Boost Your Sales and Engagement With a Chatbot

Sales are becoming more automated, that’s indisputable as teams get smaller or the pool of contacts grows, no matter how much of a personal touch you want for your business. Chatbots can play just an efficient part of your sales automation processes as part of a sales suite or a standalone tool.

Search for ‘sales automation’ and there are a huge number of services out there trying to become a part of your business, for the usual cloud or per-user subscription fee. While big businesses can afford to keep a regular flow of new recruits to the sales office or floor, to match the 33%+ turnover rate, as their best people inevitably move on for greener pastures and higher pay. For the rest of us, sales automation is the way to go to bring the brightest prospects to the attention of your efficient team.

Many of these tools now use AI to varying degrees, to help providing better leads and accurate forecasting for upselling, cross-selling, and repeat purchases, yet only a few are taking the next step and adding a chatbot to initiate the sales conversation.

A Chatbot Saves Everybody Time

One of the benefits of sales automation is that technology can find a huge range of prospects. However, your team would never have the time to make that volume of cold calls. Enter the chatbot, that can rapidly find promising leads and initiate the conversation. And for startups with a small team, the bot can take those initial calls or website visits, and triage information and prospects’ requirements, prioritizing the sales effort and driving those key early sales.

Chatbots have grown in popularity among customer services as they strip out the time lag between a question and response. Chatbots provide an instant response, and are available 24/7 and can work in multiple languages. As they have become smarter over the years, they can answer a wider set of questions with a deeper range of answers.

For sales teams, chatbots mean a prospect doesn’t have to schedule a call and they can get the more details upfront without having to spend time navigating websites or service option brochures before deciding to register their interest. Final deals or more complex decisions can be made with the help of the sales team, with all the extras like business lunches, special discounts or

Armed with better information, prospects can enter a sales negotiation with better information, shortening the process and helping both sides reach a successful conclusion. Beyond the initial sale, chatbots can also help with sales of consumables and upselling through regular automated inquiries that are fast becoming how many companies do, and prefer to do business. There’s no awkward pauses, no scrabbling for a polite no thank you, the chatbot can offer a quick yes/no option and be on its way.

How to Add A Chatbot To Your Business

Major vendors like Salesforce are adding AI and chatbot features to their service lineups, and the technology is filtering down to smaller players, linking the bots to all parts of the sales funnel. However, your company can go the custom route, which can be beneficial if you are using limited tools for your sales.

With chatbots appearing on websites, within apps or on your company’s Facebook Messenger, a well-written and trained bot can save time and money, simplifying both sales and customer support. The likes of SnatchBot allows a company to have a chatbot on call across your channels to handle initial sales interactions with the results and vital information forwarded to your sales team to build that relationship and win sales.

As your business gets used to working with bots, it can be used to go the whole way and complete sales deals for common appointments or services. There are still plenty of businesses and workers who won’t buy a product from a website without some sort of communication, and the bot can help bridge that gap.

As AI and bots become the common way to do business in the 2020s, getting started now will help give your company a modest competitive advantage over those with an all-manual sales function. Success is easy to monitor through analytics and bots can be updated and adapted to broaden their features or help offer move valuable sales processes, and they won’t quit on you at a critical time of year and can handle all the inquiries, should your business take off dramatically.