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As B2B marketers, it’s our job to continuously seek innovative strategies to improve buyer experiences on our websites and get our sales team healthy, qualified pipeline. Live Chat is a powerful tool that many teams are underutilizing, often because of it’s association with customer support, but live chat tools offer tons of benefits to your marketing and sales orgs, as well.
By offering an instant way to connect with your buyers, you’re cutting out the chances that your buyer looks elsewhere while they wait for a response and able to instantly start building rapport and trust with your target accounts.
Traditionally, live chat is seen predominantly as a customer support tool. However, its role in sales is now equally as expected by your buyers–sales chat tools are the new norm.
Unlike typical support scenarios, where live chat addresses customer issues, in sales, it's an active tool for engagement, guiding visitors through the sales funnel. Qualified, for instance, specializes in maximizing the sales potential of live chat, allowing your sales team to proactively engage your buyers, and even leverage AI to engage buyers and book meetings when your team isn’t available.
Check out our guide to kicking off your Conversational Marketing strategy if you aren’t already using live chat to engage website visitors.
One of the foremost benefits of live chat is its convenience. Visitors can receive immediate assistance without the hassle of emails or phone calls, or the risk that your competition gets to them quicker.
This instant access not only enhances the user experience but also keeps potential customers engaged, reducing the chances of them leaving your site due to unanswered questions. No filling out a form and waiting for an email from a faceless rep–instead, with tools that offer robust capabilities like video and voice calls within their chat platforms, your reps can jump on a video chat with a buyer at any time.
Live chat isn't just a tool for real-time human interaction; it's also a gateway to automation. Chatbots, for instance, can handle routine inquiries, gather initial information, and even qualify leads before routing them to the appropriate sales team. This blend of human touch and automation creates a streamlined, efficient communication channel.
Beyond these automated motions, AI has introduced another layer of tools and capabilities that help you scale your sales teams with a lower headcount and free up your sales reps for bigger, more nuanced conversations all without losing the feeling of talking to someone live.
See AI chatbots in action here.
The immediate nature of live chat significantly boosts conversion rates. Prospects who engage in live chat are more likely to convert into customers as they receive quick responses to their queries, making them more confident in their purchasing decisions.
According to Agility PR, the conversion rates tell a compelling narrative when they surveyed B2B marketers:
In the realm of B2B marketing, customer experience is king. Live chat enhances CX by providing prompt and personalized responses, addressing customer needs in real-time, and showing that your brand values their time and business.
If your customers ever run into an issue, you have an always-on tool that can help them find the right answers or connect them to someone that knows how to help with no waiting time. It’s a much better solution than firing off an email into the void and hoping someone gets back quickly.
Live chat isn't just beneficial for customers; it also elevates team productivity. By handling multiple chats simultaneously and automating routine tasks, your team can focus on more complex queries and high-value activities, thus maximizing their efficiency.
This also shows up in their deal cycles–instead of waiting on a back-and-forth email chain, your reps have direct access to who is on your website while they’re engaging with your content. They don’t have to go hunting for leads when they can simply engage them with a few button clicks.
Live chat is a treasure trove of data. Each interaction provides insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points. This data is invaluable for refining marketing strategies and tailoring sales approaches to meet customer expectations better.
It’s also a powerhouse of examples of what messaging works for your sales reps, equipping them with real-time experiment results that can inform the team and help them adjust their conversations instantly.
When Covid hit in 2020 and removed Adecco’s ability to meet with their prospects face-to-face, they had to rethink their entire sales process. They needed a way to maintain a personalized experience but in a digital world.
Qualified’s live chat platform heavily leans into the human element of connecting your reps with your buyers, something that appealed to Lisette Reyes, Head of Inside Sales.
In the first two years of their Qualified implementation, Adecco generated over $57.7M in pipeline and $24.4M in revenue for a whopping 46,000% ROI.
Read the full case study here.
Live chat is a powerful tool on it’s own, but with platforms designed specifically for Account-Based Marketing strategies like Qualified Conversations, your live chat tool has now become a pipeline generation machine.
Designed to identify high-value prospects, personalize interactions based on their profile, and facilitate seamless sales conversations the moment they engage with your website, Qualified Conversation and Chatbots are the ideal tools for B2B teams.
This tailored approach makes it an indispensable tool for B2B marketers aiming to align sales and marketing efforts closely.
Learn more here.
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