How Descope Closed an Enterprise Deal in Days Using Chat

At the beginning, we were really skeptical. We were asking ourselves: is this just another widget on our website? Is it another place where customers can go and have a chatbot situation?

We tested out the HubSpot chatbot and tried it for about a month and a half. By the end of that experience, we were like: enough. The amount of bot traffic coming in, the amount of terrible questions, and the quality of the conversations just were not there. So we decided to turn it off.

Once we put Knock in, guess what? Conversations started to happen. Customers started choosing it over a demo request, and people were actually coming in to have meaningful conversations about pricing, about the product, and about how it could best fit their solution.

We were like: there’s no way that just the interface is going to change things. Even our founder was like: no way, it’s just going to be the same.

But I’m telling you, within the first week after we put Knock in, we had very sizable enterprise organizations coming in, describing their problems, and asking questions like: can you tell me about those pricing concerns? How is this going to work for my use case?

You’d be surprised how many people will just come in and say: whoa, this is really cool. I can just come and Slack you and get my questions answered.

We went from being skeptical to fully bought in, and we’ll be Knock customers for a long time.

Save the time of trying out a HubSpot widget and just go with Knock, because we’ve already done the experiment for you. It would be a no-brainer to try it out.

A Knock conversation is much better than the form. Having something like Knock provides a comfortable way for high-growth companies and developers to engage in the medium that they are comfortable with, and to move things along quickly.

Developers do not want to talk to sales unless absolutely necessary. They do not really want to get on many face-to-face meetings. They do want to know how things work.

The Knock widget is on every page. If you're on a developer tutorial and you have some questions about that, you can just click the Knock widget and ask there.

The place where it has really helped is on our pricing page, because pricing for the customer identity and agentic identity space is not simple at all. There are many pricing levers. The list pricing often differs from what the final pricing ends up being.

That is where we have seen the greatest lift in people clicking the “chat with someone on Slack” button on the pricing page and asking pricing questions. We have had many relevant conversations start that way.

Without Knock, it's likely that they would not have taken the leap and signed up or submitted a form. They would have just come to their own conclusions from the pricing page.

We had tried chatbots before. It was more of an AI chatbot natively integrated with the website, but what we saw there was a lot of spam. I think we saw more bots coming in as well, and we didn’t find a lot of relevant conversations happening.

Once we started with the Knock implementation, that spam dropped to zero. There is a marked difference in the quality of conversations. 80% of those conversations we had on Knock were relevant.

That was the biggest pleasant surprise, and it has persisted. So it is no longer a surprise. Now it is an expectation.

I would advise any marketing leader to try out and opt for at least one use case, if not more.

Enterprise companies come in and they have to have a formal process, right? They need legal and documentation in place to be able to interact.

Instead of having all the legalities in place upfront, and going through this super long, dragging process of making sure all the right stakeholders are on the call and figuring out when it is going to work in terms of timeframe, Knock creates accessibility to information.

These people are not any different from a startup. Knock creates accessibility to information and makes informal conversations possible, even when there are formalities in place.

They can come in, have that conversation, and make it a quicker interaction. Once they have that initial 15- or 20-minute conversation inside of Knock, then they can say: you know what, I’ll make the investment in time to put those legalities in place so we can do a formal POC, a formal demo request, and a sales interaction.

It immediately cuts through that wait time of: I’m going to send an email, and I might not hear back for 24 hours. It is much more than you would experience from just a normal form submission.

One distinct deal that we won in the beginning — I’m not going to say it’s the largest fast food chicken restaurant in the US, but it’s close to it — was unbelievable.

I remember my founder messaging me after that Knock conversation. They probably had a Knock conversation for 35–45 minutes. The amount of detail that they were able to put into these conversations, from such a large enterprise, was unbelievable.

We ended up closing it. And I remember him telling me: we made the right decision by going with Knock.

The evidence is clear. Our MQL to SQL conversion from Knock interactions, the volume, the quality, and the types of companies that are coming in — all of it showed that we made the right decision.