IS IT TIME TO CHANGE THE WAY WE DO MARKETING AND SALES?

That’s the question we’re asking.

And it all starts with a look at how traditional marketing and sales work

today.

PS. I’m Dave. I work at Drift and I’ll be your narrator today. My email is dg@drift.com if you have any feedback or want to say hey.

Click here to learn more about

That’s just a link to our website, not a lead form :) OK, onward…

Here’s how traditional marketing and sales work today.

Step 1. Get people to your website.

Step 2. Once people are on your website, get them to fill out a form.

Step 3. After they fill out a form, nurture them with emails and phone

calls.

“Just following up…”

“Hey, saw you filled out a form…”

“Just thought I’d check in again…”

“I realize your inbox is crowded and my last email may have been lost, so just…”

DAY 1

DAY 3

DAY 7

DAY 10

… and then continue “nurturing” until they buy from you, unsubscribe, or just do absolutely nothing and stay on your

email list forever.

That’s how traditional marketing and sales work today.

Yes, I might have simplified how things work at your company, but stick with

me for a minute here…

Now that we’ve laid out how marketing and sales work today, think about the

way that you work today — as a person.

A real person. Like Matt. He’s our Product Manager at Drift.

If you’re a real person like Matt, then I’m willing to bet that when you’re thinking about buying something…

You hate filling out forms.

And you avoid talking to sales reps on the phone at all costs.

Because these days, you can find out just about everything you need to know before making a purchase.

And many times, you can buy things or get the information you need without

ever having to talk to sales at all.

It’s 2016. You know that information is free now. Marketing and sales don’t get to play

gatekeeper for you any more.

So when you see one of these…

Or have to do this…

You think to yourself…

“Why do I need to talk to sales right now? It was just an eBook I wanted to see…”

“I already filled out a form…”

“Can’t I just send you a message on your website?”

Preach

So let’s think about that for a second…

We hate when people do those things to us.

When we’re buying, we hate filling out forms and talking to sales reps.

We avoid them at all costs.

But in our jobs in marketing and sales, we turn around and use them on our

prospects and customers…

We stick to those traditional methods.

Because that’s how everyone else does it.

And even though we know it doesn’t work on us — we’re reluctant to make a change to the way we do marketing and

sales.

The reason we’re reluctant to make the change?

It's all because of something called the Threshold Model of Collective Behavior.

Don’t worry. We didn’t make this up. It’s from that guy — Stanford sociologist Mark

Granovetter.

The Threshold Model of Collective Behavior In One Slide

We're all driven by peer pressure. And when it comes to peer pressure, each one of us has a threshold. That threshold -- how likely we are to go against the crowd -- is driven by the number

of people who have to do something before we do it too.

This threshold especially applies to the way we act in marketing and sales today.

So much of what we do in this industry is driven by best practices, playbooks, and

benchmarks.

On one hand, this is a good thing.

Since there are a ton of best practices and benchmarks, we can spend less time trying to figure

things out from scratch and more time creating.

But it also works against us in a big way when it comes to making changes.

In order to switch things up from the way everyone else does them, we need to see

everyone else doing it too.

And this is the reason why we've been sticking to traditional marketing.

“Yeah I know. But I need to see more people abandoning the traditional way of doing marketing and sales. It still works.”

That’s the common response to breaking away from the mold in marketing and sales right now. Back to

the threshold thing.

But here’s where we’re wrong.

There are already examples of businesses that have broken the mold of traditional

marketing and sales.

Threshold Alert!

In fact, they are the companies that you probably tell your friends about.

The companies that you genuinely enjoy working with and buying from.

Modern businesses like these.

As people, we love working with these modern businesses because they let us buy things the way we want to buy them — on

our own time.

Want to try before you buy? Go for it.

Want to buy something without ever talking to sales? Great.

Have a question and need to talk to someone? Yep. You can do that, too.

LOREN PADELFORD

“Our job is to do what our customers want. Customers are in control of the

sales process now. We need to customize to the customer process, not

to the sales company process.” GM, Shopify Plus

JOSH ELMAN

“Messaging is where we spend a ton of our time and expect to communicate. It

is ridiculous we still have to call most businesses.”

Partner at Greylock Source: botgig.com

Those modern businesses believe that helping is the new selling.

They believe that customer experience is the new marketing.

And they've figured out how to have 1:1 conversations at scale.

And they've figured out how to have 1:1 conversations at scale.

And they've figured out how to have 1:1 conversations at scale.

Oh and they treat you like a person, not like a lead.

With that in mind, we think that there are two paths forward for businesses today.

They can stick to their guns, keep doing what everyone else has been doing, and

wait for that threshold level to get higher.

Or they can follow the lead of those modern businesses and change the way

they do marketing and sales to match the way that people actually want to interact

with a business today.

And we think that looks a whole lot more like this:

Than this:

Which path will your business choose?

It doesn’t have to be a huge overhaul.

For us it started with these simple changes.

1. We made the decision to make all of our content free. No more gated content.

2. We switched all of our newsletter CTA’s to feel real and human, like these:

3. We changed up our welcome email so people would actually want to respond

and say hi:

(We get 50+ personal responses a week now)

4. We gave everyone that visits our website the ability to talk to us and put our faces on every message — because

we’re real people.

So, if you want to have more 1:1 conversations with your customers, those are

four easy ways you can start.

Want to make the switch?

Click here to learn more about how Drift can help you grow your business by having 1:1 conversations with your prospects and

customers at scale.