3 Keys to Using Chatbots to Book Sales Meetings
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Host: Billy Bateman– Billy Bateman is the co-founder and VP of Operations at ChatFunnels, a digital conversation analytics, and optimization solutions provider. He has a background in digital marketing, operations, and entrepreneurship. Billy grew up in Idaho and graduated from Brigham Young University and has a Masters of Business Administration from Boise State University. While at BSU, he completed Boise State’s Venture College Entrepreneurship Program and became a mentor and entrepreneurial lead on a technology commercialization project. He is an avid outdoorsman and enjoys fishing and hunting. He currently lives in Springville, Utah, with his wife, Chelsea.
Overview: This week our host Billy Bateman give the best practices to using chatbots to book sales meetings. He includes how to manage the users expectations, how to choose qualifying criteria and different ways to effectively trigger a bot.
Reference:
Billy All right everybody. Today, I want to talk about the best practices around optimizing a bot that you’re using to book sales meetings. So a lot of people are using Drift, Intercom, HubSpot to book meetings for their sales teams. We get the benefits of the automation.
It’s good for the customer in that if you don’t have people available for live chat at the moment or just in general, that bot can connect them to a sales rep pretty quickly to schedule a meeting so that they they’ve got some resolution they can get their questions answered. But doing it well is not the easiest thing to do. So, I’ve got three big bullet points that we go through with anyone that’s thinking about.
How do I use the bot get the benefits of it for my sales team? And so I’m going to go through those. Now the first one is you really got to think about the offer that you’re making with the bots? So are you offering the three biggest ones are demos, pricing and a free trial? So if you’re using the bot to book demo meetings, pricing meetings or free trials just make sure you actually have a real process and you’re going to give them this information with the meeting.
The worst when these Bots don’t perform is when we’re just like, oh we’re going to put up a free trial and have the bot try to book meetings to get people started but it’s not really a free trial or it’s not really a demo or we’re not really going to give them pricing information. Don’t do that. You got to be straight up. The last thing people really want is a bait and switch.
So really think through your best offer and use the Bots for that run a test on it. The next thing is how is that bot triggered. The best way if you want to see value and get a lot of hits and high intent in for people engaging with your Bot is generally have a tied to a button on your website. We can have the bot pop up on the on the bottom right-hand corner of the page and it’s okay. It’s an all right way to do it, but you’re not going to get as many conversations is if you just tie it to these buttons on your website.
Run the test, see if it’s better than the form. Usually once you dial in the bot, it will perform better than the form. If for no other reason, you’re going to get partial information. Where not many forms are going to capture, you know, someone put in an email but it didn’t hit submit. You know, they don’t have to book a meeting for you to see their email address in most of these Bots softwares.
So get in there test how it’s how it’s being triggered. I always recommend trying it out from a button. The next best is put it on high intent Pages as kind of a second net on your pricing page, on your product pages offer make it very clear when the Bots Pops that the bot can help you book a demo meeting or get pricing information or start a free trial. If you put it on the homepage, it’s gonna fire a lot.
You might get a lot of conversations. But generally your completion rates going to be really low unless it’s highly transactional where someone can just get on a phone call with the sales rep right away. You’ve got a low price point. It’s easy for them to buy, you know, it’s a — they close. If you get a long sales process, you’ll still book meetings this way, but when you look at your metrics for how many people engaged to how many actually make it all the way down the funnel.
It’s going to be pretty low. Now, the last thing to get after is the qualifying criteria and this is really it’s the hardest of the three, but once you nail this, this is when the Bots really starts to shine over a form. So when you’re optimizing your qualifying criteria, the first thing you got to ask yourself is do I want to qualify people in and get more meetings with the sales team and realize that not every meeting is going to is going to be qualified just the same with the BTR.
You know, BTR sets appointments. Not everyone is really qualified or do I want to qualify people out to my sales team they are, you know, do they not have the capacity to take a lot of meetings, but they only are going to take the most qualified meetings. You got to answer that question. Now if the answer is you want to qualify people in and get people engaged with your sales team right away.
You need to boil down the bot qualifying criteria to three or four questions. So think of you know, if someone’s going to meet with my sales team, what are the three to four things I absolutely have to know and only ask those questions, okay and try to be very concise. Once you’ve got those questions some of the the best chest run question order, the order which you ask those questions, and we usually say hey, let’s start with the least intrusive one and then get to the more personal information as they get down the funnel with the bot.
It’s just like if you’re talking to somebody in the store, the first thing they’re going to ask you is just hey, how can I help you? I see you’re looking at this product. So, just you know, start off very high level then drill down to okay. What’s your email address? What company do you work for? At the end of this before you present them with a calendar to book a meeting?
And with those questions you want to also be testing do we use free response or button response is a great test to run generally the button works the best although free response can work. Usually if you give them some prompted answers or an example answer you’re going to get better results using a free response and then if you choose to go with only button responses I would really drill into how you present the options.
The number of options that you give them. Also just the copy for those options. And then the order that they appear to the end-user. Shorter is better. If you really only have like, you know, you’re asking for company size and the way you split it out is you know, they’ve got over people or under people.
You know, you may want to know exactly how many and you can give them a lot of different buckets to go into but you’re going to get a better completion rate if you just go with that. Hey, do you have less than people are over people. The less options the better and you’re gonna get more people down the phone.
Now, if you want to qualify people out. Yeah, give them a lot of options makes them think about it before they get all the way to the calendar drop, okay. And then the last thing this isn’t something to test but this is a best practice whenever using a bot for something like booking a meetings.
Make sure that you manage the expectations for the end user. So when the Bots appears and they first engage, be clear like if it’s a pricing bot, and the bot is not going to give them the price. They’ve got to talk to somebody to get that price. But make sure they know that have the bot say something to the effect of hey, I loved I’d love to help you get that pricing information.
I’ve got to ask you three or four questions to connect you to somebody who can give it to you. Or if you’re doing demos, you know, and it’s only live in-person demos. You don’t have a record a demo to offer them. Make sure that the bot says that say Hey, I’m going to ask you three questions and then connect you to the best person to give you a demo based on your needs.
So manage those expectations. If you manage the expectations, your completion percentage is usually going to bump up between five and ten percent as opposed to just having the bot go straight into a question like hey what technology stack do you use? You know, you use x y z.
So, make sure that you go through, these are the three biggest things once again, really think through what offer you’re making with the Bot. Number two, how are you triggering the bot to engage with people. And three your qualifying criteria. How are you structuring that? And then the last thing is who you’re connecting them to. And this is just a bonus is make sure that you’re connecting them to the right people that you’re setting up the sales team the right way. So, okay until later.