Tenable generates 3x qualified pipeline globally with Drift

3X

Faster delivering SDR qualified leads in past year

30%

Improved conversation quality and length in past year

2X

Doubled conversion rates in past year

The challenge: Provide higher quality leads while decreasing response times to drive more opportunities

More than 30,000 organizations around the world rely on Tenable for managing and reducing cyber risk. Based in Columbia, MD, Tenable designed their platform specifically for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) at Fortune 500 companies and other large, dynamic organizations. But as you can imagine, getting in touch with those CISOs, who – now, more than ever — have extremely demanding jobs, can be almost impossible.

Back in 2018, Tenable’s Senior Director of Global Marketing Operations and Technology, Matt Mullin, recognized that their strategy for reaching CISOs needed help. As Matt explained, “We had a heavy dependence on email marketing. But there was too much crowding with this approach. Sales folks everywhere could email the same people we were targeting in mass and in bulk.”

Tenable needed a better way to reach their busy CISOs, and their teams. And at the same time, they needed to get these hard-to-reach CISOs into the hands of Tenable’s Sales Development Reps (SDRs) faster.

As if this wasn’t enough, Matt and his team weren’t driving enough marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to deliver to their SDRs. As Matt explained, “We were just focused on generating more leads year over year. It really wasn’t about quality. It was like this old antiquated way of taking a look at the overall funnel and pipeline.”

Matt recalls a conversation he once had with his sales officer, who told him: “Year over year, you’re going to have to generate 50% more leads in order to keep up with demand.” Matt knew he couldn’t keep up with that pace with their existing strategy. Something had to change.

“I knew I needed to create more quality, more consistent engagement, and more efficiency within the pipeline from a followup standpoint.” When Tenable brought on a new VP of Marketing, Matt shared the idea of using the Drift platform to deliver more high quality MQLs that the SDR team could turn into closed business, faster. He got the greenlight, and got to work on making the changes Tenable needed to close more CISOs.

The solution: Hey SDR team, Drift is going to put money in your pockets

“Look, what if we helped your team become more visible on the website? Would that be of interest to you?”

This is how Matt got Tenable’s SDR leader onboard with getting his “A-team” SDRs using Drift Chat. He had another approach for the SDRs themselves. Matt saw the implementation of the Drift platform as a way to reset on Tenable’s Sales-Marketing alignment.

Matt told the SDR team, “Look, this is a thing that’s going to positively affect you. This is going to create money in your pockets if it’s done the right way. You’re going to get 10 times more people who actually want to talk to you, instead of you just doing the same song and dance of picking up the phone and getting a bunch of no’s or doing your standard outreach via email and never getting any response whatsoever.”

Matt’s pitch worked, and his promise of better engagement was right.

“We had the most senior SDRs using Drift, and they knocked it out of the park. We instantly saw our conversion rates go up. Drift became one of our highest converting programs. Really, you could pick any metric that you wanted and there was positive movement.”

With SDRs engaging immediately with interested people on the Tenable website through Drift Chat, Matt saw their median response time drop to below 60 seconds. This was an improvement, but Matt knew there was more opportunity to optimize by leveraging Drift Automation.

This was the next lever in Matt’s strategy. Drift AI was deployed to supercharge the already improved SDR chat strategy, as a way to capture any traffic the SDRs weren’t able to get to. “I was a super early adopter of Drift AI,” Matt shared. “I believe we’re the seventh AI customer in the history of Drift’s business.”

“We started with a crawl, walk, run approach. We started with 25 different conversations, slowly building that out with the Drift conversation team. We had a dedicated Drift employee taking a look at every single one of our conversations that were coming in through AI, and then reanalyzing and determining how we add onto those,” Matt shared. “It was a super fluid process.” At launch, Matt’s goal was to benchmark a 10% conversion rate against AI leads.

By enabling website visitors to engage in open text conversations, Tenable’s AI bots deflect unnecessary SDR traffic and create a more flexible and enjoyable buying experience. “Even when our SDRs were sleeping in their beds at night, we were able to still take in meeting requests. We’re still able to do a number of different things with the bot experience that we normally wouldn’t have been able to do. And we certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it through our standard chat function which was just basic office hours, and too much traffic for any one SDR to be able to handle on their own.”

“Now we have over 75 active playbooks total on our site. It’s really paid dividends for us.”

The result: Every marketing metric positively impacted

The analogy Matt uses for the impact of Drift is a familiar one to anyone in marketing and sales, “If you’re at a tradeshow and 3,000 people walked by your booth, but you only got to speak to 10, wouldn’t you like to be able to speak to 10 times that, or 30 times that? That’s what Drift has allowed us to do.” Matt shares, “We saw results quickly. All of a sudden, the SDRs were telling me, we can’t live without this thing.’”

Matt summarizes the value of Drift by sharing, “Really, you could pick any metric that you wanted, we were able to see some positive impact. It’s offsetting our previous form fill process, and now through Drift, people are getting answers right away. Drift has been able to handle a ton of traffic. As a result, we’ve now launched it globally. We have SDR coverage across the board.”

Matt explained that enabling website visitors to create their own journey keeps buyers on the site longer, allowing the team to convert at a later point. “Our bounce and exit rate is a lot lower since we’ve adopted AI and it’s spiked conversion rates,” Matt said. “We were trying to benchmark a 10% conversion rate against these automation leads, and we were able to hit that number and actually double it.”

A superior customer experience

But the positive impact of AI doesn’t stop there — it’s also created a more positive customer and user experience. “Drift AI has really put a huge emphasis on our customer experience and how people are leveraging the actual chat,” Matt said. He explained that being able to direct customers with support questions away from Tenable’s sales team creates a better experience for customers who want to get in touch with the right resources, and SDRs who can stay focused on revenue-generating activities. “Drift AI has offset a lot of conversations that our SDRs normally would have had to take on. It’s been super beneficial for them because they don’t have to waste time on support questions, tech questions, and things of that nature. They’re able to truly dig into their business where they’re going to be impactful,” Matt shared. “The amount of operational overhead that we saved for the SDR team was pretty drastic. I would venture to guess at least one full-time head.”

Matt also shared how AI creates more flexibility and personalization for customers visiting the Tenable site; “Some of these conversations, blogs, and insights coming in through the AI function actually allow us to craft a more Enterprise-focused message. It’s a lot different because it allows for fluidity and it allows for people to ask more questions that we’ve trained our AI to be able to answer. It creates a lot less frustration.”

Through the Drift platform, Matt has transformed Tenable’s lead generation and SDR engagement strategy, and as a result, is engaging with CISO buyers, on their terms, and seeing some pretty incredible results:

3X

faster delivering SDR qualified leads in the past year

30%

improved conversation quality and length in the past year

20%

conversion rate on AI leads

1

FTE saved in operational overhead through AI

And for Matt, Tenable’s journey to delivering better leads to SDRs faster has also been a journey in modernizing their approach to sales and marketing:

“No matter how many times somebody fills out your forms, goes to a webinar or does all of this other stuff, it becomes a black hole on the backside. If you’re not able to talk to them immediately, then there’s a good chance you’re never going to talk to them. We are having so many more conversations in an environment that’s becoming harder and harder to reach people. When people are raising their hands, we’re actually there to listen, and let them ask questions in their own voice, something we couldn’t do prior to Drift.”