Tailored sales funnels are sales reps’ best friends. If constructed well, they can do their job of turning leads and prospects into satisfied customers.
The other benefit of sales funnels is that it reduces the seller participation in the whole process. Thanks to that rep could focus on the core actions important to close the sales, while not being disrupted by other sales-related activity. How to merge artificial intelligence with a human operation to get the most out of the online sales funnel?
Sales funnels are made to build relations between customers and your brand. Customers need to be aware of your existence. You also need exposure, but not necessarily showing any particular product or service. This stage should rather focus on informative, advisory content which will show that you are an expert in a particular field. You will achieve this goal through webinars, videos, and infographics, or reports to name just a few. Good SEO, as well as sponsored social media posts, are great support at this stage. Awareness could be achieved by previously made content. When the customer is aware of your brand it will be easier to consider your product or service in the next step.
At this level, you still don’t need to enter human-to-human relations with your customer. Your potential lead will not be ready to make a purchase decision at this point, but you got the attention, so it is time to build the relationship. This time you can get the most out of your blog posts, email campaigns, and chatbots. At this stage, you can benefit from solutions like Closer, a rich media sales communication platform.
With this easy to install a widget, you could start interactions with your potential customers. Let’s say that in stage one a prospect has downloaded an interesting report from your website. Because it was hidden behind the paywall, you get the customer’s email address and the marketing consents so now you have sent an email campaign leading to your blog post, and now the customer is reading it. With Closer, you can activate proactive messages. It means that while your prospect is on your webpage the chat opens automatically, trying to start a conversation with a customer.
With Closer, it could be even more encouraging, as you can define different proactive messages, depending on targeted locations. It could be as specific as an exact URL (for example a specific blog post), or just a site category (all blog posts). You can even define a special URL parameter, which is especially useful for email and other paid campaigns. If you don’t want to be specific at this point, you can use one proactive message for all websites on your domain.
This is the first time your brand will start the interaction with a potential customer, but still, your sales rep doesn’t need to participate.
Reaching this stage, what you can say about the prospect, is that customer is now aware of your brand and interested in it to the level of considering a purchase. But still, it is not a sure deal. Now it is time to engage a little bit more, but as it is not the final stage of a sales funnel, your rep will gladly need an assistant. Why? It is because a lot of customers’ questions at this point happen frequently. Like: “what is the price?”, “how long should I wait for a delivery”, “is it available in other colors?”, “could you share other client’s testimonials”, or “could you invite me for a demo?”. There are a lot of questions, unique for every branch. But you can call it frequent.
When your sales rep needs to answer them, it usually takes a lot of time to resolve customers’ queries. Thanks to artificial intelligence Closer could suggest the right answer, saving a lot of time. It is the rep, who needs to send the reply to the client, which also opens the possibility to edit it before sending. It could be a link to the specific testimonial, price, or any other valuable information.
Sometimes your customer would like to ask you more questions and doesn’t feel comfortable writing. It is not a problem, with Closer you can start an audio or video conversation with just one click.
Your customer is now ready to buy the product or service from you, but it is not the end of the funnel. You need to be sure, that a customer will become a kind of your brand ambassador, so it is good to give something extra, benefits for a loyal customer, or extraordinary aftersales support. At this point, you can use another Closer’s feature called “actions”.
One of the actions is the meeting suggestion. You could propose a meeting which will be automatically added to your calendar. You could be sure, that the time chosen for the meeting will not interfere with your or your sales rep’s other activities, as the calendar is synchronized.
Re-engaging with your loyal customers is important, bot for future upsells or recommendations you will need to gain access to warm leads, which are the people related to your customers. For this reason, it is good to continue webinars and email campaigns. Closer will also remember your client, so the next time you will get a chat message, you could see the history of the conversation. Closer could also redirect the new inquiry to the sales rep who lead the conversation with the customer the last time.
Building sales funnels is important for many reasons. First of all, you systematize your sales process, but you could also learn more about your potential customers, explore paths that lead to the most sales, and enforce them. Solutions such as Closer could be used to get it done easier, faster, and time-saving.
Closer sp. z o.o.
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