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Discover the data, tactics and trends shaping successful prospecting in 2023 - based on 49.5 million emails.
Posted on: October 25, 2021
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Category: B2B marketing
We all know that our potential customers want to manage their own buying journey.
At least, that is, until they don’t.
There comes a point where buyers suddenly reach out for support – and, at this point, they expect help to be not just on hand, but on tap.
There are plenty of stats that show how our online buying journey is marked by an impatience and a need to be served RIGHT NOW!
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For instance:
It is this need for an immediacy of response that makes chatbots so appealing. More so than live chat, which, at the end of the day, requires someone physically there to answer the call, a chatbot starts responding and answering the moment a question is asked.
And often before.
But are B2B buyers buying into the value of a chatbot. Or does it just provide a weak reflection of a genuine interaction?
A chatbot is a program that uses AI to understand and respond to text or voice commands. Quite simply, it is a bot that holds friendly conversations.
Originally conceived as a customer service tool, chatbots excel at handling queries or answering questions that can be simply dealt with without the need for a person to jump in and intervene.
But chatbots have now long been identified as equally useful for marketing and sales departments for increasing engagement, automating lead scoring and responding immediately (aka striking while the iron is hot).
What the chatbot effectively allows you to do is move from seeing your website as a passive sales tool to using it as an active one.
This is to say, the onus is no longer on you to wait for a prospect to supply you with information about themselves; now, you can actively go out and get it!
It takes time to sift through leads:
Wouldn’t it be a dream come true to have an automated tool that could start opening conversations with prospects visiting your website, pass on any information they need and also ask the sorts of questions that you need to qualify them?
This dream is called a chatbot: and its reality just gets better and better.
Let’s take a look at what else chatbots can do for your lead generation.
By setting up a short series of simple qualifier questions for your chatbot to ask prospects you can pre-qualify leads in real time.
Your chatbot’s questions can also be used to gain insight. Let’s assume you are selling commercial property: you can make sure when you pick up that phone that your bot has already gained information about price range, property type and lease details.
As much as you want to be there for every prospect who visits your site, many will visit outside of office hours. And we all know that those who snooze are likely to lose.
Your chatbot, however, never sleeps – it is a never out-of-office lead engagement tool.
The traditional website places all the onus on the prospect to supply their data – this, obviously, has its drawbacks. It not only relies on continued engagement to build up data of sufficient quality (one painful form fill at a time) it also then places a massive burden on your team and systems to sift through, sort and organise this data collected in a piecemeal fashion.
A chatbot actively seeks to collect all the data you need in one fell swoop. And those who ask tend to receive.
With a chatbot batting for you and actively asking the right sort of prospects to book a call, the proportion of your time in fruitful meetings – rather than looking for meetings – will be weighed to the productive end of the scale.
Having qualified each prospect your bot knows who is best to take things forward – so no more wasted time on discovery calls that should have been explored by another salesperson.
Here are some quick chatbot stats that reveal how familiar buyers are with them and how personal chatbot experiences now feel.
To wrap things up, here are four top tips that will help you ensure your bot is loved by sales, marketing and your prospects.
In the 1950s Alan Turing, British mathematician and logician, moved on from his wartime work in cryptology to devise the Turing test. This aimed to determine whether or not artificial intelligence could successfully emulate the thought process and reactions of a human being.
Speaking at this time, Turing prophetically foresaw the world of chatbots that is commonplace, accepted and (more often than not) loved today.
Here’s what he said:
‘I believe that [in the near future] the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.’
Looking backwards, rather than forwards, Rashid Khan, the author of Build Better Chatbots, concluded:
‘If you picture the journey of chatbots from the 1960s to now, you see that what was once a fantasy of being able to communicate with a non-living, virtual being is now a part of our everyday lives.’
And a part of our everyday sales process.
Darren Gooding
An up-to-date, relevant, and segmented database is the first secret to successful prospecting. And while reaching that goal can take …
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