Drift considers itself a pioneer in “Conversational Marketing,” but it recently has begun to pivot its positioning, now referring to itself as a “Buyer Engagement Platform”. What does this repositioning mean, and what are some of the product developments Drift is delivering to support this repositioning?
GTM Implications
Drift is taking a page from Simon Sinek, embracing the “Why” with the re-positioning of its platform. The company says it is re-positioning because it is looking to move beyond its legacy of conversational marketing (aka “chat”) to become what it calls a “Buyer Engagement Platform”.
The goal of this re-positioning is to be less about powering transactional conversations, and more about driving personalized experiences with the right people, in the right place, at the right time along the entirety of the customer lifecycle.
This positioning is well-aligned to a key cornerstone of the ANNUITAS Converged Growth model for go‑to‑market execution — specifically, powering orchestration of customer engagement along the customer lifecycle. This is a smart move for Drift. In making this shift, Drift has the potential to transcend ‘chat as an engagement channel’— which would have kept it siloed it in the ‘tool/plugin’ category — and set itself up as a more fundamental piece of the go-to-market stack — becoming a true ‘platform.’
This positioning also addresses a fundamental gap in many go‑to‑market stacks, where organizations are able to do targeting of outbound messages and achieve some level of site personalization, but where true inbound/on-site nurture is not possible. (ANNUITAS can cite very few organizations at this level of go-to-market maturity.) If Drift succeeds in its repositioning — and is able to deliver technology substance behind this vision — it could become the first ‘inbound nurturing’ platform. This could make Drift a ‘must have’ element of the technology stack required to support a mature, multi-channel, perpetual Growth Engine — both pre- and post-sale.
Product Innovations
The company has added new capabilities to its buyer engagement platform that — according to them — listen, understand and learn from buyer behavior to help realize the vision of more personalized experiences across the customer journey. This adds to the existing full journey nurture capabilities of the Drift portfolio, but may require deeper configuration and integration with internal content libraries and key workflows, as well as other platforms in the go‑to‑market stack.
Drift’s new product innovations fall into three, distinct new feature sets:
- Site Concierge creates a new type of self-service environment. Site visitors can access more personalized content, answers and other resources based on how the AI identifies them in terms of persona and where they are in the customer journey stage. Think of it as a set of widgets on a user’s site that can offer more CTAs than chat, such as: automatic meeting booking capabilities, recommended content, GPT prompts, self-service tools, etc.
- Bionic Chatbots allow for more dynamic creation of chat flows, including injection of relevant content into the chat experience, and a more 1:1 personalized experience for those engaging with a chatbot. Essentially, users upload or integrate content libraries with the chatbot, and the chatbots can then offer up content rather than just text-based answers or links. The notion is that the bot can better identify (and self-learn about) sales intent, support intent or other intent (rather than simple Q&A models) to automatically redirect the flow of the conversation accordingly to reduce friction in any of the micro-journey stages.
- Drift Engage is now generally available and is a new real-time scoring engine (powered by Lift AI), which includes real-time intent scoring (using machine learning to focus more on how actions equal intent, rather than just leveraging a pre-built activity-based scoring matrix), real-time playbook targeting, and improved CRM sync. Drift claims the new feature can aid in improved scoring and conversion of even 100% anonymous site visitors.
Competitive Landscape
Drift continues to see competition from companies such as Intercom, and for Salesforce users, Qualified is becoming a compelling conversational marketing tool when customer support use cases are less of a concern. Drift has the benefit of being more agnostic to CRMs and MAPs, so for Marketo and non-Salesforce CRM users, Qualified is basically a non-starter at this point.
These new developments, when fully available, have the potential to place Drift in a pole position in inbound nurture. We see them truly building out more of an AI-powered platform, versus focusing on chat and other conversational marketing facets. If Drift can quickly roll these out and see early customer success, it could continue to gain market share and remain a perceived leader and innovator over its closer competitors and more legacy chat vendors, such as Live Person. However, companies like Gong continue to move more into an AI-powered engagement platform positioning. They have a solid sales foothold, and Drift has told us they will continue to focus on marketing decision makers which seems a wise focus.
The Takeaway
Leaving the ‘re-labeling’ as a Buyer Engagement Platform aside, the new announcements from Drift should be well received by GTM leaders, and they set the stage for Drift to fill the inbound-nurturing gap that exists in most GTM technology stacks.
The company is leveraging GenAI in theoretically more seamless ways to reduce the effort it takes to both set up and optimize multi-channel Conversation Tracks. As it gets harder and harder to engage with the “right content, at the right time” with prospects and customers throughout the end-to-end Demand Experience, being able to better identify and serve up the right content to the right prospect is only an improvement. And speeding the time to configuration of Conversation Tracks is a critical productivity leap.
We also like how Drift is, in its own words, “breaking away from pure chat,” with tools like Site Concierge. Chat is an important nurture tool for numerous phases of the Demand Experience, but providing more tools that are purpose driven for users, it can remove even more friction in the buying cycle.
Of course, this is not magic and pixie dust, as the lynch pin to success will be the data and content integrations that enable the Drift AI engine to access and serve up that ideal content — as well as integrations across the GTM stack to truly enable multi-channel orchestration of engagement (for example, keeping on-site sessions and email nurture in sync).
Drift’s new innovations are not yet GA, but we will monitor the ease of deployment and effectiveness of them as we see ANNUITAS clients begin to roll these out in production. However, this is a good way for practitioners to add GenAI to their GTM strategy with less effort and with solid guardrails inside Drift’s platform.
Looking forward, how Drift Engage enables identification of potential ideal customer profiles (aka “ICPs”) from anonymous traffic (for example, being able to identify types of actions that one persona typically takes versus another and categorizing accordingly) will be an interesting wrinkle as it will allow users to align their Conversation Track Architecture content even more seamlessly to the right buyer profiles even earlier in the cycle.
