3.5: Don't Get Ghosted: Sales Tips To Keep Your Prospects from Going Dark (Eliav Cohen)

Sammi Reinstein: Hey, this is Sammi Reinstein, and you're listening to Conversation Starters. On this show, we talk all about bringing conversations back to B2B marketing and selling, because if there's one thing we know about doing business in the revenue era, it's that the best customer experience wins.

Speaker 2: Season three of Conversation Starters is brought to you by Really Good Sales Plays, a landing page built to inspire your sales team, whether they're inbounding, outbounding, or managing a deal. These plays are proven to generate pipeline and close deals so you can celebrate more wins. Check them out at drift. ly/ salesplays. Now, to the episode. Sammi, I've got a conversation starter for you.

Sammi Reinstein: Please.

Speaker 2: What is the coolest thing you've seen from the sky? You're flying somewhere, flying over land, water, something else, clouds. What's the coolest thing you've seen?

Sammi Reinstein: Okay. So, for sabbatical, I went to Canada, I went to Banff National Park and I camped there for a few days, and I left from Boston at sunset.

Speaker 2: I like where this is going.

Sammi Reinstein: Because I was going across time zones, it was sunset the whole way.

Speaker 2: That's really cool.

Sammi Reinstein: When I landed in Canada, it was like, the sun was still... And also the sun in Banff doesn't set until 10, it's wild. It's just light out, forever.

Speaker 2: That is also, I feel like, wildly disorienting, to just watch that. How long was that flight?

Sammi Reinstein: Long. Like four hours?

Speaker 2: Yeah, like a four hour sunset?

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Incredible.

Sammi Reinstein: Oh, it was probably a longer flight than that. Anyways. It was very cool, it was sunset the whole way. My brother and I were sitting next to a pilot and he thought it was cool too, so I felt very validated in that it was actually a very cool experience.

Speaker 2: Well, while not a pilot, our guest today definitely has seen some cool things from the sky. Our guest today is Eliav Cohen, who is not only a bot expert, but a hot air balloon pilot, professional enthusiast, if you will.

Sammi Reinstein: Eliav Cohen founded The Bot Lab, which is a chat bot service that aims to 3X conversions and accelerate revenue for businesses. He also built Helium, a platform that allows Drift chat bots to be used on third party articles, review sites and blogs. Eliav has been a Drift partner since 2018, and we can always count on him to come to us with new ideas for how to continue conversations with prospects. So, today Eliav is going to tell us his favorite strategies for re- engaging prospects who have gone dark, or dare I say, ghosted. Let's get into it. Eliav, thank you so much for coming on Conversation Starters.

Eliav Cohen: Heck yeah, I'm excited to be here.

Sammi Reinstein: I think, of all people, there are a lot of people that build bots, but I think the two of us are very passionate about bot building playbooks, Drift video, all of that kind of stuff, so I'm really looking forward to our conversation today.

Eliav Cohen: Yeah. Well, I'm excited to share some golden nuggets that hopefully people can take away from this, those one or two or three things, and apply those right away to be able to make a difference in getting the results you need.

Sammi Reinstein: Awesome. Okay. This podcast is called Conversation Starters, so not to put you on the spot or anything, but I am going to start off by asking you a conversation starter. We were talking about it a little bit before we started the podcast, but I'm curious, where is the coolest place you have traveled in a hot air balloon?

Eliav Cohen: I've been ballooning for a long time, and it's how I got into Drift. As you probably know, I had the balloon company that I started in 2016, had live chat on my site, and I was like," Hey, how do you automate this?" I used to literally pay$ 300 a month, that's how early I was in Drift. Anyway, I still use it for the balloon company too, but I'd say the most fascinating place I flew over, this morning I just flew over some wineries in Walla Walla, that was pretty cool, but I did fly in Chiang Mai, Thailand. That was pretty awesome, flying over little beautiful palaces, and monasteries, and the rice paddies. That was pretty epic.

Sammi Reinstein: Wow. Wow. My brother is in Thailand right now, so I'll tell him to find a hot air balloon and make sure he hits that. Awesome. Well, to dive in, Eliav, can you tell me a little bit about your background and a little bit more about The Bot Lab?

Eliav Cohen: Sure. I started building bots because I'd started the balloon company and started using it for myself. I think when Drift started, they were like," Ballooning? Why is this guy wanting to use our chat bot platform?" And my biggest issue was people are asking the same question over and over again, how do we not take phone calls and just have them convert online? Before that, I was involved in big billion dollar startups for a long time, and so eventually when we had built this epic chat bot that can answer every question about ballooning, which people can check out if you want to screw around with it, it's seattleballooning. com. You can ask normal questions, like," How high do you go?" Or" Can I drink in the balloon?" Or" Can I have sex in the balloon?" Normal questions people ask a balloon company. It answers every question. Out of that, basically, companies were like," Hey, can you help us build ours?" And I was like," No, I'm not interested getting back into it." And then we started building and had a ton of success, and eventually we became the super users on Drift. Now we basically build for all kinds of mid- market companies and enterprises that are starting to really jam on Drift. We're like," We're doing fine, how do we destroy it? How do we 300 X our conversations?" Out of that, where The Bot Lab kind of came out of eventually was, I realized, well, if you could have conversations on your own site, contextually, that's awesome, because I'd become obsessed with conversational content, conversational video, like, how do you get the highest engagement rate? I discovered it was on content. So I thought, well, all the content is on your site, what if you could use your same chat bot if you had an article on the New York Times? Or you had an article in Forbes? What if you could use your same Drift chat bot and no one had to leave Forbes and book a demo chat with you? That's where we built Helium to integrate it with Drift, basically it allows anywhere you're being talked about, you can now use a chat bot. That's kind of where we're at now, so we both do Drift consulting and optimizatiion stuff, and then we're really excited to have Drift bots be everywhere, so no matter where a conversation is, you can engage.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah, that's awesome. I'll have been at Drift for, coming up in January, for four years. I remember when I started, going back and looking at Seattle Ballooning and being like," Whoa, Drift can do a lot. I'm glad I'm here. I'm ready to dive in." And like you said, there are so many use cases that you can expand upon, from, not just chat, but so many other things like content, and contents indication, and video, and all of that. But today, what I really want to dive a little bit deeper into is a very hot topic for people in marketing, people in sales, people even in customer success, is what do you do if someone starts to ghost you? What do you do if someone becomes a little bit unresponsive? We're all about starting conversations, but what happens? How do you get that conversation started again? I think that you're in a really unique position to talk to this, having worked with so many companies and implementing these different strategies. To go right into one of my first questions, within Drift there's something called a playbook, which is essentially that chat in the lower right hand corner, what are some best practices that you can use for playbooks to reengage a returning site visitor?

Eliav Cohen: Yeah, so it's really interesting. There's a couple bots you have to have as part of your core, and I call this your core scalable set of bots. You have your main homepage bot, that's your general bot, and then the second bot you build after that is your returning visitor bot. From a stats perspective, and I'll share my screen here so that you can see it here, this is showing conversation stats, this is from one of our clients. You can see the top one, this is a homepage bot. It's like 4. 5% engagement, means it's slightly contextual, right?

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: Email capture, 32%, which is about average, 4. 8% meetings, not everyone's ready to have a meeting yet, people just have a question to you. This one is the returning visitor bot. You can see the stats are about 3. 8%, but it's a 48% email capture.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: With that, the best practice is, in general, it's to be somewhat personalized where you're using the custom attributes of at least their name, like," Hey John." If you don't know their name and haven't captured it, use the waving signal.

Sammi Reinstein: Yep.

Eliav Cohen: And then it says," Welcome back, you're probably here because you have a question or need to book a demo." It's a very general way to get back. I'd say another one, if I go to Seattle Ballooning, for example," You seem to come here a lot. Did you book yet?"

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: The way that you set these up is actually for a variety of reasons. Essentially, when you think about it, it's not just one playbook. One playbook can be a returning playbook, but it's why are they there and what stage are they at? This is where becomes really important. If someone is coming back and they haven't booked a meeting yet, versus someone who's already booked a meeting who's coming back, or someone who's already had five meetings and is coming back, shouldn't you give a different experience to those people?

Sammi Reinstein: Right.

Eliav Cohen: The thing is, it's awkward not to. I really believe it's weird that if I'm already talking to a salesperson, I come back to a site and you don't know who I am, and you say," Hey, you need to book a demo?" That's an awkward experience because I've already booked a demo, I don't need to book a demo. Maybe I have a question, I need to get back to my actual sales rep. So you can both do it in just a general, in the technical piece is going," Hey, how many site visits is it?" A better way to do it is you have Marketo or Pardot is to go," Hey, they're in a specific smart list, let's give it this specific conversation." I think that's the most valuable, but again, the core thing in a generally turning playbook is, use their name or company name, and then you can just say," Hey, you're probably back here for a reason. Did you need to put a demo? Or did you have a question, you need to get in chat with the person already in a demo with?" There's ways to make it deeper, and then in a general playbook, you can also use conditional branching to look at those different pieces, too, to make it cohesive. I always look at, you can build a million playbooks for every different thing, the better way to do it is create something that's scalable that works no matter who that person is, that it can conditionally branch. I know we're getting a little bit technical here, but it's the difference between having a hundred playbooks versus five playbooks that are still contextual and personalized in order for the right time, at the right moment, of why they're there to get to the right person.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you just brought up a lot of good points, but you said it's awkward if you come to the site and they don't really know. When you think about that, in real life, if I am going through a sales process, and then I'm passed off, I'd buy and I go to a CSM, and all of the sudden the CSM is like," Why are you here? Why did you buy? Why did you whatever?" In real life, that's not something we would stand for, we would find that very off putting. So in your real life, online buying experiences, we should be mimicking the best practice of understanding why you're here and tailoring it to your needs.

Eliav Cohen: Yes, and that's part of one of the challenges with Drift. You can create a separate playbook that fires, but what I find is a lot of times, if you can have your CTAs where you really get rid of forms, you have a button, like a Drift link. A Drift link is something that you can click on a button and it fires a specific bot. You can create those where you can still know, great, this is their third visit, they've already had a demo, they're already a customer, to give still a perfect experience, but then they're engaging. I think that the more I learn about Drift, and the more I've built these things, it's just going," How do you build these things scale- ably so that as you update them, it's not like, oh man, which one is firing here? Or what's happening?" You can change something in one bot, or two bots.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah. I think that's a really good point, and we always recommend everyone starts with that general, catchall, so you can just at least start by talking to everyone. And then like you said, you can update that so simply with just a conditional branch, by recognizing someone is returning, updating that hook, and then you can see it and your engagement rates, that works and that converts. Let's say we got someone into the conversation. We contextually updated based on the customer journey, they've talked to us, and then they got in touch with sales. And sales has been chatting with them, maybe they had a discovery call, and then, they ghost. I mean, every salesperson's worst nightmare, you don't want them to ghost. What would you suggest, maybe, that first re- engagement move to be?

Eliav Cohen: It's actually, in a way, as part of that discovery call, to use Drift video. I'm going to explain a way that, I'm actually training this afternoon, we've got 20 sales people on a call with a client of ours. We are doing sales enable with them, where they've said," Hey, we're going to promote people using Drift video, specifically to do incentivizing around it." They said," What are all the ways you can use Drift video and order through an entire sales process?" Before you get to the ghosting, there's two things sales people are trained to do that they don't do. Number one is always setting a meeting before the end of the call, you always set the followup meeting. In every sales organization, if you're in sales, or you're a director of sales or marketing, you're like," Man, we talk constantly, do your Salesforce activity, put your notes in, and, for the love of God, just please, set a follow up meeting." Because otherwise you're chasing it. One of the ways that I love using Drift video to make sure people don't ghost me, is in the initial call, I help find the need by asking a couple questions, and we do a quick little sizzle demo. The sizzle in sales, you always talk about sell the sizzle, not the steak. By getting quickly to a need, finding out whatever objections, figuring out who else needs to be involved, and then doing a quick little sizzle, that's good enough. Right after that, of course, my Zoom videos are tied into Drift video and it records them. At the end, I literally say," I'm going to send you a video. First, we're going to set up a time, but then I'm also going to send you a video that you can share with John and Mark and the other people that are part of the buying party, that they can watch it, so they're updated of exactly where it's at." Now, if they have questions, what's neat is, on the right side over here, they can live chat with me, or if they need to book a meeting, they can do it. I explain that still in the Zoom meeting, so when they get to that point, those other parties that I talk directly to them, that they can do that. Then I send them the Drift video afterwards, and then I can see they're watching it, and I can see that. I don't really get ghosted because I do that as part of the sales process to make sure it doesn't. Now, let's say we do get ghosted. You have to look at, why are you getting ghosted? Well, there's really only two reasons a salesperson gets ghosted. One is it's no longer a priority for the company, and there's some issue they had where you didn't really fill a need. There really is no need there, and they're like," I have other important things."

Sammi Reinstein: Right.

Eliav Cohen: There's just something else that is really important. You have fires that happen, everyone has fires and stuff they deal with. There's something that is more important than whatever you are selling or doing at that moment. That's where, if someone misses a meeting, you can send a quick email or you can say," Hey, sounds like you're in the middle of something super important. Click the link to reschedule." You have that already, a Drift link to reschedule, right? They can just reschedule their own meeting.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: Now, if they've really ghosted at this point and you didn't set a meeting, you're trying to get back in touch, I'd do a quick video. I'd just say," Hey Sammi, hey, it's Eliav here. I was actually just thinking about you because I was out ballooning this morning, we were talking about ballooning over Walla Walla, over some vineyards, and I realized I hadn't had a chance to catch up with you. I'm not sure if you have a ton of stuff going on right now, or there's other things that are more important, or whatever we need to do that we can't do Drift stuff right now. If you have a question or you need to get the rest of the folks involved, you can book another meeting with me, it's really easy. We can set a 20 minute meeting. If you have a question, you can hit me up here. Otherwise, just let me know if for some reason right now you just have other stuff going on, and just let me know when I should follow up in a couple weeks or month when stuff has shifted."

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: At that point you're telling them what to do. Most people will just chat and go," Yeah, actually we had some other stuff we had to focus on. I'm actually really interested still." But what you're doing, is it's called a buying atmosphere. A buying atmosphere, I actually learned way back in the day, I used to sell educational books door- to- door, 80 hours a week in college.

Sammi Reinstein: Wow.

Eliav Cohen: One of the things that they taught, it's like the best sales training you can get, meeting 40,000 people over a bunch of summers, trying to sell something nobody really needs, and creating needs. Our buying atmospheres, you basically are letting someone off the hook, and it's really important to do in videos, and also in the sales call where you say," I'll show you what this stuff looks like. You can tell me what you think, Sammi. if you like it, think it's something that would be helpful for you guys, we should look at working together. And if not, let's not work together."

Sammi Reinstein: Right, yeah.

Eliav Cohen: "Butat the end, would you mind letting me know? Hey, this is something we inaudible know." And you do the same thing of letting them off the hook in that ghosting video, you say," Hey, whether it's a fit or not, either way is totally fine with me, I just wanted to make sure to close the loop to make sure that we follow up with everyone that I didn't miss something, or that there was something I didn't answer for you, or maybe things have just changed. If you could just let me know either way, it's totally fine." When you say that, it basically opens back up the conversation, because now they're not feeling pressured to buy or you're trying to sell them. It's very, very unique, but you look it up, it's called a buying atmosphere. It's in both sales and in follow up, and anytime someone tries to go cold on you, you do a big buying atmosphere of," Hey, either way is fine with me. Just out of curiosity, what about the budget were you're having a challenge with?"

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: But you can always use that, it's a very fascinating advanced sales technique that stops ghosting, or allows you to reengage properly.

Sammi Reinstein: And within that buying atmosphere, there is a layer of empathy that you can show in video that may otherwise be lost in something like an email that gets lost in your inbox.

Eliav Cohen: I can tell you what doesn't work. What doesn't work is like,"Hey, did you see my previous emails? Following up." All those things are kind of bad sales people who don't know what to say.

Sammi Reinstein: Right.

Eliav Cohen: Realistically, I think all of us, when we're in a buying situation, I think even you, Sammi, if you were looking at buying a product. We just bought these$ 1, 800 electric bikes, these awesome rad bikes, my wife and I got. If a salesperson called us up after I left the store and was like," Hey, I was just following up," that's one thing, versus if they were like," Hey, I saw you did a test drive. I was just curious if you guys were still looking at bikes, you guys have already chosen? Either way is fine. I just want to make sure the information around electric bikes or whatever you choose is cool." I would go," Man, I just want to buy from that guy now."

Sammi Reinstein: Right.

Eliav Cohen: Only because they're not hard selling me, and that's with a buying atmosphere. I think a buying atmosphere, in any situation, it's really what all of us should do is, if it makes sense, you should buy it, and if not, you should not. There's a lot of truth to that, and as a salesperson, the more you don't care whether someone buys, and you can be in that space, it allows you to actually consult and help someone to move forward, and that's why you don't get ghosted. The reason you get ghosted is they're pressuring, they have their system, they're trying to hardcore follow up, and it just doesn't always match up with someone's buying style.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah, and I think that trust that you create when you do that, it's kind of like when I'm at a restaurant and I'm like," Are the chips and the salsa, are the nachos good?" Whatever it is. And they're like," Actually, I think you should try this." I'm like," Oh, I really trust that waiter. I want to continue this experience," whatever that is. I think that there's a lot of lessons from video and buying atmosphere that sellers are doing that a lot of marketers can learn from and implement in things like their chat bots, or implement in the CS organization too, if there's some ghosting or when it's comes to renewals.

Eliav Cohen: There's another way that you can use it too, with conversational content. One of the things that I do, which is really fun, is if there's a piece of knowledge you want to share with someone, you can actually build a piece of conversational content, which for anyone listening, you don't know what it is, it's a PDF next to a conversation. I then take, actually, YouTube video because you can't put Drift video directly in a bot, playing it, someday we'll get there where it's all connected. But, I just did a quick YouTube video about 20 minutes before this podcast of us flying over Walla Walla, created a little video. I uploaded it to YouTube and we're going to put it now into our bot, because as a contextual conversation, you can build out the context very quickly. You can do the same thing with contracts. You can upload a contract as a PDF, and on the side you can have a conversation that says," Hey John," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you can end it real quick, and that individual link is just for that company. There's all kinds of ways you can do personalization, it just depends on if you're doing it at scale, or if you're doing individual salespeople now using Drift in a more fascinating way. That's the value of Drift video, it doesn't require you building playbooks, you can just do a quick video and send it off, and it works really powerfully.

Sammi Reinstein: You had mentioned earlier too, you can take snippets and you can empower your buyer, the buying committee is like eight, 10 people, it just keeps growing. So you can empower your buyer with those Drift videos, now they can really be in charge and give those videos to the rest of the people on the buying committee, and that information is all in one place and they don't have to go back and go through all the emails and try to find everything. As the seller, you're empowering that buyer with the conversational content and having that as the contract where they can chat right back in.

Eliav Cohen: It goes to the Drift deal room now, which is so cool. Everything's in there, you have your buying party, you can see when people come on, what they've seen, what they haven't, what videos they've seen, and then anyone can go back and see whatever they need. But, it's really, I think the most fascinating right now, to say Sammi, is one of the companies that I work with, what they said when they wanted me to train their salespeople and then using Drift video specifically. And I'm also in some of the sales process, because we have big sales background, they just said," We just want them to do the same experience you did with us." We were walking through, dissecting it, and I said," Well, let's walk through what the process was." On the first call, we did a 30 minute phone call, we found the need. I walked through, I asked who the rest of the buying party was, who their decision makers would, did a quick little example of some of the cool things you use Drift for. And then out of that, you share it with the other gentleman. Out of that, we didn't even book a meeting then. You then re- booked a meeting off the Drift video, in my calendar, and he goes," Yeah, because you told me to." The other guy did it. They were both together. We did one more follow up call, and on that one. Then I sent the contract over in a Drift video, walking through it, explaining it in detail, so anyone else, the CEO who wasn't involved, didn't have to even watch the videos. We could explain what the value was, what was going to happen from the contract. And then he goes," And then you constantly send us the Zoom meetings that we have with our team because we record them anyway and can send them over." He goes," That whole process is so fast." He goes," We were happy to spend a lot because he was so quick in the process." He goes," We just want to fasten up our sales process."

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: With that it's like, that's sales enablement with Drift video. There's the other side the team has to do is how do we do the rest of the pieces of getting our core playbooks, and getting our returning visitor, and getting rid of our forms, and you getting off chili pipe, or all that kind of stuff that requires a lot of work to do. That's why they're saying, have someone who can do it, you can work with your services or you can work with a partner like us. They can help do it, just depends on how fast change management you need.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have touched on a lot of best practices and ways that you can implement Drift video, chat bots, et cetera, but are there any other best practices for re- engagement that we haven't touched on yet that you want to share?

Eliav Cohen: I think that it's not necessarily driven, it's a general sales thing. If you're a salesperson watching, you built some rapport, hopefully you built some real rapport and you are just talking about a baseball team, or the weather, or some BS type of building rapport. You share things in your life. I share around ballooning, and I use that as my unique thing, how I reengage with people. One of my clients is really into fishing. He's a competitive fisherman, I found that out. When I would get on with him, or I would reach out and go," Hey, I was just thinking about you. I saw a fishing thing of some guy going sail fishing. I was just curious about if you're doing any competitions coming up." It doesn't always have to be about you and your product, and I'd say 90% of the time, it should never be about your product, because you're really building a relationship because that's why people follow up. To give you an example, right here, I'm actually at my friend's house here in Walla Walla, who I met while selling back in the day when he was the COO of a hospital system. We talked about ballooning, I brought him ballooning, we built a relationship. He's no longer with that, and we're good friends. I think that's really what sales is about.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: There's something about being about yourself and trying to sell your product and pushing it so hard versus solving a need and really building real relationships. That's where I always look at it, is it's not about me. It's not about my product, it's," Hey, do I want to be friends with this person?" And if you talk to any of our clients at The Bot Lab, they're like," Yeah, we'd love to go hang out." And we do, and we get together because, at any point in the sales process, that's kind of how it feels, it's like," Wow, this would be a fun person to hang out with," and you should be sharing your life. If you're doing that, it's more than just a product. It's really now, it's a real relationship. I think people miss that, and that's around bots, everything, so even if it's with a chat bot, if you are in there immediately, as a rep, you now have a relationship where they can get in touch with you. But doesn't mean you don't have to talk about your product, you can ask them about," Hey, I know you're going to go fishing. How was it?" You can chat through the bot about that stuff.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: I just look at it as an extension of who you are and the way you do your own processes.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah, absolutely. As a seller, if you're building those real relationships, then it sets up the rest of the customer relationship for success, and you can continue those relationships. If you are passing this relationship off to a CSM, they can now build their relationship while you get to maintain that, so you're setting up the whole, yeah.

Eliav Cohen: And one more cool little Drift nugget, you guys all have Drift profile pages. I have never even sent a calendar link through even the Gmail extension, which is cool. I never ask someone like," Hey, when do you want to meet next?" For my clients, every single one of them just know, they have my Drift profile link and they can book a time whenever they need. The saving time is unbelievable, and it allows people to just go," Oh yeah, I have to go to the inaudible." Great, here's the link, go and book it. If you're doing things right, they all book it anyway.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: If you need to follow up, put in Salesforce, and say," Hey, I know you didn't have a chance. Hey, if you wouldn't mind booking it, did you still want to book a time or send it video?" And then they can book it off that. You use all these things together, that's why I love Drift video, Drift profiles, where you can use those effectively, because I really use those in combination.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: Just fascinating.

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah. Okay, I have one last question for you, and it's not about re- engagement, but it's the Conversation Starters podcast. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you this question, so I have to ask, what is the best conversation starter you have seen or used yourself in Drift?

Eliav Cohen: All right. I would say there's two. One of them, I was working with a very large coffee company, they were on Drift. The marketing guy, we'd come up with some different openers, which worked fine, and then I go to the site and it's this thing that says BVBVGBG. And I was like," What did he do?" I was like," What is that?" And I clicked on it, and it then said, buy a bag, give a bag to a veteran. And that BVBV. It was so mysterious, I clicked on it. Engagement was through the roof.

Sammi Reinstein: Wow.

Eliav Cohen: That was one that was really fun. There was another one where it all comes down to context. If you can be contextual to someone's exact need, it works. One of my other favorites right now, there's a company called Balto, and they do realtime gong. Gong is a postmortem, how long did you talk? Did you say right?

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: This is real time using AI, where it's like, you're on customer service, it's like, what you should say at this moment based on what they're saying. And the opener, their name is Balto, do you remember the Balto movie as a kid? There's like a Balto Alaskan dog that goes across the Arctic, it was from the nineties. So we literally said," Remember the Balto Disney movie?" And people are like," Yeah, I totally remember." So, being creative sometimes, really, really works. Sometimes being contextual to an exact need, that will always work the best. Sometimes you don't know the need, and so sometimes you just get to have fun with and do goofy stuff. What I always say though is, your bot starters, and your bot in general, should only be as goofy as your site can be. If your site is a five, uninteresting, and you all know if you're watching this, you're like," We have a pretty boring company. It's just our deal." Not everything is creative and wild. Sometimes it's really cool, you can do all kinds of creative stuff, but you can't have a bot be a 10, if your company's a five. I remember talking to a mortgage broker, they do mortgage broker stuff, and family offices, and they're talking to people in their forties, and they're using crazy emojis in their openers. You can't do that. You have to really think about, A, is it contextual? B, should we just do something mysterious? Or is there a real need we can find?

Sammi Reinstein: Yeah.

Eliav Cohen: And if you can do that in that basic opener, it works. Everything after that, is it contextual to why they're there on this page, and how do make it as contextual as possible. If you do that, you win. That's where you start to get into advanced bots, where you go, great, I've got my core bot, my general one. I've got a pricing page, and probably on my form, you have a second net bot because you won't get rid of your forms yet, because we're not all there yet, and we still love HubSpot and their whole form thing. Well, eventually you realize you could triple the amount of demos you get, and you're like," Fine, I'll get rid of my forms, Eliav." Sometimes it takes a while, but ultimately, it's not just the openers. The openers, the max amount you're going to get is about a 4% engagement rate, and it's like one and a half to 4% on any general homepage, even if it's creative. If you get rid of your forms, it's another way for them to engage, but now it's 70% email capture. You really want to think of, how are they engaging? And it's not just about the conversation opener, it's how do you get them to engage? And that's things like getting rid of forms. So, if you're like," Hey, I'm not sure if I should get rid of my form," feel free to book a time with me, and I will literally show you massive amounts of stats of why the amount of money you are losing by forcing people to do something they shouldn't be doing. It's hilarious. Mostly it'd just be for fun. You don't have to buy it, whatever, we'll just happily show you some real stats or something.

Sammi Reinstein: Well, Eliav, I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this kind of stuff, and bots and everything that you have done. You have a lot of experience in this and you've really done very advanced things, and really pushed Drift to another level. But, we have to end the podcast at some point, so if people do want to follow up and learn more, where can they find you? And where can they find more information about Bot Labs?

Eliav Cohen: Yeah, for sure, so you can just go to thebotlab.io. We do free, happy to just show people cool stuff about Drift. If you're like," Hey, how do we make our Drift better?" Happy just to do it for you. Drift sends us a lot of folks also that they connect us with, some of the super users. Happy to do that, you can book a meeting on there. And then if you want to learn about Helium where you can take your Drift and use it on a piece of sponsored content in someone else's sites, since we all know that's the highest conversion of any bot, that we've got that as well. We're testing that with a lot of Drift folks now as well. So anyway, it was really awesome being able to chat with you, and look forward to, maybe we'll do one of these from a balloon and we can do Drifting While Drifting, and do it from 3000 feet in the air in front of Mount Rainier, in front of an active volcano or something.

Sammi Reinstein: I love it. I'm going to get sign off from my boss.

Eliav Cohen: We'll get a Drift balloon. inaudible. It'll be a giant sponsored Drift balloon, and then we'll just fly around the country. So if anyone's interested that, you're like," Hey, I want to go on a balloon and talk to Sammi and Eliav about the random stuff, cool things about Drift, while flying in a hot air balloon," as I burn every 30 seconds to stop you from talking, it'll be pretty fun.

Sammi Reinstein: That is awesome. Well, thank you so much, Eliav.

Eliav Cohen: Awesome. Cheers.

Speaker 2: My head feels like it has inflated like a balloon.

Sammi Reinstein: Oh my God.

Speaker 2: With the amount of playbook re- engagement strategies and knowledge I just got.

Sammi Reinstein: How many hot air balloon puns can we fit into the outro?

Speaker 2: I'm already out. I'm just inflated with emotion about this.

Sammi Reinstein: I am up in the air. No, that doesn't even work.

Speaker 2: Sky high.

Sammi Reinstein: Sky high.

Speaker 2: All right. I think we should stick to Drift and playbooks as our career, not pun-

Sammi Reinstein: Not pun.

Speaker 2: Enthusiasts.

Sammi Reinstein: Not puns, but I agree with you. Eliav is just full of information, and truly has been innovating with Drift for a long time.

Speaker 2: Four years.

Sammi Reinstein: Four years, so I'm always very curious to talk to Eliav and learn more about what he's up to, and how he's really pushing Drift to the next level in using some of these really advanced chat bots.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I love the way he integrates a lot of the different components of Drift, like Drift video with conversational content, and our general chat playbooks, email. You name it, he's got it. I will link in the show notes Eliav's contact info, should anyone want to learn more about these deep practices and methodologies he has. I would really encourage you to explore them as well. And if you're not started with Drift, do not fear, these things come with time. As we said, Eliav has been with us for four years, so he's had plenty of time to play. But, we hope we've got some great re- engagement strategies out of it, whether you are a direct user or not.

Sammi Reinstein: See you next time. Thanks so much for listening to Conversation Starters. If you liked this episode, please leave us a six star review by clicking the link in the show notes. And hit subscribe, so you never miss another one. You can connect with me on Twitter @ sammireinstein, and follow all of our shows at Drift podcast.