How Unity’s inside sales team drove 80% of its revenue through live chat

At Unity Technologies, a 3D gaming development platform, the Pro Subscriptions team is tasked with driving more revenue for their online Pro plans. Since they own the full Pro customer lifecycle from acquisition, retention, to upsell there was plenty of opportunities to optimize certain aspects of the funnel.

The most obvious opportunities came from the buzzing community of active Unity users (on personal plans) who wanted to learn more about about their paid products. These potential paying customers didn’t have a channel to reach out to his inside sales team quickly.

Jesus Requena, Director of Pro Subscriptions says, “We knew that we were only capturing a small portion of potential Pro subscribers via email or a contact form. Mainly, only those who were comfortable and ready to interact. Everything was reactive and asynchronous so we realized that we needed to open a more direct channel for our customers to talk to us in real time.”

His team has always held the belief that you need to have a presence wherever your customers are, so they looked to evaluate live chat solutions that could drive more qualified leads into their pipeline and grow revenue in real time. Jesus had used Intercom in a previous role for in-app messaging but knew it was also a good solution to communicate with his potential customers so he decided to run a test. His intuition proved to be right because when they put the Messenger live on their online store not only did his sales team start having more conversations, the Messenger also helped to immediately drive revenue within a week after going live.

“We have an online store and we had visitors abandoning our site because they had questions and no way to get them answered quickly. Intercom has enabled us to have a channel to be proactive and communicate in an instant. In particular, Visitor Auto Messages allowed us to generate revenue faster than we would have otherwise and increased our visitor to paid conversion rates by 45% in our online store.”

Intercom was the main driver to prove that live chat could capture low hanging fruit, sustain an inside sales team and grow the team very quickly. The initial success of the live chat test was crucial for making a business case to diversify the team’s sales approach and drive more revenue. What started as an inside sales team of two has expanded to ten since Intercom proved the revenue impact of live chat. In fact, within the first 3 months of implementing Intercom, 80% of inbound inside sales revenue were driven by live chat!

With the overwhelming success of their initial test came opportunities to optimize and be more strategic about which pages they expose the Messenger on in order to maximize the efficiency and productivity of his team. Now, they only show the Messenger on high-intent pages prompting contextualized interactions in the places on their site that make sense to provide value for customers.

For example, Intercom now plays an integral role in their customer retention strategy. Unity triggers Visitor Auto Messages on their subscription cancellation page to proactively engage potential churn risks before they unsubscribe. 10% of churn saves come specifically from these proactive Intercom visitor auto messages on the cancellation page.

The team has also built out a comprehensive tagging system in Intercom that allows them to easily understand how specific pages are generating new business. The two main tags are used for: 1) lead status (whether they are qualified or not 2) Nature of the inquiry (ie - sales vs. support).

“We primarily wanted to understand 3 conversion points: 1) how much traffic a page has 2) how many conversations do we have on the page 3) how many of those conversations are sales related. The conversion rate of traffic to conversations helps tell us if our initial VAM has the right copy and tone that encourages users to chat with us. The conversation to lead conversion tells us if it’s even worth it for us to have chat on the page. With our tagging system in place we could immediately prove the ROI of Intercom.”

From the inside sales team, to outbound sales, and customer success Intercom is now the key communication channel for Unity’s customers both pre and post-sale.