How Chronus Built 85% of Their Pipeline From Anonymous Visitors Their ABM Tools Couldn’t Find

Quick Summary:

• Chronus implemented a Lift AI buyer intent strategy to score the real-time behaviour of every website visitor, and built playbook experiences in Drift for each visitor based on their buyer intent score 
• High buyer intent visitors were directed to live sales resources immediately via Drift, while medium to low intent visitors were directed to automated playbooks. This combination of Drift and Lift AI optimized website conversion rates, grew pipeline and increased sales velocity 
• 85% of the resulting Chronus website pipeline from Drift, came from the 73% of website visitors that were completely anonymous except for a Lift AI buyer intent score (not able to ID match using ABM tools). This created a significant net-new revenue stream for Chronus from their website
• 15% of Chronus website pipeline from Drift came from the 27% of site visitors that were ID revealed through ABM tools
• Anonymous visitors scored as having high buyer intent converted into Sales Qualified Opportunities (SQO’s) 4x more than visitors that were identified as part of the ABM program, and 8.5x more than the lowest performing segment - a significant increase in sales velocity and productivity
• 15% of total pipeline came from just .05% of visitors that were identified as high intent and given a skip the form playbook in Drift, who converted into SQO’s 23% of the time. This equals the amount of pipeline generated from the total universe of the matched ABM segment (27% of visitors), and required ¼ of the sales resources.
  

Chronus is an employee-driven development platform, delivering mentoring and ERG software and services that unleash the full potential of people in the workplace. Powering successful mentoring for Amazon, Uber, L'Oréal, McGraw Hill, Nationwide Children's Hospital, University of Washington and more, Chronus' award-winning software helps organizations reach their greatest potential through their people

Their website is a core revenue-generating channel, so they adopted Drift’s conversational marketing tool to engage buyers while they are actively shopping to create more pipeline and ultimately revenue.

Implementing Drift - a powerful place to start

Using Drift’s conversational marketing solution alone, Chronus used a page-based personalization strategy to engage visitors, who were sent to one of three core playbook experiences depending on what page of the site they are on (e.g the Pricing page):

• Skip the Form - A Drift playbook which allows visitors to input their information via chat in real-time rather than filling out a form and waiting for an email response.
• Return Visitor - A chatbot playbook in Drift that engages visitors that have been marked as returning to the site (has been on the website before within X days)
• Engage All - A chatbot playbook in Drift which attempts to engage every visitor that is not already part of another playbook segment

This strategy gave Chronus a good start with Drift. However, they found it challenging to keep their sales team focused on opportunities as the page-based approach often resulted in sales resources tied up with unqualified prospects.  

Expanding Drift coverage across the full website brought more leads to the table, but also plenty more non-buyer conversations which impacted their sales team efficiency and conversion rates. 

Ultimately this led to Chronus looking for ways to reduce the amount of time sales teams were spending with non-buyers while still converting everything they could from their site traffic.

Adding game-changing sales intelligence

This led to integrating ABM tools and Lift AI into the mix, each bringing a key ingredient that would help them understand their site traffic better. The combination would enable them to better segment, target and engage the right visitors with the right experience.

ABM tools were able to match and enrich 27% of Chronus website traffic through ID reveal. Chat experiences could now be created that were more personalized to their account priority segments and gave Chronus the ability to find visitors on the site that belonged to their target account lists.

However, that meant 73% of their website traffic was still unmatched and completely anonymous, which is where Lift AI’s Buyer Intent technology was able to fill a critical gap.

Unlike other intent technologies, Lift AI does not need an account or email address to predict intent. Instead, Lift AI evaluates the detailed behaviour of website visitors in real-time using machine learning technology, then assigns each visitor a “buyer intent score” between 0-100 to represent their likelihood to convert.  

Using Lift AI, Chronus was able to reveal the buyer intent of every visitor - both anonymous and those ID matched by ABM tools - to uncover new revenue streams. It also allowed Chronus to find the best sales opportunities for their sales team to engage instead of wasting time with non-buyers, ultimately increasing their productivity and efficiency.

The combination of Lift AI and ABM tools  gave Chronus actionable insights for 100% of their website traffic. The next step was to create the right experiences for each segment of visitor. 

The winning engagement strategy - buyer intent segmentation

Now Chronus could personalize their engagement strategy for each and every website visitor- whether they are anonymous or known visitors. 

First, through Lift AI’s real-time buyer intent score based on visitor behaviour, which segmented 100% of visitors as:

• High buyer intent
• Medium to low buyer intent

Then, through ABM in-market data if a ID reveal match is found, resulting in 27% of visitors as: 

• ID match found with account priority 1 (best fit to target account)
• ID match found with account priority 2 
• ID match found with account priority 3

By combining the data from both Lift AI and its ABM tool, Chronus created two blended segments of visitors:

1. Sales-ready visitors who were either completely anonymous with high Lift AI buyer intent, or ID matched accounts from ABM tools who were also high Lift AI buyer intent (then further segmented into account priority stages)
2. Nurture- ready visitors who were either completely anonymous with medium to low Lift AI buyer intent, or ID matched accounts from ABM tools who were also medium to low Lift AI buyer intent (then further segmented into account priority stages)

Sales-ready visitors with high buyer intent - the red carpet treatment

The “sales-ready” visitors were engaged with the red carpet treatment in Drift - including quick access to a sales resource (who have the strongest chance of converting a visitor into pipeline compared to automated chatbots). 

The sales-ready visitors who were completely anonymous except for a high Lift AI buyer intent score represented 6% of all traffic and accounted for 25% of pipeline delivered from the Chronus website, while also converting to SQOs at 12%, a rate of 2.5X higher than the average (and 4.5x times higher than the lowest performing segment). 

This segment created net-new accounts not identified by the ABM program. Although these visitors were not from companies identified by Chronus for their initial ABM program launch, Lift AI is able to identify these opportunities on the website based purely on their real time behaviour, engage them through Drift, and turn them into immediate pipeline. We call this Anonymous Buyer Marketing, which adds a significant immediate impact to your overall ABM program from visitors that are shopping you now, but are not yet part of your ABM defined target market

Additionally, this segment of anonymous visitors with a high Lift AI buyer intent score represents a chance for Chronus to engage those prospects before their competitors do, which increases their chances of winning the sale by more than 50%. 

Even more impactful was the subsegment of anonymous high intent visitors who were given the “Skip the Form” playbook. These visitors represented only 0.5% of the overall traffic, yet generated 15% of pipeline and converted at 23% SQO. 

This 0.5% needle in a haystack segment created more pipeline than the entire 27% of traffic that was ID revealed by ABM tools, while doing so with fewer sales resources.

Somewhat surprisingly, the segment of Lift AI High Intent sales-ready visitors, who were also identified by their ABM tools as a priority, have produced zero opportunities thus far. Our experience suggests this is because while you can proactively identify who your prime target accounts are, they may not be seeking a solution like yours immediately. It takes time to nurture and develop your ABM market. Because Chronus is relatively new in its ABM adoption, we expect this segment to be a strong  performer in the future. Even still, this segment only represents a total of 2% of website visitors. 

Nurture-ready visitors with medium to low buyer intent - the automated treatment 

Nurture-ready website visitors were scored by Lift AI as medium to low buyer intent, with a subset of those visitors matched to accounts in their ABM tools as a priority stage.

These visitors are given experiences that leverage the power of Drift’s conversational marketing automation - creating playbooks designed to explore the visitors’ interests, qualify them more, and provide them with educational or other requested resources until they are deemed sales-ready. 

As there are more medium and low buyer intent visitors on a website than high intent, most of the visitors fall into this nurture-ready segment. The higher volumes of this segment results in a higher number of engagements, which requires Drift’s automation capabilities and Lift AI’s medium to low buyer intent score to protect sales teams from spending time with non sales-ready visitors. 

It is here where the automated playbooks from Drift are best utilized alongside ID matched results from their ABM tools.

The resulting nurture segments of traffic were effective, converting 6% of all conversations to SQOs.

• Skip the Form was sent to 10% of nurture-ready visitors creating 29% of pipeline at a conversion rate of 5.7% to SQO
• Return Visitor was sent to 8% of nurture-ready visitors creating 11% of pipeline at a conversion rate of 7.1% SQO 
• Engage All was sent to 48% of nurture-ready visitors creating 20% of pipeline and a conversion rate of 2.7% SQO

An unbeatable combination by the numbers

Having a buyer intent score for every single visitor allowed the Chronus sales team to focus only on sales-ready visitors while deploying automation to the nurture-ready visitors, ultimately decreasing the amount of time they were spending on non sales-ready visitors and converting SQOs by as much as 8.5x higher, increasing sales velocity and productivity. 

It turns out that Chronus’s biggest immediate revenue opportunity was the anonymous website visitors with no available data except for a Lift AI buyer intent score - and your website is likely the same. Want to uncover your pipeline while increasing conversion rates and sales team productivity? Switch to a behavioural buyer intent strategy by Lift AI today, starting with a free trial.