40: Modern Buying With Dave Gerhardt From Drift

David, this has been a blast. Tell, tell, um, everybody out here, um, how they can, you know, learn more about drift or, you know, where they can go to learn more about you and all this other stuff. Cause I find it fascinating. Yeah. So, so number one is go to drift.com, chat into the bot and say, uh, you were listening to a Facebook live with John Barrows, uh, do that. Uh, and then I'm on Twitter at Dave Gerhardt. And also I, I do try to reply to every interesting email that I get. So my email is DG at drift.com. All right. Good morning, everybody. This is John Barrows with make it happen Monday. Hopefully you're all having a fantastic day. I'm sitting here. I'm super excited for a couple of reasons for today's session.

One is because, uh, I had a fantastic weekend. My Patriots pulled it out this weekend and they crushed it. Uh, it was a little bit suspect, uh, the other, but they, they pulled it through him. But the other reason is I'm actually talking with Dave Gerhardt here, uh, over at drift, who's a company that I've been following for quite a while and, uh, really excited. One of the hottest companies out there right now, and especially based in Boston, I'm super excited to be talking to you. So Dave runs marketing, director of marketing over at drift. So say hi, Dave, how's everything going? What's up, John? Thanks for, uh, thanks for having me. We, we just did talk offline that we're not going to spend too much time gloating about the game yesterday, but, uh, you know, I'll say, I'll say the same thing that I, that I said to you is my wife asked me, she said, doesn't this ever get boring?

And I looked at you, I said, Nope. I will leave it there. Well, I will say one more piece to that. Like, so I'm 42. I don't know how old you are, but I'm 42 years old. I'm 30. Okay. So you're, you're young. I mean, I, any kid who's been 20 years old, any kid who's 20 years old or younger in new England has no idea what they're experiencing right now, because this is like the golden age. I mean, I remember when Foxborough and we sucked so hard. So I have such a good appreciation for this. Um, but yeah, so anyways, we're going to glow. We got one more game to go though, man, we can't glow too much. So that's right. Um, but anyways, not to turn everybody off on here because everybody knows I'm an obnoxious Patriots fan.

Um, but get to the point of why we're chatting. So last week I wrote a blog post on how we bought Drift. Yeah. And, um, it was interesting because it really struck me as the modern sales approach right now and how things are evolving so quickly with technology. And so for those of you who don't know, uh, you know, some of my audience might know, not know who Drift is, uh, did, could you give us kind of a little background on, on what Drift's all about, where it came from and kind of what you guys are doing right now from a sales and marketing standpoint to change the game? Yeah. So, uh, Drift is, uh, what we say Drift is the new way that businesses buy from other businesses. Uh, and, and really it stemmed out of this idea.

Uh, so the two founders, David Cancel and Alias Torres, they have been building marketing and sales software for the last 10, 15 years. Uh, they built a company called Performable, which was acquired by HubSpot and they left HubSpot, uh, right before the IPO to go and start Drift. And, and they started the company because what they realized was this was, uh, 2014, 2015. And so like, you know, everybody, everybody was starting to get these things. It's crazy how, how time flies. Like not everybody has had smartphones, uh, you know, it's really been the last two or three years and, and met and, and zoom companies like zoom and Slack have all taken off. And what they realized right around that time was like, Hey, this is how we're all starting to use in our personal lives.

We're all starting to communicate in real time, uh, via messaging, but on the business side of things, we expect people to go to our websites, fill out these long ass forms. Right. Uh, and, and go through this process that is just filled with friction. Whereas like on the consumer side of things, like I expect that I can go to your website, I can find anything I want to know without ever talking to your team. And if I can't find it, I can Google, you know, John Barrows training alternative, and I can find out who your two or three competitors are and I can go with them. And so that's the long winded way of, of explaining kind of how this company, uh, came to be. And, you know, like, like many things in the software space, like it's all based on timing and now messaging has absolutely exploded.

I think the frustration with, say it with, with shitty sales and shitty marketing tactics has, has kind of gone through the roof and, and that's, you know, that's how you and I got connected and that's why we're here. Yeah. I love it, man. And it's funny you outline that because that's the exact, that's the exact evolution that we went through. So two years ago, I was all convinced that selling my individual portal license was the way to go. Right. So I went all in, I redid my website. We, uh, I'm not joking. We went all in on HubSpot, uh, for marketing. And, um, I think we did 120 landing pages where it's like every single piece of content was there and it was lead flow and all this other stuff.

And, you know, that was great, but the, it was almost like the big dig in Boston. It's like, by the time we did that, it was almost irrelevant. I'm not saying irrelevant. It's still work, but now we're on to drift. And you'll notice now, for those of you who are listening to this or watching, you know, if you go to my Facebook live page now and you type in the chat, uh, you actually chat in help, you know, that's drift all day. You know, it's like, what do you need help with? And it's, Oh, I need help with prospecting. Well, what about prospecting? And then it gives you a chance. And then it gives you like the very specific content that is relevant to what you're looking for. And we don't even have to get engaged at this point.

And we're tracking all that information on the backend. So we're gaining insights into your user habits. And so we can retarget you and remarket to you. So this is definitely to me, uh, kind of drift, uh, my, my, the guy I'm working with Lucas, who's running most of my social stuff. You know, he, he's the one that you guys prospected to him on Slack through an alumni channel, paint him. We already knew about you. Well, he really knew about you. And then he brought it to the table to me and I was like, all right, cool. And when he set up that first chat bot and he sent it over to me, he's like, John, type in help. I was like, all right, fine. You know, how good is this going to be? And I was like, help.

And it went boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I was like, holy shit. This is fantastic. So that's on the marketing side of the house, right? Uh, well, I'm sorry. There's obvious implications here from a, from a help desk standpoint, right? From a service standpoint, I need help here. Most people don't want to talk to some frontline, you know, wet behind the ears kid who has no idea what he's fucking talking about. And then, you know, have to go through a half an hour of that and get elevated. Right. So obvious implications, chat standpoint from a service, right? That's, that's no question. Let's talk about from a sales standpoint, how, how is drift changing or how are you evolving and, and, and to helping clients sell more effectively and attract people?

Yeah. So, well, I want to, I want to dig into that for a second, because that was the number one objection that we had when, uh, when we launched is everybody's like, Oh, okay, but this is just chat. And we're like, no, this is the first chat. That's actually going to filter out the noise. Because what we found is go talk to any, um, I guess it'd be like the inbound sales team, right? Go at any of these companies. And they all have tried live chat and they loved it because it would be the easiest deals they would close because it's the highest intent. It's people that saying like, Hey, I already know who you are. I'm here. Don't talk to me. I'm ready to buy. Right. The problem is that it would be like 98 out of a hundred conversations were shit.

They were all, you know, support related, um, spam or like, Hey, how do I integrate this with that? And reps don't want to deal with those conversations all day. And so we knew that what we had to do to be successful in this market is we had to, we had to weed out those conversations. And that's why, uh, you know, that's where chatbots come in. And I think like, there's so much hype around chatbots and AI and machine learning and this and that. And there is a lot of BS out there and it's buzzed, but from my, from a funnel and a marketing and sales perspective, I can tell you that the hype around chatbots is so real because it can do exactly what, what you're saying. So let's say for example, a prospect comes to your website.

Um, they have, they might have a different set of questions than somebody who's already a customer who's looking for help. That help conversation could get routed to the support person. Whereas somebody else who we could say, Hey, this person is the VP of marketing at Dropbox and they're curious about something. Let's send them to that, to that rep. And so that's where the, the smartphone piece comes in, which is like, I would know as a rep, um, I would have a list of my target accounts uploaded into drift. And I would get an alert when John, uh, the VP of marketing at Dropbox was on the pricing page and it would say, Hey, John from John from Dropbox is on your website right now. Do you want to say hi?

Uh, and so, so there's, there's a bunch of different threads in there, but it really all comes down to like using bots to help route people to the right person at the right time. And that, that can be support. We're really focused on, on marketing and sales. Like we will tell you, if you go to our website and you, and you request a demo, we ask you, Hey, are you interested in marketing sales or support? If you say support, we actually say, ah, you know what? We're not a great fit for support. And that's because we have focused our entire business, like on generating revenue. Um, and that's how we're using, that's how we're using real-time messaging. So easy to, easy to weed out support had to be number one, like table stakes at the beginning.

See, so this is so super fascinating to me because, you know, I talk all the time about the death of the average sales rep and, you know, like you mentioned, artificial intelligence and all these different things. And to your point, there's a lot of hype about it, you know, but what I've settled on here is, you know, AI and all this machine learning and everything like that, it's going to make good sales reps, great, great sales reps, incredible. And average sales reps are relevant. So talk to me about those, like the impact this is having, because, you know, and I'll give you some context here, you know, there was a post about actually about two or three years ago where it talked about, you know, there was a VP or there was a VP or a CEO, a CEO posted on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I'm never going to hire another sales rep ever again in my life.

And, and his, and his point was, you know, sales reps are all incentivized for the wrong reasons, right? Commissions monthly, that type of stuff. So we're not customer centric at all. Um, and so what he's going to do is he's going to drive marketing, right? So marketing who's getting smarter and better and faster and all that others and more personalized, he's going to drive that. And then he's going to hire more like customer success people, customer service people. So within those people hit it and really get sales out of the way. And my positioning to him was, look, what you just described about sales reps, that's what shitty sales reps do, right? Like what you just described about, you know, customer service, that's what great sales reps do.

So help me understand the evolving role of sales in this equation. If I can, if I can do marketing automation, right. And it's getting better and better and smarter and smarter. Artificial intelligence is being more targeted with our outbound messaging to people. Then it drives somebody to the website and then a drift pops up and now it helps them navigate through, uh, to the, to the, to the point where they're almost ready to buy for crying out loud. And then we've have a customer like, where does, where does the, the traditional sales rep fit into that equation? Yeah. So, so there's, man, I love this. This is so fun. There's so many different things to, to, to, to, to go into in there. So number one, I think this is worth saying up front is like, we actually don't think that, um, we're going to replace sales reps.

Like we think of it as this, um, it's all about customer experience, right? Like because of info information is free. There's so much stuff out there that you and I can learn before we ever buy. You have to win on customer experience. And, and like, let's use zoom. We're, we're recording this over zoom right now. Um, why zoom is the same product as all these other, uh, video conferencing. Why did they win? Well, because they made it really easy for, for people to buy. It worked. It has a great customer experience. And this is in a, this is an industry that's super commoditized. Right. And so, so if I didn't, if zoom wasn't working for me, I could just go Google like, you know, best web conferencing alternative, go with them.

They take my money. So you have from WebEx to join to blue jeans to zoom and by far zoom is by, you know, and I'm just like, whatever. Okay. But, but, but, but so, so, so we think about like bots and AI as, as, um, it's all about improving the customer experience. And so I think, you know, what gets misconstrued a lot is like, uh, it's about making the VP of sales happier. Right. Because if we use bots, then our reps can make more calls, they can send more emails. And that ends up back to the same shitty process that we have today. We think of it as a, we think of it as bots are going to improve the customer experience. And what I mean by that is, oh, you're Dave from drift. You're on the pricing page.

You've been in here. You've been here three times already. You're also using a Salesforce and optimizing on your site here. Let me serve you this. This is the best. And oh, by the way, we know you're at drift, which has raised X million dollars. You can take the fast lane right to our sales rep. You don't have to fill out any of these forms. That's how we think about it is it's like the bots are going to do the heavy lifting at the top of the funnel. They're not going to get on the phone and sell. And, and, you know, as a buyer, I'm like, I am the, I would be the buyer for drift as a, as a marketing guy. I'm still skeptical. I still do want to talk to somebody, but I don't want to deal with the, it's basically like the first three or four steps of the funnel.

You shrink those out and you can just get connected. And so the, the, the positive side is like reps literally can walk into work and spend all day doing what they love doing, which is actually selling. And then the marketing team can focus on what they should be paid to do, which is drive conversations. I'm going to get people to our website. I'm going to get them to start conversations and the reps can do the rest. And the bot is the layer that, that that's all the way in the middle. I love it, man. That's, I mean, and it's without question, like, you know, my, my whole positioning on this and I'm trying to, I'm actually doing a keynote coming up here. Uh, the first like full, like I, I done a bunch of keynotes, but I've never been kind of the, the main guy.

And I'm trying to figure out what to write. And I'm coming across on this, on this idea of context content. You know, I stole this from Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, he talks about, you know, everybody taught marketing or everybody talks about content is King content is King. He said, fine. If content is King, then context is God. And that to me is sales versus marketing, right? Marketing is content. Sales is context. So if marketing can drive the content, that'll get the right people on the bus in the right position to have a conversation and sales can put the context around it. We got a nice little combination there that can go out and kick some ass. But if sales is continuing to take it from a content standpoint and just crank out template emails, make generic cold calls, stuff like that, then you guys are going to wipe out half the population, right?

Yeah. I mean, we, we think of it as like the technology has gotten so good today. You could know who somebody is before they get to your website and why they, and why they came there. So it's just crazy to be like asking the questions like, what's my name? What's my job title? Where did I come from? What's my biggest pain? Like all that stuff, you know, just at the very basic level at the top of the funnel can, can get automated. That that's one thing. The other thing is like, I think it's this bigger theme that I think we've mentioned a couple of times, which is like, I don't wake up in the morning and just go to some company's website to browse their business software. Like if I, if I am on zoom's website, I'm there for a reason.

I'm probably unhappy with something else. I probably looking for a new tool for my company. And so like, why do we ask those dumb questions at the, at the top of the funnel? Like, um, so, so you have to, you have to put a, uh, a premium on customer experience because nobody's just waking up and going to zoom's website to, to have a conversation. They're there for a reason. So you got to treat them like a real person. And, and also like, we're just skeptical. I know I don't ever want to talk to like, I am in marketing. I get a ton of vent. I get so many emails from vendors and sales reps. And I will, I take calls with the good ones. So who did your research? Like, Hey man, I saw you run with John Barrows.

That was really great. You know, one thing you mentioned, I didn't agree with that. I'd love to tell you more about how X, Y, that's like, that's a, that's one that I would take. And I, so I think like you're, I think I wrote it down, but you know, making average reps irrelevant is the number one thing to me because the bots are now, bots are now going to be able to handle all the other things. Like a bot might be smarter in the sense of like, I know who this person is. I know why they're here. Yeah. And that actually brings me into interest. I'm curious on this one. Cause I think a little while ago, I wasn't, I wasn't really heavily paying attention to drift, but I was paying attention to chatbots maybe about a year and a half ago.

And I remember about a year and a half, two years ago, like chatbots started, were, were trying to pretend like they were human. You know what I mean? So like you'd get into the conversation with a chatbot, like, especially the first time user, like, holy shit, look at this, look at how responsive this company is. But then about, you know, a few chats back and forth, all of a sudden you'd be like, wait a minute, this isn't a person. This is a computer. And that actually would turn me off because I felt duped. Right. Did you guys make the conscious decision to basically say, we're not like when, when you hit a chat with drift, it's pretty evident. You're like, look, we're not a person. We're, we're an actual, we're a chatbot here, but I think we can pull you down the funnel for another part.

Like what's the philosophy around that? And did you guys make a shift or was that a conscious decision? It was a conscious decision. Like, so I just have some of my favorite books on my desk, like ultimate sales letter, cashvertising, Ogilvy, all these, all the great sales letters and copywriters have said the same thing since the beginning, right? The best thing you can do in your marketing and sales is to be authentic and be real. Uh, and so for us, like the number one thing that we wanted to do was, was not fake that because I know you, and also the bar is so high. If you're going to fake, if you're going to pretend to be a person, shit, you bet, you better know everything. You, you better not fail.

And so, so, so we have positioned it always as like, Hey, I'm a bot. I'm here to help you get connected. What are you looking for? Right. And then also you're able to set it up in a way where like, we call it fail gracefully, where like, if somebody's trying to like, you know, screw around with the bot and just like try to outsmart it, there's not, there's nothing to outsmart because you can, you can save funny things back, but it's really just like, hold on, let me get somebody for you and then bring in a person. So there's other companies out there in the chat bot space who, who feel differently about this, but you know, we're all about like, our brand is very real, authentic human. And so we, we think of it as like, we're using chat bots.

It's like a virtual assistant for your website. That's how we think about how we're going to use bots. Love it. And that's a, you know, it's funny because I get, I've been duped a couple of times by the virtual assistants and it actually really pisses me off where, you know, and this is usually email. Right. So it's like, you know, Sarah dot XI or something like that. And I don't recognize it. And the person says, Oh, just coordinate through my assistant. And the first few times I was like, Oh, okay, cool. And I'd go back and forth with her. And, you know, eventually I use time trade to schedule my calendar, you know, calls and stuff like that. And inevitably I would send that link and the chat bot or the artificial intelligent assistant would say, I'm sorry, I don't quite understand your last email.

Could you please help me, you know, figure out a time. I'm like, how, what do you not understand about clicking on a link, click on the fuck. And then all of a sudden I'd be like, God damn it. You know, and I've gotten a, and me being as busy as I am, you know, trying to schedule meetings with people like, look, I'm asking for your, to like a prospect. If I'm always respectable your time, but if I get a seat, you know, VP of sales, who's sending me to this, this AI thing, that's, that's actually increasing my, my, the amount of effort that I have to go through and not, you know, not improving the buying experience in any way, shape or form, even though I'm probably trying to sell to them, I get frustrated.

Right. So for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that's, that's the other thing is like, um, it's all about removing friction. Like any, any salesperson or marketer knows that the less friction there are, there is the more likely somebody is to make it through the process. And so we, we want to use that technology and use bots and AI to, to remove the friction. I actually have a, you know, one thing I want to ask back to you, like, how do you, how do you keep up? Like you talk to so many reps and like, do they, when you go to talk to them and they're like, here we go. And there's the latest trend. Like, how do you, how do you talk them through the, the bot, the bot piece? I think, I think I love your, like, you know, good to great average irrelevant stuff, but like, how do you talk them through that?

So to me, the technology is almost irrelevant. It's just about paying attention. Right. So that's why I start off all my, all my trainings with death of the average sales rep. I literally have that, you know, the image of death of the average sales rep, or I'm sorry, death of death, death of the salesman or whatever that movie is with a guy holding his briefcases and walking backwards. And I put average in the middle there. And I talk about how, you know, marketing is coming upstream, artificial intelligence. And I actually show some examples. Like there's an example of a couple of kids that left Salesforce and started this artificial intelligence company called Shakespeare. Um, they've since put it, you know, uh, 86 did and are working for other companies, but this, what they said, cause one of the things that I train on is a really highly personalized email, right.

Where it's, you go on somebody's, your point, like the stuff that you would have responded to where you go on somebody's website, you read about them and you make this very direct human connection with them. And, you know, like three, four years ago, and this is the example I used three, four years ago, it's called the why you, why, you know, email Jeff Hoffman put it together. Um, three, four years ago, like it was straight up. It was worth spending 15, 20, 30 minutes writing one of these emails because you were getting a 15 to 20% response rate because it was cracking through the noise that easily these days. It's not worth spending 15, 20, 30 minutes, right? Because it's still getting a better response rate than the template stuff, but it's not, it's maybe five to 10% compared to 15 to 20.

Right. So now I'm talking about reps being the contact strategy. And that's the thing, like the experience, like the story that we tell them and the multiple touches and that type of thing. But the, the relevance to, to what, you know, their irrelevance, if you will, is, you know, I, these kids who left Salesforce, they said, Hey, John, check it out. We created this artificial intelligence company. This is going to drive like super highly personalized emails without, you know, without rep ever having to do it. Right. All I asked, I was like, yeah, whatever, just, you know, send me the, you know, send me an example. And they sent me an example. And when I tell you, Dave, this thing was better, this thing wrote an email better than I could have ever written.

And it did it in 70 seconds. And I almost had a heart attack. And so what I do is to get them in that mindset is I show them that email and I go, I've been training this stuff for 10 years. I've been, I've been, I've been doing this training cause I took this training first and then I took it over. So I literally have been writing that email give or take for 12 years. And I tell them, look, I could, I don't think I could have written a better email than that. So if you're sitting out here, cranking out bullshit, template emails, making generic cold calls, asking Bant questions, pressing play on demos and all that shit, like it's not my opinion. Like, look, this is happening. So you got to wake up.

And the question I pushed to reps, and this is to start, this is, you know, I talk about attention grabbers. Like how do you get people's attention? Well, this is how I get their attention. I'm like, look, you have to ask yourself these days, what can you do that a computer can't? Computer can do it. Then you have to ask yourselves, how much longer are they going to pay me to do this? And the answer is not very long. And so, you know, you know, you just look at any, you know, if you're, if you're not paying attention to the trends right now, and like, I always say this too, if you're comfortable with where you are right now, and I mean that from a sales standpoint, I mean that from an industry standpoint, I mean that from a standpoint, if you're comfortable with where you are right now, I'm worried for you because there's going to be an app that comes out tomorrow that makes your job irrelevant or your industry completely disrupts your industry.

And so that's why if you're not using it right now, that's okay, but you should at least be paying attention to it. And that's it, because I think it's our job right now to get our clients, you know, every, it used to be our job to teach people features and functions and feeds and feeds about our products and services. I don't, you know, that's pre-internet because that was the only way people could get it. Now it's a Google search away. But the thing is, is, you know, you, our job is, I think, to get people to think. And if I can get you to like prospect, like if I'm prospecting to you, Dave, and I'm like, Hey, you know, I'm watching it. And you know, yeah, if there's something obvious, we're like, holy shit, we're hiring so many SDRs and BDRs.

And we, I wish I had, there was a training out there that was immediately actionable. And, you know, I could deliver tomorrow. Then yeah, I'm going to call you up and say, Dave, like, I'm going to go to your office for crying out loud. What's up? But the likelihood of you, if you're not coming to me, if you're not on my website, if you're not doing that type of thing, if I'm outreaching to you, it's not, I'm going to like, let me sell you something. It's I'm going to get you to think that's why social selling. That's why challenge your sale. That's why I lead with insights and brand building, I think is so important. And I use the movie like inception, right? If I can, if I can plant that seed and let you and make it yours, we got a chance.

The brand building piece is, is so important. And it's, it's like, it's the foundation of our whole marketing and, and, and company at Drift. And the reason why is because even if like, even if I could, even if I did like have the best product in the world and I was selling it to you, I feel like everybody, everybody, they're like, well, let me see the feature comparison versus you and somebody else. And everyone just, everyone knows those are made up. And so I can make one that shows Drift with all the green checks next to it. And I can show another competitor with that red X with two things that, you know, we're, we're better at, right. You and I are just so skeptical of that, that even if that's true, right on top of that, go to, go to something like product hunt, right?

There's new products on product on every day. And if you scroll to the second or third comment, there's always a comment that's like, yeah, well this, this seems cool, but how is this different than X, which is another product that would just came out yesterday. And so there's actually a great quote in, in behind the cloud from, from Mark Benioff where he's like, you know, brand is the most important thing because anybody can go and copy and paste any one of your features. The thing that they can't copy and paste is your brand. And for us, like, and in that example that, that got my attention is like a brand is how you communicate. It's, it's how, how, how did your reps communicate with somebody?

What does your website say? What is it? What's on your podcast? What are, what are your videos look like? It's, it's more than just like that fluffy arts and crafts brand word that, you know, marketers use a lot. I think it's the sum of all the touch points that somebody has with your business, especially the, the outreach from a sales rep, because nothing turns people, I mean, and, and I hate, I don't, I don't love this process, but like, you know, you see it on LinkedIn, some, some like, you know, some marketing guy like takes a screenshot of some shitty BDR email and like ruins somebody's day. Like he obviously didn't send that, that was automated. Um, but I think, but I think that's real.

And we all expect like, you can find anything about me as a buyer online. So I'm, I'm expecting some level of personalized, you know, outreach. Absolutely. Well, and that's why I love your marketing manifesto. You know what I mean? Like be remarkable. Words are everything. Design a secondary, right? Like you talk, you know, like don't try to be something you're not. I always kind of be, uh, you know, for the manifesto as, as you've written it, cause I have my 12 guidelines to success and it's all about the genuine and those types of things. And I use, you know, my favorite sales movie as a perfect example of this, which is Tommy boy, right? You know, I call it, uh, no, it's hands down the best sales.

By the way, anybody tells you that local wall street, Glenn, Gary, Glenn Ross and boiler room, those are the worst sales movies ever. Tommy boy is hands down the best. And there's a scene in there where I call it catching your sales groove, right? Where you wake up one day and it's a little bit easier than it was the day before. Right. And that's when you stop pitching your solutions and you start having conversations about your solutions, you start caring more about the client than you do about your commission check. And, you know, and Tommy, you know, when he caught his sales groove, right? Helen, you look like a Helen. Let me tell you why I suck as a salesman. Then he goes into this whole thing.

Right. And she's like, wow, you're twisted. You know, Tommy, like you tell me what we need. That is, I mean, that was him, you know what I mean? That was the essence of him. He was just being himself. Whereas before that he was trying to be his dad. You know, you can stick your head up fast, but whatever. Right. So I, I, I actually, about like two years ago, um, we, I, so I, I did something on the side before this and I had a podcast and a newsletter and I wrote these, I wrote these emails and I sent out a newsletter every Sunday night and it was about like, um, startups in Boston, whatever. And I would just, I had nothing to lose as my own thing. So I could do whatever the hell I wanted. So I just, I wrote all the emails.

Like I was literally sending an email to my mom or my best friend. And I just was like, here's, here's what happened. And then when I started at Drift, David, our CEO, he was like, um, I started, then I started to write marketing emails for Drift and they turned into marketing emails. Right. They had, they were highly designed. They had all this crap in him. He's like, dude, write, write those emails. I'm like, you're sure. Like that's what you want. And he's like, yeah. And ever since then has, has been no looking back. Like that's, that's how we teach copywriting to everybody else on the team now. Um, and everybody asks like, Hey, what, like, did you test writing that way? Did you AB test it?

Like, why do you, how come you only have plain text and how come sometimes you have typos? And like, because that's how real people write. Uh, and that's everything. And, and the, the fate, my favorite thing is, um, the founder of Patagonia, he has a great quote and he talks about their brand. And he's like the re the best brand that we can be is us because it's way easier to write nonfiction than it is to write fiction. And, and I feel like that's the realest thing. Like if I, I don't, I'm sorry. Yeah, I did. I did make a typo. Cause I really wrote the email. I'm sorry about that. No, you're spot on, man. I mean, that's why I'm a terrible liar. Right. Cause you know, I, cause I'm transparent.

Yeah. It's like, you know, I, I suck at lying. Cause you know why that takes making shit up. Whereas I'm just truthful. I'm like, yeah, this is what happens. Uh, you know, it wasn't great, but, and you know what, most people are so much, and you talk about genuine. And I think that's the key there. Right. Which is, I think, you know, a lot of feedback I get. Cause I post, I post a lot of my failures. I'm like, I'm having a rough day today. I'm getting overwhelmed. I'm stressed out, you know, and some people, you know, there's the celebrity status of doing this. And, you know, I got a bunch of followers and stuff like that. And they're, you know, so sometimes it's like, Holy shit, you know, you know, rockstar type of thing.

And I'm like, no, I put my pants on just as what I get hung up on, on the phone, just as much as anybody else does. I get told to fuck off just as much as everybody else does. And by having that human ability, like people, that's what people relate to. Right. They don't relate to the rock star. Like, Holy shit. Look at that guy because yeah. Okay. That's cool. But I'm never, you know, that's not me, you know, perfect. And that's, that, that's a thing. I think like, look, I think marketing and sales technology has, has done a lot over the last five, 10 years, but what it's done is it's also kind of screwed everybody up because it's let us just rely on the automation and that side of things. And then, so I think like everything that, everything that I see that's working today is all about bringing marketing and sales back to its roots of like actually having conversations, actually connecting with people.

And I think that's, that's kind of a lost art. And so it's crazy because like when I do it and you do it, people are like, man, that's, that was great. And I was like, I just, I just said what I was, I said, I was eating breakfast while I wrote this email. And I think you should sign up for my webinar later today. Like what happened? Yeah, it wasn't rocket science. It was genuinely like, that's exactly what I was doing. And I said it. So I was like, I have nothing creative for you. So, all right. I know, I know where I'm, I'm not going to host your show, but I know we're up against it and I have questions. Yeah. I got, for those of you who are watching, like I got the wind in the background here, I'm in Vegas.

I got a bananas week. I got Vegas today, Seattle tomorrow, Indianapolis on Wednesday and actually Jacksonville on Thursday, which is going to be, it's probably not going to go over too well, but anyways, but let's finish up with, um, it was where anything else that you wanted to hit on real quick. I want it. I want to, uh, I've heard you say this and I wanted you to say it again. Cause I just, for my own thing, you said that your, your second email is you never waste your first email, your best email and your first one, your best email is always your second email. Yeah. It's the second, third. Well, it's part of the story. Okay. Um, I, it used to be my best one, which was, Hey, you know, here's the super customized.

And then it was, Hey, did you get my first email bubble in this one up to the top, that type of shit. Um, now I actually look at it cause I've done some analysis. I've done some split testing and realized that, you know, it's more about the contact strategy than it is any one particular email. And so that's why I really encourage reps to sit down and tell a story, like come up with five, six, seven different things, different things to reach out to your prospect about and tell a story. And it's, and I follow kind of the Gary Vaynerchuk book, jab, jab, jab, right hook, which is add value, add value, add value, then ask. And so that's why my first, second ones are really just to prime the pump.

So that when I come at you with the real ask or the real value, that's where it resonates. Cause you've seen me a couple of times, you've heard it, whatever. And now it's like, okay, shit. All right. Those first couple, you know, they were okay, but they didn't hit the mark, but that one hits the mark. So I love that. Cause I'll also like, oftentimes that first email is straight up cold. So I I've never seen your name before. So it doesn't get open. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just a, Hey, almost like a, I don't like touching base and checking emails, but it's almost just like a, Hey, heads up. You kind of fit the mold of somebody that we've worked with in the past. You know, is it, is, is, you know, here's a little bit about what we do and maybe some clients we work with.

Is that interesting enough for me to kind of engage here and, you know, send, maybe send you some more information on this one. And, and really just, uh, I don't even care if you respond to that. It's, it's more just to get that name out there. Love it. I got more. We'll save them for later. Don't worry. Yeah. We can do another one because I do have, I literally have a, uh, sales kickoff in less than an hour. And I got to try to spend as little time in Vegas here as possible. Also, I'm going to go as a gambling problem. So anyways, um, but, uh, David, this has been a blast. Tell, tell, um, everybody out here, um, how they can, you know, learn more about drift or, you know, where they can go to learn more about you and all this other stuff.

Cause I, I find it fascinating. Yeah. So, so number one is go to drift.com, uh, chat into the bot and say, uh, you were listening to, uh, Facebook live with John Barrows, uh, do that. Uh, and then I'm on Twitter at Dave Gerhardt. And also I, I do try to reply to every interesting email that I get. So my email is dg at drift.com. Awesome, man. And same thing with everybody else out there. Feel free to hit us both up, you know, on, on all the Twitter channels and everything like that. If you got, uh, if you got questions on this, we're going to post this as a podcast, uh, hit them in the, in the chat form in the, in the Facebook live here and we'll answer those. And, uh, cool, man. Well, yeah, let's do this again.

Cause I think there's a lot more to talk about. Uh, and this was a really cool conversation. Make sure you drink, uh, airborne and emergency and stay well hydrated this week. All day, man. I can't afford to get sick. So thanks for, thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for making a great one. We'll see you. Bye. Bye. Bye.