Today’s buyers have high expectations for real-time, personalized experiences, thanks to companies like Netflix, Lyft, and Amazon. So why does it still take B2B companies an average of 42 hours to respond to a lead after they’ve filled out a form?
What if you could meet with high-intent visitors the moment they’re on your website and immediately engage them in a sales cycle? With the latest Conversational Marketing technology, having instant conversations with your buyers is easier than ever before.
Session attendees will learn how to leverage their existing Salesforce Pardot platform alongside the power of Conversational Marketing to:
- Identify and engage with high-value leads the moment they land on your website
- Convert more website visitors into buyers by starting a real-time conversation via chat, phone call, or screen share
- Personalize engagement using Pardot prospect and campaign data to deliver compelling website experiences
Let’s talk about how the world has changed, how your buyers have different expectations, and how you need to evolve your demand gen and sales processes to adapt to this new world.
If you think about the world we live in today, your buyers have different expectations than they ever did before. I’m not just talking about COVID, but also about the consumer services that we use every day. I actually went into my own Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify accounts, and looked at the recommendations that I’m getting. Amazon knows that I’ve got two daughters, and they love Barbies. They know that my wife and I are tired, that we drink a lot of cold brew, and also know what I like to read: autobiographies and war books. They know that about me, so when I go to Amazon, that’s what I see. It’s not a generic static website. It’s my Amazon website.
What does this mean? B2C websites have all evolved to meet this new bar. If you are a small retailer or a photographer, you can go to Squarespace and get an awesome, beautiful website with all of the things that you need to run your business. If you are a medium or small retailer, you can go to Shopify. It has all of the e-commerce infrastructure that you need to hook into your inventory, and to do shipping and receiving. It has everything you need built right into the website. Or, if you are a large retailer like Puma, you can go to a big content management system like Salesforce Commerce Cloud. In the B2C world, websites have evolved.
The Pitfalls of Forms
However, on B2B websites, we are still relying on forms. The problem with forms is simply that they just do not work anymore. Now, I’m not saying take forms off your site, but what I am saying is that you are lucky if you get 5% of the visitors to fill your form out. Of that 5%, 38% of those people are going to ghost you. It also takes an average of 4.3 days in B2B businesses to get back in touch with a buyer who is actually interested and engaged with our brand and on our website at some moment in time.
It’s not really the form that’s the problem, it’s the process behind the form. We’ve all been trained that when you fill out a form, you get a thank you page, maybe a CTA, but you are going to get a call or an email later, when you have moved on to other things. The marketing program is wasted, because you are spending time and money sending targeted traffic to your website. When they get to your website, you are giving them a bad experience, because you are sending them away when they actually were interested in potentially speaking with you.
Lastly, you engage in what we call the asynchronous dance of missed opportunities, missed phone calls, and missed connections? Adam Blitzer, one of the godfathers of marketing, calls this “the last mile problem.” Companies spend time and money getting prospects to their site, but they struggle to get them across the finish line into a sales cycle.
Why conversational?
Conversational marketing has really emerged as the new standard. Think about all the websites you go to. There’s always some sort of a conversational infrastructure. Whether it’s for support or sales or marketing or product help, there’s always some kind of a conversational interface, and the reason being is that first of all, it’s fast. You can get answers to the questions you have. You can get connected to the people inside of a company that you need to, and you can put lots of logic into these kinds of conversational interfaces.
They’re personalized. These conversational interfaces are connected into data in your company. You know when it’s an existing customer. You know when it’s a prospect. You know when they have a good lead score. You know when they have a good lead grade. Conversational works all the time, 24/7, so there’s a lot of automation.
Your website is a selling platform. It’s not just a place to post your content. It’s a place where you should be selling to your customers. When you have a qualified prospect on your website and they’re engaged with your content, you can start to have conversations with them. It’s a really great place to sell, because all of your content is right there. You can sell in the context of what somebody happens to be looking at.
In the conversation marketing world, you have a messenger that’s connected to your data in your go-to-market systems, but it also gives you the ability to sell to qualified prospects right on the website. This is the number one question I always get from people: “How am I supposed to talk to everyone? “How do I scale this? “I don’t have that big of a team.” Well, it’s not about talking to everyone. It’s about talking to some people, the qualified prospects. This is a very data-driven approach, where you are lining up as a business on what your key industries are. Who are your target accounts? What is your ICP? What people have you paid to get to your website? These are the people that you want to prioritize and talk to.
How does this work? Again, this is a very data-driven approach. If you look into a company’s systems landscape, you are going to see the usual suspect: Pardot. With account-based marketing systems, we are seeing more and more that companies are fishing with a spear and not with a net. CRM, obviously, Salesforce, is the heart of your sales process. It’s your system of record, but sometimes, your system of action might be a sales engagement tool like an Outreach, a SalesLoft, or a ringDNA, and then third-party data enrichment services.
The way that this works is you can start to identify qualified segments based on fit and intent, where you can start to qualify people based on the rules that you work around in your go to market. You want to talk to companies over a billion dollars in revenue, or maybe it’s company size, or maybe it’s location or some combination of these. You can also get into firmographic data, technographic data, and intent data. You have all of this information, so why not use it in real time? Once you do this, you can prioritize your most important accounts.
Conversational in Salesforce
We think that Salesforce is the heart of this. It’s where your process lives. It’s where your people live and you can always tell. We like to say that we like to make your website “Salesforce aware.” So when someone comes to your site, are they a customer or not? If they’re a customer, what kind of customer are they? If they’re a prospect, what kind of prospect are they? Who needs to know? When one of your ABM accounts, target accounts, or diamond accounts, is on the site it’s not just about making sure they have a good experience and they can talk to someone on their team. It’s also about letting the account executive know that something happened, so that they can actually prioritize them in their day-to-day lives to reach out and see if they need something. This is a kind of core component.
We believe that conversational interfaces need to be connected to your CRM system, so Salesforce connectivity is paramount, because that’s where your routing rules live. That’s where your account ownership lives. An inside sales rep may be responsible for fielding the conversation, but the account executive is the one who cares and is the owner of the account. It’s important that you have something that’s very integrated into your existing process.
Lastly, measure everything. Conversational marketing is not something that you snap into place and it starts to work. You have to tune it. You have to train it, and you have to invest time and calories into it. You want to calibrate. You want to always be calibrating in terms of, are people getting the right signals? Do you have the right cadence? Do you have the right experiences? Are you having the right conversations with the right people? You want to report on this in the context of what’s important to you, which is pipeline and revenue, which is why we like to build out all of our reporting analytics inside of Salesforce.
To see what this looks like with a demo, watch the video above.
