Drift, BOL’s conversational AI partner of choice, just had its first in-person event in over two years at the lovely Faena Forum in Miami Beach - performance by Grammy award winner, and Miami native, Jon Secada included! Among several exciting things unveiled at FLASH, a new site and the biggest product rollout in the company’s history - the Conversation Cloud - folding Drift’s three core solutions into a fully-integrated, extensible, value-creating system to power your RevTech stack: Conversational Marketing, Conversational Sales and the newly-launched Conversational Service.
Insights and Leadership
In a day packed with tons of educational and insightful content, we got to hear from Katie Foote (Drift CMO) about buyer centricity and the business-to-human paradigm. Best-selling authors Robert Cialdini and Sally Hogshead lit the packed room with their perspectives on persuasion, reciprocity, and strategic polarization (ie different is better than better). A new term was coined as well - sticky tack; we here at BOL subscribe to its essence, less so the term itself!
David Cancel (Drift CEO) & Leo Tenenblat (Drift CPO) formally unveiled the Conversational Cloud and the deal room to bring buyers and sellers together in ways absent before to build transparency and trust into the system (more on that below). Brooke Freedman (Sr. Director, Sales at Drift) doubled down on how businesses need to modernize B2B selling by pivoting to a value-creating mindset and making the process more collaborative.
Heidi Darling, SVP of Strategy at event sponsor ROI DNA summed it up best - Drift is the conversational tech stack. Period.
Conversational Data Leads To More Meaningful Relationships
Today’s world of information abundance & attention scarcity makes interruptive marketing ineffective and obsolete. Drift helps bridge the disconnect between what buyers experience - saturation, information fatigue, tune out - and what B2B sellers often experience - frustration tied to unproductive leads. And it does so by collecting and analyzing disparate buyer signals, establishing relationships, and understanding patterns across structured and unstructured inputs to derive meaning, enable motion fluidity and boost the signal-to-noise ratio. Part of persuasion is influence. Influence is enhanced when you can personalize the buying journey. Help buyers buy versus selling to them.
This is key because conversational data comes directly from the source expressing interest and signaling intent, unfiltered, making the digital B2B buying experience more human, even at a time where 70% of the buying journey happens before sellers are actively engaged.
Translating engagement sourced to an initial click into a relevant, buyer-centric experience means you have to design conversations that can predict and respond to both implicit and explicit needs across buying journey stages. Conversational interactions accomplish exactly that, helping businesses better meet buyers wherever they are in their journey and enabling them in real-time while gleaning contextual cues to help inform the next best interaction. A critical element of maximizing the performance potential is incorporating this into a holistic strategic approach to marketing-supported sales and pipeline. Leveraging conversation to enhance the buyer’s experience cannot live in a vacuum and must be staged accordingly. Drift’s capabilities can enhance many activities - from paid media and lead generation on the front end to nurturing an active prospect on the back end.
Unpacking The Conversation Cloud
The Drift Conversation Cloud lets businesses engage with buyers more meaningfully at every interaction and stage-gate, from researching to chatting with reps to post-sales support:
- Drift Conversational Marketing: Conversational Marketing connects marketers and website visitors in real-time conversations to surface the right content for visitors, answer their questions, or qualify and convert best-fit buyers through the funnel.
- Drift Conversational Sales: Conversational Sales helps sellers close deals faster by giving them a unified place to get real-time buyer insights, collaborate with teammates, and jumpstart personalized conversations through chat, video, email, or phone.
- Drift Conversational Service: Conversational Service provides real-time personalized customer care and helps support agents focus on high-priority customers by deflecting low-level issues or empowering customers to answer their own questions and routing in a service agent to chat live when they need human help.
Real-Time B2B Relationship Building Is Here
The truth is traditional B2B selling no longer works. Buyers expect instant gratification, prefer easily accessible & digestible content to consume on their terms, and increasingly demand the ability to research solutions through connected, immersive, real-time experiences that don’t require an actual phone conversation with a seller. And so with that as a backdrop, we here at BOL love Drift’s potential to deliver better outcomes with human-centered, tech-enabled conversations to support our full-funnel stage-based approach to successful B2B marketing and ABM.