Drift, a conversational marketing platform, today announced the launch of Drift Video, the first enterprise-ready video platform built to start conversations and make B2B buying easy.

Since starting Drift, we’ve said there are two mega-trends that would shape the future of B2B sales and marketing: messaging and video,” said David Cancel, founder and CEO of Drift. “Over the last few years we’ve built an industry-leading messaging platform used by over 150,000 businesses, and now we’re expanding our Conversational Marketing platform by adding video.”

Drift, the world’s first and only conversational marketing and sales platform, announced the launch of Drift Sequences, a revolutionary new way for sales reps and prospects to communicate.

With context of conversations happening outside of email, Machine Learning to manage unsubscribes automatically, and the ability to send personalized messages to each website visitor, Drift Sequences is the first email platform designed to make email better for the recipient.

With Drift Sequences, sales reps won’t have to worry about missing an opportunity to have a conversation with a great prospect. If an email recipient doesn’t respond but visits the company’s website, they will be greeted with a personalized message from the sales rep and can start a conversation in real-time. In addition, if the sales rep isn’t available in real-time, Drift’s chatbot can jump into the conversation and take care of scheduling a meeting for later.

Drift today launched the Drift Platform to give developers tools to make Drift bots for marketing and sales. Companies have been able to deploy their own templated Drift bots for some time now, but the Drift Platform gives developers and businesses using Drift the ability to make custom bots and integrations.

The Drift Platform launches the same day as the Drift App Directory. Similar to services like the Slack App Directory and Microsoft’s Bot Directory, the Drift App Directory will allow customers to find and discover bots made by third-party developers, enterprise software makers, or Drift customers.

Developers can show what to submit to the app directory, but Drift will continue to focus on the development marketing and sales verticals rather than general offerings for enterprise customers.

You spend time, money and a lot of effort driving your highest valued accounts to your website. But when those VIP leads get to your site you force them to fill out forms. That’s like having a neon “open” sign on your storefront but a padlock on the front door.

Instead, roll out the red carpet for your dream customers by greeting them with a personalized message using Drift ABM.

Drift plans to bring its sales and marketing automation services to emails soon to expand upon existing services provided through live chat with a human or an automated bot.

“We started with web and app messaging, and in September we’ll announce we’re getting heavily into the email side of things — both inbound and outbound. We’ll get into voice at some point, we’ll get into video in a very specific way,” CEO David Cancel told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “We’re going to get into every way a company communicates with customers, every single one of these channels that exist over time.”

Ultimately, Cancel said, Drift wants its bots to capture all communication between sales and marketing teams and customers with the goal of providing customers insights or analysis of sentiment like Mattersight, IBM Watson, or Salesforce’s Einstein do.

"However, these are the questions I can’t answer with today’s tools:

• Why did this person buy?
• Who did they compare us to when it came to us vs. looking at competitors?
• What features are important?
• How will they define success with our product?

With all of those things, I can look at all the data available today and still have no idea.

The way that it’s built today, that type of stuff only gets there if a rep enters it into a field. “Here’s why this person decided to buy.” And in that case it’d be totally anecdotal, assuming they even bothered to do it.

"Under the new paradigm, conversations — not forms — drive the qualification process. And thanks to the rise of chatbots, sales and marketing teams can now have these conversations at scale.

Chatbots, on the other hand, never have to sleep. Chatbots can continue to ask leads the same qualifying questions that BDRs would ask.

To clarify, the goal here isn’t to replace humans, it’s to help humans manage multiple conversations and qualify leads more efficiently — that way nobody’s time is wasted.

Thanks to chatbots, sales and marketing teams can now choose to interact with only the best leads based on the rules and targeting conditions that matter most to their specific business."