Scale your business by automating your lead generation

Automation is finding it’s way into everything. These days, there are many cheap or even free ways that you can completely automate low-value parts of your team’s day. This means that your team can spend more time on the valuable things; income generating tasks & creative, problem solving tasks.

This is especially applicable in sales too. You’d be surprised how much time management is a factor in sales process design. I’ve given this analogy a few times but here it is again;

“You only have your sales team for a limited amount of hours per month. The more often they are speaking to potential customers who are interested, the more sales that you can expect them to make”

Pay Per Lead Generation Campaigns

If you think of this as a spectrum, you want to have your team spend as much time as possible on the ‘Meeting & Quote’ and ‘Closing Sales’ end of the process. That sounds great, but how do you do this?

 

To generate more sales, start by automating the left hand side of the sales process

Let’s stick with the above sales process analogy. The more that you can automate these tasks, the better:

  • Reaching out to prospects and educating them on your product (Outreach via LinkedIn, Pay Per Click campaigns, Word of Mouth, etc)
  • Helping channel that interest into further commitment (Lead Scoring, rewarding customers with valuable information in exchange for their Opt-In)
  • Capturing that interest (Web Funnels, Contact forms, Web Chat)

These are example tasks, so your actual tasks may differ depending on your sales process. An important thing to start with is to write down each stage of how your customers currently sign up and consider what you can automate.

A quick win for you: How to do personalised web chat

Chances are that whatever your actual sales process is, you probably have your website as a central point where someone can either sign up or find out more to enquire. As such, we’ll focus on how to automate the way that your website captures leads.

Step one: Add web chat to your website

Easy stage! There are 1,000,000 different platforms out there. Many of these have a free version which are pretty good. Here are some examples of web chat platforms which you might find useful:

 

Step two: Make sure that you’re going to be available to respond within at least 1 minute

You can think of web chat as like a shop assistant. There to answer questions. Did you know that the average wait time to respond is 2 minutes? Many are longer. They actually are more like glorified emails where after submitting your question, it’s more like 24 hours before you actually get an answer.

If I had to wait 24 hours in a shop to get an answer, I’d go to another shop. And that’s what people do! So the point is, you need to be available to answer questions. For example, thanks to our team of web chat reps, our average time to response is 10 seconds on our web chat. (Don’t believe me? Go ahead! Post a message in the web chat icon and time our response!)

If you’re not going to be available 24/7, it’s fine just be honest about it. Posting a question to a rep that appears online, only to get a “we will respond within 1 working day”, is kind of a slap in the face.

Being available 24/7 is ideal. It’s much better to state your available times (9-5 Monday to Friday) or in offline times have an automated FAQ available.

automated chat triggers

 

Step Three: Make it feel personal with automated chat triggers

What’s important is to personalise this as much as possible, so it feels like a tailored experience. The ideal way to do this is to have humans available 24/7 to post messages. If this isn’t logistically possible for you, then a good way to help increase this personalisation is with automated chat triggers. How do you make the experience more personalised? Use automated chat triggers to personalise based on

  • Day/Time “Good morning/Afternoon or Happy Tuesday”
  • Previous visits A simple “Welcome back” Goes a long way
  • Prior activity It’s quite straightforward to hook things up to reference things they’ve done like “Hey, did you find that Whitepaper PDF useful?”
  • The last conversation you had – Similarly, it’s possible to reference previous conversations you’ve had, like “Did you find the demo with our Rep useful?”

A lot of these are able to easily set up using Rules on the platforms. Using Zapier, you can also hook up information from other systems you have for free or cheap.

 

Do you have any ideas for automated chat triggers?

We love sharing tips with our community so we’d love to hear any thoughts you have on ways to personalise the sales process which we can share with others. If you’d like some help with automating your sales process on a pay-per-lead basis, our real humans are available 24/7 to generate web chat leads. Check it out!