How Pantheon Drove 5x ROI with Drift in Under a Year

5x

ROI

2x

opportunity creation rate each quarter

About Pantheon

Pantheon is a leading website operations (WebOps) platform that empowers businesses to build and maintain high-performing websites that deliver value. With their cloud-native software, Pantheon simplifies website management, enabling teams to securely manage their sites across multiple teams — all within one unified platform.

The Challenge

As the Pantheon team set out to evolve its marketing strategy, the team quickly realized that they needed a tool that could keep up with their rapid growth and changing needs.

“While Intercom could fulfill some of our needs, we were looking for a tool that could handle more advanced marketing functions, such as seamless handoffs between long-term conversations, precise audience targeting, and data integration. Drift simply did these better and had a much higher ceiling of capability,” said RJ Horning, Lead Growth Engineer at Pantheon.

Pantheon also wanted to create more engaging automated experiences on their website to offload person-to-person interactions. They saw a great deal of potential in this approach, and Drift was just the solution they needed to create the self-service experiences they hoped for.

We realized that we were starting to move into the formal space of Conversational Marketing, and that's when we began evaluating tools. That's where Drift came in — it was a no-brainer for us. With their extensive experience in the field and the best practices they shared, they've helped us expand our ideas and get creative with how we go to market. It's been a game-changer for us.

Karla Lawson

Director of WebOps & Digital, Pantheon

The Solution

With Drift, Pantheon found a chat solution that could deliver personalized, automated experiences, integrate seamlessly with their data, and glean valuable insights. But Drift’s appeal extended beyond its capabilities.

“Brand recognition was also a big factor. It’s important to have people excited and familiar with the tool, and that was already the case with Drift,” RJ explained.

Since implementation, that excitement has only skyrocketed.

“We have salespeople who are eager to use Drift at all times of the day because they trust the experiences we’re able to build from the outset. They really appreciate the visibility, accessibility, and actions they can take to add value for prospective customers throughout the buyer journey,” said Karla Lawson, Director of WebOps & Digital at Pantheon.

By harnessing the power of Drift, Pantheon has unlocked a new level of enthusiasm and productivity that propels their chat experience to new heights.

Support Every Step of the Way

With Drift, Pantheon had found a solution that was easy to use, easy to implement, and delivered quick results.

“The intuitiveness of the platform made the rollout significantly smoother. I was impressed by how quickly the sales team was able to get up and running, and the speed of their adoption was driven a great deal by the speed at which they saw value by being in the tool,” Karla said.

Pantheon’s seamless implementation of Drift was also sped up thanks to the support, education, and resources provided by their Drift team as well as their mutual partners, Molly Duggan Associates and Signals.

From implementation to integration, onboarding, training, and revenue generation — everything was achievable with Drift. We were able to resolve any issue that arose, and everything we needed to do was done quickly and efficiently.

RJ Horning

Lead Growth Engineer, Pantheon

Driving More Qualified Leads, Faster

When Pantheon started using Drift’s Fastlane feature, they knew they had unleashed something special. By allowing qualified customers to skip the form and quickly connect with sales, they saw a remarkable increase in engagement levels.

“The engagement rates we saw between our old ‘Contact Us’ bot and the Fastlane bot were night and day. Our ‘Contact Us’ bot was only getting a 5% engagement rate vs. Fastlane, which got a 95% engagement rate. Customers were clearly more willing to pursue immediate contact, and the higher success rate of that pattern made it clear that we needed to break Fastlane into its own entity,” RJ said.

In short, Fastlane has swiftly become a magic touchpoint by streamlining Pantheon’s interactions and keeping high-intent buyers engaged.

SIMPLIFYING ACCESS TO PRICING DETAILS

After months of discussion around their pricing process, Pantheon knew it was time to shift their approach in how they provided insight to customers. So, their WebOps team partnered with their sales counterparts to find a solution that would quickly serve up answers to common customer questions. Additionally, it came with the benefit of freeing up time for sales development representatives (SDRs) to have more strategic conversations.

As Karla explained, “We wanted to take the burden off our SDRs to answer simple pricing questions and put our SDR focus on outcome-based conversations with leads who were ready for more tailored conversations.”

Enter the Pricing Quiz — a bot designed to automate responses to frequently asked pricing questions, while offering live conversations with SDRs for visitors who are more qualified. By transforming this process, Pantheon is able to satisfy customer needs while also saving valuable time and effort for their SDR team. Now, they can swiftly engage in pricing conversations at the most crucial points in the customer journey to deliver immediate value.

In the first three quarters, we doubled our opportunity creation each quarter. The growth rate has been nothing short of phenomenal. Tools such as the pricing quiz, advanced targeting, and user-specific contextual information have played a significant role in driving this success. With Drift, we’ve seen a lot of positive results and growth, which is incredibly exciting for us.

RJ Horning

Lead Growth Engineer, Pantheon

The Results

In under a year, Pantheon has seen incredible growth since adopting Drift, including: 

x
ROI
x
opportunity creation rate each quarter

With Drift, we can engage with customers instantly, facilitate their journey, and guide them through our processes with ease. We have complete control over our messaging and can be much more intentional with our targeting.

Karla Lawson

Director of WebOps & Digital, Pantheon

Pantheon runs a WebOps strategy that involves always-on testing, monitoring, and iterating to continuously improve marketing program performance. In their first year with Drift, they’ve had an action-packed journey. The team worked in close collaboration orchestrating the tool’s launch, empowering their SDRs to achieve accelerated success, and exploring creative engagement strategies through rigorous experimentation.

As Pantheon embarks on their second year, their sights are set on harnessing Drift’s advanced functionalities and integrations. Their primary objectives include refining audience targeting, delivering personalized experiences, fine-tuning lead scoring, and unveiling new and engaging experiences with Drift Video and trivia-oriented playbooks.

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