Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with how modern B2B buyers purchase goods and services.
Meetings, phone calls, and email are still important B2B channels but how can you have immediate conversations?
Conversational Marketing is about having direct one-to-one conversations to connect with customers and offer help.
By using targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with leads in real-time (while they’re on your website), you can connect with people in real-time and convert leads faster.
That’s why I interviewed Dave Gerhardt (@davegerhardt), VP of Marketing at Drift.com and co-author of the new book Conversational Marketing. Dave is also known as DG.

Share a bit of your background and what does Drift do?
DG: 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 that Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.
Which is a significant change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were kinda 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 you know, there’s just 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 Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that’s 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: Right.
DG: 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.
Brian: Well, that’s awesome! And so, that sets us up actually.
Tell us about Conversational Marketing?
And what motivated you to write the book? Why now?
The reason we wrote the book is that we’ve just heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, 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 of all time in this industry. And it’s not because we have some secret, but our secret has been we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.
And so, as we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it late last year, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”
We’ve wanted to write a book. We had enough stuff to say, case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, blueprints, and all that stuff.
And so, you know we said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book, and really do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.