How Proofpoint Grew Their Chat Opportunities and Pipeline by 500%+ With Drift

147%

increase in website visitor email submissions

578%

increase in chat-sourced opportunities

628%

increase in chat-sourced pipeline

The Challenge: Transforming the Buyer Experience Online to Drive Global Growth

Staying ahead of the curve is critical for any business, but it’s especially important for technology companies. Proofpoint is a global cybersecurity and compliance solution leader. Their customers rely on them to provide the best threat, information, user, and ecosystem protection — and Proofpoint hasn’t let them down. The company boasts a 95% customer satisfaction rate and a 90% renewal rate.

To ensure their buyer experience was on par with their impressive customer experience, Proofpoint needed to revamp its digital strategy. The Proofpoint team focused on driving more traffic to their site and creating a better buying experience for their visitors. While COVID played a role in accelerating Proofpoint’s digital focus, Proofpoint’s strategy was also informed by a longer view of future challenges and opportunities.

Proofpoint’s existing chat solution provided little visibility into site traffic, and provided no integration with their existing sales and marketing platforms. It was impossible for them to operationalize, scale, or enable chat across all of their regions. Still, Proofpoint saw the potential of chat to transform their buyer experience and streamline their sales process. But they needed a more effective solution that could help them:

1. Deliver a friction-free and highly relevant buyer experience
2. Provide a much-improved response time that left no prospect behind
3. Automatically filter and route traffic quickly and accurately
4. Increase sales efficiency by integrating with existing platforms and automating previously manual tasks

The Solution: Combining a Better Buyer Experience With Flexibility, Insight, and Sales Efficiency

Proofpoint realized that they needed a chat solution specifically designed for demand generation — something that could handle the complexities of their existing sales and marketing efforts and grow with them. That’s where Drift’s Revenue Acceleration Platform came in.

Better-real-time Engagement

Engaging with prospects on site early in the buying process is critical for Proofpoint. “What’s exciting about Drift is the way it enables us to engage with prospects and get them off the fence before their interest fizzles out or they go to a competitor,” says Shilo Peay, Manager Sales Business Development.

Greater Flexibility Through Powerful Integrations

Drift allows Proofpoint to tailor the solution to it’s specific business model, sales and marketing needs, and existing martech stack. “Drift’s technical integrations are leaps and bounds above other tools we’ve used. They do exactly what we need them to do,” says RZ. “And they can handle all the nuances of our business, which is especially important on the international side.”

Drift also helps Proofpoint create tighter alignment between marketing and sales teams. As Shilo explains, “With Drift, we’re able to piggyback our chat interactions onto the marketing efforts we’re running with other tools. It’s a very seamless process.”

Customization Across Global Teams Within a Single Platform

Earlier chat products had allowed prospects to fall through the cracks. Without the ability to customize for different regions and time zones, messages go unanswered for an hour or even an entire business day. “Our business development team routinely came in to find twenty open chat conversations from the EMEA time zone,” explains Garrett Chew, Senior International Digital Marketing Manager. “It was a huge challenge to have to reassign these dropped balls to the proper region; and it was a poor user experience.” Now, with Drift enabled across most of their websites and segmented based on the user’s geographic location, Proofpoint is able to give buyers what they want in less than a minute instead of hours.

Deep Insights

Drift gives Proofpoint valuable visibility into account activity, engagement, and performance. “The way Drift tracks engagement is light years ahead of anything else we’ve seen,” says RZ. “We can see exactly what’s happening, how much engagement we are getting, and chat’s role in generating pipeline and opportunities. And it’s easy to report on all of this and tell a clear story so people understand how chat is helping. It’s been a big growth story and a big success.”

Improved Sales Efficiency

But growth with scalability is nearly impossible. With Drift, Proofpoint is able to automate manual tasks for sales and get them back to what they do best: Selling.

The Results: More Engagement, More Opportunities, More Pipeline

“Drift has definitely helped us accelerate revenue by allowing us to engage with more people,” says RZ. “From a capabilities and technical standpoint, it’s a very powerful tool that is invaluable to the work we’re doing right now and what we plan to achieve in the future.”

Since switching to Drift, the results at Proofpoint have been striking:

1. 147% year-over-year increase in website visitor email submissions
2. 578% year-over-year increase in opportunities generated directly from chat
3. 628% year-over-year increase in pipeline generated directly from chat

And Proofpoint has just scratched the surface with Drift. Looking ahead, Proofpoint plans to roll out Drift to their outreach team, integrate chat with events and webinars, and use more of Drift’s AI features.

“I was blown away to realize that we’re only taking advantage of a small piece of what Drift can do,” says Shilo. “I love the fact that Drift can lean even further into the marketing side in order to support sales. I look forward to further harnessing its ability to capture more data, run analytics, segment audiences, and so forth. Our outreach team is going to play a huge role as we digitally transform our buyer experience and sales motion.”