It is the question that is ever present, swimming silently around in the minds of Sales and Marketing folk everywhere, circling you like a Great White, just waiting for you to rest your head on the pillow. It was no different for me.
The standard solutions presented themselves, do we find more data, scrape details online, look at Adwords, PPC, more Social Media, Mailshots, the list goes on and on. All of them key proponents of a good inbound/outbound marketing strategy.
All of these activities have one thing in common, they bring potential leads to your website, and that is exactly what those activities are supposed to do.
The model is simple, more activity at the top of the ‘Marketing Funnel’ means more leads for the sales team at the bottom. Stands to reason the more you spend on advertising at the top, the more you get out the other end.
Now take a moment to consider an alternative. What if there were a different way of looking at this problem?
We had installed Live Chat software to help with support functions when I realised the application could be used for connecting my sales team with every web visitor. If it worked I had just moved my sales team into the ‘Awareness and Interest’ phase of the funnel, where the credibility, knowledge and trust they garner with warm leads on the phone can start to be projected onto all web visitors.
What followed was months of mistakes, failed experiments, false starts and continuous tweaking to get the most out of the Live Chat system. I learnt very quickly that installing a service is only the first step. Training for your sales team, A/B testing, triggers, analysis of exit rates on pages, working out visitor journeys and reactions to different messaging was what led to the success of Live Chat for that business.
