How sales chatbots can help you grow your business

Chatbots for sales

Salespeople are always looking for ways to convert online traffic into leads. To do this, all user interface efforts are aimed at guiding visitors to a landing page where they can choose to provide their details. And if they fit the requirements, they are qualified as a lead. Obviously, this process is long-drawn, and the end result is an average of 2.35% of website traffic converted into leads on a landing page across industries.

Today, online businesses can also use live chat to proactively reach out to visitors and convert more leads. Not only do your conversion rates increase because you have the full attention of the visitor, but you can also craft responses that speak to the specific challenges they face and therefore have a higher chance of converting them. However, live chat is hard to scale when you want to provide 24/7 availability and have limited team bandwidth. In fact, nearly 30% of all live chat conversations are left unattended.

This is where chatbots come to the rescue of sales teams.

Improve your sales process with chatbots

Chatbots convert website traffic into potential leads. Chatbots persuade visitors to take action by proactively messaging them. Think of it as a store assistant tapping your shoulder to ask, “How can I help you?”. You are more likely to turn a window shopper into a purchasing customer by simply offering help. Just like that, the chatbot can start a conversation with a question or an offer, based on what the visitor is looking for. This way, you are engaging with site visitors before they leave your website.
Chatbots remove friction from the lead capture process. Chatbots can bypass cumbersome forms and collect information on every page. You don’t need to direct visitors to a new page each time, and you can collect information across several sessions over time.
Chatbots give back to sales representatives. Before chatbots, sales representatives had to go to great lengths to get find leads. But with chatbots, a big part of lead generation and qualification is automated. Sales reps benefit from the automation because chatbots hold the fort by doing most of the work, leaving sales reps to focus on converting leads into paying customers.

Chatbots work across your sales funnel.

Chatbots can work across your sales funnel. To make the most of chatbots, here are the ways you can use it in each stage of the funnel.

PRO TIP:

When deciding on a chatbot service, analyze your sales funnel and identify interactions and processes that can be automated. Remember, chatbots can take over interactions that are repetitive or methodical for live chat agents.

Look for a chatbot that fits your business needs.

When implementing chatbots within the sales funnel, it’s important to find a provider who offers extensive capabilities where automation can fill in online sales gaps. Your chatbot software should be able to:

Trigger Messages

Chatbots can automate trigger messages to nudge site visitors into action. Trigger messages are similar to pop-up displays that appear once you enter a website, but it’s within the chat widget. Unlike pop-up displays that end up hiding content on the page, and offer only one-way communication, chatbots are personalized and conversational without hiding the page contents.

Automatically escalate to sales reps

Chatbots can be trained to automatically transfer the chat to an agent based on customer intent. There are two instances where agent hand-off is useful. First, to handle frustrated customers, and second, to resolve queries beyond the abilities of a chatbot.

Integrates with CRM

Once the chatbot qualifies leads, it automatically sends the leads to the CRM. This makes keeping track of leads much easier and helps sales teams stay productive.

Automatically schedule meetings with sales

With chatbots, you can add widgets of third-party apps such as Google calendar, in order to expand the capabilities of the bot. In fact, getting appointments is still the biggest problem faced by visitors when interacting with online businesses. Chatbots easily eliminate this problem. When the visitor requests to set up a meeting with the sales team, they can do it within the chat widget.

Connect across languages and platforms

If your customers are globally located, then you’ll want a chatbot that can communicate in several languages and integrate with channels other than your website (like WhatsApp for Business and Apple Business Chat).