Communities play a massive part in the growth of a startup ecosystem. When you are part of a community and share your ideas with people, you come across transformational ideas which may not have been possible earlier.
Recently Datahut participated in a group city meet of various Sales leaders and founders to brainstorm ideas and learn from each other. We had a meetup a few days back, and one of the topics we discussed was using chatbots for lead generation. Here is the crux of the ideas we shared amongst ourselves.
Contact forms are getting obsolete, and conversational marketing is taking over
Facebook messenger was the first big player in the conversational marketing space. Companies like drift and intercom are building amazing conversational marketing tools. $Noforms movement by drift is an exciting marketing philosophy. Within conversational marketing, Chatbots are the latest trend. At Datahut, we’ve been using different types of chatbots and chat tools for lead generation for the last three years. Here are a few observations and learnings from these tools:
Disclaimer: The ideas expressed are based on our experience using different chat tools and the insights we’ve received from fellow startups. We’re open to new ideas shared by our reader community.
Classification of Chat Tools
We can classify chat tools into three different categories depending on the way they are designed. This blog discusses the pros, cons, my observations, and how they affected the sales process.
1. Live Chat Apps
There are a ton of free / paid live chat apps available in the market that gives you a way to interact with your visitors. You just need to paste a small Javascript code on your website and you will be good to go. Whenever a customer comes to a page – a real human being needs to be there to initiate a conversation. I tested three such apps and decided to go with tawk.to and used it for almost a year.
Pros:
A lot of them are free, eg: Tawk.
It is plug and play – installation requires less than 10 minutes.
Cons:
Lead qualification is manual – for a startup founder who wears multiple hats – responding immediately to queries isn’t always possible.
Handling multiple people at the same time is messy.
ROI is low compared to the other options.
Observations:
Even though Datahut was able to get a few leads ( some pretty good ones ), we found it very inefficient for a SaaS / DaaS startup. The time we spent on the chat does not give us a very good ROI. These type of chat apps are good for customer support and B2C sales, not B2B sales/lead gen.
How does the choice of the chat app affect the sales process?
As a salesperson, one looks for only qualified leads. In the case of a chat app, a salesperson chats with everyone to first qualify them. This has a huge impact on the sales process as one ends up wasting a lot of time qualifying the leads. Preparing proposals to unqualified leads is the worst way a salesperson can waste his/her time.
2. Chatbots that you can build on top of existing platforms
There are platforms that allow you to build chatbots using a little python code and some training data. If you know basic python – you can build your own custom bot. Once you build the bot – you need to train it using sample data. Once you build the bot and train it – you can start collecting leads by integrating it with your website. Integration is as simple as pasting a Javascript snippet.
Pros:
It was better than the live chat app as it reduces the time spent.
Cons:
You need to know a little bit of python coding to set it up.
You will need to carefully prepare the training data at addresses all possible scenarios. It takes time to prepare the data.
Integrations were messy as they did not provide direct integration with the CRM ( Zoho in my case). Integration requires using their API.
The bot responds correctly in 70-80 percent of the cases only.
Observations:
Even though it saved some time with automated responses – there were still some 20% of the cases where the bot asked the visitor the wrong question or given them the wrong answer ultimately pissing them off. I tried multiple platforms and ditched them after a week or two.
How the choice of the chat app affected the sales process It did save us a lot of time, however, there were some good leads in the lost 20% the bot could not address.
3. Rule-based chatbots
This is a simple rule-based chatbot with response buttons and a defined question hierarchy. This is completely automated with no human intervention needed. A rule-based chatbot gives visitors only limited choices and qualified them then and there. At Datahut, we use collect.chat.
Pros:
Automated lead qualification.
Easy to set up.
Better ROI.
The engagement was far better than the other chat apps I used.
Cons:
It does not have a human touch.
What should be the criteria for selecting a chat solution for your business?
1. Who is your customer?
The selection for the right solution should start with the customer and should be worked backward. Let us see a few different cases.
Automated lead qualification is necessary If you want to talk to qualified leads only. An example would be an enterprise data analytics software with the pricing starting at $10000 per month.
Not everyone visiting the website will be having this budget and qualifying them upfront is the best thing to do unless you want your AE to waste time chasing wood ( leads that won’t close ).
Also, I believe giving limited choices is the best way to qualify the leads.
Another example would be an online comic book store where you must have a human touch to answer the questions. In that case, live chat apps would be the best option. I don’t recommend chatbots that need training as the failure rate was high among the three apps I tested.
Our advice: Think about your business and customer – then decide. The wrong choice will hurt your sales process – choose wisely.
2. Integrations
Integration of chatbots to other applications ( like salesforce or marketing automation tools) is a must if you want to optimize your sales process. I noticed some chat apps don’t have native integration or even zapier based integrations. Make sure the chat app has integrations or API access available for the plan you choose.
3. Analytics
Just taking the user input is not enough for a chat tool app. You want to understand who they are, what they want and based on that the questions and chat script should be changed or the chatbot retrained with new data sets. Make sure the chatbot gives the basic analytics and at least google analytics tracking. Without these insights – you will never be able to use the chatbots to their full potential.
4. Engagement
UI of the chatbot plays a major role in the engagement of the users. Even the color of the buttons, the fonts, and the size of the chat window matter for maximum engagement. Most chat apps lack a good user interface.
5. Multi-channel support
It's bad news If you are selling in multiple channels and the chatbot isn’t compatible with all of them. Chat Data scattered across multiple systems is the last thing you need.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on choosing the right chat tools for your company. Let us know in the comments section below.
Datahut helps businesses get structured data feeds from any website through our cloud-based data as a service platform. To know more about how we can help generate leads, contact us at Datahut, your web scraping experts. Take a look at how web scraping is used to generate quality leads.