How To Qualify Leads With Live Chat
So you’ve built a can’t-live-without product/service, defined your buyer personas and created some great lead generation campaigns to get qualified traffic to your website. But attracting eyeballs is only the first step. How do you sift through your website visitors to make sure you’re focusing engagement efforts on your most actionable buyers, rather than wasting time with lost traffic and looky-loos?
Lead qualification is a crucial step in the sales funnel, but it can also prove frustrating at times. Live chat software provides excellent tools to help qualify leads so your sales team can do what they do best – close deals.
Dedicate sales resources to live chat.
Live chat is only effective if you have the manpower to back it up. Sure, you can use chat boxes to capture leads when offline, but the point of live chat is real-time engagement with your website visitors. The most impactful live chat strategies employ the appropriate resources to capitalize on leads while you have their peak attention on your website.
Depending on the size and structure of your sales team, you may benefit from dedicating a few team members to serve as front-line chat agents to screen prospects and get them started down the appropriate paths of your sales funnel. Consider using live chat as a training tool for your entry level sales reps to familiarize them with client communications and lead scoring techniques.
Take advantage of intelligent proactive chat tools.
SnapEngage’s proactive chat feature allows you to configure intelligent rules and messages to dynamically display to specific audience segments, so you can be sure that your team is making the most of their time, chatting with qualified prospects. For example, say you have data showing that leads who visit a specific page on your website are 40% more likely to convert. Adding a proactive chat invitation to that page will immediately connect those qualified visitors to your sales team, adding an extra boost to conversion rates.
How HubSpot Uses SnapEngage’s Proactive Chat Features to Qualify and Convert Leads
HubSpot’s sales team uses SnapEngage’s proactive chat tools to target and connect qualified audience segments to the appropriate members of their sales team.
“SnapEngage has enabled us to connect our website visitors to our sales team through a whole new channel. Live chat is an excellent option for those prospects who want to “talk” to a person without picking up the phone. The software is easy to use and has a robust integration with HubSpot. With this integrated solution, we are able to dynamically display live chat to specific segments, so we are targeting those people who are the right fit for a conversation with our sales team. The average close rate of prospects on live chat is 2X higher than those requesting a demo through a standard landing page.” Melissa Miller, Marketing Operations, HubSpot
Consider using a pre-chat form*. (note the asterisk)
Pre-chat forms can serve as excellent lead qualifiers, enabling you to gather extra details about your visitor prior to starting a chat with your team. *However, the flip-side is that pre-chat forms can also serve as an obstacle to visitor engagement. With that caveat, try experimenting with different form fields that are relevant to your lead qualification processes, such as size of organization or industry. This will help pre-qualify incoming chats for more effective lead management.
Integrate your live chat software with your CRM
Connecting your live chat software with your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution allows you to seamlessly pass data between systems so you can identify previous visitors and create/update leads with live chat event data for follow-up tasks and activities. Let’s drill down to a specific example. Say you have a website visitor who is returning to your website for more information. On their previous visit, they supplied their email address to your chat agent, which automatically created a lead in your CRM’s contact records. On this returning visit, you are immediately able to identify your lead’s details and past activities so you can pick up where you left off.
If you’re currently using a CRM system, such as Salesforce, MS Dynamics CRM or HubSpot, then integrating SnapEngage Live Chat is a breeze. Connect your accounts with a simple verification process and map custom fields so your sales team can identify and take action on hot leads. Be sure to check out our complete listing of live chat integrations.
