Executive Summary:
- A global B2B software company was able to uncover 51% of leads from the 41% of their website traffic that is completely anonymous
- These visitors were assigned a Lift AI buyer intent score based on their real-time behavioral signals, with no other information or ID match required
- Visitors with a high buyer intent score were given a custom playbook in Drift which converted to Sales Accepted Opportunities 5x more than traditional page-based playbooks
- This High Intent Playbook is not just sales efficient, it quickly became the 2nd biggest pipeline producer (after contact sales) for the company’s website
- In fact, 12.6% of the Sales Accepted Opportunities from this period were from anonymous visitors that were not found in the company’s ABM tools at all
Making sense of millions of visitors
As a global leader in their solution space, one B2B software company received millions of visitors per month.
Their fast growth and overall success was driven through the use of highly effective digital marketing strategies and toolsets, making their website their #1 revenue-generating channel.
However, with such a significant volume of traffic came the challenge to optimize the user experience and convert those visitors at scale.
Finding ways to convert more visitors into revenue efficiently represented an enormous opportunity for the company.
The question was - how?
Converting visitors with Drift in a traditional “page-based” approach
To capitalize on the sizable opportunity of that website traffic, the company implemented Drift’s conversational marketing solution to engage visitors and ultimately educate, nurture and convert them.
The initial implementation was a huge success, contributing on average about $4.7M in opportunity value (pipeline) per month.
The initial adoption of Drift used a page-based personalization strategy, a common practice with chat programs. Over time, the company created hundreds of different chat experiences known as playbooks - for example:
- “Engage Any Visitor on the Pricing Page With Experience A”
- “Engage Any Visitor on Integration Page With Experience B”
- “Engage Any Visitor Mousing Over Exit Button on Trial Page With Experience C”
However, creating, maintaining, and updating playbooks mapped to different user journeys became challenging for the company as the number of playbooks grew. It created a disjointed experience for customers as they navigated the website, as multiple playbooks were conflicting with each other providing a suboptimal experience. It also became an administrative challenge for the marketing and sales team to manage the growing number of playbooks.
An even bigger problem was that the performance range of the playbooks varied dramatically, with many smaller playbooks having no contribution at all. The company wanted to streamline the number of playbooks to create less “noise” on the website, and have the experience more aligned to the type of visitor.
Also critical was the company’s need to optimize sales efficiency and velocity. With thousands of leads being generated per month, it was critical to refine the program to prioritize opportunities and make the best use of sales resources.
To that end, the company engaged Lift AI to take the following actions:
- Simplify. Remove all non-productive page-based playbooks
- Inform. Integrate ABM and Lift AI sales intelligence technologies
- Action. Transition from the page-based strategy to an intent and audience-based strategy
However, in order to achieve #1, the company had to move away from the page-based approach to Drift and use a new strategy entirely.
The game-changer: Finding new opportunities with the “buyer-intent” based approach
Instead of deploying Drift playbooks based on what page a user is looking at, it makes more sense to deploy a playbook based on what that individual user’s buyer intent is - and to find that, you need sales intelligence. Specifically, you need Lift AI.
Lift AI is a buyer intent technology that evaluates the detailed behaviour of website visitors in real-time using machine learning, assigning each visitor a “buyer intent score” between 0-100 to represent their likelihood to convert at any given moment.
Unlike other intent technologies, Lift AI does not need an account match or email address to predict intent, so Lift AI was able to provide a buyer intent score for 100% of the company’s traffic.
This resulted in 51% of website leads coming from 41% of the site visitors that were completely anonymous except for a Lift AI buyer intent score.
Adding Lift AI to their website alongside Drift enabled the company to capitalize on this previously overlooked, but significant opportunity in anonymous visitors.
With a Lift AI buyer intent score available for every visitor, a “High Intent” Drift playbook was built to identify and target anonymous website visitors with a high buyer intent score range.
This experience directed those visitors to a live sales resource quickly with a strong chance of converting them into pipeline, even though there was no knowledge of who the visitor was or what company they came from.
Increasing sales team efficiency with 5x more velocity
The goal however, was not just to generate more leads - it was to efficiently generate pipeline that turns into revenue. And that is exactly what Lift AI did by aligning visitor intent with the right conversion experience.
The High Intent playbook produced Sales Accepted Opportunities (SAO) at 5x the rate as the average page-based experiences without Lift AI.
Additionally, the High Intent playbook targeting completely anonymous visitors quickly became the 2nd biggest pipeline contributor to the company, surpassed only by the “Existing Contact Sales” playbook, where visitors explicitly self-select and ask to speak to a sales representative from the company’s Contact Sales CTA buttons.
Adding Lift AI to the company’s ABM program for the “bullseye” effect
The company also utilized an ABM tool and Drift Intel which helped provide account data enrichment and in-market intent information, which was able to ID match 59% of the company’s website traffic, and when combined with Lift AI contributed to 49% of the leads from the site.
Surprisingly, anonymous visitors were converting to leads at almost 1.5x the rate of ID matched visitors while accounting for 51% of the number of all leads.
Another significant output from the High Intent playbook was the ability to find 682 net-new accounts that were not in the company’s ABM, CRM or MAP systems before Lift AI revealed and captured them. These additional accounts surfaced as they did not meet the initial targeting criteria of their ABM program, but showed high buyer intent once on the company’s website. Once engaged and identified through the sales process, it was found that these accounts were not present in their existing data.
From these net-new contacts, 38 Sales Accepted Opportunities were created which represents 12.6% of all SAO’s for the period, a significant growth opportunity that was not previously considered in the company’s ABM program.
The High Intent playbook for the company was a game-changer. Not only was 51% of the pipeline generated from completely anonymous website visitors, but some of those visitors were suddenly transformed into a treasure chest of pipeline.
By prioritizing these high intent visitors, the company was able to achieve better sales velocity and efficiency, ensuring their team only engaged sales-ready visitors.
Using buyer intent scores in future applications
Lift AI showed that the intent-first approach outperforms the page-based approach, with much improved sales efficiency.
As this approach is applied more universally in the Drift channel, the company can decrease the number of future chat sends and conversations to deliver even better results in terms of pipeline and sales efficiency.
In addition to targeting High Intent visitors, the company can create experiences that are more aligned with the visitors’ journey, no matter where they are in that journey.
Visitors at the top of the funnel (with low intent) are looking to understand why they should change solutions, or consider the company’s solution. Now that the company knows which visitors should get low intent value proposition messaging, they can deliver it more precisely - and use valuable sales resources sparingly.
Visitors that have a medium buyer intent score will have questions more specific to why the company’s solution is better and how it works, so playbooks can be set up to nurture and further qualify those visitors before they’re engaged by a sales resource.
Of course, high intent visitors are all about creating urgency, who can continue to be routed to live sales agents for conversion but also prioritized through sales follow-up.
Finally, the company can expand the use of Lift AI into other digital marketing tactics by targeting high intent visitors through other channels such as paid search, retargeting, page content personalization, advertising, and more.
If you want to see how switching from a page-based strategy to a Lift AI buyer intent-based strategy can help you find more pipeline faster than ever, click here to start your free trial or watch a demo here.
