How conversational marketing reduces your sales cycle

It can be tough being in sales. You have to be confident without coming across as pushy, knowledgeable without sounding like a know-it-all, and persistent without being pesky. It's a delicate balance... and one that can be hard to strike.

In today's competitive marketplace, buyers are more educated than ever before. Thanks to the wide adoption of inbound marketing across B2B organisations, buyers have access to a wealth of information at their fingertips.

Inbound methods and tools such as marketing automation are great for finding and managing the leads that matter to you most while approaching them in creative ways. By providing helpful information at every stage of the buyer's journey, inbound marketers can build trust and increase conversions. And when you add conversational marketing to the mix...you can take things even further.

The goal of Conversational Marketing is to create personal connections with potential customers from their first interaction on your website to when they are sales-ready and beyond. 

So, how does this all work together? Inbound marketing helps you attract customers and build trust. Conversational marketing helps you create deeper relationships with potential customers. When you combine the two, you can create a powerful customer acquisition strategy that will help your business grow.

How conversational marketing helps you sell more

1. Sales teams can build rapport and relationships with prospects

When you add conversational marketing to your inbound strategy, the goal of your sales team is to offer value, rather than create a sales pitch immediately. 

2. Sales teams can qualify prospects earlier in the buyer's journey

With conversational marketing, sales teams can ask questions and probe deeper to get a better understanding of a prospect's needs, wants, and pain points. This information is essential for making sure that the right product or service is being offered to the right customer at the right time.

3. Create more personalized experiences for prospects and customers

Create highly segmented and personalised chatbot flows that empower your customer with valuable information. Tools like Drift enable you to tap into conversational AI, add conversations marketing to your ABM campaigns, and create distinct chat flows according to your visitors behaviour/needs. 

The key? Make your chatbots human and personable. 

Turning your sales teams into conversational marketing masters

As magnificent as inbound marketing is, focusing on traditional lead generation methods is creating a lot of hurdles that your sales team can face at all stages of the cycle. Static, dull lead forms that prospects need to fill out, back and forth nurturing leads over the phone and email, spending time qualifying leads... No wonder it's a lengthy process.

This is where chat marketing comes in. It can replace all the back and forth almost immediately, putting your teams in front of prospects as soon as they visit the site, presenting creative and effective scripted conversations in place when the team is out office, notifying key figures through their smartphones when a specific prospect visits the site, qualifying leads in better ways and more.

Those factors and more help vastly reduce a process that takes days and weeks to complete to mere minutes and is especially useful further down the sales funnel. How do we know? Because we've been doing it for ourselves and our clients for months as the UK's first Drift partner.

Read more: Our guide to chatbots and conversational marketing