Warmly vs. Drift
Warmly is a more affordable Drift with the addition of automating personalized outreach via channels like email and LinkedIn.
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Drift is undeniably a heavyweight in the chatbot space. But how does it compare to Warmly?
Ultimately, deciding between the two products depends on matching the right product to your existing tech stack and team capabilities. And for the average SMB, we think Warmly wins out on ROI.
To decide which option is best for you, here's a breakdown of how Warmly compares to Drift - including features, integrations, and price.
Warmly vs Drift: The Breakdown
Let's start by saying that Warmly offers almost identical features to Drift. Here's a summary of all those features:
...and here are all the Warmly features that Drift doesn’t offer:
Now, for more context, let's dive deeper into the comparable features offered by Warmly and Drift.
Drift: AI-Driven Passive Demand Capture
Drift helps sales teams qualify more leads through AI-driven website personalization. Their core product is an AI chatbot powered by customizable workflows that guides prospects in the right direction according to where they are in the buying journey.
Businesses can then bolster AI chat features with Site Concierge, which delivers individual website experiences to every customer based on analyzed interaction and intent.
Let's dive deeper into Drift's core features and how they work.
Bionic AI Chatbot
Drift's AI Chatbot takes the work out of qualifying prospects by delivering AI-powered responses to each visitor on an individual level.
Businesses can train the Bionic Chatbot to respond in specific ways to certain queries - for example, on the topic of pricing - and then leave the work of engaging prospects to AI.
The AI Chatbot is trained on content from your website, including sitemaps, blog content, and files, and it uses this information to answer questions. Content uploaded to the Content Library can be synced automatically, so the chatbot is always aware of changes to your products and services.
You can personalize the experience further in Drift's Playbooks, which are essentially manually inputted scenarios that guide the chatbot in answering questions about specific demographic situations or intent.
Finally, marketers can use AI voice customization to tweak the Chatbot's voice to be more on-brand.
Essentially, Drift's Chatbot leaves engagement in the hands of AI. Marketers and sales teams are free to focus their energies elsewhere, while the Chatbot works to engage website visitors and answer specific questions with no human assistance.
Site Concierge
Site Concierge is a new element to Drift's product line: a set of on-page interactive apps that adapt in real time based on visitor signals and engagement.
Visitors can interact with Site Concierge to get information on a specific product, book a meeting, and receive website content pushed to them based on what they're interested in.
For example, a visitor might be on a webpage looking for one specific piece of information. Instead of browsing the site, they can navigate to Site Concierge and ask the question to the GPT-powered search engine without navigating off-page.
Or, on blog pages, visitors can get personalized recommendations on what to read next based on their interaction with the page.
Drift Summary
Ultimately, Drift wants to take the process of engaging with prospects out of the hands of your marketers or sales reps and instead fully automate every website interaction.
This makes sense when you consider the acquisition of Drift by Salesloft. Both these companies are targeting high-traffic clients - companies with so many website visitors that it would be impossible for sales reps to follow through with every single one.
Drift's use of Content Libraries for Chatbot training also requires a large amount of content, which is a given for companies with an established brand presence - but not so much for companies operating on a smaller scale.
Drift is asking: Why bother when you could get AI to do it for you?
Warmly's answer? Demand capture becomes more efficient (and gives you more ROI) when you use intent data to target the right prospects at the right time and then loop in real, human sales reps to close the deal.
Warmly: Proactive Lead Qualification and Capture
Warmly combines website visitor de-anonymization with the power of AI chatbots to effectively filter your website traffic.
We find 65% of accounts visiting your website via reverse IP address lookup, and 15% of contacts from prospect opt-in methods like form fills or UTM tracking. Then, we tie website activity to the account and contact-level information that we enrich (demographic, firmographic, technographic, etc.) to tell you precisely who is landing on which page and when.
Plus, every session is cookied so we can retroactively backfill for all prior sessions once we've identified the visitor. Then, we can track that same visitor's digital footprint for subsequent visits to the website if they use the same browser.
After identifying the website visitor, customized inbound chat workflows kick in, tailored to all that account and contact-level data.
For high-intent visitors, you can let AI Chat do the talking. Our AI Chatbot uses buyer intent signals from Bombora, contact data from 6sense and Clearbit, as well as custom data from your CRM and sales engagement tools to craft custom messaging. And with real-time Slack notifications, you can loop in an actual salesperson at any time.
Inbound Chat Workflows
Warmly's inbound chat workflows operate through customer-led interaction with a chatbot, which guides customers through personalized conversations based on their responses, much like navigating a "choose your own story" book.
With Warmly, sales teams can customize these workflows extensively, including tailoring messages, defining potential responses, and specifying outcomes.
Additionally, Warmly enables personalized workflows by leveraging website visitor de-anonymization, enabling companies to automatically activate specific workflows based on various criteria such as demographic data, intent signals, CRM criteria, and traffic sources.
Here’s how it works with Warmly. First, you segment your website traffic data, creating different segments based on categories such as intent level, session time, referral source, and demographic information.
With defined segments, you can create inbound chat workflows that are personalized to each segment's situation and position in the sales funnel.
Here's what a personalized chat workflow looks like in Warmly. You have control over the options presented to the visitor - so if they're a visitor from a target account, you might want to explore their needs with them and direct them to book a demo.
AI Chat
For the prospects you know are showing higher levels of intent - for example, they've viewed your pricing page multiple times recently - you can hand it over to our AI Chatbot.
Warmly's AI Chat uses intent signals and other demographic data to craft personalized messages to website visitors based on all the information known about them. The messages read like human messages, and the visitor can interact with the chatbot without knowing they're talking to a bot.
Plus, Warmly's AI Chat can communicate with relevant sales representatives via Slack integration, enabling real-time engagement when needed. You can route notifications to a specific sales rep based on territory, deal stage, company type, and more, getting the right person in front of the prospect at the right time.
This approach allows for optimal engagement with prospects, ensuring sellers are looped in only when an account is ready for a human conversation.
You can turn off AI Chat completely for prospects who aren't in your ICP. Why waste valuable resources on someone who will likely never buy from you? (Until they switch jobs, that is—but Warmly will alert you as soon as that happens.)
Drift vs Warmly: The Summary
On the face of it, you might think there isn't that much difference between Drift and Warmly. We both offer near-identical products that do pretty much the same things.
However.
There are three core differences between us and Drift.
- Drift's workflows cater to enterprise-level companies. Warmly is purpose-built for SMBs.
If you're a small-to-medium sized business (SMB), you're relying on significantly fewer resources than the more prominent players. That means fewer sales reps, less money, and less overall brand recognition to get sellers in the door.
An SMB simply won't have the same quantity of content to prime Drift's Bionic Chat to work at its best. Instead, contact-level intent data and effective filtering of prospects enable you to work smarter by tailoring AI Chat to your ICP.
Warmly reveals the accounts visiting your site at both the contact and company level - Drift only does the latter, a symptom of a more traditional sales funnel strategy. With more contact data, you can craft better outreach campaigns to convert those ideal prospects into customers.
- Drift prioritizes automation in visitor engagement. Warmly leaves room for valuable human interaction.
Full-scale automation of chatbot features may be effective for high-volume traffic scenarios—where even a modest conversion rate yields substantial leads—but it's less suitable for smaller companies with far less monthly traffic.
Conversely, an effective sales strategy for SMBs is all about applying AI and sales rep interaction to the right people at the right moments.
We help you do this by analyzing buyer intent signals (website interactions, research intent, job changes and more) and qualifying leads according to your ICP. Then, we can craft a buyer journey corresponding to their current intent level and buying propensity.
TL;DR: Warmly leverages automation and workflows to extend the opportunity window for genuine human-to-human interaction. This ensures that sales teams don’t spend excessive time on outbound efforts and can jump in with the right prospects when they're most likely to buy.
- Drift is just one part of the puzzle. Warmly integrates everything.
An effective sales strategy doesn't start and end with personalized website interactions. Sure, your website is essential to your sales strategy. But it's still only one element of a successful sales strategy.
Even if you do integrate Drift and start to get really good results from potential prospects, you still have to integrate Drift into a wider sales prospecting strategy, where the end goal is a closed-won deal.
That's why we call Warmly an autonomous revenue orchestration platform. Because it unifies everything in your tech stack for one purpose: getting you more revenue. And it does this by harnessing the power of AI-powered tools alongside human interactions.
Wait- How Much Does it Cost?
Drift is excellent (if you’re looking for a purely automated passive lead collector). But with a $30k starting price tag, it's no longer within reach of SMBs.
There are several powerful Drift competitors and alternatives available, many of them with pricing and feature sets designed to serve a non-enterprise audience.
However, to stitch together these event-driven systems, you would need ZoomInfo or Clearbit to enrich the data, 6sense to gather the website intent, and Drift to engage with them live on the website. And SMBs especially don’t have time to deal with the complexity that comes with a hodgepodge of tools trying to accomplish what could be done with one.
Warmly is purpose-built for SMBs, and our pricing model reflects that. It's cost-effective and scalable, giving you options to integrate additional tools as you grow.
How Autonomous Revenue Orchestration Works with Warmly
Autonomous revenue orchestration involves combining intent signals with personalized, AI-powered outreach at every stage of the buyer journey. Then, we give you the flexibility to loop in real sales reps to close the deal.
So, what does the process look like?
The first step is to de-anonymize your website traffic. Once we've accomplished this, Warmly combines the data from common CRMs (Hubspot and Salesforce), engagement platforms (Outreach, SalesLoft, and LinkedIn), and intent platforms (6sense and Bombora) to create a database of your prospects and their intent level.
By unifying these traditionally disparate systems, we're laying the foundations for a genuinely automated strategy from the very beginning of the buyer journey (whether that takes place in the dark funnel or they actively search for a solution like yours on the web).
Using your ICP data, website traffic, and intent signals, we can prioritize accounts and choose the best way for you to interact with them - whether that's AI Chat, LinkedIn messaging (powered by Salesloft), or email outreach (with Outreach integration).
Personalized Email Outreach
Our AI Prospector integrates with your email sequencer of choice, whether that's HubSpot, Apollo, Outreach, or Salesloft.
Personalized LinkedIn Outreach
Warmly's integration with Salesflow makes it easy to craft personalized LinkedIn outreach for your ideal accounts.
Once you've successfully linked Warmly and Salesflow, you can use Salesflow to set up LinkedIn messaging campaigns and automatically add prospects to those campaigns in Warmly.
Or, leave it all to AI Prospector. This will automate the process of finding the right LinkedIn personas who come to your website and start an outreach campaign (including sending connection requests and messages) based on information like intent level and demographic data.
Warmly From Start to Finish
This entire workflow—from intent being triggered to outreach being fired—is automated, and all outreach messaging is designed to look like it comes from an AE.
This strategy delivers more consistent coverage and messaging, plus much faster and more proactive communication with high-intent prospects (ergo, revenue orchestration = automated.)
And we factor in flexibility, enabling you to easily integrate Warmly into your existing tech stack. No forced integrations. One unified, effective sales orchestration platform.
Launch Warmly In A Day
The onboarding process with Warmly takes just one day compared to Drift’s 30-day set-up period. The process looks like this:
1. Add Script Tag
Integrating Warmly into your website is as simple as copying and pasting a script tag into your site's code. As soon as that's complete, we can start identifying and tracking your website's traffic.
2. Define your ICP.
By setting up detailed personas and identifying target accounts within your CRM, you help Warmly focus on the prospects that align closely with your ideal customer criteria.
These personas and segments are crucial to an effective outreach strategy later on, whether you're focusing on email, LinkedIn (or both), or both.
3. Get started.
That's really all you need to do to get started. To discover how easy it is to start with AI Chat and personalized outreach on Warmly, check out our full guide to Warmly implementation.
The Full Guide to Getting Started with Warmly
Where to Begin with Warmly
If you want to spend some time playing with our features and finding out how they compare to Drift, you can try Warmly for free today.
Want to see the full scale of Warmly's integrations in action? Book a demo with one of our sales reps, who will take you through every Warmly feature and how they integrate with your existing tech stack.
Don't just take it from us, though - here's a selection of Warmly reviews for you to read (and maybe a Drift review thrown in there for good measure.)
