ACCELERATED GROWTH AND REVENUE: 2X CHAT MEETINGS AND MORE THAN 400% HIGHER CONVERSION TO DEMOS

THE CHALLENGE: DECLINING SITE CONVERSION AND A NEED FOR STRONGER ABM SUPPORT

Driving consistent growth sets a company up for long-term success, but it’s not something that comes easily. To get it right, company leaders need to understand not only the individual levers that influence growth – brand, customer experience, marketing savvy, sales productivity, etc. – they need to understand how all those things are connected to and affect each other. And they need to understand that success depends on getting all the pieces working together harmoniously.

Lessonly (now Seismic) is a company that is committed to a sophisticated growth strategy. Their powerfully simple training software helps teams learn, practice, and do better work. Since Ben Battaglia joined the company three years ago, headcount at Lessonly has quadrupled to support the expanding business. Now, as Director of Marketing, Ben is responsible for the inbound channel, leading a team of demand gen marketers and inbound SDRs.

Despite their upward trajectory, the team at Lessonly wasn’t willing to slow down. They knew they could do more to accelerate their growth. For his team, Ben identified two key challenges:

SITE CONVERSION WAS DECLINING.

“When site conversion slowed down, that was a big wakeup call for our inbound engine,” Ben recalls. “We needed a more intentional way to – once people hit our site – convert them and lead them down the funnel to becoming an opportunity or a first meeting.”

In addition to the tactical elements of the marketing flywheel, Ben’s team was also looking at the roles strong branding and customer experience played in driving site visits and conversion. Lessonly had built a unique and differentiated brand in the highly competitive learning management software market, but they wanted a way to bring more of that brand front and center in prospect and customer engagement.

SDR productivity was also suffering. Initially, Lessonly had implemented Intercom to manage inbound chat, but the team was having difficulties qualifying traffic. “Our SDRs were spending a lot of time talking to the wrong person,” Ben says. “This was inefficient in the day-to-day operations, and it made it challenging to scale.”

THEIR ABM EFFORTS NEEDED MORE EFFECTIVE SUPPORT.

As Lessonly moved upmarket to service enterprise organizations with larger teams, they knew they needed to level up their ABM strategy. “We wanted to provide a really great, friction-free, personalized experience,” Ben says. “And our website and existing tech stack were not equipped to offer differentiated, customer experiences via chat.”

Ultimately, Lessonly needed a solution that would enable a unified experience across the customer journey. This meant creating a closer and more collaborative alignment between marketing and sales. “We had been doing ‘ABM light’ for a while,” Ben says, “but we needed better motions for identifying ABM prospects; delivering personalized, diversified experiences; and fast-tracking them to the right people as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

THE SOLUTION: REDUCED FRICTION, BETTER BUYER EXPERIENCE, HIGHER ENGAGEMENT

To successfully address the interconnected nature of their conversion and ABM challenges, Lessonly deployed Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform. This comprehensive solution enabled a fully integrated approach to delivering ongoing growth.

IMPROVING ENGAGEMENT THROUGH A BETTER BUYER EXPERIENCE

Drift provided Lessonly with multiple opportunities to create a more personalized, responsive, and engaging buyer experience across the entire website. They first implemented chatbots on high-traffic, top-tier pages including the homepage, demo pages and main product pages. “Implementing Drift was incredibly easy,” Ben says. “We were up on our marketing site in hours, if that.”

Building off that success, they quickly expanded their efforts to deliver unique messaging across the entire site. Messaging is based on a buyer’s presumed progress in the buying journey and tailored for relevancy to that stage. The team also rolled out Conversational Landing Pages, an interactive content format that allowed Lessonly to ungate their content while simultaneously increasing the volume and quality of buyer conversations. “We ungated everything. Now visitors get to value faster – and qualify themselves by chatting in if they want to learn more,” Ben says. “We’re now getting more qualified leads than before. Our SDRs are having more qualified conversations and we’re driving nearly 30% more MQLs.”

Ben also uses Drift to help buyers find information on the Lessonly blog more quickly and intuitively. Before making the switch to Drift, visitors had to navigate through a bot tree to indicate the kind of content they wanted. Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform enables a more efficient path to relevant content based on use cases. “If a buyer lands on a customer service blog, Drift leads them toward other customer service content or toward a conversation,” Ben explains. “It helps us be more targeted about use cases and get people to the content they want faster.”

Finally, Drift helps Lessonly fully leverage the work they’ve done to elevate their branding. “Drift has encouraged us to bring more of our brand to the prospect experience on our site,” Ben says. “Little touches like our mascot Ollie Llama welcoming visitors on the homepage with funny llama jokes differentiates our brand with intentionality and brightness. Most people think that learning management is boring. Drift helps us stand out in the market.”

CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN MARKETING AND SALES TO REMOVE FRICTION

“Drift has reshaped how we think about the sales-marketing partnership,” says Ben. “It has been a perfect platform to unify the two teams so that we can tie together what marketing is doing with how the SDRs are using Drift.”

Lessonly uses Drift to deliver a more unified experience that’s better for the prospect and also improves conversion. “It used to take a lot of steps to talk to a human. The experience of talking with or scheduling time with a human was clunky,” Ben says of pre-Drift days. “With Drift, we are able to streamline and remove friction from the buying experience so that a site visitor can talk to a human in real time and get the information they need faster.”

In addition to doubling their inbound chat meetings, Drift also helps Lessonly convert outbound meetings when they return to the site because their SDR is waiting for them on the site to chat. “It’s been really exciting for sales reps from an ABM standpoint,” says Ben. “Drift lets them know when their target accounts are on the site and are able to engage them in real time. Not only is it exciting to see who’s on our site and start a conversation, it’s also leading to better conversion.”

Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform is instrumental in Lessonly’s goal of creating a more consistent relationship between buyers and SDRs. And Drift’s integrations with other parts of Lessonly’s tech stack (like Marketo and Salesforce) enable effective personalization that helps deepen those relationships.

“Drift has created a camaraderie between demand gen and sales development that we didn’t have before,” says Ben. “And when those two groups – the people who are creating things for prospects and the people who are talking to prospects – step out of their siloes and collaborate, good things happen. ”

THE RESULTS: ACCELERATED GROWTH AND REVENUE: 2X INBOUND MEETINGS AND 400% BETTER DEMO CONVERSION

“Marketing is about humans and people, but we often get lost in a world of funnels and reports. Those are great, but the heart of marketing is people selling to people,” says Ben. “Drift is creating a renaissance with a platform that prioritizes conversations. It’s hard for me to imagine a more meaningful channel on which to develop valuable relationships with future customers.”

With Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform, Lessonly was able to make significant progress on all their primary marketing and sales objectives including improving the buyer experience, leveraging their unique brand, better aligning sales and marketing, and improving conversion from their website. Says Kyle Lacy, Lessonly’s CMO, “we just ran a CRO test with Drift where leads can schedule a demo directly with a rep and are currently looking at a 436% increase in conversion rate compared to our old form. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Key results include:

1. More than doubled chat meetings MoM
2. 400% higher conversion rate to demo
3. In just one quarter, meetings booked to qualified opps spiked up by 42%
4. 27% more MQLs than without Drift (over the last year)
5. 20 – 30% more leads from content (via Conversational Landing Pages)
6. 18% improvement in user to lead conversion

“Drift has helped us pull all the pieces together to accelerate growth and revenue,” says Kyle. “It helps us create a better buyer experience that elevates the strength of our brand and removes friction, it empowers our SDRs to engage at the exact right time with the exact right message, and brings our marketing and sales teams into a strategically advantageous alignment. All of this contributes to us earning more qualified leads, a better conversion rate, and a more productive and efficient sales team.”