Drift provides an endless amount of resources and integrations to ensure our experience is as successful as it can be. We are able to integrate with many of our internal data platforms (Salesforce, 6sense) to know more about our prospects and provide them with the best user experience. This top notch experience helps drive prospects through the funnel and influence high value conversions. We also have a great customer experience team to support our account, which makes all the difference.
We do not see any downsides to working with Drift.
Drift is online 24/7/365, which allows prospects to convert at anytime of the day or night. Without Drift, we would not be able to capture folks at the right time with the right messaging.
Easy to set up, works with no-code developers as well. The looks are friendly and customizable. Suitable for any company that is looking for a quick solution instead of building its systems.
Quite hard to find the pricing plan. It always says to open a chat to discuss pricing. If they can be transparent about pricing, it will be beneficial. Now it seems like they want us to like the product and get used to it, and when we are comfortable with it, if they ask for a considerable sum, it will be problematic.
Handling customer inquiries when I am not available. Keeps track of the requests. Sends email notifications about visitors. Takes care of the visitors to the site.
Drift is great at conversational marketing. For us (a B2B Saas cybersecurity company) we found that the Fastlane calendar integration drove a significant increase in meetings and opportunities sourced through our website.The Fastlane feature means our investment with Drift has seen a tremendous ROI.
We have struggled to find the value from our reps engaging with customers directly in a live chat. Part of it may be our inability to drive behavior change among our reps and BDRs to monitor and jump into the chat. Our experience has also been that our customers / web visitors don't seem to want to engage with a chatbot or even engage with a rep directly in a live chat. I don't think this issue is specific to Drift relative to other conversational marketing solutions but it's been our experience. Still, the Fastlane feature drives meetings without the need for our reps or BDRs to engage with the chat functionality.
Drift has reduced friction between someone visiting our website and scheduling a meeting with a sales rep. That reduction in friction has led to a significant increase in inbound/web-sourced pipeline, which progresses more quickly and is more likely to close.
Simple to implement and flexible for a number of use cases. You can start slow and then scale up as you build out new motions in your playbook. Your SDR team will love it.
It creates value that scales over time. As such, it's not cheap. You have to decide if the investment is something you can prove with an ROI model.
Connecting in marketing prospects with our front-line sales team and creating a more fluid, scalable and efficient top-of-funnel process that creates pipeline more quickly than traditional web forms.
So far our experience with Drift has been outstanding. From the first contact with a sales rep up to now, we've been supported and assisted proactively and thoroughly. The team at Drift is super helpful, and what stands up is that is a general attitude from everyone involved. Their processes are great, easy, and simple to understand, while at the same time you have someone guiding you personally through every stage of the process. But it doesn't end at implementation, then you have a dedicated success manager, pending of you and your goals. With all things technology, situations can go south very fast, but we've never felt frustrated or unsupported with Drift and that is rare in the Tech space. I recommend them 10/10 and look forward to keeping working with them :)
Pricing can be challenging for small businesses like ours, but we understand it is an investment that it's worth it.
Drift has solved many problems such as: the automatic lead disqualification process, an increase of sales capacity of response, a controlled working environment to monitor responses and attention to end users, to help us notice when interesting accounts are in our website.
Drift has made it easier to have "ice breakers" with prospects. Nowadays, buyers want to feel they have maximum control in the buying process; Drift has the right features to make that possible. In turn, this provides a better experience for sellers and gives them a better sense of organic flow in conversation. Ultimately, having a tool like Drift can provide added value to your sales team.
One of the features that I dislike is the setting for idle or being away from your computer. However, after being on the webinar and learning more about the updates, there will eventually be a new rollout of Drift where you no longer have to toggle when you're away from your computer.
Drift is solving the problem of unanswered emails that are automated or feel boring; this also includes the hundreds of emails that typically get blocked or banned from servers as spam, ultimately landing in the junk or trash folder. Drift provides a better alternative with real-time conversation.
Drift has a top-tier Sales team (I worked with Mike Pantano, Kelvin Sims & Kate Mattos). They took the time to ask all the right questions, understand my business/needs & develop a thoughtful approach to solving those needs/roadblocks. They incorporated customized demos, relevant use cases and respectfully challenged any preconceived notion myself or other colleagues had around what a chat platform could be. You could tell they cared not only about the product they were promoting, but also making sure it was implemented thoughtfully and with high attention to detail. Alongside the excellent customer experience, the product itself also blew it out of the water. Their list of native integrations met our entire tech stack needs (Outreach, Zendesk, Chilipiper) and other product features (such as Fastlane, analytics/reporting) really left them as the one-stop-shop solution. Everything from initial website experiences to pipeline generation/segmentation they had covered. As a sales leader I was definitely focused on the pipeline generation & inbound piece, but they also had solutions to a lot of broader Customer Care/CX needs to make sure all of our clients, new or repeat got a streamlined experience. Truly impressive all around.
Their pricing can seem like a lot upfront when comparing to other services, but when you do the side-by-side comparison of the inclusions, features, resources, contract terms, etc it doesn't even come close. You get what you pay for and with some of the other more "scrappy" solutions leave a lot to be desired in terms of resources they provide, but also can cost you more in time, effort, add-ons than having it all in a one-stop shop like Drift.
Pipeline generation, Lead to Opp Conversion, Chat Experience, Self-Service, Thoughtful routing. Also solving for the time spent trying to do all of this work in-house versus leaning on their resources/consulting capabilities.
Drift is a great product with tons of features we value but I actually loved how easy it was to get started. We were able to launch a chatbot on our site using a template in less than a few hours and immediately impact demand gen! That short time-to-value encouraged us to invest more time into Drift and find value in their other features too.
It's a great product for teams of all sizes but for smaller companies you may need to depend more on automated features than ones which need people to jump into live chats. That's not essential as you can automate pretty much everything but if you like an added human touch to conversations with site visitors etc you may need to staff accordingly
Drift helps us convert more leads on our website and have more engaging conversations with our prospects with their email and video tools too. It has consistently increased our web conversion rates over time.