Use Conversational Marketing & Sales? Dave Gerhardt on Why You Should

Author: Brian Carroll / Source: Marketing Insider Group

This post was originally published on this site

Meetings, phone calls, and email are important B2B channels but how can you have immediate conversations and drive a more human buying experience?

Conversational Marketing is about having one-to-one conversations now to connect with customers and drive leads better.

In sum, conversational marketing uses targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with leads in real-time (while they’re on your website). You can engage people in real-time to offer help, and convert leads faster.

That’s why I interviewed Dave Gerhardt (@davegerhardt), VP of Marketing at Drift.com and co-author of the new book Conversational Marketing. Dave is also known as DG.

Quick Takeaways:

• Content is no longer a differentiator for B2B. It is more of a commodity now.
• Conversational marketing helps you engage in real-time conversation on your site and capture leads without using forms.
• Be patient and show empathy to your customers. Don’t push them to buy.
• Use plain text emails to personalize your conversation.

Share a bit of your background and what does Drift do?

DG: So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing; been here for three-ish years right since the beginning of the company.

The way that I talk about Drift is that Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.

Which is a big change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were kinda built for later? Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.

But you know, there’s just been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.

I think about walking outside this building: if I called Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that’s what we expect from everything. Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.

Brian: Right.

DG: So, our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing.

Brian: Well, that’s awesome! And so, that sets us up actually. –

You have a new book Conversational Marketing coming out soon?

DG: You got a copy! Wait, old that up again. I gotta take a screenshot.

Brian: Do a screenshot right here.

DG: You got one of the contrabands. Love it.

Brian: Yeah, we do! I have highlights all over this book, and so I wanted to talk about it.

This new book’s coming out. When’s the release date? I know it’s soon. And what motivated you to write the book? Why now?

DG: Release date’s January 30th. And the reason we wrote the book is that we’ve just heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, we felt it firsthand.

We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business and we have become one of the fastest growing companies of all time in this industry. And it’s not because we have some secret, but our secret has been we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.

And so, as we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it late last year we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”

We’ve wanted to write a book. We had enough stuff to say and enough case studies and examples and methodologies and playbooks and blueprints, and all that stuff.

And so, you know we said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book, and really do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.”

Brian: Well, it’s really well done.

Why do marketers need to rethink their content/lead generation?

DG: Because content’s a commodity, right?

Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody’s into video. Everybody’s on social media.

Content five, ten years ago you could be like, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people are like, “Blogging? No way!”

Today, all that stuff is a commodity, and nobody’s going to be on their commute home tonight being like, “You know what I wish I had more of?

I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. Like, I need another B2B podcast. That’s what I need.” Right? And so, there’s got to be some other way to compete.

You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” Because we’re all kind of starting to ignore that, right?

I try to avoid filling out forms if I can.

I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t normally call me. I never reply to cold emails. And so, something had to give. And that’s really the shift that we’ve seen in the market.

And something that David (who I wrote this book with; he’s the founder and CEO of Drift) the thing he talks about is, he calls it the shift from supply to demand. Right?

Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power and so if you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person that sold iced coffee.

And you could say, “You know what, Brian? You’re going to have to go through my process and you want one of my iced coffees? Great! Come back at 5 o’clock tonight. Call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.”

Where now, customers have all the power, right?

By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I’ve already evaluated four or five other companies and I’m there in your store for a reason.

Really, the concept that information is free now, it’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore.

Brian: I was just thinking you sell to marketers, right? And so, naturally, we’re kind of a snarky bunch. We know how things are played, and so it’s about building trust with people as well. I just wanted to hear the story; I was reading the book, but also, I first heard about it, I think it was a year ago. This whole idea of the #noforms movement.

How did the #noforms movement get started and what do you mean?

DG: What do I mean by “no forms”?

That’s a loaded question. So “no forms” is pretty, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not a rhetorical question, but you know what I’m trying to say, right?

Brian: Right. Right.

DG: You need no forms because of the whole process that I think marketers got into this world of just abusing forms, right? And I’m not preaching to anybody;

I did this too, right?

I remember one of the first things I did at Drift.

I wanted to write an article about the Growth Marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. And so, I made a Twitter list, I put it in a Google sheet, and I put a form behind it.

And I said, “Hey! You want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.” Like, that person’s not a lead. Right?

There’s no intent there. I’m just gating this thing that is a commodity, and so we kind of started this whole “no forms” movement to challenge marketers to rethink how they do demand gen and how they capture leads.

It started because about three years ago David Cancel called me one morning on my way into work and he’s like, “Hey! You got a second?” And I knew something was wrong because he never talks on the phone. He only texts. He only sends IMs, Slack, WhatsApp, and text messages.

So, when he called me, I was like, “I’m getting fired. Here we go.” It was actually worse than getting fired.

He was like, “Hey! I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.” And I was like, “Okay. And do what?” Like, I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away?

So, what are you going to measure me on? And he’s like, “No, idiot.” He didn’t say that.

But he’s like, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way and we need to remove all of our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.”

And so, it was really like a pivotal moment for us, because it’s like, “Alright. If we’re going to build this thing, we’ve got to live it firsthand.”

And it was amazing because it wasn’t just a marketing lesson, right?

I remember sitting next to two of our engineers, we shared a little table together and they’re like, “Okay. You’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?” And they’re like, “We’re building this thing as we go on the spot.” It was super transformational for our business because we were able to see how it worked firsthand.

But then we got to go and educate the world, right? Because you say “no forms” to marketers, people are going to jump off the side of the boat.

But for us, we were like, “Hold on. Let me show you how you would do a webinar registration without a form. Let me show you how you would do this on your pricing page without a form.”

And so, it gave us an opportunity to really go out there and educate the market. And the results since then have been amazing.

Brian: You know it still stings and feels a bit like heresy, this idea of “no forms.” because every marketing automation provider has been built in forms. We have tons of popups. I have popups on my blog and on my website, and the question is if I get rid of forms, then how do I engage people

Engage and capture leads with no forms

DG: So, the short answer to that is to have a conversation, right? And that’s really why Drift exists because the way you’re going to capture leads now is by having an actual conversation with somebody.

I’ll give you an example. Forms work. And in reality, the best advice I could give you is, don’t replace your forms.

That’s what you’re going to do eventually after you’re very successful with conversational marketing. But I want you to use conversational marketing in addition to your forms to start, right?

And you’re going to create a second net that’s going to create this fast lane for the best people because if somebody has very high intent and they land on your website, they don’t want to fill out a form.

They want to get an answer now. And so, Drift is going to create a fast lane for those best people.

So, part one is, use Drift or conversation marketing in addition to what you’re already doing with forms. The other part of that is something we see all the time, right?

How do you ask a question to a form? You can’t.

You either fill it out or you don’t, right? We see this happen all the time.

Engage in real-time conversations on your website

Somebody will come in on our website and our sales reps, when a named account comes to the website, they get a notification on their phone that says, “Hey! The VP of Marketing at DropBox is on the website right now.”

We had a real example like this, and I’ll just make up the companies.

The CMO at Starbucks, she comes to the website and she says, “Oh, I was interested-” and the bot says, “Hey! What brought you to Drift?” And she says, “Well, I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack and so we’re actually not a good fit.”

At that moment, the sales rep pops in and says, “Whoa! Hold on a second. We do integrate with Slack. Can I show you? Here’s a help doc.” And she’s like, “Oh, interesting.”

Long story short, they have a 40-minute conversation. That turns into a demo. That deal closes a month later.

…

Click here to read more