Your competitors are knocking on the door of every possible lead, so you need to quickly disqualify leads that aren’t a fit in order to spend time closing high value opportunities.

The growth of CRM systems has provided sales teams with the analytics and tools to hone-in on the target user’s “buy-cycle”. Once you understand the buy-cycle for your product, it should be used gather plenty of qualitative information about what makes a good lead. (If you are a young team, you may not have as much data on what your buy-cycle looks like, but you can still hypothesize on the ideal buy-cycle. Just make sure to re-evaluate this hypothesis frequently to validate its accuracy.) Once you have identified the qualities of a good lead, it's important to collect as much of this data as possible before your sales team jumps in. Without qualifying user data, every lead looks the same on paper and your team will have no process to plan their outreach.

Some of the most popular and effective qualifying data is collected from email campaigns, social media ads, and other forms of inbound marketing. All of these are great but they can leave a large gap in understanding “Why” the user has come to your site.

At Instabot we focus on this problem.

To be clear, not every qualified lead is ready to buy. However, qualified leads are a better time investment (and therefore likelier to close) than leads that are either spam or not a fit for your product..

Here’s where the bot comes in. Because a conversational experience is mutually beneficial for you and your users, users are much more likely to engage (we see up to 2x the amount of engagement with conversational bots when compared to traditional marketing channels). Leverage conversational marketing to qualify your leads by:

1. Discovering what the user is looking for from your site

2. Informing your sales team when to reach out for a personal engagement

So how can you integrate Instabot into your sales process? The answer is easily.

You want to create a bot that speaks to your customers in the same tone your sales team would when reaching out directly with one significant difference. The customer is choosing to have the conversation instead of feeling anxious about avoiding a sales pitch. This voluntary conversation starts your customer’s experience off on the right foot, which goes a long way in collecting more of the qualifying data needed to identify good leads.

The conversation you build with Instabot should allow the user to choose their own adventure so that their experience matches their needs. As the customer responds to your bot’s questions, Instabot is storing their answers and recording goal milestones used to qualify them into certain buckets.

Our Salesforce (or other CRM) integration then allows you to select which bot goals are the triggers for creating leads. Customers who do not complete this goal will not be added to your Salesforce account. The ability to filter out unqualified leads keeps your CRM clean and organized while also keeping your sales team focused on selling instead of filtering data. Any rules you have configured in your Salesforce account for assigning leads will still be maintained.

Using integrated services like Instabot and Salesforce, you can look at leads who have engaged with your bot and prepare yourself with information about Why they have come to your site. Use this information to nurture that relationship and have confidence that you have an advantage over the cold-calling competitors still stuck in the past.

Once Instabot is creating leads in Salesforce, you can do even more powerful lead qualifying when you add Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) into your bot!

Questions about Instabot for lead qualification? Schedule a demo and we would be happy to answer any questions for you.