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By Chris Handy in blog —

Why we pushed our chips to the middle & became the first Drift Partners

Why we pushed our chips to the middle & became the first Drift Partners

I’ve long been a student of the overlap between consumer behavior and society. Access to mass markets, media, and communication channels allowed big brands to rule the day for a very long time.

Our Take

Slowly but surely, the market has flipped the script. The channel shift to short-form mobile communication like text messaging is the final pin to drop. The buyer now gets to choose how she wants to reach out. It’s just up to us to clear the path.

People tend to open up more while they maintain their anonymity. It’s keyboard courage. There’s a magic moment when their wall comes down and the brain dump takes place. Facilitating their conversations and being there for them wherever I happen to be is the convenience Drift has given us as a team, me personally, and our clients.

Drift keeps pushing their product forward to match how people communicate; and it’s great communication that leads to sales. If you ask me what Drift does, I’d say that it helps companies better communicate with their customers (however that may be). That’s our mission too, so we’re going all in. Let’s hear what their co-founders had to say:

David’s Take

Elias’s Take

My Take (👋, I’m Chris!)

The first time I had a one-call close from a meeting that showed up on my calendar without my involvement (from a Drift scheduling bot), I knew Drift had the right mix of people, processes, and technology to enable salespeople to do what they do best. We are excited to work closely with the best product team in the business (These are the folks that built the HubSpot that went to IPO) to help companies book more ClosedWon revenue.

Bethany’s Take

I will pay more or choose a different provider that I don’t know much about sometimes, just because they have live chat and it is convenient from me. I remember the big move after our house fire, I chose that moving company because I was up researching moving companies at 5 or 6 am on a Saturday. The company had live messaging, and the deal was done right there. That was a $10,000 move.

I had emailed other companies but by the time they emailed me back, I had already booked that other mover.
– Bethany

Bethany is ClosedWon’s Chief Communications Officer and Co-founder. She is a great example of someone who makes major purchases, buys complex technology products, and… also doesn’t like to talk on the phone.

With two small children and a mobile-work-life, she often works next to a sleeping baby. “Hopping on the phone real quick” doesn’t work for her most of the time. (She prefers live messaging 100% of the time when there is a choice. Think about that! Are you offering her that option as a supplier?) Do our clients yearn for more phone calls for quick messages? No! Most of our unscheduled client communication happens through Drift messages, dedicated slack channels, GroupMe and even iMessage.

(Editor’s Note from Bethany 🤦‍♀️: I sometimes emerge from the keyboard! At ClosedWon, we love “Zoom” video meetings for previously scheduled calls and for sometime upgrading live messaging to a “get things done” session. Thanks! Back to Chris…)

I thought about having her help prepare a statement for our announcement of becoming Drift partners, so I gave her a heads up, but I thought I’d approach it a little differently. (I’m weird like that.) When you think too much about what you are trying to say it can often seem inauthentic or canned even if the words ring true to the author. It’s just the way the human mind works sometimes when we polish words a little too much.

Here is what she had to say about Drift. Note when her “wall” comes down. It’s underlined…

Chris:
Text me your quote again about the Drift partnership?

Bethany:
Our team is excited to be one of the first Drift Partner Agencies because we have seen how Drift transforms businesses first hand. We love that their mission aligns with how we like to buy ourselves- humans conversing with humans.
Do not make a purchase because you feel pressured to do so.
Make a purchase because you like the product or company

Chris:
How you like to communicate?

Bethany:
I like to communicate in the quickest most efficient way. I don’t have all day to wait for an email reply or wait on hold. I’d like a quick response while I can focus on whatever I am communicating about. I don’t want to have to jump in and out of things

Chris:
Why don’t you want to call or hop on a call with a company?

Bethany:
Well I find online easier but also I’ve got a lot of plates spinning
And it just works better for me. You also usually ditch a huge sales pitch by chatting whereas over phone you don’t
I’ll also have record of conversation. You don’t get that with phone
I think it boils down to empowerment. I’m empowered to get what I want when I want it
I also think having a chat option says something about a company Like that they care about my preferences

Did you catch it? When the wall came down?

It took two questions to get there. This is the power of text based communication and true curiosity.

We can work with your company to help you draw out the true motivations of your website visitors with tact and to help more of them feel comfortable reaching out to you using Drift. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Ultimately, this is about more revenue for your company.

Good 🔗: Here is what Julie Devaney Hogan, Drift’s VP of Customer Success has to say in an interview with our good friends over at Databox.

So we’ve stopped doing things that don’t drive more conversations for your business. You’ll see the manifestation of this over the next quarter and on our site today. We’ll be focused on things like microcopy (the little words that drive big action), humanizing email & sales outreach, making sure people use chatbots for good and not evil, integrating Drift with top-class CRM and marketing automation systems like Salesforce and HubSpot, and training sales teams to use these channels to drive new opportunities.

We couldn’t be more excited about the future. You should go all in with us too.

We even came up with a cool new name for our onboarding product.

Icebreaker℠ for Drift

…and started a Facebook Group for Users

Why partner with us for your conversational marketing?

We’ll work with you, to get you focused on the customer, which will get you more customers. Ask how we did this.

Want more?

Here are some pages you might want to check out:

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