How to improve leads qualification with chatbots

Maybe you run an exclusive resort or an elite investment fund, or perhaps you just have a product that attracts a lot of attention but is only suitable for some specific situations. If so, your sales team will probably spend a lot of time dealing with leads that turn out to be useless, wasting precious time and energy. 

It is an age-old problem. Interesting products will attract a lot of attention and good marketing campaigns will get plenty of leads but the fact that they are interested in the product doesn’t necessarily mean they are potential customers. To get around it, companies attempt to pre-qualify leads by using forms or offering some guidance on their contact page. 

Leads qualification should help you sell, not make you lose customers

These methods can be useful, but they also have unwanted side effects. A form filled up in a hurry may not reveal the real position of a person in the company causing potentially good leads to go to waste and make other leads appear more promising than they really are. It’s an inefficient system and one that until recently was perceived as a necessary compromise.
The issue is that people perceive forms and instructions as nuisances or obstacles that waste their time and stand unnecessarily between them and the information they want to get. As a result, they fill them up in a hurry, with little care, and then forget about them. Interestingly, they don’t react the same way to a conversation, even when they know that they are not talking to a human.

Conversations are better than forms

There seems to be something in the wiring of our brains that makes people more willing and interested in providing information when having a conversation, and whatever it is, it has proven to be an incredibly valuable asset for marketers and salespeople. The only caveat seems to be that people need to know whether they are talking to a human or to a machine. Once that is clear, results show they don’t mind either option and will appreciate the interaction.

Of course, in many cases, once the lead is qualified they will be handed over to an actual human being that will continue the conversation. Moreover, the bot will be able to collect a lot of useful information on what kind of things people are interested in and provide feedback to the company. The bot will have thus saved the company money by reducing the time wasted in the lead qualification process and provided it with better data for its CRM.

If the conversation continues on a text-based application, the same bot may also be able to “listen-in” and provide more data for the CRM and the company’s databases. This data can then be mined to improve the company’s products, sales strategies, and learn more about the customers. All without adding to the sales team’s workload.

To achieve all of this a bot does not to be complex, but it does need to be well-designed. To help you navigate all the options that are available we have put together a crack team of experts that will analyze your company and guide you towards the best option. Reach out to them!