Empower your team with AppExchange Chat best practices to improve how you engage with potential buyers and close more deals.
When it comes to engaging with prospects, speed is critical. It’s much more effective for sales reps to proactively reach out to visitors rather than wait around for inbound chats to roll in. In this article, we'll guide you and your team through:
- Which visitors to prioritize
- How to read a visitors digital body language
- How to best to engage
Prioritize Certain Website Visitors
It’s critical to talk to the right people at the right time. We’re not recommending you proactively engage with every website visitor—it’s not sustainable or scalable. The first step is to figure out who’s visiting your listing so you can decide whether to strike up a conversation.
We’ve found that the following four types of visitors warrant an immediate proactive engagement.
ABM Target Accounts
Your marketing team may have defined a specific list of key accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). We call this process account-based marketing (ABM)! When ABM target accounts land on your listing, Qualified will alert you and your team so you can start the conversation with them right away. You'll want to utilize firmographic and other surfaced ABM data points to demonstrate you know and understand this account.
If they’re a target account, you already know your product or service is a good fit. Focus on demonstrating that you understand their company and business.
Ideal customer profiles
Even if your marketing team hasn’t built a list of predefined target ABM accounts, chances are your company has some definition around what your ICP looks like. This is typically a set of characteristics (such as company size, industry, revenue, or geography) that are known to make a certain business a strong fit for your offering.
Similar to ABM target accounts, we'll alert you when these visitors are on your listing and these are companies that you want to jump on ASAP, as firmographic indicators already signal they are likely a good buyer fit.
Open Opportunities
AppExchange Chat will alert you when a visitor from an open opportunity that you own is on the website. Visitors that are already in a buying cycle deserve VIP treatment.
Engaging this type of visitor in a conversation when they visit the site is the perfect opportunity to keep moving things forward. With AppExchange Chat, think of your listing as an additional touchpoint in the buyer’s journey.
Lean on alerts to notify you when your open opportunity is on the site. Use Salesforce opportunity data to understand the size and stage of the deal, who on your team owns the account, and who the contact is to then personalize your greeting accordingly.
Existing or Working Leads
A lead on your listing is someone your team has already spent resources on bringing your business to their attention. Capitalize on their visit and keep them moving through your funnel. Once you get alerted that a lead arrives on your listing, start a conversation by using their name and other information you have about them, such as if they're arriving through a special landing page or marketing campaign.
Utilize the meeting booker to move the buying cycle forward. An SDR’s ultimate goal is to book a meeting. The lead is already on the site—indicating interest—so this is a good time to nail down the next step by serving the meeting booker.
Location Data
AppExchange Chat provides the location for every visitor, known and unknown. Referencing a visitor’s location demonstrates you are not a chatbot and can be a great ice breaker. Draw a personal connection when possible. If you’ve lived in or visited the city where they reside, mention it!
Even if you don't have a sales conversation here, you’ll leave them remembering the positive VIP treatment from your brand.
Chatbot-Gathered Data
When you’re not sure how to proactively engage, lean on information collected by the chabot on your listing. In many cases, your chatbot will be set up to collect information about visitor intent, company size, and any other fields you care about for qualification and routing.
Greetings and shortcuts that generate engagement
Greetings and shortcuts can help you effectively pounce. Here are a few to try:
Shortcuts to use with unknown visitors
Show them you’re human: 👋 Human here! Human there, too?
Reference the day of the week: Hey there! Happy Friday! We did it 🙌!
When you see a visitor “X’ the bot: Not looking to chat with a bot? Good thing I’m human! 💁♀️
When you see them bouncing around: I see you hopping around pages… can I help you find what you’re looking for?
If they’re ignoring you: Not ready to chat? That’s ok! If you change your mind, I’ll be down here👇
Emoji Shortcuts
Shortcuts can be created in the Productivity section of your Account Settings. Add a few emojis to quickly add some personality and flair to your chats!
GIFs and memes shortcuts
AppExchange Chat supports images and GIFs, which are a fun way to engage with prospects. Use GIFs to lighten up the conversation, but do make sure the GIFs you choose are sensitive and appropriate to the conversation at hand. We'll automatically unfurl GIFs from giphy.com and you can find more information in our University on sending GIFs, inline images, and formatting your chats!
Summary
The goal of proactive engagement is ultimately to drive sales. So what the heck do you do once you get a visitor to engage?
Think of this as your first sales meeting! Run a quick discovery via chat. Have a list of your top three qualification questions ready to help understand if the lead is a good business fit. Make these questions shortcuts so you’ll always have them on hand. Remember, sales conversations are a give-and-take process. A visitor who is actually interested in purchasing will understand that they need to answer a few questions for you to direct them to the right place. Don’t shy away from the opportunity to gather insights!
Make sure to grab an email address once you’ve qualified the visitor and get on a phone call as soon as possible. Qualified even has built-in telephony capabilities to host your first sales meeting right on the website, if the visitor is ready. Here at Qualified, we say “bots scale, but humans sell,” so when you see that someone is qualified, suggest a phone call right then and there.
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