Chatbots are most often associated with customer support, but they’re also an excellent tool for boosting B2B sales.
With chatbots as part of your sales and account-based marketing strategies, you can engage customers with intelligent, context-relevant communications while offering basic query resolution. They’re also great for collecting leads and accomplishing many front-desk tasks with ease.
Chatbots, Lead Generation, and Sales
As most sales and marketing leaders know, it takes multiple “touches” to engage potential buyers, with about 80% of sales being made between the fifth and twelfth contacts. These touches can include:
- Phone calls
- Face-to-face meetings
- Social media messages
- Voicemails
- Digital and physical ads
- Email marketing
Marketing teams traditionally rely on landing pages, lead capture forms, and follow-up attempts to connect with and convert prospects into sales. It’s a time-consuming technique that can leave a sales team feeling like it’s running in place.
If you want a faster, more efficient approach to connecting with, engaging, and selling to your customer base, look no further than chatbots, which are transforming how B2B organizations communicate with their customers.
Key B2B Chatbot Trends
A common misconception is that chatbots are best suited for B2C companies. But consider these statistics:
- 58% of B2B companies use chatbots, while only 42% of B2C websites have chatbots.
- Nearly 40% of businesses use chatbots to make their websites more interactive.
- Over 65% of businesses that have adopted chatbots are SaaS companies.
Results for B2B companies that use chatbots are impressive—with some businesses reporting up to 67% increased sales and a 55% chance of generating quality leads.
Here’s how they’re doing it.
Respond to Leads and Customers With Lightning Speed
When a potential lead visits your website, you want to connect with them as quickly as possible. Chatbots enable you to:
- Automate responses to common inquiries.
- Instantaneously send leads or customer follow-up emails.
- Route visitors to appropriate team members to provide more extensive support.
We live in a world where people want convenient, instant communication, whether ordering take-out on movie night or placing an order for SaaS services. How quickly your sales team responds to leads can make or break your conversion rates.
Chatbots speed up the communication process and remove the friction that so often exists when companies only use live sales reps. Instead of reps taking minutes, hours, or even days to respond to a lead, here’s what the process can look like with a chatbot:
- A lead visits your website and fills out a form on the chatbot.
- They chose the topic of interest.
- Depending on the topic, they can chose to move the conversation forward via chat or a call.
- If a call, they can then decide between scheduling a call or talking now.
- The lead chooses to talk now.
- Five to ten seconds later, the lead is assigned to a sales rep and receives a call.
- If they chose to continue with chat, a few seconds later they are in contact with a sales rep.
- Should the conversation move to a potential qualified lead, the sales rep can ask to move the conversation to a call to engage more effectively and qualify the lead.
Personalize Interactions
Collected website visitor data provides marketing and sales teams with the insights they need to interact with leads and customers in a more personal, meaningful way. This data can include:
- The person’s industry and company.
- The pain points they’re looking to solve.
- The solutions they’re looking for to solve those pain points.
- The amount of time they spent on your website.
- The pages they spent the most time reading.
Chatbots can easily capture this data and more by asking questions, conducting surveys, and so on. Marketing and sales teams can use this detailed customer and lead information to run better campaigns, including personalized messages and offers.
Shorten the B2B Sales Cycle
Marketing and sales teams can use chatbots to qualify leads, segment potential and existing customers, and simplify work processes by automating simple routine tasks. To move leads and customers down the sales funnel more swiftly, chatbots can:
- Help users navigate to the information they need.
- Ask users targeted questions to quickly identify their needs and qualify them.
- Route high purchase intent leads to a salesperson or consultant.
Another way chatbots shorten the sales cycle is that they’re available 24/7. This feature is particularly beneficial to B2B companies that sell across time zones.
Encourage Repeat Business
B2B or B2C, customers who are satisfied with the service they receive are more likely to return and remain loyal. Fortunately, studies show that what customers care about most is “perceived humanness” and fast answers. Chatbots help you provide the quick, customized experiences customers want, which, in turn, promotes stronger relationships, increased customer loyalty, and lifetime value.
Chatbots: Creating Better B2B Sales Experiences
The typical sales process offers many opportunities for chatbots to step in and make a positive impact. Imagine a customer visiting your website to research a product or service and encountering a chatbot on the landing page. It asks them a few questions about their requirements or business and then immediately provides information on specific, relevant products and services. A process that might have taken hours to complete is now accomplished in mere seconds.
By revolutionizing how your B2B marketing team engages customers, a chatbot can help your business gain an edge over the competition, making it easy to please customers and generate more revenue.
Chatbots can play a critical role in your company’s digital transformation.. 3D2B develops customized solutions that fill your marketing and sales activities gaps, increase your organization’s share of qualified sales opportunities, and provide a strong ROI.
Book a consultation today to learn more about all we do.
Call us at +1 813-320-0500 (US) or +39 06 978446 60 (EMEA) or contact us online for help meeting your sales goals.
