Today, people want immediacy. Nearly half of buyers expect a chatbot or live chat response within five seconds (and one-third of customers had the same standard for phone and video).
But businesses have faced significant challenges delivering on these expectations. Most notably, an over-reliance on form-based lead qualification, inbound phone calls, or rudimentary chat tools has left sales teams at a disadvantage. Unable to respond in real-time, reps have to manually sift through emails, voicemails, and form submissions — often losing out on leads in the process. And marketers are unable to capitalize on high-intent visitors that want to talk right now.
These marketing and sales challenges came to a head in 2020. COVID-19 has forced companies to accelerate their digital transformation to connect with buyers and customers in a digital-first world.
Now, buyers and sellers — accustomed to this digital reality — say there’s no going back.
To increase pipeline and surpass sales quotas, conversational platforms like Drift have become even more essential to the B2B buying experience. With Drift’s AI-powered chatbots, account tracking activity, real-time notifications, chat-to-zoom, conversation insights, sales routing, and visitor intelligence, businesses can provide the real-time, personalized experience consumers expect.
But what measurable impact do these features have on businesses’ bottom line? To find out, Drift commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact study, which details the benefits of using Drift over a three-year period.
Here’s a breakdown of the findings.
Helping you see the ROI
The Study: Drift commissioned Forrester Consulting to analyze how Drift’s Conversation Cloud helps businesses streamline the B2B buying experience, and the impact this had on their bottom line.
The Methodology: For the purpose of this study, Forrester conducted four in-depth interviews with Drift customers and aggregated their experiences to form a composite organization.
The Key Finding: Over a three-year period, Forrester found that businesses using Drift experienced a 670% return on investment with a payback period of less than six months.
Other notable benefits included:
- Increased lead conversations and pipeline conversion rates by up to 100%
- Improved annual recurring revenue (ARR) in targeted accounts by up to 17.5%
- Increased sales rep efficiency by up to 50%
Let’s dig into what those numbers could mean for your business.
Increased pipeline conversation rates by up to 100%
Your buyers aren’t willing to wait in line for a generic experience anymore. They expect instant, personalized buying experiences that help them solve their problems. Miss the mark — and they’ll move on.
By integrating Drift’s conversational chatbots, email, and AI bots into the end-to-end buying process, businesses were able to deliver the experience their buyers wanted. It didn’t matter if it was after working hours, over a weekend, or on a holiday — buyers were always able to find the information they were looking for (without having to wait).
As one Director of Performance Marketing noted, “Drift is our number one performing conversion channel because it allows us to talk to customers who are in a buying motion in real-time. There’s no appointments. There’s no ‘I’ll call you later.’ There’s no ‘Fill out a form.’ It goes right from interest to chatting with a salesperson to conversion. We’ve had deals closed in as little as one day. No other tool from a sales conversion standpoint offers us that real-time availability.”
Drift helps businesses qualify and engage buyers in real-time. Using Drift’s visitor insights, companies can deliver personalized conversations at scale, at the right time, and in the right place (whether that be mobile, email, chat, etc.). As a result, Forrester found that organizations using Drift would have a 100% uplift in conversations converted to MQL and lead-to-pipeline.
Improved ARR in targeted accounts by up to 17.5%
Speed is important. But your VIP buyers deserve more. With Drift’s visitor intelligence, businesses from the report could personalize customer interactions and then use this data to offer relevant deals and offers at key points in the customer journey.
Seamlessly integrating these cross-sell and upsell opportunities into the customer experience (especially for high-value accounts) had a notable impact on businesses’ bottom lines. Forrester found that annual recurring revenue (ARR) in target accounts increased by 17.5%, amounting to over $8.9 million in benefits over a three-year period.
Increased sales rep efficiency by up to 50%
With Drift, sales no longer had to worry about spending time on non-revenue-generating activities (like service or support requests) or having to manually sort through emails and voicemails to identify prospects.
Instead, Drift’s AI bots automatically engage visitors in a conversation and only connect qualified buyers to sales. Using account tracking, reps can understand a visitor’s intent and prioritize their outreach based on engagement scores, and then determine when and how to engage with people (e.g. via outbound video message, live chat, and more).
When a target account is on the website, reps are notified in real-time via mobile, Slack, and browser notifications. The result was more meetings booked in less time, improving sales rep efficiency by up to 50%.
Final Thoughts
Personalized, real-time customer experiences are the new standard in B2B buying. And Drift is helping businesses everywhere go above and beyond these expectations.
As a result, businesses are able to double pipeline conversion rates, increase sales reps’ bandwidth and efficiency, capitalize on real-time customer interactions, and bring in millions each year by identifying relevant cross- and upsell opportunities.
It’s the type of sustained, exponential growth that puts businesses on a new playing field — one where ROI reaches the triple-digits.
The results are in — companies that use Drift can see up to a 670% ROI. Learn more in our commissioned TEI study by Forrester Consulting.
