How Bionic Chatbots Helped Boomi Decrease Its Sales Cycle by 41 Days

About Boomi

Boomi, the intelligent integration and automation leader, helps organizations around the world automate and streamline critical processes to achieve business outcomes faster.

The challenge

Although Boomi adopted the Drift product in 2019 to help boost its website conversion rates, the company realized its inbound strategy was not yet fully optimized. So, while Drift was up and running, the team knew there was still plenty of room for improvement.

First, while decision-tree playbooks worked well for the majority of Boomi’s audience, they didn’t work for everyone. As Tim Ozmina, Demand Generation Operations at Boomi explained, “There were still 30-40% of folks on our website who may have a one-off use case or maybe something that we’ve never thought of and they’re left hanging.”  

With traditional decision tree playbooks, Boomi wasn’t accounting for that portion of site visitors. 

The solution

When Drift announced Bionic Chatbots in late 2023, Tim saw an opportunity to solve both of the challenges they were facing. So, the team set off to get Bionic Chatbots live — which happened in a matter of minutes after joining Drift’s Early Access Program.

Better deflection; higher efficiency reps

With Bionic Chatbots up and running, the Boomi team saw an interesting phenomenon: While the company was seeing fewer meetings, those meetings were also higher quality meetings. That is, no-shows and customer support requests decreased significantly while the qualified meetings continued to come through.

The result was even better than the Boomi team anticipated. 

As Tim explained, “The support deflection has been the biggest shining star for us. It has saved a lot of our SDRs’ time because they don’t need to worry about answering these really in-depth inquiries which can last from 15 minutes to an hour.” 

In fact, with Bionic Chatbots, Boomi is deflecting 60% of support conversations away from its SDR team, quarter over quarter.

Accelerated deal cycles

Beyond support deflection, Boomi has seen a notable improvement in sales efficiency and deal acceleration since it deployed Bionic Chatbots.

Because Bionic Chatbots can take care of complex questions and inquiries, Boomi’s SDRs no longer have to field conversations that a traditional chatbot wouldn’t have been able to handle. Now, Boomi’s SDRs don’t have to jump into chat as often or deal with unqualified meetings. At the same time, Boomi has seen site visitors spending more of their time with the Bionic Chatbot. 

Plus, Bionic Chatbots ensure Boomi’s SDRs are just as efficient when they do interact with site visitors. 

As Tim shared, “SDRs need to jump into fewer meetings and conversations, and the conversations that they do jump into are much more fruitful.” As a result, SDRs are happier, their trust in Drift leads has gone up, and conversion rates have increased. 

Altogether, for Boomi, Bionic Chatbots have led to greater team efficiency, as well as a more productive website experience. 

“I always look at time to value, and the Bionic Chatbot helps immensely there,” Tim explained. “You can come to the website, ask whatever questions you want, and you will get the answer. And the entire time our SDRs can sit back and cherry-pick the right conversations. If the visitor is asking certain questions, they can jump in and interrupt the bot.”

Intent-driven conversations with Bionic Chatbots

While the Boomi SDRs and Bionic Chatbots worked together to drive better conversations, Tim and the team went one step deeper. By combining Bionic Chatbots with Drift Engage, the team was able to set up their chatbots to target site visitors based on their intent.

To do this, they started by adding the Bionic Chatbot node into their low-intent visitor playbooks. “For low-intent visitors, our Bionic Chatbot is the entire CTA,” Tim explained. “It says ‘Hey there, I’m Boomi’s AI assistant. Questions? Ask here.’ The first thing they see as the hook is the Bionic Chatbot. As one of our main CTAs, we’re seeing a lot more conversion there.”

Once it had gained confidence with their low-intent playbooks, the team went on to add the Bionic Chatbot node to their medium-intent playbooks, ultimately driving more meetings and finding conversion “sweet spots” with their intent-based audiences.

The results

So, what do Bionic Chatbots ultimately amount to? For Boomi, it led to some pretty impressive results: 

• 41-day decrease in average deal cycle
• 47% prospect to marketing qualified lead conversion rate
• 60% deflection rate

The future

While Boomi has already seen significant results, for Tim and the team, Bionic Chatbots are just the beginning. 

In fact, Tim envisions a customer experience that is fully automated, and he believes Drift will help them attain it. “Where I see Conversational Marketing in the future is fully automated to the point where “sales reps don’t have to be involved in live chat, they just jump in when they’re ready to talk to a human on the phone,” He said. “Drift will be able to handle everything else — from support to prospect to customer and partner, and everything in between.”