The Drift to Salesloft Deal

The exact boundary between marketing nurture and sales follow-up has long been a source of conflict, particularly since the likes of Outreach or Salesloft became a mandatory part of the enterprise tech stack. Both sales and marketing now have tools to send multi-channel outbound communication sequences. As such, there has been plenty of talk in recent years about the overlap between marketing technology and sales technology.

Web chat is one area where marketing and sales often clash about technology ownership. The primary internal users of web chat applications are often business development teams, yet the technology itself is owned by marketing as part of the website stack. Marketing control of chatbots is often used to justify this split, but bots are generally a secondary use case for web chat. Investment in web chat applications is driven by the live chat capabilities, providing either BDRs or SDRs the ability to engage directly with prospects online.

A Question of Ownership

Conversational marketing tools have a unique place in the technology stack, because of the potential overlap in ownership between web teams, sales teams and marketing operations teams. The poster child for marketing-driven chat has long been Drift, with its best-in-class personalisation capabilities and its focus on conversational marketing. Chatbots built on the Drift platform are pitched as a tool for marketing campaigns, but they have equally effective use cases across the wider business. Drift can even be included as a touchpoint in sales outreach sequences.

The clearest evidence for the multi-disciplinary usage of chatbots came last week, when Drift was acquired by Salesloft, a sales engagement platform. There has been speculation that the acquisition might herald a wave of mergers between sales technology firms and marketing technology vendors. However, there's little evidence that Salesloft want to become a platform for running marketing campaigns. Instead, it is more likely that Salesloft are looking to diversify their platform beyond the core email capabilities. Given the recent crackdown by Google and Yahoo on cold email that is a wise move.

A Question of Touchpoints

Sales leaders reacted to the recent Gmail email deliverability restrictions by looking for new ways to engage with prospects. In many businesses, the pandemic-induced switch to digital selling simply replaced in-person touchpoints with email-based ones. The limitations of that strategy are becoming apparent. An increased focus on events has been one reaction to the problems with current digital sales programs. An expansion of web-based touchpoints is another. However, that could lead to additional conflicts between marketing and sales.

In the press release announcing the deal, Salesloft promoted Drift as a way for sellers to engage with buyers further up the funnel. That's an awkward claim for marketing teams trying to reclaim email nurture campaigns from trigger-happy lead development teams who often overuse sales outreach sequences instead of recycling leads back to marketing. The deal may not pose a competitive threat to martech vendors, but it may still cause problems for marketing teams trying to clarify the distinction between marketing campaigns and sales outreach sequences.