Pre-qualifying chatbots and 3rd party lead nurturing
Specially since the irruption of online marketing, many companies are facing a common problem: Being unable to handle all their leads properly.
When we get a new lead, we should make contact in the first five minutes, extract the information and offer them the right product as soon as possible. Failing to do so, might lead to losing a sale. But we also get many leads from users too early in the buying cycle or just dreamers that don’t really have intention to buy.
Leaving the qualification process entirely to sales agents is not the best option, since they are usually busy working in current deals, meetings, viewings and so on. So it’s recommended to help them prioritize and focus on the good ones. How can we do that?
Chatbots for lead pre-qualification
Using a chatbot to pre-qualify online leads is on the rise. Specially if we get a high volume of online leads and we have a limited budget, this could be the best option. Some of these bots are easy to configure automated Q&A to get basic information. Some others are more advanced and try to use AI algorithms to give better answers.
There are many options available for websites like Chatbot, and also for our social networks like ManyChat for Facebook. Check this article on SproutSocial for a complete guide about chatbots.
3rd party lead qualification and nurturing
Using a bot has its limitations. So another option is to use the services of a company fully dedicated to lead qualification and nurturing. Those exist since years ago and there are even industry specific. In real estate, the head of the spear is Agentology, founded in 2013 in the US and with a total of $17.3 million investment so far. And we have several others like Cribz in the UK.
These services might also offer lead generation and lead nurturing for those long term prospects. With the idea of working on the lead until is hot and only then transfer it to the sales agent. This allows the sales team to better prioritize and focus, with a very probable increase in performance.
Conclusions
We know that generating leads is not cheap, there is an effort and resources spent by the marketing team behind. So we really need to make sure every lead is taken care of properly. And for that, is not enough with just handing them over to the sales team as they come.
Having an in-house team for lead qualification would probably be the best option. But often that’s not feasible, so chatbots as an initial filter and 3rd party services for the nurturing, could be a good solution.
