How Pure Storage Increased Meetings By 4.8X Year Over Year With Drift

About Pure Storage

Pure Storage is a leading data storage company that is dedicated to simplifying how companies consume and interact with data. Pure Storage delivers a cloud experience that empowers every organization to get the most out of their data with more simplicity and flexibility, all while lowering costs.

The challenge

The technology you use is only as good as the strategy behind it, a conclusion Pure Storage came to when they realized how much more they could be doing with Drift.

Despite having Drift implemented on their site for several years, it was underutilized — with limited playbooks and optimization. According to Heather Alter, Senior Director of Web Experience at Pure Storage, the team wasn’t capturing emails at the right stages, website visitors weren’t able to book meetings on their business development representatives’ calendars, and their leads weren’t flowing into their CRM properly.

The solution

Eager to start their 2023 fiscal year with a strong foundation in place, Heather, along with Matt Yankelovich, Senior Manager, Product Owner, embarked on a journey to revitalize Pure Storage’s Drift implementation.

This reboot began with a technical audit alongside Drift’s Professional Services team to ensure email capture, calendar drops, and lead flow were all set up correctly. The team then worked with Professional Services to strategize how they would optimize Drift to reach their goals.

Making Drift a campaign cornerstone

If the team had one goal in mind with their Drift reboot, it was to accelerate the average time from chat to opportunity. That meant Pure Storage had to make sure all their internal teams were incorporating Drift into their strategies.

As Heather explained, “It wasn’t part of our standard bill of materials for a campaign or launch to have a Drift playbook as a part of it. So, we had to socialize [the company on] what Drift was and why it was important to the business.”

Today, all teams understand the value of using Drift to generate leads from campaigns, and they plan and activate Drift for each major campaign, launch, and initiative with robust testing and optimization. In the last year alone, Pure Storage went from having three playbooks to over 50.

Once the Pure Storage marketing team was fully evangelized with Drift, the team turned their eyes to the next line of attack — live chat.

Better inbound engagement

As part of Pure Storage’s revamp, they hired and trained an entirely new BDR team to engage and qualify inbound leads.

With reps ready to speak to website leads across several time zones, Pure Storage was able to accelerate their live chat response times, create more opportunities from inbound chats, and ultimately, increase their conversion rates.

New levels of admin ffficiency

Just as speed was critical for increasing inbound engagement, Matt and the Pure Storage team understood that speed was essential when building out their Drift instance — especially as they massively increased the number of playbooks they were using.

To ensure Pure Storage was deploying and managing their playbooks efficiently, Matt leveraged two key Drift features:

1. Reusable Blocks: These allowed Matt to reuse conversational flows across multiple playbooks, which meant he could create a reliable, consistent experience, without having to repeat the same tasks over and over again.
2. Content Variables: These allowed Matt to manage all names, URLs, and other information the team used in their playbooks in one place. This ensured the Pure Storage team was consistent across their playbooks, without them having to manually edit each one.

With these two features, Matt has been able to reach new levels of efficiency as he overhauls Pure Storage’s Drift deployment. “[Reusable Blocks and Content Variables] are huge game-changers in terms of quality of life and being able to update things,” Matt said.

The results

Over the past few years, the Pure Storage team has invested in improving their Drift instance on multiple fronts. And those efforts to revitalize their Drift strategy have clearly paid off:

Looking ahead, Pure Storage remains committed to leveraging Drift as a tool for delivering better customer experiences while also driving business growth.

The Future

With their sights set on reducing friction and enhancing their website experience, the team is eager to continue exploring features like Site Concierge, Bionic Chatbots, and DriftLinks. As Heather sums up, Drift plays (and will continue to play) an integral role in achieving Pure Storage’s vision of storing, managing, and protecting the world’s data.