How to Clone Your Best Sales Reps with Drift's Chatbot

Drift is a Revenue Acceleration Platform that connects companies with buyers and customers in real-time via chat, video, voice, and email.

Conversational AI powers Drift’s platform. With it, companies can maximize all of their revenue sources—from new business to retention to upsell—rather than just one source. Drift does this by focusing on the entire customer lifecycle, engaging customers from first touch to expansion to advocacy.

We spoke with Aurelia Solomon, Director of Product Marketing to learn more about this AI-powered marketing solution.

In a single sentence or statement, describe Drift.

We help companies engage in personalized conversations with the right customers at the right time, so they can build trust and grow revenue.

How does Drift use artificial intelligence in its products?

Drift's patented Conversational AI powers our Revenue Acceleration Platform. AI analyzes customer conversations and suggest key topics buyers are asking about so marketing can take action.

And our AI-powered Virtual Selling Assistants automatically engage visitors in human-like conversations. They accurately answer even the most surprising questions and spontaneously switch topics in the natural flow of conversation to qualify visitors in a human-like manner. Because VSAs can understand concepts, they can ask questions that match a visitor’s intent, and give the right response in the right moments. This includes nurturing visitors with the right information, deflecting support requests away from your sales team, and routing target accounts to the right sales rep.

What are the primary marketing use cases for Drift's AI-powered solutions?

Inbound lead qualification, pipeline generation, meeting bookings, account based marketing, webinar/event promotion and sign up, support case deflection, and better ROI of marketing spend.

What makes Drift's AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?

Traditional bots can only think about and respond to one thing at a time—forcing humans to to waste time on more manual, menial tasks. Drift's AI improve the efficiency of your sales and marketing spend by delivering personalization at scale, consistently generating qualified pipeline, enhancing the customer experience, and improving your prospecting efforts, for a higher productivity per rep.

Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of Drift's AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)

There are no minimum requirements but typically the most site traffic and data the customer has, the faster the AI can learn

Who are Drift's ideal customers in terms of company size and industries?

Enterprise businesses—global or regional (i.e. US-based, EMEA etc), tech, SaaS, financial services, and healthcare.

What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?

AI improves and learns from having a lot of data—and new data points. Some industries generate more data than others, or have different levels of site traffic, etc., so I think AI needs to find a way to be able to grow, learn and scale with a smaller sample size.

What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing?

AI will help marketers scale their personalization efforts and deliver the seamless experience that buyers want (i.e. an experience customized to them, based on their needs and questions. One that is fast, easy and human-like.

Probably the most valuable thing AI will bring marketers is insights about our buyers and customers. The more we know, the more we can personalize and target our messaging and marketing in a way that works—that builds raving fans, creates a great customer experience, builds our brand, and grows our pipeline and revenue.

Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just starting with AI?

It can be used in a variety of ways so can an open mind and A/B test different ideas!