Drift Unveils New Products, Siftrock Acquisition, Key Partnerships At HYPERGROWTH Conference

September 5, 2018
Written by Brian Anderson
Published in News Briefs

Source: Drift (via Twitter)

Drift, a conversational marketing and sales platform, unveiled new products, partnerships and an acquisition at HYPERGROWTH 2018, the company’s annual event hosted in Boston. The announcements enable Drift customers to quickly engage with prospects by removing form fills from digital advertising and turning them into conversations.

The new product, dubbed Conversational Advertising, is designed to connect customers that engage with digital advertising directly with a brand, enabling companies to have conversations with their prospects at the pique of their interest without potentially turning them away with a landing page. The company also unveiled Drift Assistant, a solution designed to handle digital paperwork for marketing and sales reps. For sales reps, Drift Assistant can help gather info for upcoming meetings, send reminders and notifications for sales follow up and provide more information on prospects to fuel relevant and contextual conversations.

“The last decade in B2B sales and marketing was all about the business following up later,” said David Cancel, Drift Founder & CEO, in a statement. “But today, B2B sales and marketing have to be about now. The internet has changed everything and put customers in control of the buying process, not the business. As a result, people won’t put up with waiting days and weeks to get a response — they want answers now.”

Drift Acquires Siftrock To Streamline Email Management, Marketing Engagement

The company also announced that it has acquired the email management solution Siftrock for an undisclosed fee. The acquisition will power Drift’s Assistant for Marketing, and positions marketers to automate their email management processes, create conversations with prospects via email and keep all the data being gathered from those conversations up to date.

“Last year, we started talking about reinventing email and focusing on conversations and replies instead of opens and clicks,” Cancel said. “Siftrock has built a best-in-class product that manages email replies at scale, and this acquisition will help us deliver on that vision even faster. But most importantly, this is a move that adds real value to both of our customer bases immediately."

Tied into the product announcements and SiftRock acquisition, Drift also unveiled three new partnerships to position the company to offer more value to its customer base. The three partnerships include:

Marketo for marketing automation;
Demandbase for account-based advertising; and
Outreach for sales engagement.

“At Drift, everything we’re doing is about removing friction, shortening the sales cycle and connecting businesses with the customers who are interested right now,” said Cancel. “Today, we are excited to share what the future of B2B buying will look like.”