Dave Gerhardt from Drift Swings by to Talk About Modern Buying - Episode 39 Make It Happen Mondays

All right. Good morning everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Monday. Hopefully you're all having a fantastic day. I'm sitting here, I'm super excited for a couple of reasons for today's session. One is because I had a fantastic weekend. My patriots pulled it out this weekend and they crushed it. It was a little bit suspect, the other, but they pulled it through them. The other reason is I'm actually talking with Dave Gerhardt here over at Drift, who's a company that I've been following for quite a while and really excited. One of the hottest companies out there right now, and especially based in Boston. I'm super excited to talk to you. So Dave runs marketing director of marketing over at Drift. From a service, right? That's, that's no question. Let's talk from a sales standpoint.

How.

How is Drift changing or how are you evolving and to helping clients sell more effectively and attract people?

Yeah. So I want to dig into that for a second because that was the number one objection that we had when, when we launched. Everybody's like, oh, okay. But this is just chat. And we're like, no, this is the first chat that's actually going to filter out the noise. Because what we found is go talk to any. I guess it'd be like the inbound sales team, right. Any of these companies. And they all have tried live chat and they loved it because it would be the easiest deals they would close because it's the highest intent. It's people that saying like, hey, I already know who you are. I'm here. Don't talk to me. I'm ready to buy. Right. The problem is that it would be like 98 out of 100 conversations were shit. They were all support related spam or like, hey, how do I integrate this with that? And reps don't want to deal with those conversations all day. And so we knew that what we had to do to be successful in this market is we had to weed out those conversations. And that's why that's where chatbots come in. And I think like there's so much hype around chatbots and AI and machine learning and this and that and there is a lot of BS out there and it's buzzed. But from a, from a funnel and a marketing and sales perspective, I can tell you that the hype around chatbots is so real because it do exactly what you're saying. So let's say, for example, a prospect comes to your website. They might have a different set of questions than somebody who's already a customer who's looking for help. That help conversation could get routed to the support person. Whereas somebody else, we could say, hey, this person is the VP of marketing at Dropbox and they're curious about something, let's send them to that rep. And so that's where the smartphone piece comes in. Which is like I would know as a rep, I would have a list of my target accounts uploaded into Drift and I would get and start Drift. And they started the company because what they realized was this was 2014, 2015. And so like, you know, everybody, everybody was starting to get these things. It's crazy how time flies. Like not everybody has had smartphones. You know, it's really been the last two or three years and Zoom companies like Zoom and Slack have all taken off. And what they realized right around that time was like, hey, this is how we're all starting to use in our personal lives. We're all starting to communicate in real time via messaging. But on the business side of things, we expect people to go to our websites, fill out these long ass forms, right, and go through this process that is just filled with friction. Whereas like on the consumer side of things, like I expect that I can go to your website, I can find anything I want to know without ever talking to your team. And if I can't find it, I can Google John Barrow's training alternative and I can find out who your two or three competitors are and I can go with them. And so that's the long winded way of explaining kind of how this company came to be. And like many things in the software space, it's all based on timing. And now messaging has absolutely exploded. I think the frustration with shitty sales and shitty marketing tactics has kind of gone through the roof. And that's how you and I got connected. And that's why we're here.

Yeah, I love it, man. And it's funny you outline that because that's the exact evolution that we went through. So two years ago I was all convinced that selling my individual portal license was the way to go, right? So I went all in. I redid my website. I'm not joking. We went all in on HubSpot for marketing and I think we did 120 landing pages where it's like every single piece of content was there and it was lead flow and all this other stuff. And that was great. But the, it was almost like the big dig in Boston. It's like by the time we did that, it was almost irrelevant. I'm not saying irrelevant. It still work. But now we're on to Drift. And you'll notice now for those of you who are listening to this or watching, you know, if you go to my Facebook Live page now and you type in the chat, you actually chat in help, you know, that's drift all day. You know, it's like, what do you need help with? And it's oh, I need help with prospecting. Well, what about prospecting? And then it gives you a chance and then it gives you like the very specific content that is relevant to what you're looking for. And we don't even have to get engaged at this point and we're tracking all that information on the back end so we're gaining insights into your user habits and so we can retarget you and remarket to you. So this is definitely to me a kind of drift. The guy I'm working with, Lucas, who's running most of my social stuff, you know, he's the one that you guys prospected to him on Slack through an alumni channel. Ping him. We already knew about you. Well, he really knew about you. And then he brought it to the table to me and I was like, all right, cool. And when he set up that first chatbot and he sent it over to me, he's like, john, type in help. I was like, alright, fine, you know, how good is this gonna be? And I was like, help. And it went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I was like, holy shit, this is fantastic. So that's on the marketing side of the house, right? Well, I'm sorry, there's obvious implications here from a help desk standpoint. Right. From a service standpoint, I need help here. Most people don't want to talk to some frontline, you know, wet behind the ears kid who has no idea what he's fucking talking about. And then you have to go through a half an hour of that and get elevated. Right. So obvious implications, chat standpoint from a service. Right, that's. That's question. Let's talk from a sales standpoint.

How.

How is Drift changing or how are you evolving and to helping clients sell more effectively and attract people?

Yeah. So I want to dig into that for a second because that was the number one objection that we had when, when we launched is everybody's like, oh, okay, but this is just chat. And we're like, no, this is the first chat that's actually going to filter out the noise. Because what we found is go talk to any. I guess it'd be like the inbound sales team, right. Any of these Companies and they all have tried live chat and they loved it because it would be the easiest deals they would close because it's the highest intent. It's people that saying like, hey, I already know who you are. I'm here, don't talk to me, I'm ready to buy. Right? The problem is that it would be like 98 out of 100 conversations were shit. They were all, you know, support related spam or like, hey, how do I integrate this with that? And reps don't want to deal with those conversations all day. And so we knew that what we had to do to be successful in this market is we had to, we had to weed out those conversations. Conversations. And that's why, that's where chatbots come in. And I think like, there's so much hype around chatbots and AI and machine learning and this and that and there is a lot of BS out there and it's buzz. But from a, from a funnel and a marketing and sales perspective, I can tell you that the hype around chatbots is so real because it can do exactly what you're saying. So let's say, for example, a prospect comes to your website, they might have a different set of questions than somebody who's already a customer who's looking for help. That help conversation could get routed to the support person. Whereas somebody el. We could say, hey, this person is the VP of marketing @ Dropbox and they're curious about something, let's send them to that, to that rep. And so that's where the smartphone piece comes in. Which is like, I would know as a rep, I would have a list of my target accounts uploaded into Drift and I would get an alert when John, the VP of marketing at Dropbox was on the pricing page and it would say, hey, John from. John from Dropbox is on your website right now. Do you want to say hi? And so there's a bunch of different threads in there. But it really all comes down to like using bots to help route people to the right person at the right time. And that can be support. We're really focused on marketing and sales. Like we will tell you, if you go to our website and you request a demo, we ask you, hey, are you interested in marketing, sales or support? If you say support, we actually say, ah, you know what, we're not a great fit for support. And that's because we have focused our entire business like on generating revenue. And that's how we're using real time messaging. So easy to weed out support had to Be number one, like table stakes at the beginning.

See, so this is so super fascinating to me because I talk all the time about the death of the average sales rep. And like you mentioned, artificial intelligence and all these different things. And to your point, there's a lot of hype about it, but what I've settled on here is AI and all this machine learning and everything like that. It's going to make good sales reps great, great sales reps incredible. And average sales reps are relevant. So talk to me about those, like the impact this is having because, and I'll give you some context here, there was a post actually about two or three years ago where it talked about, you know, there was a VP or there was a VP or a CEO, CEO posted on LinkedIn saying, hey, I'm never going to hire another sales rep ever again in my life. And his point was, you know, sales reps are all incentivized for the wrong reasons, right? Commissions monthly, that type of stuff. So we're not customer centric at all. And so what he's going to do is he's going to drive marketing, right? So marketing, who's getting smarter and better and faster and all that others and more personalized, he's going to drive that and then he's going to hire more like customer success people, customer service people. So within those people hit it and really get sales out of the way. And my positioning to him was, look what you just described about sales reps. That's what shitty sales reps do, right? Like what you just described about, you know, customer service. That's what great sales reps do. So help me understand the evolving role of sales in this equation. If I can, if I can do marketing automation, right? And it's getting better and better and smarter and smarter. Artificial intelligence is being more targeted with our outbound messaging to people. Then it drives somebody to the website and then a drift pops up and helps them navigate through to the, to the, to the point where they're almost ready to buy, for crying out loud. And then we have customers like, where does, where does the traditional sales rep fit into that equation?

Yeah. So there's been, I love this. This is so fun. There's so many different things to go into in there. So number one, I think this is worth saying up front is like, we actually don't think that we're going to replace sales reps. Like, we think of it as this. It's all about customer experience, right? Like because of information is free, there's so much stuff out There that you and I can learn before we ever buy. You have to win on customer experience. And like, let's use Zoom. We're recording this over Zoom right now. Why? Zoom is the same product as all these other video conferencing. Why did they win? Well, because they made it really easy for people to buy. It worked. It has a great customer experience. And this isn't a, this is an industry that's super commoditized, right? So if I didn't, if Zoom wasn't working for me, I could just go Google, like, you know, best web conferencing alternative go with them. They take my money.

So you have WebEx to join to Blue Jeans to Zoom. And by far, you know, and I'm just like, whatever, okay, next, next.

But, but, but, so, so, so we think about like bots and AI as, as it's all about improving the customer experience. And so I think, you know, what gets misconstrued a lot is like, it's about making the VP of sales happier, right? Because if we use bots, then our reps can make more call emails and that ends up back to the same shitty process that we have today. We think of it as, we think of it as bots are going to improve the customer experience. And what I mean by that is, oh, you're Dave from Drift. You're on the pricing page. You've been in here, you've been here three times already. You're also using Salesforce and optimizing on your site. Here, let me serve you this. This is the best. And oh, by the way, we know you're at Drift, which has raised X million dollars. You can take the fast lane right to our sales rep. You don't have to fill out any of these forms. That's how we think about it is it's like the bots are going to do the heavy lifting at the top of the funnel. They're not going to get on the phone and sell. And you know, as a buyer, I'm like, I am the, I would be the buyer for Drift. As a, as a marketing guy, I'm still skeptical. I still do want to talk to somebody, but I don't want to deal with the. It's basically like the first three or four steps of the funnel, you shrink those out and you can just get connected. And so the positive side is like, reps literally can walk into work and spend all day doing what they love doing, which is actually selling, and then the marketing team can focus on what they should be paid to do. Which is drive conversations. I'm going to get people to our website, I'm going to get them to start conversations, and the reps can do the rest. And the bot is the layer that. That. That's all the way in the middle.

I love it, man. That's. I mean, and it's without question, like, you know, my. My whole positioning on this, and I'm trying to. I'm actually doing a keynote coming up here. The first, like, full. Like, I done a bunch of keynotes, but I've never been kind of the main guy. And I'm trying to figure out what to write. And I'm coming across on this. On this idea of context, content. You know, I stole this from Gary Vaynerchuk. He talks marketing. Everybody talks about content is king. Content is king. He said, fine, if content is king, then context is God. And that, to me is sales versus marketing. Right? Marketing is content, sales is context. So if marketing can drive the content, that'll get the right people on the bus in the right position to have a conversation, and sales can put the context around it. We got a nice little combination there that can go out and kick some ass. But if sales is continuing to take it from a content standpoint and just crank out template emails, make generic cold calls, stuff like that, you guys are gonna wipe out half the population. Crying out loud. Yeah.

I mean, we think of it as, like, the technology's gotten so good today, you could know who somebody is before they get to your website and why they. And why they came there. So it's just crazy to be, like, asking the questions like, what's my name? What's my job title? Where did I come from? What's my biggest pain? Like, all that stuff, you know, just at the very basic level, at the top of the funnel can. Can get automated. That. That's one thing. The other thing is, like, I think it's this bigger theme that I think we've mentioned a couple times, which is, like, I don't wake up in the morning and just go to some company's website to browse their business software. Like, if I am on Zoom's website, I'm there for a reason. I'm probably unhappy with something else. I'm probably looking for a new tool for my company. And so, like, why do we ask those dumb questions at the top of the funnel? So you have to put a premium on customer experience, because nobody's just waking up and going to Zoom's website to have a conversation. They're there for a reason. So you got to treat them like a real person. And, and also like we're just skeptical. I know I don't ever want to talk to like, I am in marketing. I get a ton of vent. I get so many emails from vendors and sales reps and I will, I take calls with the good ones though. Who did your research. Like, hey man, I saw you run with John Barrows. That was really great. You know, one thing you mentioned I didn't agree with and I'd love to tell you more about how X, Y, that's one that I would take. And I. So I think like your, I think I wrote it down. But you know, making average reps irrelevant is the number one thing to me because the BO are now, bots are now going to be able to handle all the other things. Like a bot might be smarter in the sense of like, I know who this person is, I know why they're here.

And that actually brings me to interesting. I'm curious on this one because I think a little while ago I wasn't, I wasn't really heavily paying attention to Drift, but I was paying attention to chat bots maybe about a year and a half ago. And I remember about a year and a half, two years ago like chatbots started, were trying to pretend like they were human, you know what I mean? So like you'd get into the conversation with a chatbot, like especially the first time user, like, holy shit, look at this, look at how responsive this company is. But then about, you know, a few chats back and forth, all of a sudden you'd be like, wait a minute, this isn't a person, this is a computer. And that actually would turn me off because I felt duped. Right? Did you guys make the conscious decision to basically say we're not? Like when, when you hit a chat with Drift, it's pretty evident you're like, look, we're not a person. We're an actual. We're a chatbot here. But I think we can pull you down the funnel for an upright. Like what's the philosophy around that? And did you guys. Or was that a conscious.

It was a conscious decision. Like, so I just have some of my favorite books on my desk like Ultimate Sales Letter, Cashvertising, Ogilvy, all these, all the great sales letters and copywriters have said the same thing since the beginning. Right? The best thing you can do in your marketing and sales is be authentic and be real. And so for us, like the number one thing that we wanted to do was, was not fake. That Because I know you. And also, the bar is so high. If you're gonna fake, if you're gonna pretend to be a person, shit, you bet. You better know everything. You better not fail. And so, so, so we have positioned it always as, like, hey, I'm a bot. I'm here to help you get connected. What are you looking for? Right? And then also you're able to set it up in a way where, like, we call it fail gracefully. Where, like, if somebody's trying to, like, you know, screw around with the bot and just, like, try to outsmart it. There's not. There's nothing to outsmart because you can. You can say funny things back, but it's really just like, hold on, let me get somebody for you. And then bring in a person. So there's other companies out there in the chatbot space who feel differently about this. But, you know, we're all about, like, our brand is very real, authentic, human. And so we think of it as like, we're using chatbots. It's like a virtual assistant for your website. That's how we think about how we're going to use bots.

Love it. And that's it. You know, it's funny because I get. I've been duped a couple of times by the virtual assistants, and it actually really pisses me off where, you know, and this is usually email, right? So it's like, you know, Sarah Xi or something like that, and I don't recognize it. And the person says, oh, just coordinate through my assistant. And the first few times, I was like, okay, cool. And I'd go back and forth with her. And, you know, eventually I use time trade to schedule my calendar, you know, calls and stuff like that. And inevitably I would send that link and the chat bot or the artificial intelligence assistant would say, I'm sorry, I don't quite understand your last email. Could you please help me, you know, figure out a time? I'm like, how? What do you not understand about clicking on a link? Click on the fuck. And then all of a sudden I'd be like, God damn it. You know, and I've gotten a. And me being as busy as I am, you know, trying to schedule meetings with people, like, look, I'm asking for your, like, a prospect if I'm always respectable, your time. But if I get a VP of sales who's sending me to this AI thing that's actually increasing the amount of effort that I have to go through and not improving the buying experience in any way, shape or form, even though I'm probably trying to sell to them. I get frustrated, right? For sure, yeah.

I mean, I think that's the other thing is like it's all about removing friction. Like any salesperson or marketer knows that the less friction there is, the more likely somebody is to make it through the process. And so we want to use that technology and use bots and AI to remove the friction. I actually have one thing I want to ask back to you. How do you keep up? You talk to so many reps and when you go to talk to them and they're like, here we go and here's the latest trend. How do you talk them through the bot piece? I think I love your good to great average, irrelevant stuff. How do you talk them through that?

So to me, the technology is almost irrelevant. It's just about paying attention, right? So that's why I start off all my, all my trainings with death of the average sales rep. I literally have that, you know, the image of death of the average sales rep, or I'm sorry, death of death, Death of the Salesman or whatever that movie is, with a guy holding his briefcases and walking backwards. And I put average in the middle there. And I talk about how, you know, marketing is coming upstream artificial intelligence. And I actually show some examples. Like there's an example of a couple of kids that left Salesforce and started this artificial intelligence company called Shakespeare. They've since put it, you know, 86 it and are working for other companies. But this what they said. Because one of the things that I train on is a really highly personalized email, right? Where it's. You go on somebody's. Your point, like the stuff that you would have responded to, where you go on somebody's website, you read about them and you make this very direct human connection with them. And you know, like three, four years ago, and this is the example I used three, four years ago. It's called the Yuyu know email. Jeff Hoffman put it together three, four years ago. Like it was straight up. It was worth spending 15, 20, 30 minutes writing one of these emails because you were getting a 15 to 20% response rate because it was cracking through the noise that easily. These days it's not worth spending 15, 20, 30 minutes, right? Because it's still getting a better response rate than the template stuff. But it's not, it's maybe 5 to 10% compared to 15 to 20, right? So now I'm talking about reps being the contact strategy. And that's the thing, like the experience, like the story that we tell them and the multiple touches and that type of thing. But the relevance to what, you know, they're irrelevance, if you will, is, you know, I. These kids who left Salesforce, they said, hey, John, check it out. We created this artificial intelligence company that's going to drive like super highly personalized emails without, you know, without rep ever having to do it, right? All asked, I was like, yeah, whatever. Just, you know, send me the, you know, send me an example. And they sent me an example. And when I tell you, Dave, this thing was better. This thing wrote an email better than I could have ever written. And it did it in 70 seconds and I almost had a heart attack. And so what I do is to get them in that mindset is I show them that email and I go, I've been training this stuff for 10 years. I've been doing this training because I took this training first and then I took it over. So I literally have been writing that email, give or take, for 12 years. And I tell them, look, I don't think I could have written a better email than that. So if you're sitting out here cranking out bullshit template emails, making generic cold calls, asking bant questions, pressing play on demos and all that shit, like, it's not my opinion, like, look, this is happening, so you gotta wake up. And the question I push to reps and this is to start, this is, you know, I talk about attention grabbers, like, how do you get people's attention? Well, this is how I get their attention. I'm like, look, you have to ask yourself these days, what can you do that a computer can't? Computer can do it. Then you have to ask yourselves, how much longer are they going to pay me to do this? And the answer is, not very long. And so you just look at any if you're not paying attention to the trends right now. I always say this too. If you're comfortable with where you are right now. And I mean that from a sales standpoint. I mean that from an industry standpoint. I mean that from a standpoint. If you're alert.

When John, the VP of marketing at Dropbox, was on the pricing page and it would say, hey, John from. John from Dropbox is on your website right now. Do you want to say hi? And so there's a bunch of different threads in there, but it really all comes down to, like, using bots to help route people to the right person at the right time. And that can be support. We're really focused on marketing and sales. Like, we Will tell you if you go to our website and you, you request a demo, we ask you, hey, are you interested in marketing, sales or support? If you say support, we actually say, ah, you know what? We're not a great fit for support. And that's because we have focused our entire business like on generating revenue. And that's how we're using, that's how we're using real time messaging. So easy to, easy to weed out. Support had to be number one, like table stakes at the beginning.

See, so this is so super fascinating to me because, you know, I talk all the time about the death of the average sales rep. And you know, like you mentioned artificial intelligence and all these different things. And to your point, there's a lot of hype about it. But what I've settled on here is AI and all this machine learning and everything like that. It's going to make good sales reps great, great sales reps incredible. And average sales reps are relevant. So talk to me about those, like the impact this is having because, you know, and I'll give you some context here. You know, there was a post about, actually about two or three years ago where it talked about, you know, there was a VP or there was a VP of a CEO, CEO posted on LinkedIn saying, hey, I'm never going to hire another sales rep ever again in my life. And point was, you know, sales reps are all incentivized for the wrong reasons, right? Commissions monthly, that type of stuff. So we're not customer centric at all. And so what he's going to do is he's going to drive marketing, right? So marketing who's getting smarter and better and faster and all that others and more personalized. He's going to drive that and then he's going to hire more like customer success people, customer service people. So within those people hit it and really get sales out of the way. And my positioning to him was, look what you just described about sales reps. That's what shitty sales reps do, right? Like what you just described about, you know, customer service. That's what great sales reps do. So help me understand the evolving role of sales in this equation if I can, if I can do marketing automation, right? And it's getting better and better and smarter and smarter. Artificial intelligence is being more targeted with our outbound messaging to people. Then it drives somebody to the website and then drift pops up and now it helps them navigate through to the, to the, to the point where they're almost ready to buy for crying out Loud. And then you have customers like, where does, where does the traditional sales rep fit into that equation?

Yeah. So there's. Man, I love this. This is so fun. There's so many different things to go into in there. So number one, I think this is worth saying up front is like, we actually don't think that we're going to replace sales reps. Like, we think of it as this. It's all about customer experience, right? Like, because of information is free, there's so much stuff out there that you and I can learn before we ever buy. You have to win on custom experience. And like, let's use Zoom. We're recording this over Zoom right now. Why? Zoom is the same product as all these other video conferencing. Why did they win? Well, because they made it really easy for people to buy. It worked. It has a great customer experience. And this isn't a. This is an industry that's super commoditized, right? And so, so if I didn't, if Zoom wasn't working for me, I could just go Google. Like, you know, best web conferencing alternative go with them. They take my money.

So you have from WebEx to join to Blue Jeans to Zoom. And by far, you know, and I'm just like, whatever. Okay, next.

So we think about bots and AI as it's all about improving the customer experience. And so I think what gets misconstrued a lot is like, it's about making the VP of sales happier, right? Because if we use bots, then our reps can make more calls, they can send more emails, and that ends up back to the same shitty process that we have today. We think of it as bots are going to improve the customer experience. And what I mean by that is, oh, you're Dave from Drift. You're on the pricing page. You've been here three times already. You're also using Salesforce and Optimizely on your site. Here, let me serve you this. This is the best. And oh, by the way, we know you're at Drift, which has raised X million dollars. You can take the fast lane right to our sales rep. You don't have to fill out any of these forms. That's how we think about it is it's like the bots are gonna do the heavy lifting at the top of the funnel. They're not gonna get on the phone and sell. And you know, as a buyer, I'm like, I am the. I would be the buyer for Drift. As a marketing guy, I'm still skeptical I still do want to talk to somebody, but I don't want to deal with the. It's basically like the first three or four steps of the funnel, you shrink those out and you can just get connected. And so the positive side is, like, reps literally can walk into work and spend all day doing what they love doing, which is actually selling. And then the marketing team can focus on what they should be paid to do, which is drive conversations. I'm going to get people to our website, I'm going to get them to start conversations, and the reps can do the rest. And the bot is the layer that's all the way into the. The middle.

I love it, man. That's. I mean, and it's without question, like, you know, my. My whole positioning on this, and I'm trying to. I'm actually doing a keynote coming up here. The first, like, full. Like, I done a bunch of keynotes, but I've never been kind of the main guy. And I'm trying to figure out what to write. And I'm coming across on this. On this idea of context, content. You know, I stole this from Gary Vaynerchuk. You know, he talks about, you know, everybody talk marketing, everybody talks about content is king, content is king. He said, fine, if content is king, then content context is God. And that, to me is sales versus marketing. Right? Marketing is content, sales is context. So if marketing can drive the content, that'll get the right people on the bus in the right position to have a conversation, and sales can put the context around it. We got a nice little combination there that can go out and kick some ass. But if sales is continuing to take it from a content standpoint and just crank out template emails, make generic cold calls, stuff like that, then. Then you guys are gonna wipe out half the population, for crying out loud.

Yeah, I mean, we think of it as, like, the technology has gotten so good today. You could know who somebody is before they get to your website and why they. And why they came there. So it's just crazy to be, like, asking the questions like, what's my name? What's my job title? Where did I come from? What's my biggest pain? Like, all that stuff, you know, just at the very basic level at the top of the funnel can get automated. That's one thing. The other thing is, like, I think it's this bigger theme that I think we've mentioned a couple times, which is like, I don't wake up in the morning and just go to some company's website to browse their business software. Like, if I am on Zoom's website, I'm there for a reason. I'm probably unhappy with something else. I'm probably looking for a new tool for my company. And so like, why do we ask those dumb questions at the top of the funnel? So you have to put a premium on customer experience because nobody's just waking up and going to Zoom's website to have a conversation. They're there for a reason. So you got to treat them like a real person. And, and also, like, we're just skeptical. I know I don't ever want to talk to like, I am in marketing. I get a ton of vent. I get so many emails from vendors and sales reps and I will. I take calls with the good ones though. Who did your research, like, hey man, I saw you run with John Barrows. That was really great. You know, one thing you mentioned I didn't agree with and I'd love to tell you more about how xy, that's like, that's a what? That's one that I would take. And I. So I think like your. I think I wrote it down. But you know, making average reps irrelevant is the number one thing to me because the BO bots are now going to be able to handle all the other things. Like a bot might be smarter in the sense of like, I know who this person is, I know why they're here.

And that actually brings me to interesting. I'm curious on this one because I think a little while ago I wasn't really heavily paying attention to Drift, but I was paying attention to chatbots maybe about a year and a half ago. And I remember about a year and a half, two years ago, like chatbots started. We're trying to pretend like they were human, you know what I mean? So like you'd get into the conversation with a chatbot, like especially the first time user, like, holy shit, look at this, look at how responsive this company. But then about, you know, a few chats back and forth, all of a sudden you'd be like, wait a minute, this isn't a person, this is a computer. And that actually would turn me off because I felt duped. Right. Did you guys make the conscious decision to basically say we're not? Like when, when you hit a chat with Drift, it's pretty evident you're like, look, we're not a person, we're an actual, we're a chatbot here. But I think we can pull you down the funnel for an up part. Like, what's the philosophy around that. And did you get. Or was that a conscious thing?

It was a conscious decision. Like, so I just have some of my favorite books on my desk, like Ultimate Sales Letter Cashvertising, Ogilvy. All these. All the great sales letters and copywriters have said the same thing since the beginning, right? The best thing you can do in your marketing and sales is be authentic and be real. And so for us, like, the number one thing that we wanted to do was. Was not fake that, because I know you. And also the bar is so high. If you're going to fake. If you're gonna pretend to be a person, shit, you bet. You better know everything. You better not fail. And so, so, so we have positioned it always as, like, hey, I'm a bot. I'm here to help you get connected. What are you looking for? Right? And then also you're able to set it up in a way where, like, we call it fail gracefully. Where, like, if somebody's trying to, like, you know, screw around with the bot and just, like, try to outsmart it. There's not. There's nothing to outsmart because you can. You can say funny things back, but it's really just like, hold on, let me get somebody for you. And then bring in a person. So there's other companies out there in the chatbot space who feel different, but, you know, we're all about, like, our brand is very real, authentic, human. And so we think of it as like, we're using chatbots. It's like a virtual assistant for your website. That's how we think about how we're going to use bots.

Love it. And that's, you know, it's funny because I get. I've been duped a couple of times by the virtual assistants, and it actually really pisses me off where, you know, and this is usually email, right? So it's like, you know, Sarah Xi or something like that, and I don't recognize it. And the person says, oh, just coordinate through my assistant. And the first few times I was like, okay, cool. And I'd go back and forth with her. And, you know, eventually I use time trade to schedule my calendar, you know, calls and stuff like that. And inevitably I would send that link and the chat bot or the artificial intelligence assistant would say, I'm sorry, I don't quite understand your last email. Could you please help me, you know, figure out a time? I'm like, how. What do you not understand about clicking on a link? Click on the fuck. And then all of a sudden, I'd Be like, God damn it, you know, and I've gotten a. And me being as busy as I am, you know, trying to schedule meetings with people like, look, I'm asking for your, like a prospect if I'm always respectable your time. But if I get a VP of sales who's sending me to this AI thing, that's actually increasing the amount of effort that I have to go through and not improving the buying experience in any way, shape or form, even though I'm probably trying to sell to them, I get frustrated, right? For sure, yeah.

I mean, I think that's the other thing is like, it's all about removing friction. Like, any salesperson or marketer knows that the less friction there is, the more likely somebody is to make it through the process. And so we want to use that technology and use bots and AI to remove the friction. I actually have one thing I want to ask back to you. How do you keep up? You talk to so many reps and when you go to talk to them and they're like, here we go, and here's the latest trend. How do you talk them through the bot piece? I think I love your good to great average irrelevant stuff, but how do you talk them through that?

So to me, the technology is almost irrelevant. It's just about paying attention, right? So that's why I start off all my, all my trainings with death of the average sales rep. I literally have that, you know, the image of death of the average sales rep, or I'm sorry, death of death, Death of the salesman or whatever that movie is with a guy holding his briefcases and walking backwards. And I put average in the middle there. And I talk about how, you know, marketing is coming upstream artificial intelligence. And I actually show some examples. Like there's an example of a couple of kids that left sales for force and started this artificial intelligence company called Shakespeare. They've since put it, you know, 86 it and are working for other companies. But this what they said. Because one of the things that I train on is a really highly personalized email, right? Where it's going. Somebody's your point. Like the stuff that you would have responded to, where you go on somebody's website, you read about them and you make this very direct human connection with them. And you know, like three, four years ago, and this is the example I used three, four years ago. It's called the why you why you know email. Jeff Hoffman put it together three, four years ago. Like it was straight up. It was worth spending 15, 20, 30 minutes writing one of these emails, because you were getting a 15 to 20% response rate because it was cracking through the noise that easily these days it's not worth spending 15, 20, 30 minutes, right, because it's still getting a better response rate than the template stuff. But it's not. It's maybe 5 to 10% compared to 15 to 20, right? So now I'm talking about reps being the contact strategy. And that's the thing like, like the experience, like the story that we tell them and the multiple touches and that type of thing. But the relevance to what, you know, their irrelevance, if you will, is, you know, these kids who left Salesforce, they said, hey, John, check it out. We created this artificial intelligence company that's going to drive like super highly personalized emails without, you know, without rep ever having to do it, right? All they asked, I was like, yeah, whatever. Just, you know, send me the, you know, send me an example. And they sent me an example. And when I tell you, Dave, this thing was better. This thing wrote an email better than I could have ever written. And it did it in 70 seconds and I almost had a heart attack. And so what I do is to get them in that mindset is I show them that email and I go, I've been training this stuff for 10 years. I've been, I've been, I've been doing this training because I took this training first and then I took it over. So I literally have been writing that email, give or take, for 12 years. And I tell them, look, I don't think I could have written a better email than that. So if you're sitting out here cranking out bullshit template emails, making generic cold calls, asking bant questions, pressing play on demos and all that shit, like, it's not my opinion. Like, look, this is happening, so you gotta wake up. And the question I push to reps, and this is to start, this is, you know, I talk about attention grabbers. Like, how do you get people's attention? Well, this is how I get their attention. I'm like, look, you have to ask yourself these days, what can you do that a computer can't? Computer can do it. Then you have to ask yourselves, how much longer are they going to pay me to do this? And the answer is not very long. And so you just look at any. If you're not paying attention to the trends right now. I always say this too. If you're comfortable with where you are right now. And I mean that from a sales standpoint. I mean that from an Industry standpoint. I mean that from a standpoint, if you're comfortable with where you are right now, I'm worried for you because there's going to be an app that comes out tomorrow that makes your job irrelevant or your industry completely disrupts your industry. And so that's why if you're not using it right now, that's okay, but you should at least be paying attention to it. And that's it. Because I think it's our job right now to get our clients, you know, it used to be our job to teach people features and functions and speeds and feeds about our products and services. I don't, you know, that's pre Internet because that was the only way people could get it. Now it's of Google search away. But the thing is, is, you know, you, our job is, I think, to get people to think. And if I can get you to like prospect, like if I'm prospecting to you, Dave, and I'm like, hey, you know, I'm watching it at a. And you know, yeah, if there's something obvious, we're like, holy shit, we're hiring so many SDRs and BDRs and we. I wish I had. There was a training out there that was immediately actionable and you know, I could deliver. Tomorrow then, yeah, I'm going to call you up and say, dave, like, I'm going to go to your office for crying, what's up? But the likelihood of you, if you're not coming to me, if you're not on my website, if you're not doing that type of thing, if I'm outreaching to you, it's not. I'm gonna like, let me sell you something. It's. I'm gonna get you to think. That's why social selling. That's why Challenger sale, that's why I lead with insights. And brand building, I think is so important. And I use the movie like Inception, right? If I can plant that seed and let you make it yours, we got a chance.

The brand building piece is so important and it's, it's like, it's the foundation of our whole marketing and, and company at Drift. And the reason why is because even if, like, even if I could, even if I did like have the best product in the world and I was selling it to you, I feel like everybody, everybody, they're like, oh, let me see the feature comparison versus you and somebody else and everyone just, everyone knows those are made up. And so I can make one that shows drift with all the green checks next to it. And I can show another competitor with that red X with two things that, you know, we're. We're better at, right? You and I are just so skeptical of that that even if that's true, right on top of that, go to go to something like Product Hunt, right? There's new products on product on every day. And if you scroll to the second or third comment, there's always a comment that's like, yeah, well, this, this seems cool, but how is this different than X, which is another product that would just came out yesterday? And so there's actually a great quote in behind the Cloud from. From Marc Benioff where he's like, you know, brand is the most important thing because anybody can go and copy and paste any one of your features. The thing that they can't copy and paste is your brand. And for us, like, and that example that got my attention is like, a brand is how you communicate. It's how did your reps communicate with somebody? What does your website say? What is it? You know, what's on your podcast? What are your videos look like? It's more than just like that fluffy arts and crafts brand word that marketers use a lot. I think it's the sum of all the touch points that somebody has with your business, especially the outreach from a sales rep, because nothing turns people. I mean, and I hate, I don't love this process, but, like, you know, you see it on LinkedIn.

Some.

Some like, you know, some marketing guy, like, takes a screenshot of some shitty BDR email and like, ruins somebody's day. Like, he obviously didn't send that. That was automated. But I think. But I think that's real. And we all expect, like, you can find anything about me as a buyer online. So I'm expecting some level of personalized, you know, outreach.

Well, and that's why I love your marketing manifesto. You know what I mean? Like, be remarkable. Words are everything. Design is secondary. Write like you talk, you know, don't try to be something you're not. I always kind of be, you know, for the manifesto as you've written it, because I have my 12 guidelines to success, and it's all about the genuine and those type of things. And I use, you know, my favorite sales movie as a perfect example of this, which is Tommy Boy. Right? You know, I call it. No, it's hands down the best sales. By the way, anybody tells you, Wolf of Wall Street, Glengarry, Glynn Ross and Boiler Room, those are the worst sales movies ever. Tommy Boy is hands down the best and there's a scene in there where I call it catching your sales groove, right? Where you wake up one day and it's a little bit easier than it was the day before, right? And that's when you stop pitching your solutions, start having conversations about your solutions. You start caring more about the client than you do about your commission check. And, you know. And Tommy, you know when he caught his sales groove, right? Helen. You look like a Helen. Let me tell you why I suck as a salesman. Then he goes into this whole thing, right? And she's like, wow, you're twisted. You know, Tommy, like, you tell me what Wingie that is. I mean, that was him. You know what I mean? That was the essence of him. He was just being himself, whereas before that, he was trying to be his dad. You know, you could stick your head up, but whatever, right?

So I actually about. Like, two years ago, we. So I did something on the side before this, and I had a podcast and a newsletter, and I wrote these emails, and I sent out a newsletter every Sunday night, and it was about, like, startups in Boston, whatever. And I would just. I had nothing to lose is my own thing, so I could do whatever the hell I wanted. So I just. I wrote all the emails. Like, I was literally sending an email to my mom or my best friend, and I just was like, here's. Here's what happened. And then when I started Drift, David, our CEO, he was. He was like, I started. Then I started to write marketing emails for Drift, and they turned into marketing emails, right? They had. They were highly designed. They had all this crap in them. He's like, dude, write those emails. I'm like, you're sure? Like, that's what you want? And he's like, yeah. And ever since then, there's been no looking back. Like, that's how we teach copywriting to everybody else on the team now. And everybody asks like, hey, what? Like, did you test writing that way? Did you a b. Test it? Like, why do you. How come you only have plain text? And how come sometimes you have typos? And, like. Because that's how real people write, and that's everything. And the fake. My favorite thing is the founder of Patagonia. He has a great quote, and he talks about their brand, and he's like, the read. The best brand that we can be is us. Because it's way easier to write nonfiction than it is to write fiction. And I feel like that's the realest thing. Like, if. I'm sorry. Yeah, I did. I did make A typo, because I really wrote the email. I'm sorry about that.

No, you're spot on, man. I mean, that's why I'm a terrible liar, right? Because I'm true. Yes. Like, you know, I suck at lying because you know why? That takes making shit up. Whereas I'm just truthful. I'm like, yeah, this is what happens, you know, wasn't great, but. And you know what? Most people are so much. And you talk about genuine. And I think that's the key there, right? Which is I think, you know, a lot of feedback I get because I post a lot of my failures. I'm like, I'm having a rough day today. I'm getting overwhelmed. I'm stressed out, you know, and some people, you know, there's the celebrity status of doing this, and, you know, know I got a bunch of followers and stuff like that now, you know, so sometimes it's like, holy shit, you know, you know, rock star type of thing. And I'm like, now I put my pants on just as what I get hung up on, on the phone just as much as anybody else does. I get told the fuck off just as much as everybody else does. And by having that human ability, like people. That's what people relate to, right. They don't relate to the rock star. Like, holy shit, look at that guy. Because, yeah, okay, that's cool. But I'm never, you know, that's not me. You know, we're.

And that's. That. That's the thing. I think, like, look, I think marketing and sales technology has. Has done a lot over the last five, 10 years, but what it's done is it's also kind of screwed everybody up because it's let us just rely on the automation and that side of things. And then. So I think, like, everything that. Everything that I see that's working today is all about bringing marketing and sales back to its roots of, like, actually having conversations, actually connecting with people. And I think that's. That's kind of a lost start. And so it's crazy because, like, when I do it and you do it, people are like, man, that's. That was great. And I was like, I just. I just said what I was. I said I was eating breakfast while I wrote this email, and I think you should sign up for my webinar later today. Like, what happened?

Yeah, it wasn't rocket science. It was genuinely like, that's exactly what I was doing, and I said it.

So I was like, I have nothing creative for you, so. All right. I know, I know where I'm, I'm not going to host your show, but I know we're up against it and I have questions.

Yeah, I got, for those of you who are watching, like I got the wind in the background here. I'm in Vegas. I got a bananas week. I got Vegas today, Seattle tomorrow, Indianapolis on Wednesday, and actually Jacksonville on Thursday, which is going to be. It's probably not going to go over too well, but anyways. But let's finish up with. Was there anything else that you wanted to hit on real quick?

I wanted, I want to. I've heard you say this and I wanted you to say it again because I'm just my own thing. You said that your, your second email is. You never waste your first email. Your best email and your first one, your best emails, always your second an email.

Yeah, it's either second there. Well, it's part of the story. Okay. It used to be my best one, which was, hey, you know, here's the super customized. And then it was, hey, to get my first email bubble and this one up to the top, that type of shit. Now I actually look at it because I've done some analysis, I've done some split testing and realized that, you know, it's more about the contact strategy than it is any one particular email. And so that's why I really encourage reps to sit down and tell a story, like come up with 5, 6, 7 different things, different things to reach out to your prospect about and tell a story. And it. And I follow kind of the Gary Vaynerchuk book. Jab, jab, jab, right hook, which is you add value, add value, then ask. And so that's why my first second ones are really just to prime the pump so that when I come at you with the real ask or the real value, that's where it resonates because you've seen me a couple of times, you've heard it, whatever, and now it's like, okay, shit.

All right.

Those first couple, you know, they were okay, but they didn't hit the mark. But that one hits the mark.

So I love that because also, like oftentimes that first email is straight up cold. So I've never seen your name before. So it doesn't get open anyway. Yeah, yeah.

So it's just a hey, almost like a head. I don't like touching base and checking emails, but it's almost just like a hey, heads up. You kind of fit the mold of somebody that we've worked with in the past, you know, Is it. Is. Is. You know, here's a little bit of all what we do and maybe some clients we work with. Is that interesting enough for me to kind of engage here and, you know, send. Maybe send you some more information on this one and really just. I don't even care if you respond to that. It's. It's more just to get that. The name out there.

Love it. I got more. We'll save them for later. Don't worry.

Yeah, we can do another one of these because I do have. I literally have a sales kickoff in less than an hour. Clients at me, and I got to try to spend as little time in Vegas here as possible, else I'm As a gambling problem. So. Anyways, but, David, this has been a blast. Tell everybody out here how they can, you know, learn more about Drift or, you know, where they can go to learn more about you and all this other stuff.

Because I. Yeah, so number one is go to drift.com chat into the bot and say you were listening to Facebook Live with John Barrows. Do that. And then I'm on Twitter at Dave Gearhart. And also I do try to reply to every interesting email that I get. So my email is dg drift.com awesome, man.

And same thing with everybody else out there. Feel free to hit us both up, you know, on all the Twitter channels and everything like that. If you got questions on this, we're going to post this as a podcast. Hit them up in the chat form, in the. In the Facebook live here, and we'll answer those and. Cool, man. Well, yeah, let's do this again because I think there's a lot more to talk about. And this was a really cool conversation.

Make sure you drink airborne and emergency and stay well hydrated this week.

All day, man. I can't.

Tough stretch.

I can't afford to get sick.

So thanks. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Thanks, man. Make it a great one.

We'll see you.