Drift, the world’s leading Revenue Acceleration Platform, today announced that its Virtual Selling Assistants have been acknowledged by Gartner, Inc., in a new report on the power of AI in enterprise operations.

In the report, Emerging Technologies: Top Use Cases for Advanced Virtual Assistants in Enterprise Operations, Gartner evaluates three use cases for advanced virtual assistants in helping increase efficiency and return for enterprise operations.

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Gartner recognizes that “changes in organization buying behavior and customer expectations are requiring sales teams to redesign demand generations and sales processes.” As a result, Virtual Assistants “for sales are emerging as a disruptive use case with significant efficiency and revenue generation benefits for sales and marketing functions.” The report goes on to share  powerful examples of VAs benefiting organizations, including Okta, the leading independent identity provider.

With more than 7,000 integrations and 10,000+ global clients, Okta is a leader in the complex field of workforce and customer identity and authentication. They rely heavily on their website and needed a solution that better qualified potential customers, and streamlined the handoff of prospect information to sales. Drift and their VSAs were tapped to help Okta achieve this important goal.

What resulted was a blueprint for Conversational Sales success at scale. Okta’s utilization of Drift’s Virtual Selling Assistants led to a 30% increase in the sales pipeline influence, quarter on quarter for the first six quarters, the conversion rate was doubled from Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and Okta became the No.1 fastest channel to convert MQL to pipeline.

“We’re thrilled to be included in this Gartner Emerging Technology report as we pride ourselves on redefining how businesses buy from businesses, with new solutions such as Virtual Selling Assistants,” said David Cancel, CEO of Drift. “In a digital first world, the sales and marketing landscape is changing, and AI is a powerful tool to streamline processes that result in driving more revenue faster. We are excited that our customer Okta continues to grow their pipeline influence with our solutions. We’re constantly iterating and innovating for our customers to solve new challenges as the process of business buying evolves.”

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“A huge differentiator for Drift is the depth of alignment it creates between marketing and sales,” said David Wellwood, Senior Director of Web Marketing at Okta. “Drift understands what marketing needs to do in order to drive sales. It’s much more than just a chat tool. The Drift platform is optimized to deliver exactly the enablement we were looking for.”

Gartner, ‘Emerging Technologies: Top Use Cases for Advanced Virtual Assistants in Enterprise Operations’, Danielle Casey, Annette Jump, Srijita Chakraborty, June 16, 2021

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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