. Who are we solving problems for, and what are the kinds of problems maybe we’ve solved to give you a hint at why we do what we do? We’re laser-focused on sales and marketing. So there’s a lot of folks that are out there building best-in-class support tools that tack on this sales and marketing piece. We are looking to build the best platform for sales and marketing on the planet. And if we continue down that path, what we’re going to find is things like that help thing that I was telling you about where we could just automatically, 100% of support completely out of the way. Those kinds of things, they do emerge. And they come into play in really interesting ways. We have all kinds of different skills that our bot has. One of those skills is the email capture skill. It might come into play when someone asks for a meeting or when someone—you can use our product as sort of a universal gate for your content. What we found is that a lot of people have this big, complicated marketing automation system, and they’ve got a legacy of using forms. And they’re not ready to just upend everything and say, okay, we’re not going to take down forms. We’re very much against forms, but we realize that they are in place. And so the best way to ungate all of the content for people who you know already is to say, hey, tell us your email. And then Drift recognizes you wherever you end up going on the website. So why would we ever ask someone for an email again?

Danny:

It doesn’t make sense, redundant.

Chris:

It’s—absolutely. So we can offer an experience adjacent to all those forms and landing pages that you’ve got to give someone a fast lane into the content that they’re looking for, so we’ve got skills that take care of that. They take care of that throughout the conversation, and then they make sure that you get routed to either the right person or the right content based on where you are. And so allowing folks to skip that line and not ever feel like, hey, shouldn’t you already know who I am, is part of what we’re solving for. And I think that that speaks to our focus on solving the problems of people in sales and people in marketing who are focused on demand generation. Demand generation is all about sending email and sending people back to those forms, but we can make it better, and we can increase conversion rate because we’re not asking you to fill out those forms. We’re sending you right on through.

Danny:

That’s awesome. It’s such a different way of being able to propose that information. I love the idea. Even, it’s almost like not necessarily killing forms, but really moving away from that. And then, it totally plays into a much more seamless approach to that progressive profiling to get incremental information as we get along down the process, not having a form that has 15 million, which is a bad anything, having 15 million different fields. I don’t know you from Adam. Yeah, I’m going to give you my address; no. But having that as an iterative process. And I love also what you talked about, how you don’t have a roadmap, per se. It’s really all about listening to the customer.

Chris:

Right; there’ve been things that we’ve built, and we’ve thought, hey, this is going to go gangbusters. And it didn’t really go off the way we thought it would. And we put less emphasis on some of that stuff going forward and put more emphasis into what the demand is. And that is what’s so great about being close to the customer as an organization. The way I felt when I was a customer is how close we still are with a lot of customers where we feel a real attachment with these folks that help us build the product. When it’s a customer telling you what they want, that is the voice of maybe 100 or 1000 customers who really want the same thing but haven’t taken the time to speak up. So the one thing that Drift uniquely allows us to do is to stay in tune because we get these comments and suggestions all the time, and we’ve got now a cadre of folks that are just, they’re in the inner circle. We know who they are. We recognize them every time. Not just the technology, but we do. They’re trusted advisors because they’re telling us what they need. And we lean on the customer for that.

Danny:

Well, I think what is great and is such an awesome opportunity is taking that methodology, that idea and being able to, rolling that out, like with our audience. If they’ve got—you’ve got websites; you’ve got all this information there—is taking that exact approach, using that as the ability to listen to what people are asking for and then being able to adjust. And I think that’s, for a lot of people in the manufacturing and industrial space, that’s a big lesson that we’re learning and making adjustments to be able to say, hey, you know what? It’s funny you mention the whole, hey, we develop a product, and we think it’s going to be amazing. It’s the same, exact thing in the manufacturing space. We’ve talked about it all the time. If you’re developing a product, okay, well, let’s make sure first that there’s an actual need for it versus, hey, we think this is awesome. And it may be awesome, but if your customers don’t think it is and there’s not a need for it, well then it’s completely pointless. So this is kind of flipping that, being able to say, hey, look, we can take a pulse, take the temperature, see what’s going on. We might discover things that we didn’t know about, which I’m assuming that happens all the time.

Chris:

Oh, the product today versus where it was when I started using it as a customer is a completely evolved and, in some ways, very different place to be. The one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s only just gotten a better version of the same way it was is the way it feels when you’re talking with someone in there. I use this hand motion because I find that it’s even better. And so if someone’s out there, they’re already using drift or something like it, it’s even better to use it with your mobile device because that feeling of talking to someone, it very much allows you to be more conversational because you’re using that motion you use with your—

Danny:

Text message or whatever, yeah.

Chris:

Friends, right. I tend to have much more direct, more—I call the language business casual. It’s not so informal that you wouldn’t be comfortable doing it, but sometimes you have casual Friday, you wear jeans and a button-down shirt. You can sort of let your hair down when you’re talking with someone one-on-one and be more punchy in the way that you—because if you look at how you text, you’ll send a response to a question, like “do you want to go do this?” You’ll say “yes,” and you’ll send that. And then you’ll say “I was thinking about the same thing.” You’ll send that. And then you’ll say “but what about after, we do this,” and then you’ll send that. So you’ll have three little messages versus this big email. And what I see is that that’s how people use the product who are the most successful, and that hasn’t changed a bit. So this core experience between people who are just connecting with one another which is what we’re best at doing, connecting people now, has remained unchanged despite all of those other things that we’ve added to the product that really just help that connection happen with the right people, and happen faster.

Danny:

Yeah, that’s awesome. And that’s a big, sometimes, concern, too with a lot of our audience is that you know what? Well, listen; this whole online marketing automation, all this stuff, it seems so impersonal, and no, our business is all about relationships. I know; everybody’s business is about relationships. That is the key. And so I love the ability of being able to do that, to really make that connection happen faster when it’s needed. It’s a very interesting use case you’re talking about, just how the text messaging thing is almost how—yeah, you would communicate maybe a little bit differently that way. I love it. That’s awesome. What would you say to a company that are saying, hey, we’re thinking about rolling this out? What would be some tips in terms of first steps, in terms of rolling out something like this?

Chris:

Right, so oftentimes this will start either in the sales organization or in the marketing organization. So let’s talk about how it might look in both different instances. So if you’re starting in a marketing organization, a lot of times you’ll find one person who is excited about the idea and is looking to roll it out, but maybe isn’t sure exactly how to communicate all that to their sales team. If you’re not as open-minded and/or educated in what this can do, then the old dog-type salesperson might immediately shut the idea down. So I would say the way to get started is not to go to the sales team and say, alright, now you’re going to be chatting with everyone on our website because—and we’ve done a lot to solve for that, and it’s hard to communicate that if you don’t set the stage first. And so oftentimes, the most successful organizations driven by marketing are, they’re going in and they’re creating some of these experiences in an automated fashion, more so to get a proof of concept out there and just to use it as a lead-gen tool, sort of like what you described before. Let’s ungate most of the content by providing one opportunity to tell us who you are. Now, we’re going to send you off in different ways and make this whole process easier for you. And then as those leads are generated, you can find one person you can show on the sales team and say, hey look, here’s what we’re doing. This is working really well. We’re bringing in new people, more people than before, in fact. And we have a way where we can get people through a qualification process and then book them right on your calendar for a sales appointment. Is that something that—

Danny:

You would be interested in?

Chris:

Right, yeah, sure.

Danny:

Um, okay, yes.

Chris:

Right, so when you show people hey, look, here’s what’s going on, here’s how this is going to work, and here’s how I’m going to protect you from the massive volume of people who are on our site who may have a question that’s completely unrelated to a salesperson’s day. And so if you could position it that way, then you’re going to be able to get this thing going because you get one person going. They get automatic meetings, and they’re starting to build pipeline.

Danny:

Done.

Chris:

It just goes. So that’s, from a marketing organization standpoint, is getting that proof of concept, finding a pilot partner in the sales team. And a lot of times these sort of lines of communications are already there, but sometimes, and particularly in lower-tech or not quite as—you don’t have a bunch of software running all your stuff, basically. If this is a new area, then you may not have people who are focused on marketing operations or some of the things that go along with that. Now, if you’re a salesperson, you have a lot more leeway in this. So you can talk with someone in marketing and get this thing going and sort of bring that pilot person with them. Marketers love the opportunity to generate more leads because they’re measured on that, and how can we get this thing done faster? And I think my best advice would be to put this thing on—and you just go to the app store, you download the app, Drift. And then now you’ve got it on your phone, and you can just have this on you all the time when you’re ready to talk with anyone during the hours you set and the parameters you set up.

Danny:

No, that’s awesome. That’s super cool. Admittedly, we don’t have this on IndustrialSage, IndustrialSage.com on our website there. But we are totally—

Chris:

Well, that’s why I’m here, to change all that.

Danny:

We are totally going to implement it. Actually, it’s been interesting. It’s come up quite a bit, and actually we’ve looked at it. We’re like, gosh darn it, we need to do this. But it’s been interesting how we’ve seen some of our clients roll out with it and different things like that. So I definitely see this as going—we really appreciate your sharing with us your insights on it. I love your story, how you came from agency; that totally flipped the script for you, if you will, and now you have a pretty cool story. But it totally makes sense about the use case and how you guys are using it. So that’s awesome.

Chris:

Yeah, so if we ever do round two, we can talk about building the next level type bots for your company and what they should be doing. We talked about it being, flipping it again on the focus of your website and saying, can I ask you a question? So it’s the ice-breaker that gets the conversation started that’s maybe the most important thing. And it’s all about writing great headlines, and this goes back to old-school copywriting and all this. We’re not designing a new website and putting snazzy stuff on it. We’re just providing this other experience that other people choose to engage with, and we get to flex our creative skills a little bit on the copywriting. So I can talk with you again someday, maybe, about that.

Danny:

We’re going to have to have that second version, take two because we could probably go hours on this. For sure, we could go on hours. It’s super cool stuff; love all this technology. But really, at the end of the day, it is purposeful. It’s not like—because there’s so many different technologies—hey, we can do all these things. We can measure all this—yeah, it’s great, but you know. But this is very intriguing, especially as you have more machine learning and AI, all this stuff rolling out to make these things even smarter, better, faster, and all that stuff. That is super cool stuff. As we wrap up here, any last words you’d like to say to our audience about Drift and chatbots and all, where to be thinking for 2019?

Chris:

Right, one of the best things that I can offer you as a resource is that I’m heading up your Conversational Marketing University.

Danny:

Okay, very cool.

Chris:

There’s going to be a lot of education there and some of the things that we talked about, but going in a little bit deeper. So if this is something that you’re looking at rolling out at your company, even if you’re rolling out with another company, come learn, take the strategies that we’ve got in Conversational Marketing University. And roll it out wherever you like. We just want everyone to understand how to do this better, how to make better connections. And you can find that at drift.com/university.

Danny:

Perfect, that’s awesome. Well, we’ll put that in the show notes, make sure we’ve got that link in the articles and stuff that we have. So Chris, I really appreciate the time. This has been fantastic. I’ve learned a lot; I know our audience has learned a lot as well. So just thank you.

Chris:

Hey, thanks for having me, Danny. I appreciate your time.

Danny:

Absolutely, any time. Alright, so, wow. That was an awesome episode about Drift. Who’d have thought? Chatbots and AI and all kinds of crazy stuff. Listen, this is something that I mentioned there. I am not blowing smoke. We are going to put this on our website, IndustrialSage.com. We’re going to see first-hand just how this works, and we’re going to report those results back to you. And I wholeheartedly believe in this. I think this is something that we’re really, you’re going to see a lot more of. And it’s something to be thinking about on how to really augment your digital marketing campaigns to really help your sales teams to be able to generate leads, get them qualified, process them. Your sales teams are going to love you when you do this because that’s really what our job is as marketers is to really generate really qualified leads and really help sales to really close those. So that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them. You can reach out to us; IndustrialSage.com/questions. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. Social media, hey, we’d love a share. And until next time, I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

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