Traditional sales and marketing methods have failed to keep pace with how modern B2B buyers purchase goods and services.

Meetings, phone calls, and email are still important B2B channels but how can you have immediate conversations?

Conversational Marketing is about having direct one-to-one conversations to connect with customers and offer help.

By using targeted messaging and intelligent chatbots to engage with leads in real-time (while they’re on your website), you can connect with people in real-time and convert leads faster.

That’s why I interviewed Dave Gerhardt (@davegerhardt), VP of Marketing at Drift.com and co-author of the new book Conversational Marketing. Dave is also known as DG.

Share a bit of your background and what does Drift do?

DG: So, my background. I don’t even know where to start. I love marketing. I do marketing at Drift. VP of Marketing; been here for three-ish years right since the beginning of the company.

The way that I talk about Drift is that Drift connects you now with the people who are ready to buy now.

Which is a significant change from how traditional marketing typically works, where most of the traditional marketing and sales systems were kinda built for later? Go to my website, fill out this form, and somebody on the team is going to follow up with you later.

But you know, there’s just been a huge shift in the way that we all behave and communicate online, and the now is more important than ever.

I think about walking outside this building: if I called Lyft on my phone, the driver would be there in about one to two minutes, and that’s what we expect from everything. Except in the B2B world, where the rules, for some reason don’t apply to how we actually all do things in real life.

Brian: Right.

DG: So, our mission at Drift is really to transform the way businesses buy from businesses, and the way that we do that is through conversational marketing.

Brian: Well, that’s awesome! And so, that sets us up actually.

Tell us about Conversational Marketing?

And what motivated you to write the book? Why now?

The reason we wrote the book is that we’ve just heard so much about the power of conversational marketing, we felt it firsthand.

We use conversational marketing and Drift to run our whole business, and we have become one of the fastest-growing companies of all time in this industry. And it’s not because we have some secret, but our secret has been we’ve used our own product and really made conversations the center of our business.

And so, as we created this category of conversational marketing and started to educate more people about it late last year, we were like, “You know what? It’s time to write the book.”

We’ve wanted to write a book. We had enough stuff to say, case studies, examples, methodologies, playbooks, blueprints, and all that stuff.

And so, you know we said, “Let’s make 2019 the year that we write the book, and really do the best job we can trying to help educate the future of marketing and sales on this next wave.”

Brian: Well, it’s really well done.

Why do marketers need to rethink their content/lead generation?

DG: Because content’s a commodity, right?

Everybody has a podcast. Everybody has a blog. Everybody’s into videos. Everybody’s on social media.

Content five, ten years ago you could be like, “You know what makes us unique? We are a B2B company, and we have a blog.” And people are like, “Blogging? No way!”

Today, all that stuff is a commodity, and nobody’s going to be on their commute home tonight being like, “You know what I wish I had more of?

I wish I had more content from a B2B brand. Like, I need another B2B podcast. That’s what I need.” Right? And so, there’s got to be some other way to compete.

You can’t just write a four-page PDF and slap a form in front of it and say, “Here you go sales team. Here are some leads.” Because we’re all kind of starting to ignore that, right?

I try to avoid filling out forms if I can.

I hate talking on the phone. I never answer numbers that don’t usually call me. I never reply to cold emails. And so, something had to give. And that’s really the shift that we’ve seen in the market.

And something that David (who I wrote this book with; he’s the founder and CEO of Drift) the thing he talks about is, he calls it the shift from supply to demand. Right?

Customers have all the power today. Ten years ago, they didn’t have any of the power, and so if you sold iced coffee, you could be the only person that sold iced coffee.

And you could say, “You know what, Brian? You’re going to have to go through my process, and you want one of my iced coffees? Great! Come back at 5 o’clock tonight. Call me on this number, and I’ll talk to you.”

Where now, customers have all the power, right?

By the time I’m ready to buy an iced coffee, I’ve already evaluated four or five other companies, and I’m there in your store for a reason.

Really, the concept that information is free now, it’s not something that can be a differentiator for you anymore.

Brian: I was just thinking you sell to marketers, right? And so, naturally, we’re kind of a snarky bunch. We know how things are played, and so it’s about building trust with people as well. I just wanted to hear the story; I was reading the book, but also, I first heard about it, I think it was a year ago. This whole idea of the #noforms movement.

How did the #noforms movement get started and what do you mean?

DG: What do I mean by “no forms”?

That’s a loaded question. So “no forms” is pretty, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not a rhetorical question, but you know what I’m trying to say, right?

Brian: Right. Right.

DG: You need no forms because of the whole process that I think marketers got into this world of just abusing forms, right? And I’m not preaching to anybody;

I did this too, right?

I remember one of the first things I did at Drift.

I wanted to write an article about the Growth Marketing influencers you should follow on Twitter. And so, I made a Twitter list, I put it in a Google sheet, and I put a form behind it.

And I said, “Hey! You want to get my list of 50 people to follow on Twitter? Put your email in here.” Like, that person’s not a lead. Right?

There’s no intent there. I’m just gating this thing that is a commodity, and so we kind of started this whole “no forms” movement to challenge marketers to rethink how they do demand gen and how they capture leads.

It started because about three years ago David Cancel called me one morning on my way into work and he’s like, “Hey! You got a second?” And I knew something was wrong because he never talks on the phone. He only texts. He only sends IMs, Slack, WhatsApp, and text messages.

So, when he called me, I was like, “I’m getting fired. Here we go.” It was actually worse than getting fired.

He was like, “Hey! I think we need to get rid of all the lead forms on our website and our content.” And I was like, “Okay. And do what?” Like, I’m your first marketing person here. You pay me to generate leads, and you’re taking that away?

So, what are you going to measure me on? And he’s like, “No, idiot.” He didn’t say that.

But he’s like, “You’re missing the point. If we’re going to build a business around conversations, we need to lead the way, and we need to remove all of our forms and show businesses how to generate demand and drive sales without having to gate content and use lead forms.”

And so, it was really like a pivotal moment for us, because it’s like, “Alright. If we’re going to build this thing, we’ve got to live it firsthand.”

And it was amazing because it wasn’t just a marketing lesson, right?

I remember sitting next to two of our engineers, we shared a little table together and they’re like, “Okay. You’ve got no forms, so what would you do here?” And they’re like, “We’re building this thing as we go on the spot.” It was super transformational for our business because we were able to see how it worked firsthand.

But then we got to go and educate the world, right? Because you say “no forms” to marketers, people are going to jump off the side of the boat.

But for us, we were like, “Hold on. Let me show you how you w