At Warmly, we believe that enterprise-grade revenue orchestration doesn’t have to come with an enterprise price tag.
Our goal has always been to bring AI-powered revenue orchestration to the SMB market, and our latest feature release is helping do just that.
Introducing Warmly’s inbound chat workflows, the new Drift sales chatbot.
Following the recent acquisition of Drift by Salesloft — which is just one episode in an ongoing series of acquisitions and consolidation in this space — many small and medium-sized businesses are looking for a more affordable way to orchestrate conversational chat workflows.
The State of Conversational Chat
Alright, a bit of background.
The revenue space (sales and marketing software tools) has been undergoing massive changes in recent months.
Some of these changes are technological (owing to the increased adoption of AI), but a lot of it is strategic and takes the form of mergers, acquisitions, and a general move away from standalone best-in-class tools to tech stack consolidation and all-in-one suites.
The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft is the perfect example of this.
Both tools, by themselves, are struggling to meet projected valuation and revenue outcomes.
The acquisition speaks to a challenging market environment not only for software companies but also for their customers, who are looking for ways to cut down on costs, reduce the number of vendors they are working with, and consolidate their software stacks.
This might make sense at the enterprise level, but for SMBs, it opens up a huge rift that was already cracking when Drift got bought by Vista Equity back in 2021 and shifted its focus towards large companies abandoning the small business.
SMBs simply can’t afford enterprise-facing tech like a Salesloft-centric stack.
Small businesses were already looking to Drift alternatives, but for many, this is the final nail in the coffin.
That’s due to the concern that the acquisition represents a lack of future development and the ability to innovate (bigger companies move more slowly).
So, small and medium-sized companies with aggressive growth goals who need to stay competitive are looking for a more agile alternative to conversational chat.
Well, here it is…
Warmly’s Inbound Chat Workflows
Warmly’s latest solution, inbound chat workflows, is a direct alternative to Drift’s conversational marketing function.
The difference?
It’s actually affordable for SMBs.
Sure, Drift has a couple more features that focus on the enterprise use case, but for what small and medium-sized businesses need, we’re basically at feature parity.
Here’s how it works:
A sample workflow with Warmly’s new sales chatbot
On the front end, customers interact with a chatbot that pops up in the bottom corner of their screen.
It’s completely customer-led, meaning they get a signal to engage, but it's up to them to initiate the conversation.
Then, depending on how they engage with the chatbot, they move down a logic tree of potential answers. Think of it like a “choose your own story” book. The answers they choose as they engage with the chatbot determine what content they see.
For example, here’s what the initial option set looks like on our own site:
What comes next depends entirely on which option the visitor clicks. For instance, choosing “Looking to learn more about Warmly” delivers this:
On the back end, you create what those conversational journeys look like.
Let me show you what I mean. Here’s what that same workflow looks like as you build it in Warmly.
At each level, you can craft the exact text that the chatbot displays, the potential answers a prospect can choose, and the various branches/scenarios that can come thereafter.
Zooming out, you can see how the whole workflow looks:
Every workflow you build should lead to a desired outcome, which will be relevant to the customer's needs as well as your business goals and processes. For instance, you might have the chatbot suggest that the customer speak with a sales rep.
The appropriate rep can then receive a notification via Slack, take over the chat, and even engage the prospect in a live video call right on the website using our warm chat feature.
In the workflow builder, you can choose which CRM owners to mention in Slack and even select a rule for whom notifications should go to if there are no CRM owners assigned.
Personalized workflows for relevant customer conversations
Here’s where things get really interesting:
Not every prospect needs to be presented with the same chat workflow.
Using Warmly’s website visitor deanonymization feature, you can identify who is visiting your website (at the company or individual level, depending on the prospect), integrate best-in-class firmographic and intent data, and then automatically activate a given workflow based on filters such as:
- Demographic data (for example, the industry that the company is in)
- Intent data (e.g., the number of people from that company who have visited your site)
- CRM criteria (such as deal stage or account owners)
- Traffic source (whether they came from paid ads, referral traffic, outbound email campaigns, etc.)
But that’s not the only conversational chat solution.
Warmly’s Approach to Website Chat
Our new conversational chatbot workflow tool is just one feature we’ve added to our expansion revenue orchestration solution.
For high-intent leads, though, we’ve actually got something even better:
Warm AI chat.
Our AI-powered chat solution gathers all of the intel you have on the prospect — thanks to integrations with third-party buying intent data from Bombora, best-in-class company and contact data from 6sense and Clearbit, as well as your CRM and sales engagement tools.
Then, it custom crafts messaging to convert website visitors into real sales conversations.
PS. Learn how the team at D2D Experts uses AI chat and sales emails that convert at 10x the rate of their human-written outreach.
The big win here is that prospects can interact with the chatbot in plain English, and it appears as if they’re speaking to a real person who not only understands what they’re after but responds in context.
It's a more proactive approach to website chat. That said, it's generally better reserved for identified site visitors who have demonstrated at least some level of intent.
Here’s how Max Greenwald, our CEO, recommends building rule-based automation to make proper use of both our warm AI and inbound chat features.
With this broad framework for website visitor interaction, you can strike the right balance between proactive chat for high-intent prospects and reactive chat for low-intent visitors.
That last category is important, too.
You don’t want to be wasting resources engaging with people who are never going to be your customers (such as a non-ICP fit), so why bother funneling them through to a sales rep through an AI-driven or inbound chat workflow?
Warmly: The SMB’s Revenue Orchestration Platform
The acquisition of Drift by Salesloft highlights one of the key problems with Drift originally:
It was too focused on the passive inbound chat use case.
Warmly’s introduction of sales chatbot workflows is an SMB-focused replacement for Drift, but rather than being a standalone tool; it sits within a wider architecture of AI and automation-powered revenue orchestration.
Here are just a few of the other features Warmly offers to help small and medium-sized businesses compete with enterprise-grade behemoths:
To sweeten the deal, you can get started for free right now without having to speak to a sales rep or go through a painful qualification process.
While our AI chat and inbound chat workflows are only available on our paid tier, you can start de-anonymizing your site visitors for free.