How to Increase Lead Engagement With Conversational AI

Businesses know they need to attract leads—but that’s not an end goal in itself. The real objective, of course, is to convert leads into customers. But before you get prospects to sign the dotted line, businesses need to engage prospects, educate them, and build rapport. This takes time and attention.

But therein lies the rub. It’s easy to personally engage a small number of attentive leads—but what about leads that are slow to engage or even high volumes of leads? How can Marketing and Sales teams quickly and effectively scale lead engagement?

The truth of the matter is that better lead engagement starts with Conversational AI.

The Capacity Challenge and What to Do About It

Finding leads to target isn’t the problem for most companies. You can always do a little more leg work to dig up folks to go after or deploy technologies that recommend target accounts. But the goal of Marketing and Sales today is to shift from lead generation to lead engagement.

Incoming leads, like those who attend a webinar or download a piece of content, tend to respond best when your brand is fresh in their minds; typically within 5 minutes. Yet the vast majority of companies fail to respond promptly to these leads. Similarly, lead follow-up might take as many as 8 touches before the lead is ready to talk to a Salesperson but most Sales Development Reps will only make two attempts before calling it quits.

And who can blame them? It takes a lot of time and effort to chase down leads with personalized communications. And many leads will never engage. Speed, persistence, and personalization matter. But with only so many hours in a day, Marketers and Salespeople are forced to choose where to put their attention.

This creates two problems:

1. Potential opportunities are left unengaged, untouched, and unqualified
2. Employees feel like they need to rely on gut feelings, which are hardly reliable

So, what’s the solution? If better lead engagement requires prompt, persistent, and personalized outreach that business professionals simply cannot provide, what alternative is there?

The answer is Conversational AI for Marketing and Sales

Conversational AI helps scale personalized interactions across email, SMS, and website chat. By promptly and persistently delivering personalized conversations at scale, Salespeople save thousands of hours of manpower. This time saved can be spent on high-value activities that only business professionals can provide; like establishing lasting relationships, navigating pain points, and providing guidance on how to best use your offerings.

Better still, AI Assistants built for revenue teams autonomously recognize and elevate handraisers to the notice of your Sales team. Thus giving customers the attention they need while simultaneously accelerating opportunities through the funnel. It’s a win-win.

This kind of conversation-based lead engagement is a far better strategy than traditional lead scoring. Why? Because lead scoring only offers an estimation of how likely a lead is to convert based on past experiences. Clicks, downloads, and webinar attendance can only tell you so much—and often what seems like a hot opportunity is really a low-quality lead. Conversational AI, on the other hand, kicks the guesswork in favor of generating a real rapport with your contacts.

Conversational AI can even work in tandem with traditional Sales Engagement Platforms and Marketing Automation Platforms. While some organizations worry that dual streams will inundate a lead, the evidence shows otherwise. That’s because leads recognize automated messages (inviting them to download a piece of content or join a scheduled webinar) as different from personalized touches from a Salesperson or AI Assistant inviting them to a Sales meeting to answer questions.

Ready to increase lead engagement?

Let’s chat about how your company can leverage AI Assistants from Conversica to accelerate revenue and growth for your business.

This post originally published on Conversica’s blog.