Pendo and Drift: Better Data Means Better Conversations

Pendo recently announced a new partner program called Activate, meant to inspire innovation on top of the Pendo product cloud. 

Executives often make difficult trade-offs, like quality for volume and efficiency for growth. Whether it’s tickets cleared by the customer success team, leads generated by the marketing team, or even features shipped by the product team, when you’re focused only on generating quantity it’s easy to lose sight of how efficiently you got to the number.

Each in our own way, Drift and Pendo have spent the past several years helping companies shift from more to better. Drift has helped marketers have better conversations with prospects who visit their website by replacing obtrusive forms with natural conversation. Pendo’s product analytics and guided user engagement has helped product leaders deliver the features users want while guiding them to a better product experience.

Maybe it’s because of our shared empathy with the increasingly interrelated roles we serve, but a Drift/Pendo partnership seemed like a natural, if not inevitable, next step. And that’s just what we announced today: a partnership focused on advancing marketing/product alignment to improve efficiency and generate better results.

Businesses suffer some glaring operational inefficiencies that also sap customer happiness. From mutually-tedious protocols around lost credentials to common support requests, like help with settings and configuration, certain customer needs are better met with a real-time chatbot than through human intervention. To that end, Pendo in-app messages extends Drift’s chatbot into the product so that marketing, product management and customer success can together automate actions, like walking a user through customized onboarding. See image below.

But there’s more to running an efficient business than removing cost. There’s also the need to prioritize go-to-market efforts around the prospects and customers who have the highest probability to purchase, renew and purchase more.

Drift has long focused on helping marketers convert website visitors into paying customers. But the value of their conversational marketing approach dropped off once the prospect converted into a trial or went on to become a customer—because the chatbot didn’t fire inside of the product, where business users spend most of their time. The Drift/Pendo integration addresses this need as well.

Our joint customers can engage their users with personalized messages triggered by their product usage, from right within the application. For example, sales can maximize trial-to-paid conversions by chatting with users who adopt a feature that correlates to purchase, such as building their first report in the case of an analytics tool or reaching their usage capacity in a limited trial. Similarly, customer success can chat with users at key moments — like logging in after a long layoff (to reduce churn) or hitting an adoption milestone that may open the door to up-selling opportunities — in their product experience.

Beyond removing friction from administrative functions or even improving revenue efficiency, this integration helps pave the way to a profound organizational shift — one from being project led to being product led. And, along with other Pendo integrations like Intercom and Zendesk, it does so simply by converging sales, marketing, customer success and product management around a common channel to reach the customer: the company’s own product.