• by Ray Schultz , September 4, 2018

Drift, a marketing and sales platform, has acquired Siftrock -- a firm that helps B2B marketers and sales teams manage their email replies -- and formed partnerships with Marketo, Demandbase and Outreach, the firm announced Tuesday at the HyperGrowth 2018 conference. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.  

Siftrock is a Seattle-based company that serves such firms as Glassdoor, Citrix, Okta, SurveyMonkey and Procore.

With Siftrock, Drift’s new Drift Assistant will help B2B companies track email replies, route them to the right sales reps, and sync data to their marketing automation systems, the firm says.

The objective is to prevent email from being a one-way communications medium. For instance, prospects can respond that they want to attend an event.

Drift has also introduced Conversational Advertising, a service that can bring potential customers from an ad to a conversation.

The objective of these programs is to connect business with interested customers, remove friction and shorten the sales cycle,

“With traditional advertising it’s always been about later,” states David Cancel, founder and CEO of Drift. “You drive people to a landing page, get them to fill out a form, and then someone at the company contacts you later.”

Another service, Drift Assistant for Sales, can prepare sales reps for meetings, and performs such tasks as nudging them to conduct follow-ups, Drift adds.

Sales reps will receive an email prior to meetings, outlining the prospect company’s tech stack, context from previous conversations and data on recent website activity, it says.

The company is also partnering with Marketo for marketing automation, Demandbase for account-based advertising, Outreach for sales engagement, it adds.

Salespeople in particular need service that can make their jobs easier, the company contends.

“B2B businesses have gone digital, but we haven’t been able to move on from all of the paperwork,” Cancel notes. “Only a third of a sales reps time is actually spent selling, with over 60 percent of their time wasted on administrative tasks and meetings.