Conversational Marketing

Chapter 11 How to Put Your Sales Funnel on Autopilot

Thanks to the rise of messaging and chatbots, which allow us to capture and qualify leads in real time, sales teams are now able to put their sales funnels on autopilot. That means as a sales rep, instead of having to sort through lists of leads and play phone tag (and email tag) with people who have filled out lead capture forms, you can now sit back and wait for sales meetings to appear on your calendar automatically. Whether you’re at the beach or stuck in a meeting, a lead qualification chatbot (which we learned how to build in Chapter Ten) can step in and qualify leads for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

However, while a lead qualification chatbot makes it possible to scale and automate the lead qualification process—and, more generally, can make everyone’s life easier—a chatbot is still no replacement for an actual, human sales rep. So even when autopilot is turned on, sales reps need to pay attention and, when they’re online, be ready to engage with leads at a moment’s notice.

Throughout this chapter, I’m going to explore some of the tools and tactics sales teams can use in order to drive the best results possible and to ensure leads move through their sales funnels as quickly and as efficiently as possible. We’re going to start by looking at one of the most crucial aspects of any conversational selling strategy: figuring out how new conversations should be routed and, more specifically, which sales reps they ...