How Ping Identity Increased Opportunities by 66% with Drift Professional Services
About Ping Identity
Ping Identity is an identity security company that serves some of the largest enterprises in the world — and those with the most complex identity security challenges. Their business focuses on what matters most: making digital experiences both secure and seamless for all users, without compromise.
The Challenge
In 2020, the web team at Ping saw a tidal shift in how users wanted to access information. “For B2B companies, the tried and true way of getting leads by gating content and having someone fill out a form is becoming a more and more dated process of acquiring leads,” said Matt Winninger, Senior Manager, Web and Digital Services at Ping. “We wanted to shift to leading with value up-front so we’re demonstrating our thought leadership and showing value before asking for information.”
“Initially, our primary objective with Drift was that we knew we needed to start shifting to an ungated content model, and needed a tool to support that change,” Matt explained.
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The Solution
The Ping team began their journey with Drift by doing some basic testing. “We started ungating a lot of our content. But as part of that, we wanted to make sure we had a mechanism for people to still be able to engage with someone at Ping to get information. And Drift was the perfect solution for that, where we could ungate a piece of content, run Drift on the side, start a conversation, and try to lead them down the buyer’s journey to something else,” Matt said.
Since the team’s initial deployment of Drift, they’ve gotten increasingly sophisticated. “We try to make sure we’re using Drift contextually. So depending on where someone is on the site, what we know about them, and where they are in the buyer’s journey, we can present a more personalized experience,” Matt explained.
A Frictionless Buying Experience
“Drift is a great channel because it provides less friction for somebody to engage with us,” Matt said. “It solves the issue of lag time between filling out a form and getting a follow-up. It has the immediacy that people expect these days from a website. People have to make fast decisions themselves, so the more rapidly somebody can get information and understand if we’re a solution for them, the easier we make their jobs.”
And with the information that website visitors share with the Ping bot, the team can be far more prescriptive within their playbooks and website design. “It’s been helpful to get more first-party feedback around general site experience, findability issues, content that we may need to develop, and the overall architecture of our site,” Matt said.
It doesn’t hurt that Drift enables Ping to break from the tradition of using static forms. “A chatbot gives your site more personality and allows you to bring forward more of your brand voice,” Matt said.
A Multi-Pronged Strategy
Ping’s marketing and sales development representative (SDR) team are the primary users of Drift, but the team has found additional use cases across various departments. “We don’t use Drift for live chat troubleshooting,” Matt explained, “but we have a playbook with paths for the most common customer questions. It’s been great at providing a more self-serve experience for our website visitors.”
“Part of what informed our new support playbook is that we were seeing what options people were selecting and what options were being chatted back. We realized we needed to refresh our list of questions because we’re seeing some common themes for particular topics.”
Even the partners team is in on the action, leveraging a bot flow that helps bring in new partners and gauge the interest of prospective partners. As Matt explains, “Any information that we’re presenting on the website, has a form, or requires someone to get in touch with us, we look at if there’s a role for Drift to play. In most cases, we say yes.”
Matt Winninger
Partnership with Professional Services
Ping knew they could get more out of Drift, but didn’t have the team capacity to dedicate. They quickly realized that they needed to augment their team in order to maximize their results.
“When we put Drift on autopilot, our results began to diminish,” Matt explained. “We brought on the professional services team to supplement our internal capacity, bring the core team up to speed on Drift, help us set a roadmap, instill best practices, and manage the tests we wanted to run.”
“When we started working with Drift Professional Services, we really wanted to increase the conversation rate, which we’ve seen for sure,” Matt said.
By putting their deployment in the hands of Drift Professional Services, Matt’s team has been able to lean on Drift for testing and optimization, as well as project management and best practices.
Matt Winninger
“Now that we have our coverage back up to benchmark, we can be focused on leads, [marketing qualified leads], and velocity,” Matt said. “It’s been great to have the expectations and benchmarks from Drift to say, ‘Here’s where you should be, here’s where you are, and here’s a prescriptive plan of how to get there.’”
And with a wealth of experience working across businesses and industries, Drift Professional Services always has best practices to share with the Ping team — and the know-how to get it done:
“It’s been helpful for us to have access to the Drift team to understand what opportunities we have for improvement and to see great examples. It helps us understand what resources are needed internally. Having the professional services team as part of our team keeps us on task. They create a project plan and schedule. We only have so much capacity, even for project management internally. And being able to turn that project management over to Drift has been so helpful to keep us moving at a quick pace,” Matt said.
Matt Winninger
After a year of working alongside Drift Professional Services, Ping increased their engagement level with the team for the following year. “We were seeing success and we really wanted to take full advantage of what features we had within the next tier of Drift. We want to get up and running and realize the value of that upgrade as soon as we can. We can do that when we work alongside Drift.”
The Results
According to Matt, when the team took Drift off autopilot and engaged with the Drift professional services team, they saw an immediate change. “Right away, we started seeing great results from Drift. We saw an uptick in our key metrics around leads and down-funnel performance,” Matt said.
Since beginning their work with the professional services team, Ping has seen:
“As chatbots become more ubiquitous, you need to spend the time to ensure you’re really meeting your customers’ needs,” Matt explained. “We know it’s something that we need to put the time into to ensure it continues to perform for us.”
