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Conversational Marketing in B2B with Dave Gerhardt
About this episode
Most B2B buyers do not want to wait.
They come to your website with questions, context, and intent. But too many B2B companies still force them through forms, delayed follow-up, and disconnected sales processes.
That is the problem conversational marketing was built to address.
In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Dave Gerhardt, then VP of Marketing at Drift and now founder of Exit Five, about how B2B companies can use real-time conversations to connect with buyers while they are ready to engage.
At the time of this conversation, Dave and Drift were helping define the conversational marketing category. They were also challenging one of the most familiar habits in B2B demand generation: putting forms in front of content and calling every form fill a lead.
The short version: buyers do not always want another piece of gated content. They often want an answer. They want help. They want a path forward without having to wait for someone to follow up later.
We get into why content has become a commodity, how the #noforms movement started, why chatbots should handle digital paperwork instead of replacing humans, how plain text emails build trust, and why the BDR problem is often a process problem, not a people problem.
If your website still treats every buyer the same way, this conversation will help you rethink what it means to help buyers in the moment.
About Dave Gerhardt
Dave Gerhardt, also known as DG, was VP of Marketing at Drift when this interview was recorded. He helped build Drift’s brand and helped popularize the conversational marketing category.
Dave is now the founder of Exit Five, a community and media company for B2B marketers. He is also known for his work on founder brand, B2B marketing, content, community, and practical marketing leadership.
Connect with Dave:
What we cover
00:00 Introduction to Dave Gerhardt and Drift
01:08 What conversational marketing means
02:59 Rethinking content and lead generation
05:31 How the no forms movement started
08:47 Capturing leads without relying on forms
09:50 Real-time conversations on your website
14:24 How empathy powers conversational marketing
18:18 Reverse engineering how you like to buy
A few things worth taking away
A few lines that stuck with me
“Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.” — Dave Gerhardt
“Most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.” — Dave Gerhardt
“You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, ‘Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.’” — Dave Gerhardt
“How do you ask a question to a form? You can’t.” — Dave Gerhardt
“We don’t use bots to replace a human. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork.” — Dave Gerhardt
“Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun.” — Dave Gerhardt
“Think about how you buy, and start thinking about how you can reverse engineer your buying process to match what you would like.” — Dave Gerhardt
“The reason they do bad things is because they’re not incentivized to do the good things.” — Dave Gerhardt
Resources mentioned
Listen and subscribe
If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.
Full transcript
Brian Carroll:
Well, cool. Dave, I’m glad to have you with us today. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you all do at Drift.
Dave Gerhardt:
So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing. Been here for three-ish years, right since the beginning of the company.
The way that I talk about Drift is Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now, which is a big change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.
Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.
But there has been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.
I think about walking outside this building. If I called a Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that is what we expect from everything.
Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason, don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.
Brian Carroll:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt:
So our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing.
What is conversational marketing?
Brian Carroll:
That sets us up. You have this new book coming out. I have highlights all over this book, and I wanted to talk about it. What motivated you to write the book? Why now?
Dave Gerhardt:
The reason we wrote the book is because we heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, and we felt it firsthand.
We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest-growing companies in this industry. It’s not because we have some secret. Our secret has been that we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.
As we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”
We had enough stuff to say and enough case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, and blueprints.
We said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book and do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.”
Why content and lead generation need to change
Brian Carroll:
As I read through it, you started with this premise that marketers need to rethink the way they’re doing content and lead generation. Why is that?
Dave Gerhardt:
Because content is a commodity.
Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody is in video. Everybody is on social media.
Five or ten years ago, you could say, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people were like, “Blogging? No way!”
Today, all that stuff is a commodity.
Nobody is going to be on their commute home tonight thinking, “You know what I wish I had more of? I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. I need another B2B podcast.”
There has to be some other way to compete.
You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” We are all starting to ignore that.
I try to avoid filling out forms if I can. I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t normally call me. I never reply to cold emails.
Something had to give. That is the shift we have seen in the market.
David Cancel, who I wrote this book with, calls it the shift from supply to demand.
Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power.
If you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person who sold iced coffee. You could say, “Brian, you have to go through my process. You want one of my iced coffees? Come back at 5 o’clock tonight, call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.”
Now customers have all the power. By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I have already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m there in your store for a reason.
It’s about adapting to the way people behave and want to interact online. Information is free now. It’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore.
How the #noforms movement started
Brian Carroll:
I first heard about this a year ago, this whole idea of the #noforms movement. For our readers who are not familiar, what do you mean by no forms? How did this happen?
Dave Gerhardt:
You need no forms because marketers got into this world of abusing forms. And I’m not preaching to anybody. I did this too.
One of the first things I did at Drift was write an article about the growth marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. I made a Twitter list, put it in a Google Sheet, and put a form behind it.
I said, “Hey, you want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.”
That person is not a lead. There is no intent there. I’m just gating something that is a commodity.
We started the #noforms movement to challenge marketers to rethink how they do demand gen and how they capture leads.
It started because about three years ago David Cancel called me one morning on my way into work. He said, “Hey, you got a second?”
I knew something was wrong because he never talks on the phone. He only texts. He only sends IMs, Slack, WhatsApp, and text messages.
So when he called me, I was like, “I’m getting fired. Here we go.”
It was actually worse than getting fired.
He said, “I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.”
I was like, “Okay. And do what? I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away? What are you going to measure me on?”
He said, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way. We need to remove our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.”
It was a major moment for us. If we were going to build this thing, we had to live it firsthand.
It wasn’t just a marketing lesson. I remember sitting next to two of our engineers. We shared a little table together, and they said, “Okay, you’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?”
We were building it as we went.
It was transformational for our business because we got to see how it worked firsthand. Then we got to go and educate the world.
You say “no forms” to marketers and people are going to jump off the side of the boat.
But for us, it was, “Hold on. Let me show you how you would do a webinar registration without a form. Let me show you how you would do this on your pricing page without a form.”
That gave us an opportunity to educate the market.
How to capture leads without relying only on forms
Brian Carroll:
For other marketers hearing this, it still stings and feels like heresy, this idea of no forms. If I get rid of forms, what do we do to capture leads? How do we engage people who stop by?
Dave Gerhardt:
The short answer is to have a conversation.
That is why Drift exists. The way you capture leads now is by having an actual conversation with somebody.
Forms work. The best advice I could give you is, don’t actually replace your forms at first. That is what you do eventually after you are successful with conversational marketing.
Use conversational marketing in addition to your forms to start.
You create a second net that creates a fast lane for the best people. If somebody has high intent and lands on your website, they don’t want to fill out a form. They want to get an answer now.
Drift creates a fast lane for those best people.
And how do you ask a question to a form? You can’t. You either fill it out or you don’t.
Real-time conversations on your website
Dave Gerhardt:
We see this happen all the time. Somebody will come in on our website, and when a named account comes to the website, our sales reps get a notification on their phone that says, “Hey, the VP of Marketing at Dropbox is on the website right now.”
We had an example like this. The CMO at Starbucks comes to the website and says, “I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack, so we’re not a good fit.”
At that moment, the sales rep pops in and says, “Whoa, hold on a second. We do integrate with Slack. Can I show you? Here’s a help doc.”
Long story short, they have a 40-minute conversation. That turns into a demo. That deal closes a month later.
How does that happen in the world of a form? It doesn’t.
The only opportunity is you either fill out the form or you don’t. There is no conversation, and that is the heart of conversational marketing.
Using bots and AI to handle digital paperwork
Dave Gerhardt:
The next question people ask is, “Does that mean my team has to sit there on chat waiting for new messages 24/7?”
No. That is where we use bots and AI.
We don’t use bots to replace a human, and we don’t want to put anybody out of a job. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork, the stuff that was normally used for a form.
A bot can ask the same questions a form can ask in two seconds instead of adding the friction of someone filling out a form.
That way, as a marketer, I can do what I’m good at, which is getting people to talk about Drift and coming to our website. And sales can take calls all day.
That is the kind of relationship conversational marketing can help create.
Creative ways brands use conversational marketing
Brian Carroll:
As I’m listening to you, I think of two ways of building a relationship. One is if you get rid of forms, you’re making things available to people and helping them. And two, it’s through conversation. That is how we build relationships.
Do you have any stories of brands applying this?
Dave Gerhardt:
There are so many. I’ve seen creative ways people have used conversational marketing.
We have a customer who uses it not to book sales meetings, but to sell tickets to their event. Every person that lands on that website gets a message: “Hey Brian, nice to see you here. Did you know that right now we’re running two-for-one tickets? Do you want to get one?”
That is a conversation to sell event tickets.
We have customers who use conversational marketing instead of forms to do webinar registration, and it makes webinar registration one click. It can double the number of conversions by simplifying the webinar registration.
A lot of people use conversational marketing with content: “Hey, you just finished reading this article about thing X. I bet you’d also like part two, which is about thing Y. Do you want to go check that out?”
The bot leads them to another piece of content.
Customer experience and timing
Dave Gerhardt:
It would be annoying if every time you visited our blog, a bot said, “Do you want a demo of Drift?”
You would say, “No. I just want to read this article.”
But what if on the fifth time you come to our blog, we ask for the demo? And the message is, “Hey, let’s be honest. You kind of come here a lot. Can I show you what the Drift product is all about?”
That is such a different ask. It’s about being more patient and doing it when the time is right.
Imagine you had a store. If every person who walked in was asked, “Do you want to buy something? Do you want to buy something now? Can I show you where to buy something?” you would scare them away.
But that is how most B2B companies operate on their website.
How empathy powers conversational marketing
Brian Carroll:
We know how that feels in the retail setting. We don’t want to have that experience. How do you see empathy playing a role in conversational marketing?
Dave Gerhardt:
Most B2B marketers treat the people on their website like they are dumb.
Like they did no research and just stumbled on your website in the middle of the desert and said, “What does this cybersecurity company do?”
It doesn’t happen that way.
Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun. You are not lying in bed on a Saturday morning going through B2B company websites.
Step one is to understand that the people who are there are there for a reason. They probably listen to your podcasts, watch your videos, read your blog, got on your email list, or heard from a friend.
If someone comes to the Drift website and does not find what they want, they are going to Google “Drift alternative” and find one of our competitors.
It is all about empathy. It is understanding who somebody is and why they are on your website.
My wife and I bought a new car about a month ago. We walked into the dealership and already had everything narrowed down. We just wanted a test drive.
That is how we behave as people. That is how we all buy.
But then something happens in our brains when we go to work in sales and marketing. We say, “I have to make sure we don’t tell them anything about this unless they talk to us.”
The old sales rep tactic was, “You want to know the price? Let’s get on a call.”
No. Just tell me the price over email.
It starts with empathy and understanding that the goal should be to have a conversation with somebody who is in your store. Your store as a B2B company is your website.
If I had a store, I’d have somebody in front and somebody in the aisles saying, “I’m here if you need anything. Let me know if you have any questions.” That is how we think about conversational marketing.
Put the customer first
Brian Carroll:
We’re all customers, and yet when you’re a marketer, you’re not your customer. You need to think about that experience and ask how you can help them.
Dave Gerhardt:
The customer has to be first.
The easiest way to be empathetic is to think about what type of marketing you react to.
We don’t ever think like this. We think, “I’m just going to send this email for the fourth time in three days.”
Hold on. We are all the same. I’m not B2B Dave at work and then Dave the dad at home. I am the same person in all walks of life.
We live in a world where I can order Starbucks on my phone. I can order a car on my phone. I can order four boxes of diapers and have them sent to my house tomorrow.
Then when you go to a B2B website, we want things to work the same, but they don’t.
To break into empathy, you do not have to only think about what somebody else feels. Think about how you buy. Think about the last thing you bought, and start reverse engineering your buying process to match what you would like.
Why plain text emails work
Brian Carroll:
In the book, you talked about the power of plain text emails. Why plain text emails?
Dave Gerhardt:
This is something we first started doing about three years ago. We did plain text emails because people started to get banner blindness in email.
When I saw a highly designed HTML banner email, I was like, “This is a promotion from a company.”
We wanted all of our emails to look and feel like they were being sent from a friend.
Our whole email marketing strategy was, “I’m going to a wedding with my family in New York. I’m meeting my mom and dad at the train tomorrow. How would I email my mom to make sure we’re going to be there on time?”
The subject line would be “Tomorrow?”
“Hey mom, I’m just making sure we’re still on for tomorrow. We’ll be there at 1 o’clock. Do you need anything from me?”
Why do our marketing emails have to be different than that? That is how we talk. That is how we communicate.
So we started thinking: what if we ditched the banners, ditched the design, and started sending plain text emails written like they were from a friend?
Making marketing feel human
Brian Carroll:
It was written as if it came from a real person, because it did.
Dave Gerhardt:
The thing that was frustrating for me was I got responses from people like, “You’re trying to be too sneaky. I don’t like this. It felt like a real person.”
Wait a second. Doesn’t that say something about the state of the industry?
B2B marketing is not supposed to sound like a real person?
No. That is exactly why we are doing it. I want it to sound like a real person.
When you subscribed to our blog, you would get an email from me that said, “Hey, I just want to get this out of the way. My name is Dave, and I’m VP of Marketing at Drift. Even though this is an automated email, I wanted to let you know I’m a real person, I’m really here, and I actually wrote this. If you ever get spammed or feel like your inbox is being disrespected, just email me directly.”
That email disarms people because it says: I’m a real person. Nobody is trying to spam you. We’re real. We’re human.
That little piece of humanity helped us build a relationship with those early subscribers.
Treating people as people, not leads
Brian Carroll:
The way I would describe it is that you’re treating people as people, not as leads. Not as objects to convert.
When I first started, before it was called business development reps, my VP of Sales said to me, “Just be people with people.”
I was 23. I was an intern trying to sound important because I was calling executives. When I embraced the fact that I was 23, didn’t have a lot of experience, and was just who I was, there was authenticity.
Dave Gerhardt:
I love that.
No 23-year-old BDR is going to know more about marketing than me. That’s not a knock. You just graduated college and are in an entry-level sales job.
If you reach out and try to tell me that you can triple my conversion, there’s no way.
So how can you be human? How can you show who you really are?
“Hey, look, I’m at this company. I’m not a marketing person, but we have this product that has seen great results for customers like you. Can I show you how it works?”
That little change makes such a difference.
Why the BDR problem is often the process
Brian Carroll:
You talk about the problem with business development reps being the process, not the people. How do you mean?
Dave Gerhardt:
It’s probably not a people problem.
The reason sales, marketing, or BDR teams do bad things is because they are not incentivized to do the good things.
If you say, “Brian, you’re a 23-year-old BDR. You have to make 200 calls today. That’s all I care about,” what are you going to do? You’re going to make 200 calls.
Or, “You have to send 300 emails today.” Then you’re going to send a bunch of automated, terrible emails.
If you incentivize behavior like that, then of course that will be the result.
But if you said, “You need to get two meetings a day. I don’t care about how many activities, inputs, or outputs. Two meetings a day.”
There are two ways to do that.
You could send 300 emails and hope you get two replies, which probably means you have to blast people.
Or you could reach out to six perfect dream customers and book two meetings from that. That means you spend half your day doing research.
It’s the same process for sales and marketing that we have to bring back.
How to start with conversational marketing
Brian Carroll:
If we were having coffee together and I said, “Dave, how do I get into conversational marketing? Where can I start?” what would you say?
Dave Gerhardt:
Pick one to two things, one to two places where you can be successful right away.
The biggest mistake people make is, “I bought Drift. It’s everywhere. Let’s see what happens.”
No. What is your plan?
Most websites have a contact-us button or request-demo page, and that pops out a 13-field, 15-field, or 20-field form. That is easy. We could replace that.
Start with that one page. Have a contained experiment on that one page. Prove out success and then start to expand.
Then put it on the pricing page. Then put it on the homepage. Then put it on the blog.
You need a motion that you are trying to improve. Maybe you think you can double the conversion rate on your homepage by doing this.
Start with one or two familiar patterns, whether it is your blog or your request-demo button, and learn.
You will learn more than you thought you would. Some people say, “I only want to book sales demos.” Then they start using Drift and say, “I haven’t booked a demo yet, but I’ve had five conversations this morning that blew my mind, and now I need to change my homepage.”
That is the stuff you cannot quantify until you get out there and have real conversations with people.
Closing
Brian Carroll:
Very cool. What’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you and find out more about the book?
Dave Gerhardt:
I’m Dave Gerhardt, one word, pretty much everywhere online: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. The easiest way to find out about the book is Drift.com/book.
Brian Carroll:
Fantastic. For our listeners, we’re going to put these links in the show notes. Dave, thanks for joining us. I really enjoyed our conversation and look forward to us talking more.
Dave Gerhardt:
Thank you. I appreciate it, Brian. Thanks for doing it. I know we had a bunch of back and forth trying to get it done, so I’m glad to do it and thanks for talking sales and marketing with me.
View all episodes
By Brian Carroll
4.6
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About this episode
Most B2B buyers do not want to wait.
They come to your website with questions, context, and intent. But too many B2B companies still force them through forms, delayed follow-up, and disconnected sales processes.
That is the problem conversational marketing was built to address.
In this episode of the B2B Roundtable Podcast, I talk with Dave Gerhardt, then VP of Marketing at Drift and now founder of Exit Five, about how B2B companies can use real-time conversations to connect with buyers while they are ready to engage.
At the time of this conversation, Dave and Drift were helping define the conversational marketing category. They were also challenging one of the most familiar habits in B2B demand generation: putting forms in front of content and calling every form fill a lead.
The short version: buyers do not always want another piece of gated content. They often want an answer. They want help. They want a path forward without having to wait for someone to follow up later.
We get into why content has become a commodity, how the #noforms movement started, why chatbots should handle digital paperwork instead of replacing humans, how plain text emails build trust, and why the BDR problem is often a process problem, not a people problem.
If your website still treats every buyer the same way, this conversation will help you rethink what it means to help buyers in the moment.
About Dave Gerhardt
Dave Gerhardt, also known as DG, was VP of Marketing at Drift when this interview was recorded. He helped build Drift’s brand and helped popularize the conversational marketing category.
Dave is now the founder of Exit Five, a community and media company for B2B marketers. He is also known for his work on founder brand, B2B marketing, content, community, and practical marketing leadership.
Connect with Dave:
What we cover
00:00 Introduction to Dave Gerhardt and Drift
01:08 What conversational marketing means
02:59 Rethinking content and lead generation
05:31 How the no forms movement started
08:47 Capturing leads without relying on forms
09:50 Real-time conversations on your website
14:24 How empathy powers conversational marketing
18:18 Reverse engineering how you like to buy
A few things worth taking away
A few lines that stuck with me
“Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.” — Dave Gerhardt
“Most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.” — Dave Gerhardt
“You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, ‘Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.’” — Dave Gerhardt
“How do you ask a question to a form? You can’t.” — Dave Gerhardt
“We don’t use bots to replace a human. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork.” — Dave Gerhardt
“Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun.” — Dave Gerhardt
“Think about how you buy, and start thinking about how you can reverse engineer your buying process to match what you would like.” — Dave Gerhardt
“The reason they do bad things is because they’re not incentivized to do the good things.” — Dave Gerhardt
Resources mentioned
Listen and subscribe
If you found this episode helpful, subscribe to the B2B Roundtable Podcast wherever you listen.
Full transcript
Brian Carroll:
Well, cool. Dave, I’m glad to have you with us today. Tell us a little bit about your background and what you all do at Drift.
Dave Gerhardt:
So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing. Been here for three-ish years, right since the beginning of the company.
The way that I talk about Drift is Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now, which is a big change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were built for later.
Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.
But there has been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.
I think about walking outside this building. If I called a Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that is what we expect from everything.
Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason, don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.
Brian Carroll:
Right.
Dave Gerhardt:
So our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing.
What is conversational marketing?
Brian Carroll:
That sets us up. You have this new book coming out. I have highlights all over this book, and I wanted to talk about it. What motivated you to write the book? Why now?
Dave Gerhardt:
The reason we wrote the book is because we heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, and we felt it firsthand.
We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest-growing companies in this industry. It’s not because we have some secret. Our secret has been that we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.
As we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”
We had enough stuff to say and enough case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, and blueprints.
We said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book and do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.”
Why content and lead generation need to change
Brian Carroll:
As I read through it, you started with this premise that marketers need to rethink the way they’re doing content and lead generation. Why is that?
Dave Gerhardt:
Because content is a commodity.
Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody is in video. Everybody is on social media.
Five or ten years ago, you could say, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people were like, “Blogging? No way!”
Today, all that stuff is a commodity.
Nobody is going to be on their commute home tonight thinking, “You know what I wish I had more of? I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. I need another B2B podcast.”
There has to be some other way to compete.
You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” We are all starting to ignore that.
I try to avoid filling out forms if I can. I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t normally call me. I never reply to cold emails.
Something had to give. That is the shift we have seen in the market.
David Cancel, who I wrote this book with, calls it the shift from supply to demand.
Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power.
If you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person who sold iced coffee. You could say, “Brian, you have to go through my process. You want one of my iced coffees? Come back at 5 o’clock tonight, call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.”
Now customers have all the power. By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I have already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m there in your store for a reason.
It’s about adapting to the way people behave and want to interact online. Information is free now. It’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore.
How the #noforms movement started
Brian Carroll:
I first heard about this a year ago, this whole idea of the #noforms movement. For our readers who are not familiar, what do you mean by no forms? How did this happen?
Dave Gerhardt:
You need no forms because marketers got into this world of abusing forms. And I’m not preaching to anybody. I did this too.
One of the first things I did at Drift was write an article about the growth marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. I made a Twitter list, put it in a Google Sheet, and put a form behind it.
I said, “Hey, you want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.”
That person is not a lead. There is no intent there. I’m just gating something that is a commodity.
We started the #noforms movement to challenge marketers to rethink how they do demand gen and how they capture leads.
It started because about three years ago David Cancel called me one morning on my way into work. He said, “Hey, you got a second?”
I knew something was wrong because he never talks on the phone. He only texts. He only sends IMs, Slack, WhatsApp, and text messages.
So when he called me, I was like, “I’m getting fired. Here we go.”
It was actually worse than getting fired.
He said, “I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.”
I was like, “Okay. And do what? I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away? What are you going to measure me on?”
He said, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way. We need to remove our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.”
It was a major moment for us. If we were going to build this thing, we had to live it firsthand.
It wasn’t just a marketing lesson. I remember sitting next to two of our engineers. We shared a little table together, and they said, “Okay, you’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?”
We were building it as we went.
It was transformational for our business because we got to see how it worked firsthand. Then we got to go and educate the world.
You say “no forms” to marketers and people are going to jump off the side of the boat.
But for us, it was, “Hold on. Let me show you how you would do a webinar registration without a form. Let me show you how you would do this on your pricing page without a form.”
That gave us an opportunity to educate the market.
How to capture leads without relying only on forms
Brian Carroll:
For other marketers hearing this, it still stings and feels like heresy, this idea of no forms. If I get rid of forms, what do we do to capture leads? How do we engage people who stop by?
Dave Gerhardt:
The short answer is to have a conversation.
That is why Drift exists. The way you capture leads now is by having an actual conversation with somebody.
Forms work. The best advice I could give you is, don’t actually replace your forms at first. That is what you do eventually after you are successful with conversational marketing.
Use conversational marketing in addition to your forms to start.
You create a second net that creates a fast lane for the best people. If somebody has high intent and lands on your website, they don’t want to fill out a form. They want to get an answer now.
Drift creates a fast lane for those best people.
And how do you ask a question to a form? You can’t. You either fill it out or you don’t.
Real-time conversations on your website
Dave Gerhardt:
We see this happen all the time. Somebody will come in on our website, and when a named account comes to the website, our sales reps get a notification on their phone that says, “Hey, the VP of Marketing at Dropbox is on the website right now.”
We had an example like this. The CMO at Starbucks comes to the website and says, “I was interested in doing this, but it looks like you don’t integrate with Slack, so we’re not a good fit.”
At that moment, the sales rep pops in and says, “Whoa, hold on a second. We do integrate with Slack. Can I show you? Here’s a help doc.”
Long story short, they have a 40-minute conversation. That turns into a demo. That deal closes a month later.
How does that happen in the world of a form? It doesn’t.
The only opportunity is you either fill out the form or you don’t. There is no conversation, and that is the heart of conversational marketing.
Using bots and AI to handle digital paperwork
Dave Gerhardt:
The next question people ask is, “Does that mean my team has to sit there on chat waiting for new messages 24/7?”
No. That is where we use bots and AI.
We don’t use bots to replace a human, and we don’t want to put anybody out of a job. We use bots to handle the digital paperwork, the stuff that was normally used for a form.
A bot can ask the same questions a form can ask in two seconds instead of adding the friction of someone filling out a form.
That way, as a marketer, I can do what I’m good at, which is getting people to talk about Drift and coming to our website. And sales can take calls all day.
That is the kind of relationship conversational marketing can help create.
Creative ways brands use conversational marketing
Brian Carroll:
As I’m listening to you, I think of two ways of building a relationship. One is if you get rid of forms, you’re making things available to people and helping them. And two, it’s through conversation. That is how we build relationships.
Do you have any stories of brands applying this?
Dave Gerhardt:
There are so many. I’ve seen creative ways people have used conversational marketing.
We have a customer who uses it not to book sales meetings, but to sell tickets to their event. Every person that lands on that website gets a message: “Hey Brian, nice to see you here. Did you know that right now we’re running two-for-one tickets? Do you want to get one?”
That is a conversation to sell event tickets.
We have customers who use conversational marketing instead of forms to do webinar registration, and it makes webinar registration one click. It can double the number of conversions by simplifying the webinar registration.
A lot of people use conversational marketing with content: “Hey, you just finished reading this article about thing X. I bet you’d also like part two, which is about thing Y. Do you want to go check that out?”
The bot leads them to another piece of content.
Customer experience and timing
Dave Gerhardt:
It would be annoying if every time you visited our blog, a bot said, “Do you want a demo of Drift?”
You would say, “No. I just want to read this article.”
But what if on the fifth time you come to our blog, we ask for the demo? And the message is, “Hey, let’s be honest. You kind of come here a lot. Can I show you what the Drift product is all about?”
That is such a different ask. It’s about being more patient and doing it when the time is right.
Imagine you had a store. If every person who walked in was asked, “Do you want to buy something? Do you want to buy something now? Can I show you where to buy something?” you would scare them away.
But that is how most B2B companies operate on their website.
How empathy powers conversational marketing
Brian Carroll:
We know how that feels in the retail setting. We don’t want to have that experience. How do you see empathy playing a role in conversational marketing?
Dave Gerhardt:
Most B2B marketers treat the people on their website like they are dumb.
Like they did no research and just stumbled on your website in the middle of the desert and said, “What does this cybersecurity company do?”
It doesn’t happen that way.
Nobody is just browsing a B2B website for fun. You are not lying in bed on a Saturday morning going through B2B company websites.
Step one is to understand that the people who are there are there for a reason. They probably listen to your podcasts, watch your videos, read your blog, got on your email list, or heard from a friend.
If someone comes to the Drift website and does not find what they want, they are going to Google “Drift alternative” and find one of our competitors.
It is all about empathy. It is understanding who somebody is and why they are on your website.
My wife and I bought a new car about a month ago. We walked into the dealership and already had everything narrowed down. We just wanted a test drive.
That is how we behave as people. That is how we all buy.
But then something happens in our brains when we go to work in sales and marketing. We say, “I have to make sure we don’t tell them anything about this unless they talk to us.”
The old sales rep tactic was, “You want to know the price? Let’s get on a call.”
No. Just tell me the price over email.
It starts with empathy and understanding that the goal should be to have a conversation with somebody who is in your store. Your store as a B2B company is your website.
If I had a store, I’d have somebody in front and somebody in the aisles saying, “I’m here if you need anything. Let me know if you have any questions.” That is how we think about conversational marketing.
Put the customer first
Brian Carroll:
We’re all customers, and yet when you’re a marketer, you’re not your customer. You need to think about that experience and ask how you can help them.
Dave Gerhardt:
The customer has to be first.
The easiest way to be empathetic is to think about what type of marketing you react to.
We don’t ever think like this. We think, “I’m just going to send this email for the fourth time in three days.”
Hold on. We are all the same. I’m not B2B Dave at work and then Dave the dad at home. I am the same person in all walks of life.
We live in a world where I can order Starbucks on my phone. I can order a car on my phone. I can order four boxes of diapers and have them sent to my house tomorrow.
Then when you go to a B2B website, we want things to work the same, but they don’t.
To break into empathy, you do not have to only think about what somebody else feels. Think about how you buy. Think about the last thing you bought, and start reverse engineering your buying process to match what you would like.
Why plain text emails work
Brian Carroll:
In the book, you talked about the power of plain text emails. Why plain text emails?
Dave Gerhardt:
This is something we first started doing about three years ago. We did plain text emails because people started to get banner blindness in email.
When I saw a highly designed HTML banner email, I was like, “This is a promotion from a company.”
We wanted all of our emails to look and feel like they were being sent from a friend.
Our whole email marketing strategy was, “I’m going to a wedding with my family in New York. I’m meeting my mom and dad at the train tomorrow. How would I email my mom to make sure we’re going to be there on time?”
The subject line would be “Tomorrow?”
“Hey mom, I’m just making sure we’re still on for tomorrow. We’ll be there at 1 o’clock. Do you need anything from me?”
Why do our marketing emails have to be different than that? That is how we talk. That is how we communicate.
So we started thinking: what if we ditched the banners, ditched the design, and started sending plain text emails written like they were from a friend?
Making marketing feel human
Brian Carroll:
It was written as if it came from a real person, because it did.
Dave Gerhardt:
The thing that was frustrating for me was I got responses from people like, “You’re trying to be too sneaky. I don’t like this. It felt like a real person.”
Wait a second. Doesn’t that say something about the state of the industry?
B2B marketing is not supposed to sound like a real person?
No. That is exactly why we are doing it. I want it to sound like a real person.
When you subscribed to our blog, you would get an email from me that said, “Hey, I just want to get this out of the way. My name is Dave, and I’m VP of Marketing at Drift. Even though this is an automated email, I wanted to let you know I’m a real person, I’m really here, and I actually wrote this. If you ever get spammed or feel like your inbox is being disrespected, just email me directly.”
That email disarms people because it says: I’m a real person. Nobody is trying to spam you. We’re real. We’re human.
That little piece of humanity helped us build a relationship with those early subscribers.
Treating people as people, not leads
Brian Carroll:
The way I would describe it is that you’re treating people as people, not as leads. Not as objects to convert.
When I first started, before it was called business development reps, my VP of Sales said to me, “Just be people with people.”
I was 23. I was an intern trying to sound important because I was calling executives. When I embraced the fact that I was 23, didn’t have a lot of experience, and was just who I was, there was authenticity.
Dave Gerhardt:
I love that.
No 23-year-old BDR is going to know more about marketing than me. That’s not a knock. You just graduated college and are in an entry-level sales job.
If you reach out and try to tell me that you can triple my conversion, there’s no way.
So how can you be human? How can you show who you really are?
“Hey, look, I’m at this company. I’m not a marketing person, but we have this product that has seen great results for customers like you. Can I show you how it works?”
That little change makes such a difference.
Why the BDR problem is often the process
Brian Carroll:
You talk about the problem with business development reps being the process, not the people. How do you mean?
Dave Gerhardt:
It’s probably not a people problem.
The reason sales, marketing, or BDR teams do bad things is because they are not incentivized to do the good things.
If you say, “Brian, you’re a 23-year-old BDR. You have to make 200 calls today. That’s all I care about,” what are you going to do? You’re going to make 200 calls.
Or, “You have to send 300 emails today.” Then you’re going to send a bunch of automated, terrible emails.
If you incentivize behavior like that, then of course that will be the result.
But if you said, “You need to get two meetings a day. I don’t care about how many activities, inputs, or outputs. Two meetings a day.”
There are two ways to do that.
You could send 300 emails and hope you get two replies, which probably means you have to blast people.
Or you could reach out to six perfect dream customers and book two meetings from that. That means you spend half your day doing research.
It’s the same process for sales and marketing that we have to bring back.
How to start with conversational marketing
Brian Carroll:
If we were having coffee together and I said, “Dave, how do I get into conversational marketing? Where can I start?” what would you say?
Dave Gerhardt:
Pick one to two things, one to two places where you can be successful right away.
The biggest mistake people make is, “I bought Drift. It’s everywhere. Let’s see what happens.”
No. What is your plan?
Most websites have a contact-us button or request-demo page, and that pops out a 13-field, 15-field, or 20-field form. That is easy. We could replace that.
Start with that one page. Have a contained experiment on that one page. Prove out success and then start to expand.
Then put it on the pricing page. Then put it on the homepage. Then put it on the blog.
You need a motion that you are trying to improve. Maybe you think you can double the conversion rate on your homepage by doing this.
Start with one or two familiar patterns, whether it is your blog or your request-demo button, and learn.
You will learn more than you thought you would. Some people say, “I only want to book sales demos.” Then they start using Drift and say, “I haven’t booked a demo yet, but I’ve had five conversations this morning that blew my mind, and now I need to change my homepage.”
That is the stuff you cannot quantify until you get out there and have real conversations with people.
Closing
Brian Carroll:
Very cool. What’s the best way for readers and listeners to get in touch with you and find out more about the book?
Dave Gerhardt:
I’m Dave Gerhardt, one word, pretty much everywhere online: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. The easiest way to find out about the book is Drift.com/book.
Brian Carroll:
Fantastic. For our listeners, we’re going to put these links in the show notes. Dave, thanks for joining us. I really enjoyed our conversation and look forward to us talking more.
Dave Gerhardt:
Thank you. I appreciate it, Brian. Thanks for doing it. I know we had a bunch of back and forth trying to get it done, so I’m glad to do it and thanks for talking sales and marketing with me.