I was speaking with a recent client—we’ll call him Bill to protect his privacy—about our next steps for his home care agency. He came to my company with an already successful business. He has a solid team of dedicated, knowledgeable and experienced professionals. His problem wasn’t success; it was that his company had reached a plateau, and none of his efforts to that point had gotten them over that plateau to the next level.
As I discussed with Bill the different options available to us for lead acquisition and management, he said something that I often hear but didn’t expect to hear from him: “I don’t want bots talking to my leads. I want to do that.”
I got over that hurdle with Bill, but it made me want to speak to all the Bills out there. Bill is not alone in having the misconception that automating your lead generation and management means automating every interaction with your leads. So, let’s look at what using automation to optimize your sales funnel looks like in practice.
Accelerating New Leads Into The Proper Place In The Funnel
Adding automation into your marketing strategy can do wonders for getting new leads into the sales funnel where they belong.
Automation works best when it:
Personalizes interactions based on consumer activity: One good example is not merely having an AI chatbot pop up when someone lands on the site but rather when that person takes an action. Once activated, the chatbot can ask the user a question or provide a call to action based on the user’s action. The chatbot can provide them with a contact form link when they click on the Contact Us page, for example, or guide them to specific services based on the links they have selected.
Tracks user behavior and interactions to score leads: You can set up automation software to consider where a lead came from (was it a search, an ad or a social media post, or did they come directly to the website?), what links they visit on the site, how long they stay on each page, and whether they interact with the AI chatbot and the content of that interaction. Each of these behaviors, individually and together, helps the software determine how ready a lead is to become a client and place them in the sales funnel appropriately.
Segments and maps lead properly: You also can set up automation software to track users’ demographics, interests and behaviors so that when it maps a lead’s actions, it sends that information to the individuals whose expertise and experience most closely match those behaviors and demographics. Each member of your sales team likely has a specialty or some aspect of your business that they work closely with or have more expertise in. You can use automation to help your leads get to the right people.
Automation As A Time-Saver
Ah, but you say your team members already do all of these things. Yes, they do. These actions, when performed manually, are also time-consuming and require a lot of labor. While the automation I discuss above does take some actions out of the hands of your sales team, it doesn’t take everything away.
My agency has automated website chat contact, but not phone calls or even emails. We have automated ranking leads and assigning them, but we haven’t automated outreach to all of those leads.
Automating Some Of Your Outreach
The value of automation is in having it go out to the right people.
If a new lead shows behaviors that indicate they’re ready to close, sending out an automated message inviting them to learn more may only push them backward. Instead, you can set up your automation to send that lead to your sales team, prompting them to call the lead and make human contact.
On the other hand, a lead whose behaviors indicate they’re just looking for information or shopping around can receive automated messages related to what they are looking for. Did they spend significant time on your page with information about Medicare and Medicaid funding for home care? Providing them with information or tips for working with these programs (including contact information for local services) demonstrates your ability to work with these programs. Did they spend a lot of time on your services pages or inquire about pricing? Follow-up messaging that highlights how you stand above the competition or provides an offer to entice them further down the sales funnel is a good choice.
Both of the above lower-qualified leads are valuable leads, and you don’t want to lose them. However, you don’t want to sacrifice time having a human provide information when you can easily automate the process and spend your time following up with high-qualified leads instead. As a bonus, this automation ensures that when it is time for your sales team to follow up with lower-qualified leads, those leads have information to help bring them closer to closing.
Using automation to optimize your marketing efforts and manage leads isn’t about replacing human contact. In each of the situations and solutions I discussed above, you can augment human contact in some ways and free up sales teams to go after the leads who are ready to sign.
When you’ve done business hands-on and low-tech for a long time, as my client Bill had, the idea of automation can seem frightening. However, I was able to win Bill over with the examples above. Have I brought you over, too?
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