Conversational Marketing

Chapter 4 Replacing Lead Capture Forms with Conversations

By adding messaging to their websites, marketers and salespeople gained the ability to capture and qualify leads through having real-time conversations. By adding chatbots, they gained the ability to scale that experience and to keep their websites open for business 24 hours a day.

Finally, marketers and salespeople have the tools they need in order to prevent their websites from becoming “empty stores.” Business-to-business (B2B) companies can finally catch up to the business-to-consumer (B2C) world and start providing the real-time, on-demand buying experience today’s customers have come to expect. Just imagine a world where going through the B2B buying process feels like buying a book from Amazon, or streaming a video on Netflix, or scheduling a ride with Uber or Lyft. That’s where we’re headed, and messaging and chatbots can help us get there.

Lead capture forms, on the other hand, have been holding us back. They are relics from an earlier marketing and sales paradigm, back before owning the demand became more important than owning the supply, and before the balance of power shifted from company to customer. Today, any company can install messaging and chatbots on their website in just a few minutes by simply copying and pasting a snippet of code. So why are so many of us still relying on lead capture forms? Why are we still putting up roadblocks and making potential customers wait when we could be having conversations ...