Conversational Marketing, Brand-Building, and Selling the Snot Out of SaaS

What does an entrepreneur with five successful SAAS companies choose:

1. Lying on a beach in the Caribbean for the rest of time?
2. Starting another company?

Serial entrepreneur, podcast host, and angel investor David Cancel chose the latter. Despite having successful exits from his start ups, being featured in major publications around the world and guest lecturing at the best schools in the country-he’s not finished yet.

His latest company, Drift, is a conversational marketing platform.

What’s the difference between Drift and the competitive chat apps?

 Cancel is using two major factors to establish Drift.

First, he’s is using his past expertise to replicate his successful business models such as driving traffic to the website, lead magnets, nurturing, automation, contact with a salesperson and following up. Second, he’s looking at human behavior’s new default to message and using it to get ahead of the upcoming shift in customer service.

Using these two factors, he’s growing Drift as a brand by providing as much free value as possible. Instead of falling into the allure of gated content,

all content is free. This establishes a relationship between consumer and business that’s deeper than a financial connection. Within this relationship is the consumer feeling like they’re getting something extra from the company.

Companies without this extra feeling succumb to Amazon or Alibaba’s power. Consumers don’t care where they buy their laundry detergent from but they do care if it’s fairly priced and convenient. The companies that focus on establishing a brand are practicing a premium thinking mindset.

Branding comes down to how a business makes an individual feel. It’s every interaction with a customer or prospect. It’s the conference, the website, emails and more. The foundation of branding doesn’t start with the logo or colors, it’s within the office of the company. The people behind the company inevitably become the marketers of it. Support teams, sales and product engineer employees have to be aware that they aren’t just a support, sales or product engineering force, they are the marketing team.

The development team at Drift is part of the social media efforts, customer support and sales process. They have to talk with customers and validate everything they are building with prospective customers. The idea at Drift is that this link between teams and customers will minimize the support issues of the products. Each link makes the business and product the most impactful it can be, in turn creating a stronger brand image.

Impactful brands are able to establish themselves and scale their businesses. Each product sale started with an initial conversation. At Drift the focus isn’t on cost per clicks, it’s on value per conversation. It’s not about the value of  the product that is being sold, it’s about the lifetime value associated with the customer. Once you get a customer with this strategy, you can sell to them forever. This is when conversations become scalable.

B2B is no longer the power player of the business world. Everyone is buying something and SAAS has been officially accepted. Businesses have moved from B2B to business to human model. Whether a product is designed for

a business or individual, humans are making the buying decision. Scaling a large business involves taking the B2B model and making it look like the consumer experience.

The role of marketers is becoming increasingly important. It’s about starting a relationship with a consumer and then preserving it. Drop the idea of getting them into a fictional funnel and focus on upselling and cross selling. How can the consumer to business relationship be maximized over time?

Watch Drift’s marketing strategy as it grows, taking note on their ability to build an affinity with a person and turn them into a lifelong customer.

• www.davidcancel.com
• www.drift.com