HOW GONG USES DRIFT TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE BUYING EXPERIENCE AND ACCELERATE PIPELINE
THE CHALLENGE: ENABLING AND ENHANCING SALES AND MARKETING IN A RAPIDLY GROWING COMPANY
Gong is a company that knows something about writing its own future. They created the Revenue Intelligence category, and have gone on to become the global leader in the space. Their solutions help a wide range of roles – from sales managers to CROs to people on customer success, product, and marketing teams – get at the unfiltered truth about customer interactions and deals.
Like any growing enterprise, Gong’s ultimate marketing and sales goals focus on driving more pipeline and higher conversion. To meet these objectives, they needed a platform that could deliver on two specific fronts: Conversational Marketing and scalability.
Conversational Marketing is a critical strategy for Gong because their audience’s lack of familiarity with Revenue Intelligence means they have to do a fair amount of work to educate their market. A Conversational Marketing platform is the perfect complement to their heavy investment in content marketing.
Experience is everything for Gong because a major portion of their growth is driven by referrals from brand evangelists. What Gong needed was a sales and marketing platform that could deliver customized bots, sophisticated integrations, and seamless ABM capabilities. In short, they needed a platform that could leverage their existing martech stack to enable the delivery of a highly relevant white-glove experience.
At the same time, Gong needed a platform that could help future-proof their business as they grew. In only 24 months, they had evolved from a Series A to a Series D company valued at $2.2 billion. They needed a platform that could handle their enormous website traffic load and scale quickly and easily to accommodate their expanding ABM efforts. “The pressure was on to scale our organization really, really quickly,” says Russell Banzon, Senior Director of Marketing. “We needed a solution to solve today’s problems, and tomorrow’s problems.”
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THE SOLUTION – A REVENUE ACCELERATION PLATFORM THAT GROWS WITH YOUR BUSINESS
Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform is able to fully deliver on both of Gong’s primary needs. It provides a powerful and flexible set of Conversational Marketing solutions within a comprehensive and innovative platform that is constantly evolving to meet the changing needs of Gong’s marketing and sales teams.
CONVERSATIONAL MARKETING
“Businesses don’t sell to businesses,” says Udi Ledergor, CMO. “People sell to people.” Drift helps Gong enable people-to-people conversations that are more authentic and human.
“More and more marketers are figuring out that unbuttoning their collars and letting their hair down is actually good for business,” says Udi. Gong’s Drift bot is called Bruno, and he’s a bulldog who greets visitors with a woof.
But Bruno isn’t just fun and charming; he’s a working part of the team with an important job to do. For starters, Bruno is on duty 24/7. Even if a visitor hits Gong’s website at four AM, they can still have a conversation and book a demo for the following day.
Udi Ledergor
FUTURE-PROOFING AND SCALABILITY
Constrained by the usual resource and bandwidth issues of lean teams, Gong initially launched with fairly generic and non-personalized playbooks. They also limited the reach of these early playbooks to only about 10% of their site visitors – accounts they could identify as having greater than a certain number of employees based on Clearbit data.
Even with such a minimal rollout to start, Gong saw clear early success and was eager to optimize Drift for greater reach and better conversion. With a dedicated resource in place to ensure its success, Gong’s marketing team, SDR team, and ABM accounts are all synced up. Everyone is on board.
Overseeing Drift, Gong’s Marketing Specialist, Vince Chan is definitely seeing more and more positive results every day.
Vince Chan
“Drift delivers exactly everything we need for account based conversational marketing,” says Vince. “It provides immediate notifications when a target account is on your site, it offers a great deal of flexibility and personalization, and it enables really deeply ingrained workflows and triggering rules that give buyers the ability to chat with someone in real time while helping us accelerate pipeline on the back end.”
Vince Chan
In addition to expanding their use of Drift across different sales and marketing functions, Gong also focused on optimization and implementing other parts of the Drift platform. Shares Vince, “We continued refining Bruno’s personality through voice and the addition of details like a mask to model smart Covid-19 preventive measures. We began customizing chat messages to make them more specific to Gong’s brand and offerings. And we launched retargeting playbooks with welcome-back messaging for returning visitors.”
Today, Gong uses a wide range of Drift capabilities to engage their audience:
WRANGLING THE INBOX
“We use Drift Email extensively, and it has really helped in several key areas,” says Kyle Brown, Head of Marketing Operations. “It helps us keep our inboxes clean by automatically separating human responses from autoresponders. That alone saves us an hour or two on each email campaign. It also appends data to our existing records so we have a more complete view of the people we’re engaging. And it helps us with unsubscribe requests to ensure compliance.”
PUTTING A FACE TO THE NAME
Drift Video brings even more of the human element to Gong’s communications. The ability to send rich messages featuring personalized videos is already improving engagement with Gong’s LinkedIn messages and providing a new source for meetings.
Kyle Brown
UPDATING THE TRADITIONAL CONTENT DOWNLOAD
Gong also uses Drift’s Conversational Landing Pages on a variety of campaigns and new offers. By driving post form fills to a Conversational Landing Page, Gong is able to increase engagement with visitors by offering up more relevant content or a personalized conversation to help them on their buying journey. “Conversational landing pages give us another kind of touchpoint for effective engagement,” Vince says.
THE RESULTS – A SCALABLE, BUYER-BASED EXPERIENCE THAT DRIVES MORE MEETINGS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Overall, Drift helps Gong create an experience that’s built around buyer needs and preferences. It helps them connect in more authentic ways, even when they aren’t in the office. And it helps them continuously iterate on and improve the experience with the addition of more use cases and features. “In the past year, Drift has been really, really successful for us,” says Kyle.
KEY STATS
- $9 Million in pipeline influenced
- $1.3 Million closed won influenced
- Increased meetings booked via Drift Chat by an average of 44% QoQ
- Increased meetings booked via Drift Video by 15% QoQ
- Drift Video – produced 750 videos that got 2100 views and drove 28 meetings in only 2 months
Kyle Brown
Kyle attributes their success not only to Drift’s platform but also to the strength of their partnership. “Drift isn’t just a tool,” he says. “They’re a true partner that helps us strategize how we can use Drift to accelerate revenue, increase meetings, and drive pipeline and conversion. We’ve definitely seen an important transformation.”
Gong continues to optimize Drift and explore other use cases that will help them provide the best buyer experience and business outcomes. Russell sums up his opinion on Drift this way, “If you want a platform designed specifically to empower marketing and sales, it’s Drift. We bought Drift based on its ability to accelerate our revenue, and we’re not disappointed.”
