Have you ever played email ping pong when attempting to qualify leads and book meetings?
You know what I mean!
Here’s an example:
Email 1: Hi Dave. Are you free this week to discuss Service X?
Reply email: Sure, I am flexible.
Email 2: That’s great, Dave. How is your morning on Wed. the 14th?
Reply email: Ugh, sorry I am booked that morning. When is good for you?
Email 3: How about Friday the 16th at 10am ET?
Reply email: Friday works but can you do 1pm ET?
Email 4: We are getting close! How about 2pm ET?
Look familiar?
How is it that such a simple thing like booking a qualified meeting could take 10 back and forth emails and extend over more than a week?
It’s a problem a lot of companies are dealing with these days: Figuring out how to engage with more website visitors — and book more qualified sales meetings — without having to hire an army of new employees to manage all of the conversations.
Imagine how much more efficient you could be with your time avoiding this type of back and forth with all of your leads!
This is where chatbots are going to rock your world!
Not only are chatbots perfectly suited to qualify leads and book meetings 24/7, they can send confirmation emails and reminders or other useful information as you approach your meeting date, and integrate with Calendly, Acquity, and many others.
With that said, notwithstanding the enormous opportunity here, a uni-focused “scheduling bot” that pops up and jumps right into scheduling may not be that effective at booking meetings.
This is where timing and a bit of creative bot scripting is key!
First, trigger your bot in a smart way – perhaps after your visitor has expressed some real interest by surfing on a particular URL, like your pricing page, for 30 seconds or so.
Then, warm up your visitors with some bot chit chat first, and when the time is right (and only when the time is right), offer to schedule a meeting.
Something like this:
Bot: Hi there and welcome!
Choose below:
- About Us
- Solutions
- Case Studies
- Book A Demo
Visitor: Choice a) About Us
(visitor is not quite ready to commit to a meeting because she doesn’t want to start working with an accountant that is not comfortable with Quicken)
Bot: ABC Accountants have been working in Bergen County for 25 years!
We specialize in doing your taxes and so much more!
- i) Taxes
- ii) Corporate Formations
iii) Accounting
Visitor: Chooses iii) Accounting
Bot: We do your books on Quicken!
Interested in learning more about how we use Quicken?
Yes or No?
Visitor: Clicks Yes
Bot: Schedule button
Visitor: Selects Schedule and an available meeting date as well as her email address
Bot: Great! We’ll see you then. I sent you a confirmatory email and some useful information about our service ahead of our meeting.
Gobot’s bot building platform allows you to easily build a multi-purpose bot like the one above.
The key with Gobot is that it allows you to (i) trigger your bot to appear in a smart and timely way, (ii) weave the Scheduling button into the conversation so as to maximize the chance of a real useful booking, and (iii) then make sure to make the most of your meeting and keep your lead warm by automatically sending emails with useful information to the person you are scheduled to meet with leading up to your scheduled date.
It is the perfect scheduling bot trifecta!
As to no. (ii) above, it’s not just about a bot script that lays on the charm, although that definitely helps!
Often times visitors don’t want to waste time booking a meeting until they are at least semi-convinced that your product or service will meet their needs.
For this you can use Gobot’s knowledge base and Q&A functionality to address your visitor’s preliminary questions.
This automated engagement will only whet your visitor’s appetite for a full-on meeting!
I should note that using a chatbot does not necessarily mean relying entirely on a web bot rather than email.
You can still opt to use email to offer a meeting, however, instead of engaging in the above ping pong, embed a link to your scheduling bot directly in your email.
This will avoid much of the back and forth by allowing your target to trigger your scheduling bot, immediately see your availability, and book a convenient time with minimal effort.
Gobot not only helps you schedule meetings, it helps you decide which meetings to prioritize!
In a world of limited resources, as business owners, we necessarily have to use our time judiciously.
With Gobot’s tagging feature you can tag a visitor based on his or her interaction with your bot.
Gobot arms you with this knowledge so you can go back and approach your “amazing lead” with a more immediate time slot and reschedule your “mediocre leads” as necessary!
Gobot is good at getting you meetings, no doubt, but some might say that what you do at those scheduled meetings is entirely up to you, right?
It’s true that Gobot is not going to literally feed you lines during your meeting like Cyrano de Bergerac, but when preparing for your scheduled meeting, don’t forget about all of the qualification data your bot has already collected!
Say, for example, that your visitor made clear to your chatbot the exact product and features she wants to focus on.
In that case you better be prepared to share this very information if you want to have a successful meeting.
So Gobot is not just about using 24/7 bot automation to increase your booking conversion rate.
What makes Gobot seriously stand out is the ease in which you can weave automated scheduling into a perfectly timed bot conversation, leverage a knowledge base and Q&A functionality to whet your visitor’s appetite for a meeting, email your lead to keep him warm as you approach your meeting date, prioritize your booked meetings based on the quality of your leads, and then ultimately kill it at your scheduled meeting leveraging all of the qualifying answers your bot collected!
