If your sales funnel isn’t an AI sales funnel yet, you’re in the right place.
With the rapid evolution of AI technology, AI solutions like lead generation chatbots are exploding in popularity.
But chatbots and AI agents are extensible – they can be configured for nearly every task. That includes every other step of your sales pipeline.
AI lead generation software doesn’t just chat – it books meetings, it engages leads with media. It can suggest marketing campaigns and help segment your leads more accurately.
Here’s a quick guide on how AI agents can expedite each stage of your sales funnel:
Awareness
What’s the goal?
Make potential customers aware of your business offering.
How a chatbot can help
AI agents can supercharge your outreach by making your strategy more effective, less time-consuming, and less costly.
If you use a platform to connect with prospects – like LinkedIn or Facebook – you can deploy your agent as an assistant. They can send messages and facilitate outreach with marketing campaigns.
Most cold outreach involves sending repetitive messages with touches of personalization: the perfect task for an AI agent or chatbot. An AI software is perfectly capable of personalizing messages, and even more capable of drafting templates for human review.
An AI agent trained on your company’s data – like your website or internal documents – can also be a valuable resource for strategizing marketing campaigns.
Instead of asking an associate to brainstorm marketing strategies (by conducting competitor comparisons, examining internal offerings, analyzing past marketing campaigns, etc.), an AI agent can review the same data in a fraction of the time.
Examples
- Power analyses that inform your marketing campaigns
- Facilitate personalized email campaigns
- Conduct marketing campaigns on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram
Interest
What’s the goal?
Engage leads. Stimulate interest.
How a chatbot can help
AI lead gen tools like agents are perfectly suited for driving interest for potential leads.
Traditional lead capturing tools like forms or checkout pages have a fundamental flaw: your potential leads have to choose to navigate to them.
And if you already have a digital following, an AI agent can engage potential customers on social media platforms.
Examples
- Analyze customer behavior in order to identify the highest value prospects
- Provide personalized content recommendations, like blogs or videos
- Answer questions and dynamically engage with website visitors
- Send bespoke emails to targeted leads
Consideration
What’s the goal?
Help potential customers evaluate your offering. Position your organization as their solution.
How a chatbot can help
A chatbot is perfectly suited for the consideration stage of the sales journey. If they’re on your website, thinking about whether your product is for them, your chatbot can meet them where they are.
It can provide answers and content that help them through their consideration phase, no matter which aspects they’re stuck on.
Examples
- Provide comparisons between different products or services (including benefits, features, and prices)
- Share customer testimonials from similar customers
- Schedule a consultation
- Schedule a demo
- Provide detailed information about your offering
- Suggest educational videos to explain use cases or case studies
Qualification
What’s the goal?
Ensure your lead is a good match for your business.
How a chatbot can help
If you’re not using your AI lead generation software for qualification, you’re not using it correctly.
Qualification is one of the most cost-effective areas to deploy your AI agent. If your company is receiving a growing amount of interest, efficiently qualifying your leads is a quick win for a bot to accomplish.
AI software is often used for lead scoring, since AI agents can analyze behavior – like pages visited, time spent on your website, or content consumed – to score leads based on their quality and level of interest.
An AI agent is not only capable of learning your target audience, but using predictive analytics to create a finetuned identification system.
Just like a lot of decision-making systems are improved by the combination of machine learning models and human intelligence, lead scoring can be revolutionized by the marriage of the two.
Examples
- Analyze website visitor behavior to score leads
- Qualify leads after back-and-forth conversation
- Update your CRM with new lead interactions
- Create predictive analytics for high quality leads based on past leads’ behavior and outcomes
Evaluation
What’s the goal?
Facilitate the final decision-making process.
How a chatbot can help
The further your progress down the sales funnel, the more likely you’ll want a human in the loop. Similarly to the intent stage, lead generation software is perfect for mid-funnel conversations with prospects.
That’s because a chatbot does a lot of heavy lifting once a lead is already on your website and engaged. There are infinite ways a chatbot can interact with a lead in the evaluation stage, always tailored to their situation and unique user profile.
These interactions can happen directly on your website, or via email or a messaging service (like Facebook messenger or WhatsApp).
Examples
- Provide relevant case studies or demos
- Analyze key features of similar products or services
- Search customer testimonials for relevant information
- Explain pricing and payment plan differences
Intent
What’s the goal?
Encourage potential customers to make a purchase.
How a chatbot can help
A properly deployed chatbot is often where leads will first signal their intent.
This has two benefits: it’s easy for them to find an avenue in which to query, and it’s easy for your sales team to retrieve this customer data on the backend, as long as your chatbot is hooked up to your CRM.
A chatbot provides a frictionless pathway by bringing the conversation directly to their screen. If leads are considering asking for a demo, talking to sales, or signing up for a free trial, a chatbot eliminates a step in their process.
This ease of access brings in more sales than companies who wait for a user to make the leap themselves.
Examples
- Provide discounts to certain leads
- Send personalized product recommendations based on behavior
- Send follow-up messages or emails to high quality leads
Purchase
What’s the goal?
Convert a lead into a sale. Complete the purchase.
How a chatbot can help
High-quality leads should be handled by your experienced sales leaders, but for low-level purchases, a chatbot can facilitate an interaction from start to finish.
AI agents can easily connect to your payment systems, reducing the steps it takes your customers to make a purchase.
Even if you prefer to host purchasing functions outside of your AI agent, your bot can provide all the necessary information and explanatory steps.
Examples
- Facilitate the checkout process from beginning to end
- Assist in an independent checkout process
- Process payments with integrations like Stripe
- Upsell customers during the purchase
- Provide information on how to access post-purchase information or support (e.g. educational videos)
Post-Purchase
What’s the goal?
Retain your customer. Get repeat business.
How a chatbot can help
Since chatbots are hooked up to customer data and messaging services, their job doesn’t end after a sale is made.
If your chatbot is integrated with your other systems, it has a wealth of data to seamlessly provide to your employees – and it can continue taking actions towards customers.
An AI agent can analyze both individual and overall customer data to craft personalized follow-ups, recommendations, and communications.
Examples
- Send follow-up emails (e.g. with a thank you or with instructions)
- Send messages to request feedback
- Provide 24/7 customer service
- Invite users to loyalty programs after analyzing ongoing usage
- Give tips and tricks on product use
- Provide employees with analytics about customer usage
Deploy an AI agent next month
AI-enhanced sales funnels are here to stay - it's no longer enough to use AI tools for a single, isolated business process. The most successful companies in the AI wave will use artificial intelligence throughout their sales and internal processes.
Botpress is a fully extendable chatbot platform that connects to any and all of your pre-existing systems and workflows.
With clients across industries, an active community of 20,000+ bot builders, and intelligent building, Botpress is a next-generation chatbot and AI agent platform.
Start building today. It's free.
Or contact our sales team to learn more about introducing AI to your sales motions.
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