How to sell chat bot services: part 2
More specific strategy on selling chat bot services
Last weeks post on selling chat bot services we talked about a sales strategy for your chat bot services.
However I had a lot of people reach out and ask if I could write up something a little more specific. Focusing on the process of selling chat bots, their benefits and the way to close a chat bot deal – this is that post.
If you want to skip straight to the part where I explain the benefits of a chat bot service – head to Key benefits of chat bot services.
Approach previous customers and new customers with chat bot services
I want to cover how to approach previous customers who have bought other services from you in the past, and how to approach new leads and prospects.
Close chat bot pitches
Finally, you’ll see how I close a chat bot pitch on a call, quickly and easily.
The last post wasn’t that specific
The last post was perhaps a little too generic. It focused on a sales strategy for any new service, rather than looking at how chat bots could be sold specifically.
This post delves deeper into the sales process for this specific service.
Need to know the benefits
If we want to sell chat bots, we have to know the benefits. Benefits are what people buy and what gets them emotionally invested, if you’re broaching a new product into a market, the benefits have to be crystal clear.
Find customers who want to talk about it
Before we kick off, I want to start with a piece of advice. Find customers who you have a good relationship, and even if you’re starting from scratch, and offer to just talk to them.
If you can find customers who are happy to talk, they’ll help you massively with understanding what people buy.
Selling a chat bot is no different from selling any other product or service
The most fundamental rule of selling, is making it all about the customer. Whether you’re selling a brand new offering like chat bots or a decades old service like printing. Your job is to make it ALL about the customer.
They don’t care how fast, how much or even about the price. What people care about, is themselves.
Make it about their goals and their fears and problems. The more you focus on them and their lives and their future, the more likely you are to sell something.
Tell me which of these sounds more appealing.
We have a chat bot service that allows users to automatically route their conversations through complex and sophisticated follow up sequences.
Or
If you’re a business that wants to start spending less time at the office and more time doing things you love, you’ve probably tried social media and you know how time consuming it is. You can offload all the social media work and start to focus on things that matter.
Both of those statements are true. But the first one talks about you and your business. The second one talks about them and their business.
As more funnel businesses into the market, most will try to sell features
The faster you can learn to sell on benefits and futures, the better you’ll fair as more players enter the market and try to overwhelm customers on features.
Almost ALL decisions are based on gut instinct. Chat bots are no different. You customers have to feel they’ll get the best results from you, even if they have all the feature based data that someone else can do more of.
How to sell chat bot services to your customers: part 2
Openers for chat bot services
“Hello Mrs customer I’d like to talk to you about increasing your lead to close rate by 20%”
If we we’re approaching previous customers or new customers and prospects about chat bot services, we need to have some kind of opening dialogue.
I don’t believe that cold calling is inherently the wrong thing to do for your business. But whether you are networking, using content marketing, using webinars or referrals, you have to be aware of the opening hook or benefits that a potential customer will be interested in.
Customers aren’t interested in talking to you about spending money. There interested in talking to you about making their life easier, giving them more time back and making them money.
If you speak to 10 random businesses who are willing to pick up the phone to you, explaining that you sell chat bot services is the fastest way for them to put down the phone. Instead, you need to ask them if they are interested in increasing one of the key metrics within their business.
“Hello Mr customer I’d like to talk to you about a method we have to increase webinar attendance by 50% and increase webinar sales by 10%.”
“Hello Miss customer I have a system to be able to double your open rates and attract subscribers a fraction of the cost you’re paying today.”
These openers clearly demonstrate the value and future that someone could experience, if they were to buy from you. It’s almost irrelevant that your selling chat bot services, because you should be selling futures not features.
List out all of the potential benefits that chat bot services could render to your customers. Within that list pick 2 key items that all customers will want to know more about.
Your initial first call and contact with the customer is not when you make the sale. It’s especially not when you make THE close, but you do want to close them on a meeting.
Your job is to secure some kind of discovery call with the customer or prospect, to talk to them about increasing the number of subscribers on the email list, increasing the number of leads they have, decreasing their cost of acquisition or any other benefits that they are looking for within their life.
Finish the sentence “in the future after buying a chat bot service from me, customers will be able to…”. That’s your opening gambit. It might also be different for every single person reading this blog post, and that’s absolutely fine.
For example we could pick up the phone, call up a snowboard training and certification businesses and ask them “hello Mr customer, I’d like to talk to you about acquiring leads at a fraction of the cost you’re paying now, as well as increasing your leads to sales to close rate. Are you the right person to talk to regarding this?”
That final question about asking if they are the right person is extremely important. It will tell you whether they are the decision-maker, and if they say that they are not responsible or the right person to talk to, then you need to get the name and number of whoever is the right person to talk to. If they are the right person continue with the below.
“I’d love to take 10 minutes of your time to show you the process that we use. I’ll be driving past your office tomorrow and Wednesday, would either of those dates suit?”
Using opening paragraph like that to start booking more discovery calls.
Discovery call for chat bot services
The key to running a great discovery call for chat bot services, if you want to sell chat bot services and products to your customers, is to not close or sell during the discovery call.
I am of the opinion that you should be willing and able to close and take a sale as early as the initial cold call. I’ll always have a payment method available with me and a previous proposal or testimonial if the customer decides to buy right away (which does happen occasionally).
But my main aim of the discovery call is to introduce myself, understand what the customer wants and if they have the budget to pay for it. The way that we discover those characteristics is by asking the right questions.
You have to take your benefit and the future that you’re asking the customer about, and ask them where they are now by comparison. By understanding the number of leads they generate now, the cost of acquisition or the number of sales they make per subscriber, you are able to tailor your pitch later and will have a higher likelihood of closing.
If the future you’re offering your customers is a higher open rate for messages and attendance rate for webinars, you have to know what those numbers are now.
The more you understand about where the customer is now, the better suited you are to improving those figures and results, through selling your chapel services.
It only takes a few minutes to ask questions of where they are now. It’s also an easier route to growing a relationship in qualifying the customer.
Use some of the questions below as an example, but don’t feel you have to ask all of them, especially if they’re not pertinent to the particular benefit that you offer.
- What your current cost per lead?
- What’s your current cost per customer? This
- what your current email open rates?
- What your current email click through rate?
- How may people attend your webinars compared to signups now?
- Hammy people sign up to your webinars?
- Hammy leads did you attract last month?
- How many leads do you have now?
- Out of those leads, how many of them have become customers?
Out of those 9 questions you might only realise that 3 or 4 of them are relevant to your product. Your job is to understand where the customer is now, and then follow up by understanding where they want to go.
The next questions you need to ask, are all focused on where the customer wants to be. By discovering the type of goals and future that they want to have, we are better suited to create a proposal that matches their vision.
“Mrs customer, what are your main priorities for the next 90 days/6 months/year?”
You can change the timescale accordingly, many small businesses for example will work on a 90 day cycle, whereas larger corporate businesses work on 6, 12 or even 24 month strategy cycles.
Get them to list out all of the goals for their business, and perhaps more importantly their life. The more you understand about where they want to go themselves, and what they want to experience, you be better positioned to make a sale.
The more you can dig into where they want to go, and their goals, the better your stand a chance of closing a petrol proposal. This is also where we qualify that the customer is the decision maker and project lead.
“Mrs customer are you responsible for achieving these goals? Are you also responsible for making purchases for these goals?”
What we’re trying to discover is, are they the decision-maker for both the budget and the project? If not, you need to get the name and number of whoever is in charge, and book a meeting with them.
Write out a list of all the goals that your prospect and customer has, and repeat them back to them. This list is literally a list of things that the customer will buy.
For example it could look like the below:
- This gross sales turnover by 10% by the end of the year
- Attract 10 new customers per month
- Launch new service to market
- Generate 1000 new leads and email addresses
- Stop working weekends
- Hire 2 new admin members of staff
This is where the “sell” part of selling comes into play. Your job is to see if it makes sense for you and the other party to work together. The definition of sales being making sure that it makes sense for 2 parties to work together.
If none of their goals can be solved by you building a chat bot, then it’s a tough sell. Which is why I believe during the discovery call, the more points you can uncover, the more likely you are to sell. Often customers will say the first few goals that come to the mind, but after a bit of digging, we uncover some of the real reasons they are having this conversation with you.
Maybe you are looking to sell the business, maybe they want to go public or create a 7 figure business within the year. When we have their real goals and the reasoning behind those goals, we can explain the purpose of a chat box to the customer.
No need to go into too much detail, the line of questioning you went through previously should only take 10 to 15 minutes. You can either try to pitch the chapel services now, or offer to send over a proposal and pitch live in person.
I find after discovery call I like to read back everything the customer has told me about their goals, and everything they have told me about where they are now.
“Miss customer you’ve told me that your primary goal is to get the business to 7 figure so that you can sell it, how I understood that correctly?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Great. You’ve also told me that you want to reduce lead churn and that you currently generate around 10 leads a day, but they can take up to 2 weeks to buy. Is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s about it.”
“Fantastic, would you like some help with that?”
“Yes that sounds great thank you.”
When the customer agrees that this is where we should focus, that’s our chance to ask about the budget and begin to book a pitch or proposal meeting.
This comes in the form of 2 questions. First, what would that be worth you? And second, “if I could offer you those results today, what would you be willing to pay?”
We need to understand what getting those goals would be worth to that customer. Doubling their sales and reaching a 7 figure business could be the difference between $900,000 or $10,000.
Customers with strong sales already, are more likely to spend a decent sum on increase no sales.
A business who is only 10% of the way to their goal, might struggle to make that next investment.
“Mr customer, you’ve told me that you want to double your sales turnover and reach 7 figures within the year. What would that be worth your business?”
“If we would double our sales and reach 7 figures, that’s roughly a $300,000 goal.”
“Fantastic, if we were able to get you to that next level, what would you be willing to pay, all things being equal?”
“I suppose we could allocate a budget of $25,000 to a project like this.”
There are other ways of asking the budget, I’ve got blog post here and a video here on asking the budget question. Don’t be embarrassed about it, you have to absolutely know what their budget is, and what they be willing to pay, or what they are allocating to their marketing spend in order to be able to help them.
Never ever ever send a proposal without a firm understanding of what the potential budget could be for a project.
We then lead with another prescription style question (called so because we simply repeating back the symptoms rather than using our own terminology).
“Great, if I could help you increase the number of leads you attract and the close rates and create something which will help you get close to a 7 figure business, would that be interesting to you?
“Yes please of love to know more about that.”
“Awesome, let me write a proposal and send it over to you.”
That script there is taken from real conversation I had with the customer regarding automation services. Not identical to chat services but not a million miles away.
Pitching and proposing chat bot services
The key to a solid chat bot service pitch or proposal, is to keep pushing the benefits and the future that you are providing the customer.
Many people think that a proposal is a line item list of the technical deliverables for a project. That’s how your customers will become confused. Your job is to make it as simple as possible to help them understand the benefits and the future that you will be delivering to their business.
If a customer ever asks you “what is it that you actually do?” It simply means that you haven’t explored and explained the benefits and the future clearly enough to them.
Customers think they want to know the features, and deliverables, but in fact that just confuses them.
When writing up a proposal, you could use our proposal template here, or heads to betterproposals.io and use the marketing funnel proposal inside there.
Key benefits of chat bot services
The benefits that you want to focus on though I’ve listed below.
- Increased optin rate for email lists
- Reduced cost per lead acquisition
- Reduced manual outreach and customer support
- Increased webinar attendance
- Increased webinar and lead magnet signups
- Increased frequency of sales per customer
- Reduced time between optin and sale
The key is to make sure that you are repeating the same benefits in future, that the customer told you they want in the discovery call.
The clearer you can make a brighter, better and more profitable future appear to the customer, the more likely they are to buy.
During the timescale or investment part of the proposal, don’t over complicate the deliverables. Stick to 2 or 3 core parts of the process such as and lead capture and automation.
Use language the customer would be familiar with, and don’t try to get too clever with comment based remarketing or choice based customer journeys.
Closing chat bot services
Finally, you’re going to send over the petrol proposal. Personally I like to present all proposals face-to-face, and I will ask the customer if they have 25 minutes for me to check through the proposal.
“Mrs customer I’d love to send over the proposal, but I wanted to take 25 minutes of your time just to make sure that I had understood everything correctly. Are you available next Tuesday at 3?”
In fact we are going to pitch and make a proposal to them live on the call. We use appear.in or zoom to share our screen and run through the proposal in real time.
This also gives us the chance to ask the question “have I understood correctly” during each stage. When I explained their goals, their problems, where they are now and what they are looking for, I’ll always make sure I ask “have I understood correctly?”
Then lead into the benefits, the timescale, the investment and most importantly I will finish with a close.
I don’t close proposals by asking if they have any questions, I assume that they have been sitting on this call because they want to get started.
Which is why I use the following close line “if you want to double your sales revenue and reach a 7 figure business within the year, we can get started on this today if you send over the deposit and signed this contract.”
Your job is to then stay completely silent until they either ask a question (which is an objection, which you should turn and then repeat the close). It might get awkward, it might even sound awkward, but 10 seconds of silence is well worth you closing the project. Don’t repeat yourself, don’t ask if they heard. Just wait until they ask a question or say “yes let’s go for it”.
I’ve never sold chat bot services before
Selling chat bots is no easier or harder than any other product. I understand the hesitation around a new offering, but the key to selling a new product to the market, is truly believing that it can help your market.
You don’t make sales believing that it’s an easy sell or that it’ll make you a lot of money. You have to believe that it really is the best possible option for your customers.
Authentic belief in a service is 100x more powerful than a slick pitch or sales skills. Sales is a transference of enthusiasm. If you’re enthusiastic about how chat bots can help your customers, your audience will be too.
Selling chat bot services to customers
Open up the conversation about chat bots with your customers and audience, and make it all about them. Focus on what they want and if they’re the right person to talk to.
Yes, chat bot services and automation can massively help with lead conversions, sales times, attendance rates and list growth. But humans don’t buy based on features or what you’re selling, they buy based off their emotions.
Book calls to talk to customers and qualify them. Take your time to get to know them and see what would suit them and their business. The more you understand about their goals and their problems, the better your chances at closing a sale.
Write up a proposal and focus on the benefits. Talk about their future and the results that they want. Talk about their goals and their roadblocks. The more they read about themselves, the more likely they are to buy a new service.
Lastly, don’t forget that chat bots are a new service. You’re going to need to take some time to refine your approach. Keep practising and you’ll get better.
Call to action
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