With businesses moving more and more online, marketing teams are challenged both with attracting website visitors and identifying and qualifying leads that their sales team is looking for.
On top of volume, the focus should be on how many sales qualified leads you are able to deliver to your sales department to guarantee smooth cooperation and sales effectiveness.
Chatbots are known for helping marketing teams optimise customer experience and boost lead generation online. Generating leads with chatbot strategies is increasingly replacing static contact forms.
The fact that they are conversational, always available and can be modified based on the different stages of the customer journey makes chatbots a great tool to help you qualify your leads.
Building your lead qualification flow
How you are going to build the lead qualification flow depends on the type of business you are in. When building the qualification steps in your chatbot you can start by thinking about what are the standard things or the basic questions your chatbot should ask your website visitors. You can ask yourself:
- What makes a good lead for your business?
- What does your ideal customer profile look like?
- Who are your most profitable customers?
And, on the other hand, spend some time thinking about what makes a bad lead for your business, or what kind of a lead is good enough for your sales team.
Once you have the answers to these questions you can start thinking about how to turn this criteria into questions that your chatbot can ask directly or indirectly from website visitors.. Perhaps you have some ‘gatekeeping’ questions that immediately qualify some of your potential customers, while others need to go through a more extensive set of questions.
Based on these questions you can start building the flow of your bot to qualify visitors. The purpose is to find out if the visitor is interested in buying or able to buy your product or service. The questions should also help you to define if there are any obstacles in the way.
Examples of lead qualification questions that can be used depending on your targets:
- What brings you here today?
- Are you our customer? (To know if you are dealing with an existing customer or a prospect)
- What is your purpose with [our product]?
- What do you know about [our product]?
- Are you a decision maker?
- What is your budget range?
- What is your schedule?
These types of questions should help you understand which prospects are likely to buy your product or service and help you guide them to the right people in your team.
To make the process of collecting lead information smooth and effortless it’s recommended to utilise multi-step converting, and, this way, break down the information collection into a series of conversations.
Try to keep the forms used within the bot as short as possible and make visitor progress visible. Splitting your form fields into different views can improve conversion rates by 87%. To ensure the best leads are sent to your sales you also need to set up a handover process and identify the time it takes to transfer leads to the experts.
How is giosg qualifying leads?
How are we doing it ourselves? Here are our best practices:
- Target your lead qualification chatbots – We target our bots based on which page the visitor is on and the stage of the customer journey the customer is at.
- Break down your qualifying questions – We are using multistep forms to avoid overwhelming the visitor with questions.
- Integrate your data – Our chatbots and forms are integrated with HubSpot, which allows us to customise them, place them anywhere on the website and target them anyway we want.
- Set up notifications – We are using our own mobile application, Giosg BAR, to help our sales team to stay alert on new demo requests.
- Prioritise the questions your chatbot asks – Ask the most critical questions first.
- Make it easy for visitors – Provide options with easy to click buttons!
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Want to learn more about this topic? Download our ultimate guide to lead generation chatbots.