State Street Global Advisors' Digital Transformation with Drift

State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) is the investment management division of State Street Corporation, headquartered in Boston, MA. SSGA is a financial services firm that traditionally relied on in-person interactions to sell their services. However, they recognized the need for a digital transformation as their clients increasingly sought a digital experience where they could conduct their own research, ask questions on their terms, and make most of their purchases digitally. This shift was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made video and live chat the primary channels for interaction and sales.

State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), the investment management division of State Street Corporation, faced a significant challenge in adapting to the digital transformation demanded by their clients. Traditionally, SSGA relied heavily on in-person interactions to sell their services. However, they realized that their clients were increasingly seeking a digital experience where they could conduct their own research, ask questions on their terms, and make most of their purchases digitally. This shift was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made video and live chat the primary channels for interaction and sales, while in-person meetings and related sales activities declined sharply. SSGA needed a software solution to support this digital transformation and meet their clients' changing needs.

In response to this challenge, SSGA began exploring chat solutions in early 2020 to support their four main objectives: accelerating time to revenue, enhancing the 360-degree view of the customer, improving sales efficiency by 10%, and providing more efficient and convenient experiences to differentiate from competitors. After evaluating several solutions, they chose Drift, a chat solution that they felt was invested in their success. They adopted a 'crawl-walk-run' approach to gradually prove the effectiveness of Drift. They initially launched Drift on their UK SPDRs website with a six-month goal of $15 million in trades originating from Drift chat. They built bots to deflect irrelevant traffic, qualify site visitors, and provide answers to frequently asked questions, ensuring that only qualified visitors reached their sales team.

• The implementation of Drift brought significant operational benefits to SSGA. It not only helped them achieve their revenue goals but also convinced their sales team of the value of the Drift Conversation Cloud. It demonstrated that chatbots could enhance their performance. Drift facilitated meetings with key clients, including a CMO from a target account that their sales rep had been trying to reach. The sales rep was able to meet the client on their own terms, leading to a successful meeting and subsequent trade. Drift also provided SSGA with valuable insights into buyer behaviors, preferences, and interests in real-time. It revealed that C-suite executives were using chat to start transactions, enabling marketing and sales to refine their strategies. Furthermore, Drift allowed SSGA to capture target accounts with little additional work, providing immediate notifications when target accounts visited their website.

• $65M in allocations from Drift leads in 18 months

• 2X attainment of trade goals by Q4

• Reached six-month $15M revenue goal in half the time