I’ve been working in many years with qualifying leads and convert marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads. The process of doing this might the different depending on who you are talking to. The most common way of qualifying a lead is to ask for information from example a web form on your website. These forms are often huge with mandatory fields… a lot of mandatory fields. Marketer’s are dependent of potential customers to fill in a form with all information they need in order to pass it over to sales as a SQL. Through out this funnel you loose a lot of leads whom are not interested in giving away all information in one swipe.
This is an ancient process of doing it.
Ask yourself: When do you fill in a form if you are interested in a product or a service? If I should answer this question – the answer is when I have made up my mind to try it out. It can take me weeks or even month’s before I have decided.
For a business it’s crucial to persuade a new potential customer that the product they are offering, is the best out on the market. You should capture these leads at the exact moment when they entering your website or landing page.
What do you eat for breakfast?
Therefor it’s important to try capture some information bit by bit and not ask for First name, Last name, Company name, Phone number, E-mail address and what they ate for breakfast all at once. If you can start a conversation with the lead and explaining (read sell) your product and answer the questions they have, you will have a higher chance of converting them to a SQL.
Qualification is not just about qualifying leads, it’s about understanding who is visiting your website. If you as a marketer are being measured by traffic and conversion – and surely the conversion rate between these to. You also want to identify those visitors who are employers, job hunter or customers and exclude them from your data.
Start using chatbots for lead qualification
The past three years I’ve been using Intercom for qualifying leads. Intercom is often referred by me as a big monster. One sentence short, Intercom is a CRM system for marketers. The reason: it’s a fantastic sales and marketing tool. In the platform you can organize all incoming leads, sending them chat messages, e-mails, put them in nurturing campaigns for different qualification stages and even use chatbots. Also, the system is built for customer support. I can really recommend having a look at their new feature Product Tours to see the power of a complete system.
Also read: Increase open rates: E-mail or In-App Messaging?
When using Intercom chatbots you controll the entire workflow from when someone visits your website for the first time and when they are becoming a lead. When a visitor interacts with your messenger you can either choose start chatting with the lead straight away or let the chatbot take over.
When using qualification stages such as “Are you a customer?” with the alternatives “Yes, I am a customer” and “No, I’m not a customer” you can with ease exclude those choosing they are customers to be redirected to support. How many of you form submissions are from customers? With chatbots you can eliminate several conversations and only focus on leads.
You can also use chatbots operating outside office hours so you don’t miss out an opportunity.
From the image above the workflow works like this when a visitor is pressing one of the three options:
Message sales
The customer replies in the chat and the bot will automatically ask for an e-mail, since we are arguing with that they will receive the answer to their e-mail address. Hence, this is not mandatory and they can still go back to our website and continue the conversation another time.
Talk to support
The conversation will be redirected to our support inbox and not touched by marketing
Just browsing
With just browsing the bot are just saying “Happy browsing!”. But at the same time the bot creates a tag on the lead and are adding them to an Intercom marketing campaign where we are pushing a new message next time the lead are entering the website with the message “Hey and welcome back. Do you want a free trial?”
When choosing a free trial they will be redirected to marketing for more qualification.
Save time and get more qualified leads
In the image above you can see the workflow for a chatbot operating with routing incoming chats into different directions. Since I started using chatbots it has increased incoming leads and saved a lot of time for the support teams. Isn’t this the future of “win-win situation”?