In this guest post, Tim Absalikov of Lasting Trend discusses how using chatbots for lead generation can help grow your business by furthering relationships with your audience. 

Chatbots have come a long way, especially in the recent past.  Now, they don’t just handle basic conversations.  Chatbots have a bunch of features that can be extremely beneficial to your business.  Chatbots are now sophisticated enough to help you with lead generation.  

You know how important lead generation is, and how it can help you grow your business.  The more effective you can be the better it is for your business.  

Of the several options you have, chatbots can be the most beneficial.  Let us explain, you see, you want to hire the best individuals that you can.  You search and search to find the right fit for your teams and who will work hard. 

The difficult part is that it doesn’t matter how many great individuals you can hire; they can only work so much.  Either they burn out, or they need to take time off in order to be able to stay focused.  The most diligent and hardest working employee can still only do so much.  This is where chatbots come into play.  

Here are some things that chatbots can do that even the best employee cannot:

Lead generation

Sales conversions

Better RIO

Audience segmentation

Provide hybrid support

Talk with leads and build relationships

And many, many more!

Overall, chatbots will help you drive conversions.  As a leading B2B SEO firm, Lasting Trend as well as many others recommend chatbots. We join those firms in echoing the importance of chatbots and the impact they can have on your business.

Features and benefits of chatbots for business

 From an overall business perspective, having a sales bot can do a lot to improve the interaction between your customers and prospects with your business.  Chatbots are easy to set up and can provide help where employees cannot.  

Quick responses and interactions to help gather information as well as further business discussions.  It can be done in a way where the client or up-and-coming clients can understand that they are talking with a bot, but still be very professional.

Sales conversion automation

Chatbot sales conversions can make the process increasingly automated. Using the features to generate more sales can allow your company to convert at all hours of the day.

While your sales force is sleeping, the chatbot can continue to grow your business since the chatbot can be programmed to respond and direct the conversation in an efficient way. 

Basically, it can do anything in the sales process, so your sales force has an easier job, and can perform more efficiently.

Better ROI

We know that cost can be a deterrent when looking at a sales bot.  The question as to whether it will be worth it is really up to you.  Think of it as an investment, where it might take some time to get it to be extremely efficient.  

Once you’ve got it set up and handling the questions as well as furthering conversations, the ROI is huge.  Setting up your chatbot and incorporating it with your sales team involved can help with making sure this investment pays off exponentially.

Activity all day, every day

As we’ve mentioned before, one of the best benefits of your chatbot is that it’s available all day, every day.  Because the chatbot doesn’t take time off, chatbot sales can happen at any time.  

This is helpful, of course, as someone who may become a client may want to connect at odd hours.  It’s especially helpful if you have an international business.  This makes it so you don’t have peak hours of business, your business can be peak hours at all times!

How do chatbots help with lead generation?

Chatbots are especially effective at generating new leads.  ‘How do chatbots qualify leads?’ you may ask. There are many ways that a chatbot can be used in the lead generation process.  

They can be especially effective in helping upcoming clients feel comfortable in moving forward in the process.  There is no emotion, and it goes straight to the point of what info is needed.  Even the way that the bot can gather information, and what details it can get, are all potentially more effective.

Help understand the audience

As a B2B SEO firm, we recommend that at the very least you utilize your chatbot to help you understand who your audience is.

The better you understand your target market and those you appeal to, the more effective you can be.

You can gather details through the bot to get information that will help you in your marketing approach.  It also can help you fine-tune the questions you ask and the process of converting a lead to a client.

You may like: How To Understand Your Small Business Target Audience

Audience segmentation

A chatbot will be one of your best resources for audience segmentation.  Once you understand who you want to appeal to, it’s important to figure out which products or services appeal to which groups of your market. 

The chatbot can be used to gather information based on the questions asked and how the responses go.  It’s an effective and non-invasive way for the target audience to provide information.   Through the data that the bot can gather, you can further enhance the use of your bot and your targeted marketing.

Talk with leads to build stronger relationships

Your chatbot can talk with leads and develop a relationship between your potential clients and business.  This can really come in handy in the beginning to potentially save big leads! 

Where your sales team may not be available, not getting in touch with your business could be the difference between gaining a client gained or losing them.

Not only that, as impressive as your bot can be with conversation and gathering information, the better off your relationships can be.

Replace forms

Filling out forms can feel outdated and tedious.  Even though this potential role of your chatbot may not drive conversions, it definitely improves the experience for your clients. 

By getting the bot to ask the questions that would normally need to be done in a form, it makes the process feel more conversational.  This also means that you can continue to converse with your clients in a positive way and get all the information you need.

Provide hybrid support for complex sales conversations

Where there are longer sales conversations that require multiple discussions and negotiations, the chatbot can play an intricate role. Where there is information that is needed to be gathered within the negotiation process, the bot can handle that.  This allows the sales team to discuss and negotiate contracts.  

We recommend looking into other creative ways like this to incorporate chatbots into your organization.  There are so many advantages to utilizing bots within sales conversations.

Chatbots are the future

Chatbots can be integrated easily into businesses to help them with all of their processes. Regardless of how you choose to utilize them, if you don’t add a chatbot into your strategy you will fall behind. 

Take the time to weigh out chatbots’ pros and cons for your business. Make sure that you have a strategy before you invest, then make the move to integrate.  The better your strategy is, and the better idea you have, the sooner your chatbot will make an impact on your business. 

Conclusion on Chatbots for Lead Generation

We will always recommend the strategy of integrating a chatbot into your business. There are a handful of major reasons to do so:

• Improves relationships.  The user experience is important and having a chatbot to help develop and improve relationships is key.
• Increased availability.  You will always have some availability to gather information and start the relationship, regardless of the time of day. 
• Sales automation.  Involving a chatbot allows the automation process for your sales strategy.  All sales details have parts that can easily be automated, and this allows your sales team to focus on negotiation.  They can discuss and focus on making the deal instead of the “paperwork” type content that needs to occur during the process.

These three reasons alone are enough to increase the ROI on your business exponentially.  The sooner you can get the strategy together and incorporate a chatbot, the better.