Selling is more difficult than ever.

Buyers are 60-70% of the way through their journey before they ever talk to sales.

This means that the majority of your buyers’ buying journey is based on your marketing efforts and their own anonymous research. And that’s why Salesloft’s acquisition of Drift makes so much sense.

Because buyers conduct the majority of their buying journey online, in their own way, and on their own time, Drift helps sellers using Salesloft better understand their buyers before the first conversation takes place. This acquisition will help sellers find new buyers earlier in their buying journey.  

While the acquisition of Drift is new, Salesloft’s partnership with the Buyer Engagement Platform is not. Drift and Salesloft have long had an integration to help merge these inbound and outbound sales flywheels. Because by leveraging intent data from both your on-site and off-site go-to-market efforts, you’re able to bring together your marketing and sales initiatives to create a more cohesive buying journey for your customers. 

Buyers want to remain anonymous until they think you might be able to solve their problem. And most don’t want to give up their personal contact and email information before you have earned it. 

Digital behaviors on websites are complex to track, making it difficult for sellers to understand buyer intent and timing across digital channels, which is only amplified by the largely anonymous nature of this behavior.

That’s why Drift launched Drift Engage Powered by Lift AI back in October. Drift Engage uses Lift AI’s website Buyer Intent Scoring to sift through the complexity of behavioral data and identify buyers on websites in real-time. With Drift Engage, Drift customers, and now Salesloft customers too, can:

• Identify potential buyers earlier: With Drift Engage Powered by Lift AI, you can identify accounts with high buying intent much earlier in their buying journey. Lift AI looks at a combination of thousands of behavioral signals for a visitor on your website, and determines their buyer intent score in real-time. Using the website buyer intent activity alongside your Salesloft data combined with Drift Bionic Bots, Site Concierge and Live Chat capabilities, you can determine and prioritize the engagement experience for buyers while they are on your website, and orchestrate and prioritize the follow up activities after they leave.
• Better prioritize their accounts: The Drift Engage score is added to your Account or Lead Score to provide reps with better insight into which leads are the most engaged with their product and ready to talk, based on their Lift AI Buyer Intent Score. This saves reps countless hours of sifting through their account list and blindly reaching out to accounts in hopes of a response.  a dramatic increase in the ability to accurately predict buyer intent to correctly prioritize sales activities. In one customer example, using Lift AI with their ABM platform allowed them to find the “bullseye” segment of website visitors who were from known accounts and showed high individual buyer intent, to increase sales conversion to pipeline rates by 11.6x.
• Increase efficiency through Artificial Intelligence (AI): The combination of Drift Engage and Salesloft broadens the sellers’ ability to leverage AI-powered automation to target high intent buyers from known Accounts earlier in their journey using Drift Intel, Drift Prospector, and Drift Engage. Bionic bots, and Site Concierge can be used to advance and nurture the rest. This drives a significantly shorter sales cycle and increases velocity to closed won deals, by allowing AI intent scoring to drive prioritization of which leads to focus on‍
• Find buyers from anonymous visitors on their website that are currently being overlooked! Drift Engage Powered by Lift AI, informs sales teams when and how best to engage with anonymous website visitors to produce sales efficient pipeline and revenue.

Customers can leverage AI powered automation with Drift Engage to connect sales faster with the anonymous high intent buyers.  These high intent anonymous buyers add more than 50% of the website pipeline for companies like Okta, Payscale and Chronus (for example, Chronus unlocked 85% of their pipeline from anonymous website visitors) and convert at higher sales velocity (Truckstop increased their conversion rate by 3x by targeting high intent anonymous visitors).  Intelex gets 60% of their Drift pipeline from anonymous visitors and their conversion to pipeline sales velocity increased by 4x.

How Does it Work?:

• Drift Intel and Prospector deliver sales teams more insight into accounts’ activity on the site.
• Drift Engage powered by Lift AI provides AI to synthesize the complex digital behaviors of  individuals within the known accounts into actionable segments to trigger both intent-based on site engagement, and prioritization of sales outreach and follow up.
• Drift Engage powered by Lift AI identifies high intent website visitors who are completely anonymous enabling specific playbooks built to fast track potential buyers to sales agents, while they are on the website.  
• Salesloft connects Drift more tightly to sales action and follow up - and Drift connects Salesloft more tightly into the website bringing together onsite experiences and outbound engagements into a single system and uniting and orchestrating them  into one – making both technologies that much more valuable to their customers by increasing revenue, marketing ROI, and sales efficiency. And it delivers a better buying experience by matching the engagement to the intent.
  

We believe that this is going to be a game changer for sales and marketing teams and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to it.