How Pipefy Closes Opportunities 7x Faster
with Drift

The Challenge

Since its founding in 2015, Pipefy’s platform has rapidly gained a following, becoming the go-to business process automation platform for some of the leading enterprises in the world. And, in 2020, they were looking to keep up that momentum by bolstering their lead generation activities. ”We want to automate as much of our internal processes as possible,” Wilfrid Butelet, Director of Marketing Operations at Pipefy, said. “I’m trying to make our sales team’s jobs easier, with as much insight as possible, so they can focus on their job and not operations.”

While the Pipefy team already used Intercom for customer support, they quickly realized they needed a more advanced tool for this task.

So, Pipefy began looking for a platform that would maximize the number of leads engaging with their sales reps, help marketing and sales collaborate successfully, and create a superior buyer experience for website visitors. And much like their business, Pipefy wanted a solution that would be easy to use — something that would prevent emails from getting lost in inboxes, boost follow-up times, and create a channel to engage buyers on their terms.

The Solution

Pipefy implemented Drift in 2020, and since the beginning, it’s been a true cross-collaborative effort between the sales, growth, and marketing operations teams. With Drift, the marketing operations team set out to automate as many processes as possible, while sales sought to accelerate Pipefy’s speed to revenue.

Today, the team has three types of playbooks deployed across 90% of their website: generic catch-all playbooks, which target leads who want to better understand Pipefy or request a demo, vertical playbooks to target visitors who have a specific objective or use case, and ABM playbooks to capture inbound leads from target accounts. And across all playbooks, there’s a common denominator: higher-intent, more engaged visitors.

An Accelerated Sales Cycle with More Engaged Leads

“Opportunities sourced by Drift close seven times faster,” Wilfrid explained, citing that Drift leads are significantly more engaged than those coming from other channels. Gabrielle Oliveira, a Global Inbound Account Executive at Pipefy has seen the same pattern in her Drift engagements. “The leads that come through Drift are more technical than other types of leads,” she said. “Drift leads are much faster to close because they’re engaged — they’re the perfect leads.”

But Drift has also enabled Pipefy to experiment with a new approach to selling — by giving account executives the power to qualify leads. “Instead of having the [sales development rep (SDR)] do the first touch qualification, I can do the qualification myself and see in seconds if the lead knows what Pipefy is or is just lost,” Gabrielle explained. “It’s very rare that we have someone who is not a fit come through Drift.”

She added, “With an SDR, engagement goes down until we can reconnect on a demo. If I have the opportunity to be on Drift, I can use that momentum to bring the wow moment to the lead.”

And this approach has paid dividends for Gabrielle:

“With Drift, instead of spending 15 minutes with an SDR and 45 with me, I can reduce the cycle to 30 minutes. As a result, I can handle a lot more leads, convert more, and bring more money to the table.”

Creating a Superior Customer Experience

Beyond generating leads and accelerating their sales cycle, Gabrielle explained that Drift also supports Pipefy’s differentiated customer experience. “I’ve been working with customer experience for eight years, and I know that Drift contributes to it a lot. Whenever a lead isn’t able to reach out to us or has trouble joining a call, they can just re-open the Drift chat and they’re redirected to the same person. It makes the customer experience better,” she said.

By integrating with Salesforce, Drift keeps the Pipefy team from duplicating outreach efforts. “We’re integrated with Salesforce,” Gabrielle said. “So if a lead is already assigned to someone, we can see it right there. On traditional channels, we wouldn’t know if two people from the same company signed up, and we’d contact them from two different people. We couldn’t show that we’re an organized company that knows what we’re doing — it seemed messy. With Drift, we have the Salesforce information there and we can see if that lead is assigned to someone. With one click, we can redirect to their account in Salesforce and see all the history.”

And with a less than 10-second response time across the entire team, Pipefy is certainly creating a memorable experience for their customers.

As Pipefy gets increasingly advanced with how they use Drift, the team looks forward to being even more personalized with their approach — targeting users not just by what page they’re visiting, but who they are.