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“No company is going to survive in the future without implementing, or at least gaining an understanding of, artificial intelligence and how it can be used to better grasp data they collect.” – David Gasparyan, President of Phonexa
Sales robots help the sales team reach prospects that usually fall through the cracks and do not get attention because salespeople are focused on interested buyers who are ready to close deals. There are various holes in a sales funnel where prospects fall through the cracks because of a lack of resources. Robots can augment a sales team by reaching out to prospects, helping them stay engaged, providing them more information to accelerate their buying decision and qualifying prospects. Here are some ways sales robots can help:
Cultivate Early Interest - Salespeople can only reach out to so many prospects a day. Sales robots can help reach out to more prospects who signaled potential interest but have not requested contact. These prospects could be ABM targets, cold outreach, social media followers, or consumers of content.
Engage Interested Prospects - Instead of having a salesperson focus on everyone who requests information, robots can be the first point of contact to engage prospects. Robots can always be available, immediately reply, share relevant information, and qualify the contact. Robots are perfect for channels where prospects are usually low-scoring leads and have a low conversion rate, such as certain types of advertisement, social media campaigns, and partner referrals.
Pre-Event Outreach - Robots can reach out to drive attendance and schedule meetings ahead of events such as customer conferences, trade shows, webinars, podcast downloads, and demos. Have robots help early in the funnel with logistical matters while qualifying leads for the sales team.
Post-Event Engagement - Robots can help connect with leads as the first point of contact following an event such as a customer conference, trade show, booth visit, webinar, or demo. Instead of spending a salesperson, valuable time qualifying event leads, companies can let a robot do all the qualifying and educating for salespeople.
Activate Prospects That Have Shown Interest - For instances where prospects have shown high-interest levels, but salespeople could not get in contact with the prospect, sales robots can be the second point of contact. Sales robots can be more persistent by consistently engaging until a prospect responds.
Accelerate Open Opportunities - Robots can contact existing opportunities late in the funnel and advance prospects through the sales process by providing them more information, reminding them to decide to complete forms, and offering help.
Reactivate Dormant Prospects - Robots can proactively initiate contact with prospects who previously expressed interest but have gone untouched, unresponsive for more than 90 days, or have been marked closed/lost by sales. Robots are excellent at giving these types of contacts another opportunity to re-engage.
Win Back, Former Customers - Companies can use robots to proactively reach out to recently lost customers who left more than 90 days ago or to long lost customers who parted ways more than a year ago.
Companies who use sales robots to augment their sales team will find that sales robots can provide the human-like personalized touch and scale to reach more prospects at a fraction of a real salesperson's cost. Also, sales robots can engage in a personal way with better results than a branded mass emailer.
In this chapter, we will further illustrate how to implement each of the sales outreach efforts with sales robots:
Cultivate Early Interest with Sales Robots
Companies can dedicate a team of sales robots to focus on outreach efforts to ensure a steady stream of qualified leads coming to salespeople each quarter. For example, companies can expand their account-based marketing target list and plan to reach out to an incremental 30,000 target companies and 120,000 prospects. For a typical sales team, this may be too many prospects to provide individual attention. Yet, with a team of sales robots, all you need to do is:
1. Upload your list of contacts to Sales Innovator
2. Assign contacts to various sales robots
3. Create an email sequence
4. Add a dynamic landing page
5. Start your personalized outreach campaign
Each account will get a personalized email from a digital sales assistant, a personalized landing page, and a personalized note. Prospects will also have the opportunity to read additional content that will help accelerate their purchasing decision. Each engagement a robot has with a prospect is tracked, and robots qualify prospects based on their attention and notify sales once an opportunity is attractive. Sales can then engage on high-quality leads and focus on accounts that are most likely to close.
Your team of outbound sales robots can be used for cold outreach, ABM targets, contacting social media followers, and your content consumers. An outbound sales robot team can generate a steady stream of leads for your sales team that they would not have without their extra robot team members.
How Robots Can Engage Interested Prospects
A company can dedicate another set of sales robots to follow-up with leads coming from your website, ad campaigns, partner referrals, or any other channel generating many leads that are not high quality. You can download the leads from your form, ad campaign, or CRM and upload those into Sales Innovator in each of these cases. Then you can assign the leads to your robots, create an email sequence and assign a dynamic landing page and you can kick-off your sales robot campaign. The sales robots will email each prospect and provide them content that will help accelerate their decision. Once a contact is ready to engage, they can reach out, or after they click on several content items, the robot can notify a salesperson that they should engage with the prospect.
Suppose you have an ongoing marketing channel that needs follow-up. In that case, Sales Innovator can help you integrate that marketing channel, and leads can be automatically assigned to a sales robot and added to a Sales Innovator campaign.
Sales Robots will provide contacts with a more personalized approach and be more likely to build a relationship with prospects that may take time to decide. Sales robots give your contact a face they can depend on and can engage with at any time.
Use Robots for Pre-Event Outreach
Similar to how a salesperson would engage with pre-event outreach, a sales robot would do the same. For a pre-event outreach campaign, you can provide sales robots with a list of attendees, an email sequence, and an event-specific dynamic landing page. Then sales robots can reach out to each attendee and give them VIP treatment. Sales robots can provide them with additional information, offer to schedule appointments, and remind attendees to attend.
Attendees will appreciate the individual attention and the additional information and will be more likely to reach out when they are ready. Sales robots allow personalizing your follow-up in a way that would have been too costly to do with a real salesperson and, in many cases, is not being done. By using sales robots, marketing can have full control of the pre-event outreach and get it done.
Suppose a prospect is interested to learn more before the event. In that case, a sales robot can qualify prospects based on their activity and notify a salesperson who can reach out to that prospect.
Robots Can Help with Post-Event Engagement
Like pre-event outreach, companies can create a new campaign for prospects who have attended the event and send personalized messages to each prospect with more information to help that prospect in their customer journey. Post-event content can provide additional content to help prospects learn more about a product or service and can be more direct in giving prospects information that will help them decide.
Post-event engagement helps further pre-qualify candidates and gives attendees a salesperson they can contact at any time with questions. When having the same sales robot reach out pre and post-event, that sales robot can build a relationship with that attendee and give that attendee more confidence in engaging with the sales robot.
Sales robots are always ready to help, and if your existing robots are busy with outbound sales efforts and you need help with a large event, you can scale a whole new team of sales robots to help you, content event attendees. Unlike human salespeople who will need to stop their sales efforts to help with an event or hiring more salespeople to work an event, which hiring takes time, you can scale sales robots at a click of a button.
Robots Can Activate Prospects That Have Shown Interest
Every day salespeople need to decide what prospects to focus on so they can hit their sales quotas. Therefore, when a contact is not interested right away but could be in a few months, salespeople move on and leave it up to marketing to send periodic email messages to the prospect. The salesperson hopes to follow-up in a few months with the prospect to see if they are interested. This approach leaves the potential opportunity open to learning from a competitor who may better educate the prospect and show more interest.
Instead of letting marketing send non-personalized email messages, sales robots can take on the second point of contact and send personalized weekly email messages to the prospect educating them and building a relationship. The prospect may not be interested immediately, but the constant assistance and emails will put the sales robot at the forefront of the prospect's mind when ready to make a decision. The prospect will only have to search their email box for the sales robot's last email and reach out to the sales robot. The sales robot will notify the salesperson who has been following the prospect's engagement by messages sent from the sales robot.
The process is simple to get sales robots to be the second point of contact. All you need to do is download the contacts from your CRM and upload them into Sales Innovator. Once they are upload, you can select the dynamic landing page and the email sequence and start your sales robot campaign. Each week you can kick-off a new campaign with leads that sales are not prioritizing but have shown interest in the companies offering.
Use Robots to Reactive Dormant Prospects
Sales robots are perfect for engaging with your CRM contacts that have not been contacted in the last 90 days or marked as closed. Unlike salespeople who may see this exercise as non-fruitful and not a high priority, sales robots are eager to take on the challenge. These types of contacts will also respond to a human face more than to a branded email blast. Sales robots can start sending emails to these contacts and re-engaging them with content to gauge their interest. Overtime contacts who are interested will engage, and sales robots can notify salespeople who can then take action.
All you need to do to create a reactivation campaign is download these contacts from your CRM and upload them into Sales Innovator. To be more successful, you may want to segment your list and create different campaigns that are more personalized. You may also want to reference their prior engagement with a member of the sales team to give more continuity. The more personalized you can make your approach, the more likely you will get a better response.
Sales robots can also help you AB test multiple approaches to a target audience to see what approach delivers the best results. Sales robots give you feedback on how emails are performing, content items, call-to-actions, and dynamic landing pages.
How Robots Accelerate Open Opportunities
Another way sales robots can help you with your sales is to contact prospects who are in the funnel's late phases and are slow at progressing. For example, say you have hundreds of prospects who have signed up for your free demo and have used your product during the 14-day trial but have stopped using it after the trial. Instead of having salespeople follow-up with these prospects, you can have sales robots follow-up to remind the prospect to sign-up, offer content that will help the prospect accelerate their decision, or offer help. Sales robots can follow-up at a fraction of a salesperson's cost and can continually send emails to prospects each day. Suppose you can have a sales robot engage immediately as the prospect sign-ups for a free trial and follow-up with the prospect during the trial. In that case, the ongoing relationship will lead to better results and a better qualification of the prospect.
All you need to do to start an acceleration campaign is to upload a list of contacts to Sales Innovator as soon as prospects sign-up for a free trial and select an email sequence and dynamic landing page you want to send them. You can create a dynamic landing page to help prospects through their initial trial and then one to convince a prospect to purchase once their trial has ended.
You may choose to dedicate one or more sales robots to follow-up with prospects based on different use cases where prospects are getting stuck during the sales process.
Robots Help Win Back Former Customers
Another use case that sales teams overlook is those customers who have left for more than 90 days. Sales robots can follow-up with these prospects and give them a personalized message instead of an un-personalized company email blast. As you are trying to win back these customers, you want to do all within your power to give them a VIP experience in your re-engagement efforts. Sales robots can provide them with the VIP experience, and sales robots can have the patients to wait until the prospects are ready to re-engage.
Very similar to reactivating dormant prospects, you will want to segment your list of former customers and create content and dynamic landing pages that will inform them of the changes you have made and the new value you are providing. The more targeted your content can be to the reason they left, the more likely you will convince them to give you a second try.
To get started with a win-back campaign, you only need to download a list of contacts from your CRM and upload them into Sales Innovator. You can assign a small team of sales robots to help you with your campaign. You can A/B test by using different sales robots and see what emails, content, dynamic pages, and messages work best.
Sales Robots Can Help Accelerate Sales Across the Sales Funnel
Sales robots can help you sell in various ways to prospects at different stages of the sales funnel. You may want to divide your sales robot team into smaller groups that focus on specific use cases. This way, you can compare how sales robots perform and what emails, content, messages, and dynamic pages perform best for a given use case and segment.
The number of leads Sales robots can contact is infinite, and you only have to spin up a new sales robot at a click of a button. Sales robots are more economical than assigning a salesperson to the same task and are more effective than sending a branded email blast. Companies that adopt sales robots and deploy them across various use cases will accelerate their sales by finding prospects they could not have reached without robots' help.
Notes
Sales AI Assistant Packaging, January 28, 2021, Conversica