In the first part of this article, we told you what the qualification is, what qualification stages a user gets through and what models are there to help you define how much a lead suits your business. Now it’s time to turn to lead qualification at the first stage of the funnel.
Before you start qualifying your leads, you need to define who is your most desired user. You need to portray your ideal customer for that purpose.
Though you’re unlikely to find users that perfectly suit you, you’ll be able to distinguish major parameters from the ones that you don’t need at all.
What defines a perfect customer? Who’d you like to work with?
Draw up your buyer persona in detail. Engaging sales and marketing teams before you generate and qualify leads, and you’ll save a big deal of hours on lead processing and nurturing.
After defining the buyer persona, you need to figure out what data you’ll collect using a live chat, chatbot, or lead forms for further qualification.
These data can usually be divided into the following categories:
The choice of the qualification data obviously depends on the buyer persona, but there’s some prerequisite data you definitely need to collect at the first stage of the funnel.
For online stores:
For online platforms:
These data will help you evaluate the basic parameters of a user, e.g. their company size and the industry; this will help you define how much they suit you.
After you’ve defined the buyer persona and the data you need to gather, it’s time to configure data collection campaigns using a chatbot.
Why a chatbot in particular? A chatbot talks to users automatically and qualifies them. Depending on the campaign you launch, you’ll be able to get the information that you need from a user directly and automatically redirect them to a support agent or a sales rep.
Without any additional tools, it takes us 10 to 20 minutes to collect the preliminary information on a customer
Paul, Head of Sales at Dashly
Below we’ll explore the most common chatbot qualification campaigns for online platforms and online stores.
When a user first visits our website’s main page, we have very little information on them and we can only ask general questions.
If an online platform has several departments or products, one can find out what gets a buyer the most interested.
Let’s assume you run a digital school and you have courses for designers, developers, and marketers. Using a chatbot, you can ask your user on the main page what profession they are interested in the most and offer several possible answers.
This will help you to get to know your user better and offer them the most appealing content or assign the conversation to a sales rep.
Obviously, when a user enters your blog, they want to find some interesting content. A chatbot can help offer them some topics or blog sections for reading.
When a user selects a subject or a section, we can give them the list of related articles or even send our selection via email; the second option is much better, do you agree?
This is how we get a qualified lead: now we know their email AND their interests, and we can nurture them much more effectively.
If a customer is viewing the page with our success stories, they’re definitely willing to see if we can deal with them.
If this is the case, we can ask them what stories they find interesting, and email them. This way, we’ll define what industry they’re working in, and if this lead matches our buyer persona, we can pass them on to the sales team.
The second option is to offer a user a free demo or a make a demo but first, don’t forget to find out where they work!
It’s likely a user is ready to buy and considers some options at the moment if they visit the plan page
You’ll definitely need to know their company size and offer them your help choosing the plan.
If we see the value of this user, we configure the automatic redirect of the conversation to the sales team.
The more complex product you have, the more diverse and complicated your chatbot campaigns will be. Don’t forget to let your imagination run free and do your best to give as much value to the customer.
When we sell goods, we’re first of all interested in its design, details, and payment methods (installment, credit, or immediate payment on a website). In this case, we don’t care where a user works and how large their company is.
Depending on where your user is, we can qualify them in different ways using a chatbot.
Help your user select products. As soon as you find out what product they need, assign the conversation to a sales rep, or redirect them to the desired section.
For example, if you sell cosmetics, find out tactfully your user’s problem, their skin type and budget, and then show them the list of products.
If you are selling both wholesale and retail, ask your user how much they are planning to buy. If they are interested in wholesale, you can offer them a wholesale price list or immediately assign the conversation to a sales rep.
Lead forms are an effective tool for both lead generation and qualification. We can prequalify a user and see what type of leads they are if we know their company name and size.
This form lets you find out what product your customer sells and if you actually can help them solve their problems.
Useful content is a fair price for a customer’s email. From now on, you have a lead, and you already know what to do with it 😉
When offering something truly worthy to your user, you can ask for a bit more information about them in return than just an email.
Aside from the common fields, there are fields for the user’s occupation and the company website in this lead form. When you get this information, you can immediately pass them on to the sales team if they match your buyer persona or continue nurturing them with your marketing initiatives.
As soon as you generate enough leads using chatbots and lead forms, you can pass them on to the sales team.
At this stage, the sales rep contacts qualified users and conduct in-depth interviews with customers, helps identify their pains, and finds a personalized solution.
Read also: