When it comes to engaging with prospects, speed is critical. After all, you only have 10 seconds to capture a lead’s interest when they come to your website. With such a small window of success, it’s much more effective for sales development reps (SDRs) to proactively reach out to visitors rather than wait around for inbound chats to roll in.
At Qualified, we call this proactive approach “pouncing.” It ensures that your sales team is connecting with as many qualified buyers as possible the moment they visit your site to quickly start meaningful conversations.
But when it comes to starting a conversation, you can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Most website visitors are not qualified, while others will require you to roll out the red carpet.
SDRs are always asking us for guidance on how to proactively engage the right website visitors. There’s an art to pouncing. You have to be thoughtful about who you engage with and genuine in how you converse with them.
If you’re an SDR looking to improve how you engage with potential buyers, we’ve found that the following types of visitors warrant an immediate pounce.
Your marketing team may have defined a specific list of key accounts that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). They are a gift! Qualified will alert you when a named account that you own is on your site. When ABM target accounts land on your site, be sure to start a conversation pronto. Use firmographic and ABM data points to demonstrate you know and understand this account.
Qualified Tip: If they’re a target account, you already know your product/service is a good fit. Focus on demonstrating that you understand their company and business.
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, these are companies that you want to jump on ASAP, as firmographic indicators already signal they’re likely a good buyer fit.
Qualified alerts 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 Qualified, think of your website as an additional touchpoint in the buyer’s journey.
When you start a conversation with these visitors, show them you understand who they are, what their business needs are, and where they are in the buying process. The more you can show that you’re meeting them where they are, the better.
Qualified Tip: 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, and then personalize your greeting accordingly.
Qualified creates a new class of sales reps: “ALLbound rep”. Your outbound initiatives send leads to the website, while inbound leads then become your outbound targets. Your inbound informs your outbound efforts, your outbound informs your inbound efforts. Real-time conversations close the gap between outbound and inbound work streams to flip leads quickly
A working lead is most likely visiting your site because you shared content or a link that drove them there. Once you get alerted when a working lead lands on your site, start a conversation by using their name and the content you chose for them.
Qualified Tip: 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.
If your marketing team has shelled out dollars to drive your target audience to your website, you can’t afford to miss out on the opportunity to engage these visitors. These days, marketers can launch campaigns targeted to audiences based on a wide range of criteria, including geography, industry, job title, company, or even behavior (such a recent search activity).
Because of these rich targeting capabilities, it’s valuable to pay attention to which media channel or content drove them to your site. This point of entry tells you a lot about the type of visitor they are. For example, if a visitor lands on your website from a campaign that positions you as an alternative to a competitor, you’ll want to use that insight in your outreach.
Qualified Tip: If you’re like us, our paid traffic tends to exit the site more quickly than organic visitors. Set up shortcuts for each media channel so you can quickly engage before a visitor bounces.
Onsite activity is a proxy for buying intent. Visitors that check out certain high-converting pages, such as pricing pages, are showing strong intent to buy. Start a conversation by acknowledging the page the visitor is on and ask a question to help move the visitor towards their business goal (i.e. “Would you like to chat about more detailed pricing?”).
Qualified Tip: Use Qualified’s Live View to see what content the visitor is focusing on, then subtly reference the visitor’s hovering or highlighting activity.
We’re not recommending you pounce on every website visitor. It’s not sustainable or scalable. After all, 82% of website visitors aren’t qualified prospects. That’s a lot to sort through!
Rather than start conversations with everyone, it’s critical to talk to the right people at the right time. The trick is to figure out who’s visiting your site so you can decide whether to strike up a conversation.
Not all visitors are going to fall into these top five buckets of visitors. So how do you effectively pounce on anonymous visitors that you don’t know much about?
Qualified makes it easy by empowering you with additional signals to supercharge engagement with anonymous visitors. By focusing on digital body language, location data, and data gathered from chatbots, you’ll be armed with information that can help fuel engaging, personalized conversations. Use this information wisely to drive productive sales conversations with a visitor that’s seemingly not sales-ready. Flipping an anonymous visitor into a stage 1 opportunity in the first visit is one of the most exciting wins!
Although you can’t see your visitor face-to-face, you can see their digital body language. That is, you can see how a visitor is interacting with your site. By looking at Live View, Active Tabs, and Page Type within Qualified, you’ll be able to gain pretty deep insights about your visitor.
Qualified Tip: Utilize scroll depth (which indicates how far a visitor is scrolling down a page) as an intent signal. On a high-converting page, like a product page, ~15% is a good threshold to engage.
Qualified provides the location for every visitor, known and unknown. Referencing a visitor’s location demonstrates you are not a bot 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!
Chances are you won’t have a sales conversation here, but you’ll leave them remembering the positive VIP treatment from your brand.
When you’re not sure how to proactively engage, lean on information collected by the bot onsite. You can set up your bots to collect information about visitor intent, company size, and any other fields you care about for qualification and routing.
Don’t let a bot be the last “person” a qualified visitor speaks with. Use chatbot data to wow a visitor with the transition from bot to human. Always continue the conversation where the bot left off. Reference previous answers and don’t repeat questions.
Greetings and shortcuts can help you effectively pounce. Here are a few to try:
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👇
Qualified 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.
The goal of this 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 are 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.
Looking for more on how to convert conversations into sales? Check out Speed to Lead, which is packed full of strategies, tactics, and best practices for Conversation Selling.
If you're building your demand gen strategy around ABM, don't miss our Conversational ABM Playbook, which focuses on how to effectively engage your target accounts.
Discover how we can help you convert more prospects into pipeline–right from your website.
Get pipeline generation playbooks from today's top marketing leaders.
.svg)
