How Do Chatbots Qualify Leads?

If you've ever browsed an e-Commerce page, you may have come across a bubble asking "What can I help you with today?" These little helpers are chatbots - a nifty AI-powered tool that's essential for businesses looking to streamline their customer service experience. And their demand keeps growing - according to a Salesforce report, 23% of businesses rely on chatbots and another 31% are looking to switch over to chatbots by 2025.

AI chatbots help you complete a wide range of tasks, from solving queries to making profitable sales. These tasks are part of a bigger picture of automated lead qualification. Chatbots can help marketing and sales teams prioritize leads through scoring and make the process of pursuing potential clients more efficient and hassle-free.

In this article, we will go over how chatbots are used in lead qualification and its benefits, alongside helping you pick the right chatbot for your business. So, let's dive in!

1What is Lead Qualification

As the name suggests, lead qualification is a process of figuring out whether a lead is valuable or not. It's a multi-stage process in which marketing and sales teams assess how likely it is for a prospective client to buy their product or service.

Strong sales teams are regularly qualifying their leads to ensure that their time is spent chasing the most profitable lead for the company.

Lead qualification begins during the inbound marketing phase. In this phase, businesses gather marketing data from their social media, websites, and emails to check how closely a prospect fits onto their ideal customer persona. To identify such a potential client, who not only aligns with the brand's values but is likely to convert as a buyer, marketing teams set a defined criteria. This includes data on desired demographics, budget, and buyers intent and expectations. Once this criteria is set, a reference persona or profile is created which is used to match for an ideal customer.

If a prospect fits into the said profile, they're marked as a potential sales source. The sales team can then reach out to the person via email or call to better identify their needs and persuade them to convert.

This follow-up after primary interest is the second phase of lead qualification. Any information collected by the sales rep here can be used to further assess whether a lead is worth investing more time or not. This re-qualification of leads continues down the sales funnel.

Now, all this can be done manually by marketing and sales reps. However, that route is costly for businesses and results in slow growth rate progression. Automated lead qualification deals with that problem, offering greater efficiency and scalability. AI collects data, analyzes it, matches it with the set criteria, and does follow-ups, all by itself. Even for a mixed approach where sales reps do follow-ups, using AI for initial lead generation and qualification is key to improve your company's working.

2How Chatbots Are Used In Lead Qualification

AI chatbot  virtual assistants are used in both B2B and B2C settings for simple tasks and text or voice interactions.

But how do they pertain to lead qualification? Well, there are major benefits to using a chatbot in lead qualification:

1. 24/7 Engagement

Chatbots are available 24/7 for instant responses, even during off-hours, so your number of prospective leads grows.

2. No Human Error

If your scoring model and question scripts are perfect, chatbots eliminate any human error in the qualification process.

3. Better Time Management

Chatbots reduce times by saving sales reps from chasing less promising leads. In addition, it can answer the routine queries of multiple leads simultaneously so the sales rep can focus on other tasks of their business.

4. Quick Scheduling

Customers find multi-step processes for scheduling meetings and calls tedious, but chatbots simplify through quick direct questions.

5. Targeted Marketing

Chatbots are key to targeted marketing, and give marketing teams a better idea of the average visitor and what changes they can make to the company's online presence to attain the ideal client.

6. Cost-Efficiency

While paid, chatbots are much more cost-efficient than hiring large sales teams. Automation here cuts human effort by a large percentage.

7. Fast Responses

What's worse than a customer service rep not being available? A rep taking too long to respond, of course. But as chatbots are quick with automated replies, your leads won't be annoyed by long wait times.

8. Conversation Tracking

Chatbots have access to customers' conversation history, and they can recognize texting patterns. This helps further assess a buyer's persona.

3How Do Chatbots Qualify Leads

Now that you're aware of the benefits of using chatbots for lead qualification, let's focus on how you can get started with it.

1. Make a List of Qualifying Questions

The first step in chatbot-powered lead qualification is to make a list of qualifying questions, i.e. selecting questions that will help decide if a lead is worth pursuing or not.

To do so, it's essential to outline your business goals first and understand what your ideal customer looks like. Metrics like demographics, location, budget, accessibility requirements, etc are relevant here.

Questions are formulated to get answers for these metrics. For example, in a B2B setting, your chatbot can ask businesses how many employees they have on board, what their current solution to a problem is, what their expectation is for a service, so on and so forth.

However, making a list of your questions is far from the end. You want to make sure the questions don't sound robotic, and there's a friendly, conversational tone between your chatbot and the lead. Likewise, the chatbot needs to keep the conversation flowing naturally and asking questions at the right moments. This can be achieved through a mix of the right tools, strong interactive scripts, and personalized greetings.

2. Choose the Right Tools

Speaking of choosing the right tools, it's important to go for an AI chatbot  that aligns with your business needs. The ideal chatbot should be codeless, with easy customization options, and seamless integration with your systems. Chatbots should also be able to provide analytics that sales teams can use to further qualify a lead.

Omnichannel chatbots are the best way to go, since they can be deployed across social platforms, websites, and apps, increasing the number of leads collected.

All these features and more can be found on ChatInsight. A leading chatbot in the sales space, ChatInsight is packed with a great deal of features- everything you need to begin qualifying your leads and gaining substantial business and network growth.

3. Collect and Analyze Lead Information

Once you feed your dynamic question script into ChatInsight, the program will start gathering relevant info during conversations with prospects. ChatInsight relies on human-like questioning patterns and conversation flow, so leads will feel more comfortable engaging in a dialogue.

Aside from this, the AI chatbot  can automatically analyze leads and assign them scores based on job title, industry type, engagement level, budget, etc. The higher a lead scores, the more it's relevant for a follow-up.

4. Routing Qualifying Leads

Once leads are qualified i.e. they score high, chatbots will route them directly to a sales rep or team members in charge of running the bot itself. This ensures your leads receive timely follow-ups and have a higher conversion rate.

4Tips for Chatbot Lead Qualification

Now that you know where to begin, here are a few tips to keep in mind when running an AI chatbot  for lead qualification:

5Try the Best Lead Qualification Chatbot

Looking for the best lead qualification AI chatbot  for your business? Try giving ChatInsight a shot!

ChatInsight is a smart chatbot that brings together advanced AI tech, user-friendly interface, codeless experience, and smart integrations, leading the way for effective lead generation and qualification. Once you feed personalized questions into the program, the bot will ask them in a natural manner, and use the answers to score your prospects automatically. If a lead receives high scores, ChatInsight will redirect it to your sales team- the future of marketing and sales is here.

Not just that, but ChatInsight integrates seamlessly on all platforms and analyzes customer data in real-time for fast qualification. Try ChatInsight today and benefit from immediate 24/7 customer support and a greater quantity of better leads.

Conclusion

To summarize, chatbots are the way forward when it comes to lead qualification. With timely assistance, quick response times, cross-platform availability, and personalized greetings, chatbots generate leads with greater efficiency and have higher odds of converting potential buyers.

Not only that, but through questioning and automated analysis, chatbots can decipher whether or not a lead is worth pursuing for a sales rep. ChatInsight is a great tool that combines all these features with easy integration to your business model.

So, if you want to scale your business and reduce time spent chasing leads that *lead* nowhere, try ChatInsight and grab those quality leads today!