Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
Welcome back to the Web Canopy Studio Show. I'm your host, Tom Andrews, and today we're diving into the game changing potential of chatbots in transforming your sales process. Get ready for insights that could redefine customer interaction on your website. Let's get started. Hey, and welcome back to the show.
Tom Andrews:John, you teased at the end of the last show what this was about, and I'm really excited to hear about this because I'll be honest, I'm, like, much more of a marketer. The stuff that we talked about in the last episode was is my jam. I absolutely love all that stuff. But this time, we're gonna be talking about using chatbot bots to very simply get people on a sales call and then the sort of things you need to say on that sales call, like, to correlate to the chatbot questions they've answered. At least I think that's what Yeah.
Tom Andrews:You're gonna you're gonna talk about me. I'm gonna go. So, yeah, John, the floor is all yours. Give us give an overview of this Yeah. Strategy to the listeners.
John Aikin:Absolutely. I think the concept of of using live chat and chat bots is extremely underutilized today on websites. And I think underutilized and maybe is it misutilized is the is the word I'm thinking. Like, people are not doing it right, and it's a it's a it's a concept where, yeah, I have a tool I could put a chatbot on there, and I just ask a question. Need any help?
John Aikin:Do you have any questions? And then I just I might ask them a few questions, or maybe I have a form, and yes, some people do engage with that. You will get a lot of customer service complaints, and a lot of, like, people will use that as as a the wrong use of what you're intending it to be, and that's okay. It's still better than nothing. So, I applaud you if you are doing something like that.
John Aikin:But how can we actually use a chatbot to become one of the best sales tools in your entire arsenal of marketing and sales tools. The way that we wanna think about this is answering the biggest question or the biggest problems that people have when they are coming to your website as a prospective customer who's in a buying motion. They They don't necessarily have to be ready to buy now, but when I go to a product or a services website, I do not want to book a call and talk to somebody unless I'm it's urgent. The last thing I wanna do is, like, oh, yeah. Let's book a call.
John Aikin:I will if that's what I have to do right now, but most cases, that is not what's gonna happen. And if you look at any of I guarantee anybody listening to this, if you go to your website statistics, you will not see that the majority of the users come to your website and book a call. So how can a chatbot serve as that? What is the number one question that people have if they're evaluating what your company does? It's price.
John Aikin:Everybody wants to know price. It is the 2nd most visited page on any website, aside from the home page, when price or pricing or fees, is an option at the top. It does not matter if you're a small t shirt company, or if you are a large manufacturing, selling, you know, it takes a year to become a customer through your sales process selling, you know, 7 figure quotes. It does not matter. People want to know what you charge, and they want to know if you're good at it.
John Aikin:And so how can we combine the need of wanting to know price without also making it to the point where I have to, like, get on a call and go through a whole sales process just to know? Because I also don't wanna waste other people's time, and I don't wanna waste my time. Nobody wants to get on a phone call because they're interested in something and then find out, like, I think this is gonna be $1,000 and it's $57,000. I'm gonna Yeah. Quietly go in the back of the room and cry that I just look like an idiot now on this phone call.
John Aikin:Right? So a chatbot is absolutely awesome in this scenario, and the way that I would think about this is utilizing it from a a sales let's take the example of a salesperson in a store. I don't know if people go buy clothes in stores anymore, but I had a mall. And I'm in a mall.
Tom Andrews:I do. I do. You do? Look at you, Tatum. I don't I don't trust the whole process.
Tom Andrews:I'm a girlfriend. She'll get stuff delivered, and she'll try it on here. And if it doesn't fit, she has no problem taking it back. I don't have time for that. Like Oh, man.
Tom Andrews:No. I'll just go to the store, try it on. I like this. I'll get it. I'm old school.
John Aikin:I got 4 kids. Last thing I wanna do is go walk through them all. Oh my gosh.
Tom Andrews:That's that's a good point.
John Aikin:Okay. So a good salesperson well, what happens when you go to a store? Right? Most people walk into a store and a salesperson will ask the same question, which is, what do they say? You know?
Tom Andrews:Will I help you today?
John Aikin:Yes. What are you gonna help me today? Yeah. And what is your answer every time?
Tom Andrews:Just browsing. Just loading. Just browsing.
John Aikin:No. Thanks. Just loading. 100% of the time. It's not in there.
Tom Andrews:Every single time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Literally.
John Aikin:Yeah. And so, like, good sale, like sales 101 in retail like that is to not ask that question. Never. It's not a question we're allowed to ask. The question should be nothing.
John Aikin:Like you can greet them and say, hey, welcome. You know, let me know if you have any questions. I'll be over here and you're busy doing your thing. What that salesperson should do is wait until there's an action that they see that person taking. And when that person takes a buying action, that's when the salesperson should go and talk to them.
John Aikin:And so let's say this person's in the store for 3, 4 minutes and they're looking at different racks and I happen to notice they pick up this jacket and they pick it up twice, and now they're starting to really look at it. I might come over and I'm just gonna casually say like, hey. That that's a great jacket. I actually looked to see if we had that too. I wanted to buy it for myself.
John Aikin:Do you want me to go see if we have one in your size? I think I found one in the back. You're now in a conversation on the same side of the table talking about an object as opposed to let me try and talk to you and sell you this thing. Right? So just good sales 101.
John Aikin:Now, how does that apply to a chatbot or a live chat? Well, these people are here looking for price. They want to know what you charge, regardless if it's $7,000,000 or if it's $25. They wanna know, am I am I in the right ballpark? So the best way to do this is to use a chatbot, not to just ask a question of what questions do you have, but have an intentional chatbot that is going to help them understand price.
John Aikin:So, you could use a quote calculator or an estimate or a, let's say you're in logistics, like a shipping cost estimation tool, things like that. As much as some industries don't wanna go that route, guarantee in 10 years, it will only be that route. So either get on now or you be last one in the door at the party. And so that kind of a momentum allows you to create an awesome, awesome sales tool on your website that will be used by all kinds of people.
Tom Andrews:Oh, that is so cool. I tell you what, like, you've got me excited about this, like, now that you're throwing
John Aikin:it up.
Tom Andrews:Yeah. I love that. So the chatbot, we wanna find out, like, the information so we can give them a price. What sort of information do we need to collect from them? What questions do we need to ask?
John Aikin:So a couple episodes back, we talked a little bit about lead score and how that could play a really good role in qualifying customers. And I think the question you asked me was like what what ways if if if I'm just sitting in this seat, what are some ways that I could play an impact or immediate role right now in driving some sales? And I had said lead score, and I kind of walked through what that would look like. One of the first pieces of that was qualifying fit, high fit, high engage. So let's imagine now you have this chatbot on your website.
John Aikin:You collect their data. You're literally they're giving you as much information as you want to ask until they don't feel comfortable giving any more information. And so you're asking first name, last name, email before anything. You're collecting who it is you're talking to. The cool thing about some of these, like HubSpot and some of these other ones, like, we could immediately rule out people that are giving bogus information.
John Aikin:So if that's the case, like, you could just that's not a real email. Sorry. You your your name is not henry test atgmail.com. So, like, no. And you could you know, there's different ways to apply that, and that's another topic of how we would isolate that.
John Aikin:But just the simple fact that they're already there, you just created a lead inside of your CRM if you're using HubSpot. Now, you can start to ask the qualifying questions that any salesperson would want to know in order to give an accurate fee. So what I would want to do is just think about my lead scoring rules. What are the things that I need to know that a salesperson would also want to know in order to scale this out? So I might ask company size.
John Aikin:I might ask industry. Just some basic qualifiers. But then as it gets into the specifics of a quote or an estimate or a calculator or pricing, What are the things that I know I would have to understand in order to price that out? Great example for us as websites. We have this on our site for a website calculator, And, you know, oh, how is your website 1 to 3 pages, or is it, like, 700 to 6000 pages?
John Aikin:Like, there's obviously, like, gonna be cost differences in those. And so I only give multiple choice questions. That's the rule. Don't give open ended questions. Why?
John Aikin:Because you have to now create a whole bunch of other rules inside of the back end to get any kind of data. But if you just ask multiple choice questions, option 1, option 2, option 3, they all kind of trigger different things on the back end. Okay? Now, you can get really complicated with the calculations, but you don't have to. If there's one particular question that you need to ask, the rest is literally just collecting data on on this contact and helping to qualify them, and then picking the 1 or 2 questions that might trigger different ranges of what's shared to them.
John Aikin:And, again, like, you don't have to give an exact number. You don't have to say, fill out this form and I will give you this is $7,392 and 22ยข for 2 months. It's not like that. You could. You you have the power to do that inside of HubSpot.
John Aikin:The way I would approach this is saying, let's look at it from a perspective of I could probably bucket things into 3 major categories. 5000 to 15,000, 15,000 to 50,000, 50,000 and above. Okay? So I could say based off of the information, projects of this size or deliveries of this size or, like, think, you know, so your your service of this size typically fall between 5 and 15 k. And now I've delivered a range to help them understand more about what the cost is gonna be.
John Aikin:So if they're thinking they're only gonna pay $20 and you tell them it's 5 to 15 k, you know you don't have a qualified customer, and they're gonna go away on their own. But if they are qualified and it doesn't scare them away, you now have a whole other set of things that you can do just from that no touch thing that they did while they were sipping a pina colada on a beach just happened to be on your website clicking on things.
Tom Andrews:That's cool. So say say there, that's me. I'm sitting at Pina Colada on the beach. But although I'm probably listening to music as opposed to on your website, however great it is. But say say I'm there, and I've filled in this chatbot, what then happens?
Tom Andrews:So you've now got that initial data with those closed ended questions. What's the next step? Do we try and get them to, like, book a call right away? Do we give it some time, send some emails? Do we do both?
John Aikin:That's a really good question. So let's go back to the let's go back to the perspective of a salesperson, and that salesperson sees that, you know, okay. Oh, yes. It is in your size. Cool.
John Aikin:You can carry this around. Do you want me to take it up to the register for you? Right? Like, they're not just gonna say, oh, we do have it in your size, and then just stop talking. Mhmm.
John Aikin:The conversation continues. Right? So they're going to say, we do have it in your size. You like the jacket. Okay.
John Aikin:If it's cool with you, I'll I can set up at the register for you so you don't have to worry about carrying around the store. Okay. And so, yeah, actually, that's great. Thanks. So I'm gonna go put it up the register, and it's sitting there when you're ready to check out.
John Aikin:My name is John, by the way. If you have any other questions, give me a ring. And so or flag me down. Right? So, like, I'm now on this same page with this person.
John Aikin:Same thing with the chatbot. It doesn't stop once you would give a price. It doesn't stop once you get and that's that's such a big misstep that people make is, like, they will stop once they get the information they want, and now it's done. Thank you. We'll be in touch.
John Aikin:No. That's not it. Think about what the next step is that they have. What is the very next question? Once I get a fee, and I'm gonna internally decide 5 to 15 k.
John Aikin:Okay. That's probably right. That I'm probably paying 7 k for this tool, and I'm probably paying 2 k for this tool. If I get rid of both those and I come to this one, okay, yeah, it's probably gonna be roughly the same. I this is probably a good option, or this is a viable option.
John Aikin:My next question is naturally gonna be, what is this gonna look like? Like, what what is this process? How heavy? How intense is this? So you wanna propose that same kind of of conversation to them after you give them a range, or a fee.
John Aikin:So, for example, I might say, yes. My calendar's right here. If you want to know more, you're ready to jump in, here's my calendar. Right? You can book a call directly now with with somebody on my team.
John Aikin:Or would you like to know more about how this process works and how we actually do this and how this might apply to your business? They're gonna say, yes. So now you could send you could put the replay of the master class, the the webinar that we just talked about from the previous episode. You might have already done that and made a recording of it. Boom.
John Aikin:Now you have a really great asset to use to just feed them into the next thing. You also have a really great tool to send as email follow-up to get them to engage and opt in to watch the recording of that. So they're all kind of playing together into the same kind of campaign. And then the other thing would be you could easily just produce a process, a step by step plan, showing them exactly how things work, and trying just to get to answer more questions as time goes on.
Tom Andrews:Yeah. That's awesome. And I was gonna ask, what's the purpose of having this chatbot in place versus just having a page that says, okay, if you need 1 to 3 pages, it's this much. If you need 600, like, pages, it's this much. Why would you have the chatbot as opposed to doing that and then just letting them book a call?
Tom Andrews:But you've literally stated it right there. It's for multiple reasons. First of all, you get their email address with the chatbot so you can market to them afterwards and follow-up with them. Even if they don't, I guess, complete the entire series of questions. I might be wrong there.
Tom Andrews:Correct me if I am. But then also, given them that other asset at the end of it. Because if you didn't have that chatbot in place, then you couldn't just feed them a masterclass or another really cool asset. And it's a psychological thing where when where people have taken little baby steps, I e, they've answered these questions, they're gonna be much more likely to book a call from that chatbot versus just clicking on a page, seeing some ranges. Even if it's the exact same information they're presented with, but they haven't actually interacted with you at all before that, they're probably not gonna book a call, whereas the people that have been through the chatbot may.
John Aikin:Absolutely. That's a great point. And the other thing would be, like, remember the engagement piece. There's something fun about going through a tool. It's just it just feels different than just looking at a pricing sheet.
John Aikin:So going through that tool, I'm actively engaging, and it feels less obtrusive because once I've started, I'm kind of just following along with the next steps. So that's actively increasing that engagement, and it's collecting more data, and it's much less, intrusive, much less harmful to my, like, my trust bank of of what I'm willing to give away. On the flip side, if I would just ask it in a form, and we've a we've tested this. We've a b tested this. We have the same chatbot questions filled out on a form as we do on a chatbot.
John Aikin:If you look at the form, there's 16 questions on that form aside from just like first name, last name, company, email, like that stuff. There's 16 qualifying questions. If I look at that, I'm not filling that out. I have no interest in going through this whole process. I'm like, oh my gosh.
John Aikin:I gotta give my life away. I'm not doing this. But it just the the same questions in a chatbot, one at a time, it feels so much easier to me to fill that out. And in fact, it does. Like, people are way more likely to fill out a chatbot.
John Aikin:Same questions, going to the same fields, same properties as it would otherwise.
Tom Andrews:That's yeah. That's cool. I got one question I'd love to ask
John Aikin:Yeah.
Tom Andrews:Ask you. And there's no right answer here because it's futuristic thinking, but it's probably not too far in the future. Do you think we'll get to the stage I I personally think we will quite quickly, but where chatbots will literally be there'll be AI, but you'll be able to interact with a chatbot like it's human. So any question you ask it, it will be able to give you a human like response. Yeah.
John Aikin:This this is already in development in in HubSpot, actually, and there yeah. There's a lot of cool stuff that's coming through the roadmap that they've been sharing on their AI roadmap. It's fascinating. There's we've done we've done some boot camps around some of this as a starting point. The the chatbot functionality will be exactly as you're describing, in just a few years.
John Aikin:The other cool thing is inside of HubSpot inside of HubSpot is like on the back end, you will have access to that same chatbot, but for your CRM. So they they have they have a tool that Darmesh created called chat spot, and it's slowly kind of gone away, gone the right way, and now it's like really taking off. They have a whole team built around it now, And the cool thing about that is, like, you can ask it or will be able to ask it, like, show me all my contacts that have, you know, been in this industry that live here that engaged with this form, and it will just populate that for you in a list. You won't even have to go digging around and trying to make your own filters and views. So the the cool the cool thing of this is, like, the AI component is only in its infancy, and it's only just getting started.
John Aikin:That use of the chatbot that we talked about just now is is literally just looking at a pricing chatbot. There's so many other ways to do this from, like, a demo chat bot to a Mhmm. To a customer service, knowledge hub, support kind of chatbot as well. Other things are, like, internal chatbots. We've built websites for customers who are strictly building an intranet website, So it's a resource for their 50 person sales team.
John Aikin:Okay? And so now they are using the website that we build just strictly internally, or at least a large portion of the website just internally, the chatbot can also serve for the team to use that tool as well. So it's not just a sales side. And I think the biggest misconception about chatbot is that it one size fits all. I'm gonna put a chatbot on my website, and it's just there.
John Aikin:It should be specific to the purpose of why someone's on that particular page.
Tom Andrews:It's awesome. It's making me want to just, like, create a chatbot for just some some random site now and just have a do it. A little thing. Yeah. Oh, that is awesome.
Tom Andrews:So, John, if there's 2 things I'm gonna take away from this and the listeners probably should as well, it's for me, a chatbot is if it's not already, it's very soon gonna become almost a necessity. And if you don't have one, your competitors probably will. And if you are offering something similar to a competitor who has a chatbot where they can find out a price range, they're probably gonna go and speak to the the person, the sales rep at your competitor because people like to know the price about something before they get on the call. Mhmm. And the second big takeaway is that Americans working in clothing stores are much more friendly than, our scripts.
Tom Andrews:I'm much better at their jobs as well. So that is the that is the that's the end of this episode. Hope you've had a great time listening, and, yeah, We would love to hear from you. If you do go and implement a chatbot off at the back of this, we'd love to hear you, like, hear from you and find out exactly what you've included. And also let us know the results of it.
Tom Andrews:Let us know if you have noticed an uptick in, Coursebook because, yeah, we'd love to hear that.
John Aikin:Awesome. That's great. Thank you, Tom. I appreciate it. Awesome.
Tom Andrews:Thank you very much, and we'll see you in the next episode.