Executive Summary
- Truckstop sought to balance live sales resources and automation with Drift conversational marketing
- However, they faced the dilemma of overwhelming their sales team by engaging with too many visitors across the whole website, or missing potential buyers by focusing too narrowly on certain pages
- By integrating Lift AI, Truckstop successfully isolated and targeted high-intent website visitors based on their real-time behavior, no matter where those visitors were on the website
- One Lift AI High Intent playbook added incremental ARR in the first 30 days to provide an immediate 3.8x ROI on Lift AI monthly costs.
- This created sales team buy in and success as they were spending their time on traffic that is converting 3x higher than general traffic (9.72% vs. 3.28%)
- By month 5, Lift AI’s High Intent playbook added incremental ARR equating to a 27x ROI on Lift AI’s monthly costs.
Truckstop, a leading software in the freight industry, specializes in load management software. Their platform brings carriers, brokers, and shippers together, facilitating efficient freight management and empowering businesses to thrive.
The Goal: Optimizing Sales Resources
Truckstop’s website receives a healthy and growing number of visitors, which leads to the challenge of optimizing revenue generation.
Their solution is self-explanatory for some, which allows a self-serve ecommerce experience for those ready to buy.
However, given that Truckstop's software can serve complex challenges in the freight industry, many potential buyers may need help or sales assistance in order to convert them.
The challenge was: how could Truckstop understand which website visitors need live sales team input and support?
One potential solution was to offer online chat through Drift - the leading conversational marketing and revenue acceleration platform.
However, Truckstop cannot simply have their sales team engage every website visitor through chat in the hopes they would be buyers - the scale of visitors is too high to service with live sales agents, and the chances of engaging non-buyers is high which results in wasted time.
Striking the right balance between their dedicated sales team and the self-serve ecommerce funnel was essential.
A Familiar Conversational Marketing Challenge
Truckstop’s engagement strategy mirrored a common predicament. Like many businesses, they relied on two prevalent Drift "playbooks" for engaging website visitors:
Engage All Playbooks - Spreading Too Thin:
This approach casts a wide net, targeting all visitors across the entire website based on a few simple parameters. However, this approach often led to sales agents being overwhelmed, unable to engage every visitor effectively. There are simply too many visitors to engage with live sales resources, and the automated chatbots used to engage remaining visitors used generic messaging that failed to resonate with buyers lacking the personalization needed for a meaningful connection.
Page-Based Playbooks - Missing Buyers Elsewhere:
On the other end of the spectrum, Truckstop employed a highly specific and narrow strategy targeting visitors on particular pages (e.g., the Pricing and Product pages). While this approach seemed precise, it overlooked the fact that not all visitors on those pages were prospects. In fact, it was discovered that a significant portion of potential buyers were not on these specific pages, resulting in missed opportunities. This approach also burdened Truckstop with managing numerous custom journeys for each page and playbook.
The cumulative effect of these two common strategies for most companies would be a strain on the sales team, with considerable time spent on conversations with non-buying visitors. This would result in lower-than-expected metrics and reduced enthusiasm among the sales team.
The Solution - Targeting Buyers by Intent, Not Page
Truckstop knew what challenges awaited them in the conversational marketing space, so they took proactive measures to address them, and turned their Drift implementation into a formidable revenue channel.
Instead of engaging all visitors or limiting engagement to specific pages, Truckstop set their sights on visitors demonstrating strong buyer intent through real-time behavior.
This is where Lift AI came into play.
The Lift AI Advantage - Distinguish Buyers in Real-time:
Lift AI's distinguishing feature is its ability to predict a "buyer intent score" for each visitor based solely on their behavior on your website.
These scores boast an impressive accuracy rate of over 85%, making them useful at high volume and scale.
Lift AI’s machine learning model draws from a massive dataset, learning to distinguish true buyers from casual browsers based on real-time website signals– much like an experienced salesperson can gauge a potential customer's intent in a physical store.
When a visitor achieves a high buyer intent score, Lift AI is able to trigger precisely timed engagements for the marketing and sales teams, by way of integrations.
Moreover, Lift AI works with 100% of website traffic, including completely anonymous visitors, a feat that sets it apart from other intent tools that only cater to "known" (ID revealed) visitors, which typically is around 30% of total traffic (and with fewer, less comprehensive website signals).
The Step-by-Step Transformation: High Intent Playbooks
Upon integrating Lift AI into their website, Truckstop unlocked new capabilities that would elevate their Drift implementation, optimize their sales team, and increase revenue
Specifically, Truckstop set up a ‘High Intent Playbook’ in Drift to target buyers. This playbook specifically targeted visitors with Lift AI scores ranging between 65-90. Why only up to 90? Because website visitors with a score between 90-100 are likely self-serve buyers that do not need the assistance or sales support of a live agent.
Notably, this high intent playbook established direct connections between visitors and live sales agents during business hours, significantly enhancing the likelihood of conversion compared to automated chatbots.
Visitors hitting this score threshold, regardless of their location on the site, triggered the high-intent playbook. This playbook didn't stop at targeting; it also involved crafting compelling hooks and clear messaging trees to address common questions and concerns at this stage of the buying process
How it Started: Results That Redefined Success In Just 30 Days
Truckstop's pivot toward a Lift AI intent-based approach achieved remarkable results:
Rapid Revenue Growth:
Within just 30 days, Truckstop was able to add $17,000 in incremental ARR over and above what they would have had without Lift AI.
Efficiency and Speed:
The conversion process was not only more successful but also considerably faster. The high-intent traffic moved from initial contact to opportunity in just 4.3 days, a stark contrast to the 10.9 days required by the previous Drift 'engage all' playbook. This acceleration represented a remarkable 2.5x increase in the speed of converting opportunities.
Sales Team Buy-in:
After installing Lift AI, Truckstop could clearly see the segmentation of their website visitors to find that 9.94% of their visitors demonstrated high intent. By focusing their time and resources on these visitors, they were able to convert engagements to opportunity 3x higher than general traffic (9.72% vs. 3.28%) - growing revenue and optimize their time, while spending less time with non-buyers. This enabled immediate buy-in from the sales team to fully harness the power of intent-driven playbooks.
“We use Lift AI to identify which anonymous website visitors have high intent to direct them quickly to a self-serve ecommerce experience or to a live sales agent. The impact on our sales conversions has been incredible, and we are just getting started.”
- Tara Rowe, Sr Manager, Marketing Technology
How it’s Going: 27x Return on Investment for Lift AI Spend
The results above were all obtained with just one Lift AI High Intent playbook over 30 days.
Now, after 5 months of operation, Lift AI has become a phenomenal driver of revenue, creating a 27x ROI in revenue compared to Lift AI costs.
During this time, the singular Lift AI High Intent playbook accounted for 69% of all ARR closed through Drift.
These results with the same monthly average of website traffic, so it is not proportionate to increased advertising or traffic. Rather, Lift AI’s rapid success in 30 days motivated Truckstop to invest more in their sales team, who were suddenly turned into revenue-generating superstars by spending their time exclusively with High Intent visitors.
The Future Beckons: Extracting Value & Efficiency from Medium & Low Intent Playbooks
Building on this transformative success, Lift AI's roadmap at Truckstop involves the development of playbooks tailored to mid and low-intent visitor segments.
These playbooks will cater to varying visitor types, including automated sales qualification for medium-intent visitors, which can escalate to live agents, and automated support or nurturing for low-intent visitors, deftly deflecting them from live sales agents while offering them content that could create future buyers.
This strategy promises to deliver even more value while optimizing sales team efficiency, all while maintaining a laser focus on high-intent visitors primed for conversion.
In partnership with Lift AI, Truckstop not only unlocked the true revenue potential of their website but also established a foundation for continued excellence in the future.
If you’d like to experience the dramatic impact of an intent-based engagement strategy, you can request a free Lift AI Proof of Concept to get started.
