Carpenters, Chatbots, And Selling The Result

Think back to the most perfect service person who’s ever come to your house and fixed something. What was the experience like? And how did they differentiate?

In this episode of Two Minute Marketing, we dive into how the best companies focus on providing an experience, not just a product, taking a look at Drift’s launch of their Insider’s Circle.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How Drift builds defensibility in a ultra-competitive market
• What customers actually want
• Whether or not I’m handy with tools (I’m not)

Episode Transcript

Eytan Buchman:

This is Eytan Buchman and you are listening to Two Minute Marketing where you hear real actionable quick marketing insights that are inspired by real world observations.

This is an incredibly exciting episode for me today because I have with me David Cancel, the CEO of Drift. If you don’t know Drift, you really should. They’re an incredible chat bot sales and marketing platform or as they call them conversational marketing Platform. They are a phenomenal company with some incredible marketing, but we’ll get there in a second.

First, here is the observation that triggered this episode. I’m not what you would call particularly handy. When a shelf needs to go up, I call a carpenter. Over time, I realized that there’s some carpenters or plumbers whatever who when they’re just about done will ask for a broom and make sure that everything is spic and span and there’s others that will hang the shelf and fix the toilet and head on out. For me, that cleaning at the end makes all the difference, that provides the distinction between what’s essentially a product, hanging a shelf and a service, delighting a customer, hanging that shelf.

It’s the same end product with the shelf up there, but the experience is completely transformed by the service. Pushing over to the marketing side, that distinction really got me thinking about something Drift launched on the service side that they call their Inner Circle. I’ll let David explain what that means.

David Cancel:

I created this idea of the Inner Circle for some of our highest most successful type of customers and companies where they would have access to not only our full version of our enterprise software but also that they would have private training and access to myself, Guillaume who is our VP of growth and Dave Gerhardt who is our VP of marketing. They would have access to all three of us, and we would do monthly check ins. We would do an initial kick off with them, but we would be there as the people to coach their team to go through the transformation that is needed to go from traditional marketing to what we call conversational marketing.

Eytan Buchman:

What David is talking about is moving from providing a chat bot service to providing a full fledged hands on customer experience. When positioning a company in today’s landscape, David says that makes all of the difference.

David Cancel:

One thing that I believe is that we’re starting Drift in a very different time for SaaS, Software as a Service. Now there are thousands of companies in any given category. When that happens, you have to built your moat on more than just your technology and more than just your product. We’re building out moat around the idea of brand, product and service, that trifecta. When it comes to service, it’s something that SAAS companies have shied away from for a long time. I decided that our customers don’t actually care if it’s software, humans, a mixture of both or artificial intelligence or all three that is doing the work for them, what they want is the result.

Eytan Buchman:

We’ll hear more from David in a future episode but for now, I want you to ask yourself one question, “Are you selling a product or are you selling the result of that product”?

David Cancel:

We believe firmly that there’s no other reason for a business to exist than to serve its customers.We put that as the key pillar of how we build our company.

Eytan Buchman:

I’ll be back in episode three with some other cool observations. Don’t forget to share this episode and if you haven’t already, subscribe to Two Minute Marketing on your podcast platform of choice. Happy marketing, this is Eytan.