Drift vs. Salesforce Starter

It is recommended for any company; it is a comprehensive tool for teams interested in strengthening business management and improving efficiency. It allows you to automatically schedule support with customers, thus saving a lot of time. Large companies can establish a chat and communication between potential customers, answering their questions quickly; allow you to monitor and track your leads and new leads, to make it fully functional, it has a very affordable value so that it can be used in all companies, it will not affect their economic aspects.

Incentivized

If you own a business that has complex selling processes or requires integrations with 3rd party tools/systems, you should look at Professional, Enterprise, or Unlimited editions. Salesforce operates very well across pretty much every industry, but not all sales, marketing, and operational processes are created equal. If your marketing process requires a long list of sendable contacts then I would recommend adding on Pardot or Hubspot. Always start small and scale up, to avoid boxing yourself in down the road.

Incentivized

• Easy to implement - we were up on our site in hours.
• Increases the volume and quality of buyer conversations - visitors get to value faster and qualify themselves by chatting in.
• Surfaces relevant experiences and content to people faster based on targeted use cases.
• Brings your brand to the prospect experience to stand out in the market. For example, our mascot Ollie Llama welcoming visitors on the homepage with funny llama.

• Tracking phone calls is extremely easy when using the app on the iphone. After a phone call is complete it prompts the user to enter in call details.
• SalesforceIQ also automatically logs emails for us. This has saved us time from entering in information manually.
• SalesforceIQ was easy to set up and allowed us customization for fields that were relevant to our business.

Incentivized

• Whenever there have been challenges with the product, the team has always been hungry to fix the issues that we raise.
• In-platform reporting on conversion metrics can be improved. For example, it's not possible to report on business vs non business email capture rate (currently reported by our CSM every week), and to get the most detail about meetings that have been booked, you have to export data and review in Sheets/Excel. Drift responds quickly, and they're already working on this... so by the time you read this review, the reports will probably be fully functional in the platform.

• Price point for smaller startups. Not budget friendly.

Incentivized

The customer-facing usability is great, but managing drift from the back end can be challenging at times. This is mainly due to slow loading speeds when it comes to editing or viewing routing. Coupling this with no autosave function, changes are hard to make and can easily be lost.

The Drift team has been remarkably responsive to me. From support reps available in-app, to my account manager committed to my long-term success, to regular connections and interactions with their leadership team. They have been wholeheartedly committed to answering every question and solving every issue so that we can succeed as a team, and I can succeed as a marketer!

I have used a few different chat platforms, the most popular one being Intercom. They both have some similarities in functionalities and features. I have had more success with Drift and the calendar link/automation. I love the fact that a prospect can easily find my calendar link and book a demo without needing to speak with me.

Incentivized

Salesforce Starter is exactly what it says. It's specific to getting a small business up and running effectively, without unnecessary development or internal overhead required. It doesn't allow for a ton of customization, but it provides more than most other providers across sales, service, and integration/automating business processes. Some tools are more specific to organizations that want to focus on a specific area to grow or manage their business. That's where the other package types and integrations with specific tools come in

Incentivized

• Save time by allowing your inbound audience to access what they want immediately through Drift bots.
• Reducing friction you will increase your inbound audience engagement traffic.
• With Drift, our company has increased our qualified sales meetings booked more than 3x than when we used forms.

Incentivized

• We have noticed since we have started using SalesforceIQ to communicate items on customer account notes we have freed up hours of phone time between employees allowing us to better answer customer phone calls. This is especially true in our parts department where we have inside and outside sales.
• We tied in use of Salesforce to our bonus structure to encourage employees to use the software. It is the direction our business is going and we needed everyone to participate to make it work. The newer the employee the better they are about logging information and visits.

Incentivized