Conversational Marketing

Chapter 8 Step Three: Master the Art (and Science) of Qualifying Leads Through Conversation

While adding real-time messaging to your website (as well as to your emails) will allow your marketing and sales teams to start having more conversations, technology alone can’t guarantee that those conversations will result in new leads and customers for your business. Adapting to a conversational marketing and sales strategy isn’t just about using the right tools, it’s about asking the right questions and using conversations to build relationships. As a marketer or salesperson who’s interested in adopting a conversational strategy, that means you’re going to need to work on your conversational skills.

The good news: Even for those who are not natural conversationalists, there is a science to using conversations in order to elicit the right information so you can qualify a lead. But at the same time, there’s an art to it as well. Because if everyone at your company robotically followed the same conversation protocol, instead of being themselves and letting their personalities shine through, the overall experience would suffer.

For the past several decades, companies and their buyers have been drifting apart. Their relationships have been strained. By adopting a friendly tone and talking to your potential customers as if you were talking to a trusted friend (and not just to “some lead”), you’ll be able to help repair those relationships, one conversation at a time.

Of course, that’s ...