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Reviving & Pre-Qualifying Leads with an AI Sales Bot

Reviving & Pre-Qualifying Leads with an AI Sales Bot

Charlie Carroll
Chief Performance Officer
September 17, 2024
AI
introduction

The use of Chatbots is nothing new, they have been used for customer service and for online engagement for a number of years.  However, with the emergence of AI, particularly large language models (LLM’s), chatbots have seen a leap in their evolution.

You may have recently seen our post on how AI sales/chat bots work and just how powerful they are. If so, skip down straight to the case study to avoid reading again how they work.

Introducing the AI Sales bot; a sophisticated tool that not only provides automated responses but also engages in conversations with customers.  These sophisticated tools understand user intent, can personalise communication and drive conversions.

They not only answer questions, but can also nurture leads, collect feedback but also walk the user through the sales process.

In this blog, we will look at how AI Sales bot’s work, how they can be used, the benefits of integrating them into your sales process and how to improve your return on investment.

Use Cases for AI Sales Bots

At Push we use them in numerous ways; these include:

  • Collecting Feedback
    Using AI Sales Bots to connect with attendees of our webinars and in-person events and have conversations with them.

  • Engaging with low quality traffic
    For example if we are using Facebook Lead forms, which traditionally don’t provide the best quality leads, we can use an AI Sales bot to warm up the leads and book appointments for only the better quality leads.  We then push the lower quality leads through a different funnel.

  • Re-engaging Cold leads
    Where we have leads that we have not engaged with in over 30 days, we can use the bots to re-engage the bots personalised messaging.  Thus, reviving interest in our business and moving the lead further down the sales funnel.

Setting Up an AI Sales Bot Workflow

Setting up an AI Sales bot workflow involves several key steps to ensure that bot engages with the leads and walks them through the sales process.

  1. Gather Your Leads
    These could be leads from your CRM that haven’t responded to your previous outreach attempts.  Make sure that the leads are still relevant and have potential for conversion.

  2. Upload Leads to the Workflow
    Next the leads need to be uploaded to the Sales bot system.  How you do this will depend on the tool you are using.  Many platforms will have automated options to synchronise your leads directly from your CRM.

  3. Set-up Preset Questions
    Create a set of questions that the AI will use to engage with the leads.  These should align with your goals, such as re-engaging cold leads or booking appointments.  The questions should be clear, concise and relevant to the needs of the contact.

  4. Response Scenarios
    Next you’ll need to map out the possible responses from the leads.  For example, the contact may respond with one of the following Yes, No, No response or they ask another question, in which case they would be sent down 4 different paths.

  5. Build the Flow
    Using the scenarios you've mapped out, create a comprehensive conversation flow. This flow should cover as many eventualities as possible, guiding the bot's interactions to ensure it knows how to respond in different situations. Include decision points where the bot can determine the next best action based on the lead's responses.

    This will help create a seamless and effective conversation experience for the lead.

This is a basic example that we have put together, however there are numerous tools that you could use to set-up the process.  These tools use AI to help you create natural questions and interactions; using them can help to streamline the effectiveness of the bot.

For us it typically takes anywhere between 5 and 15 hours to build the bot.  This includes planning, set-up, testing and refinement.  While this might seem like a lot of effort, the longer term benefits include significant time savings for your sales team.

To maximise the effectiveness of the bot, we spend time testing the bot as well as regularly reviewing the logs, so that we can adjust the flows accordingly to ensure that we get the best chance of engagement and ultimately conversions.

How we Helped a Finance Client Revive 26% of Dead Leads in 30 days

Our client was only achieving a contact rate of only 60%, losing 40% of potential deals, and leaving money on the table due to leads that haven't been contacted.

Our solution involved implementing an AI sales bot named Lisa. We used simple, targeted messages to engage leads, checking if they still needed assistance with their loan applications.

The bot also included a calendar booking link for easy scheduling.

The process involved gathering unreachable leads from a 30-day cold list, uploading them to the AI sales bot for automated outreach, crafting compelling messages, and integrating a calendar booking link.

The results were impressive

  • 26% of dead leads were revived
  • New appointments were successfully booked

We achieved an increased ROI on the existing data with the key benefit that these leads were already paid for, resulting in pure profit.

The process is now built into our clients workflow where we continually run this once a lead has gone cold for 30 days. As a result we are increasing our ROI constantly on our marketing efforts without having to invest anything more than a tech and SMS fee.

As you will have seen from this article, Chatbots have come a long way in a short time; they are no longer binary tools; they now provide human-like experiences that can be utilised to convert your once dead leads.

If you are interested in learning more, please contact us today and we’ll show you how!

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