Insights
October 1, 2023

How To Configure Drift Chat For More Sales

by 
Don Simpson

If in the early days of enterprise SaaS, contact forms offered a good way for companies to assign scores to web visitors. Today, the B2B landscape looks completely different. As more and more software products are fighting for the same customer, presenting a potential prospect with a six-question form simply means losing them to one of your competitors. But this is old news.

A core tenet of present-day sales is speed. This means that no one can afford to leave their leads waiting for a reply, whether it’s for a day or even an hour. People expect all interactions to be instant, and if you want your product or service to be competitive, you have to adjust.

So what’s the optimal solution? As you might’ve noticed, the most forward-looking companies right now rely on live chat for sales to communicate with web visitors instantly. It doesn’t get much faster than that, but it’s not without challenges. 

A refresher On Drift

Drift is a revenue acceleration platform that offers live chat for sales as well as AI-powered chatbots to engage your visitors in more natural dialogs rather than one-way contact form applications. 

Live chat for sales through Drift results in higher conversions because it’s able to meet your leads at the peak of their interest and in the contextually perfect environment, where they are reading about your product or service and can ask questions that are important to them. Your SDRs also end up being more agile and can use sales techniques like calendar invites, recording custom walkthroughs, or sending video case studies to convert faster.

With over 50,000 customers, Drift is clearly the platform of choice for many well-known brands today. The key to success, however, is in configuring Drift chat properly to maximize the rate of conversions.

How to fine-tune Drift for more conversions

Like many other chat tools, Drift allows you to completely integrate it into your sales process, down to the smallest details, such as chat window appearance. Once you sign up for Drift, you can change it to incorporate your brand by adding your own logo and colors. This covers the basics.

Next, you can create a variety of Playbooks — workflows that define your audience, goals, welcome messages, and more. You can even trigger different chatbots for each one — choosing from a homepage bot, pricing page bot, or “skip the form” bot. 

As your Drift chat goes live, don’t rely solely on Playbooks to get you sales. Make sure your SDRs are proactive and greet promising leads, offering timely support. In some cases, just a simple “How can I help you?” goes a long way. 

Finally, don’t forget to leverage Drift’s extensive marketing ecosystem of product integrations. Drift seamlessly works with CRMs and marketing automation systems like Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, and more. In fact, you can even build your own custom integrations using their developer-friendly API.

There’s only one thing that manually configuring Drift chat won’t solve properly — accurately figuring out when your visitors should engage with your SDRs or be greeted by an AI-powered chatbot.

How to Optimize Drift with Lift AI

Drift, just like all other live chat for sales tools, relies on manual intervention or CRM-powered rules to switch from a chatbot to a live representative. This is a problem because live representatives convert better than a chatbot, so you want to ensure your best prospects are immediately connected with your SDRs instead of going through the high-friction “gate” of a chatbot first for qualification.

If you try configuring Drift chat to take advantage of basic lead scoring, the best you can do is assess visitors based on their past behavior (e.g. pages visited) or personal data (e.g. corporate email). This doesn't help if the visitor is anonymous (and most of them are). You can’t reliably know the quality of the lead as soon as they come to your website — unless you use Lift AI.

Lift AI is the only machine-learning model available today that’s able to predict the conversion probability for every single visitor instantly, without relying on pre-existing CRM data or waiting for your chatbots to qualify visitors first. And it even works on anonymous visitors. To do so, Lift AI relies on its proprietary AI-powered model with 15 years worth of sales data across various industries, including more than a billion website visitors profiled and 14 million live sales interactions. 

To see how Lift AI works with Drift, it’s helpful to look at a standard conversion funnel for a Drift installment. At the top of the funnel you have website visitors. A portion of those website visitors will be invited to chat based on your Drift configuration. Out of those invites, a percentage of them will generally be accepted and turned into conversations. Finally, some of those conversations will result in a conversion.

However, adding Lift AI on top suddenly provides x-ray vision of the website visitors at the top of the funnel, understanding which of those visitors have a low, medium, or high conversion potential, and then inviting them to chat based on their score. From there, Lift AI knows that high potential visitors should be connected with live agents instantly, while the rest can go to bots or bots assisted by live agents.

Ultimately, what Lift AI helps you do is identify high-scoring leads and automatically funnel them into live chat for sales, making your SDRs much more effective as a result. Lower-quality leads will in turn be presented with a chatbot of your choice to guide them through your product or service. In fact, PointClickCare were able to increase their leads by 168% using Lift AI.

The best part about Lift AI is that you can continue using your tech stack just as before. No need to spend time configuring Drift chat, just add a small Lift AI JavaScript code snippet to your website and watch your sales grow. 

Get in touch with us today - and see how Machine Scoring can instantly improve your live chat for sales strategy and bring in more revenue in no time.

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