Updated May 30, 2024: We added new information about how chat based on buyer intent can become an integral part of a successful conversion funnel.
A sales funnel is at the heart of every company’s sales process. Whether it’s a physical product, service, or software, your sales funnel describes the exact steps required to generate awareness and convert it into action, as outlined by the popular AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) marketing model.
Thus, optimizing your sales funnel is directly correlated with improved sales results. Sales funnels are akin to leveraged investments, where small inputs can result in disproportionate outcomes.
When it comes to sales funnel optimization, adding live sales chat and chat funnels to your website is one of the most effective options you can explore.
Tip: Supercharge your sales funnel with Lift AI, and add buyer intent indicators throughout your marketing stack, including live chat for sales.
Challenges with Traditional Chat
While traditional chat tools provide immediate engagement opportunities with website visitors, they do present several challenges that can limit their effectiveness in driving conversions and providing a seamless customer experience. Here are a few of the key weaknesses:
1. Limited Personalization
Chatbots often fail to provide a truly personalized experience due to their inability to interpret detailed visitor data in real time. This results in generic interactions that fail to address the specific needs and interests of each visitor. Plus, many chat tools require visitors to provide email addresses to even initiate a chat, which causes many visitors to remain anonymous—and essentially invisible.
2. Inefficient Prioritization and Routing
With up to 98% of website visitors being anonymous, it becomes challenging to determine their intent and potential value. Traditional chat systems struggle to differentiate between high-value and low-value visitors without additional layers of intelligence, making it difficult to prioritize contacts and allocate resources efficiently. You can also run into cases where chat tools direct "unqualified" visitors to live agents, which can overwhelm them with low-quality leads and miss opportunities to engage high-potential visitors effectively.
3. Limited Scalability
Websites that get a lot of traffic volume often experience challenges in maintaining high-level service and timely responsiveness without significantly expanding the live chat team. This limitation can lead to delayed response times, overwhelmed support agents, and, ultimately, a decrease in customer satisfaction and conversions.
Funnel Compression: The Key to Improving Your Funnel
There are two ways to improve your funnel results — lead generation and funnel compression.
Lead Generation
Lead generation is about adding more volume to the top of your funnel. The increase in website visitors (for example) would then lead to more conversions, even without changing the conversion rate (on average around 1.5-2%). The problem is that bringing more traffic to your website is difficult and expensive.
Funnel Compression
Funnel compression is about reducing the number of steps between the top (entry) and the bottom (conversion) of the funnel to make the process as simple and efficient as possible.
If the middle and bottom of your funnel aren’t streamlined, it doesn’t matter how many leads are at the top — most of them will get lost in the conversion process.
That’s why funnel compression is crucial.
Plus, you can start with analyzing conversions and compressing your funnel, and once the conversion rate improves, switch the efforts to lead generation. This way, you’ll be converting new leads at a higher rate, forever.
How do you compress the sales funnel? The best way to start is to incorporate live chat on your website. Automated chat funnels create a frictionless and more targeted experience, saving time for your sales team, which can focus on the visitors with the highest buyer intent.
How a Sales Chat Funnel Benefits Your Customers
Traditionally, potential customers will reach out to your BDRs after browsing your website, getting interested in the product or service based on the general information provided, filling out a contact form, and waiting for a response.
You can see how this process creates striking inefficiencies. Instead of getting specific answers to unique problems, your website visitors have to read through the marketing copy to find solutions on their own first.
The same is true for e-commerce websites. Most companies assume their visitors will have no problem navigating the website, finding the product they are looking for, and going through the checkout process.
Critically, this leads to your BDRs missing the opportunity to connect with leads in real time, when they are at their most inquisitive state.
Incorporating live chat for sales into your funnel solves these issues. Now, your BDRs can establish a real-time connection with visitors, which lowers the friction of finding the right information, asking questions, and self-qualifying for the next conversion step.
By prioritizing high-intent visitors and taking a website-first approach, you essentially flip your sales funnel, approaching your marketing and sales from a “buyer out” perspective rather than “account-in”.
Additionally, using chatbot funnels can guide visitors through their buying journey and qualify leads automatically. Chatbot funnels help speed up the buying process, increase conversion rates, and provide a frictionless experience for potential customers.
From our experience with customers engaging in live sales for chat, about 65% seek answers to one-off questions that FAQs and chatbots can’t answer, and the other 35% want to be reassured that the product or service they are considering will solve their problem.
Why Having a Live Chat Funnel Is Good for Sales
While the benefits of live chat are clear when it comes to website visitors, how can it help you improve your bottom line?
As mentioned above, getting a real-time channel of communication shortens the funnel and results in higher conversion rates. Even if visitors don’t seek out live chat interactions themselves, your BDRs can proactively reach out through chat (called a chat invitation), just as store assistants would in a retail environment.
In such a setting, BDRs can give potential customers a helpful nudge toward fulfilling an action or finding critical information. The only problem is that chat invitations tend to be sent out at random rather than deliberately (more on this later).
From a technical perspective, live chat for sales is a more efficient process. A real-time chat combines the engagement and immediacy of a phone call while allowing your BDRs to manage a few conversations at once. It also saves time by letting your team solve problems faster and disqualify leads sooner into the process. An intelligent chatbot solution that learns from its conversations and grows the knowledge base can further enhance this efficiency.
However, there’s a big problem that free-for-all live chat for sales creates: what if you get too many low-quality leads contacting you and overwhelming your sales team?
Up until now, the most effective solution has been to introduce a chatbot marketing funnel to shield your staff from spending their days answering the most common questions. Lots of companies now use chatbot marketing funnels with tools like LivePerson, Intercom, Salesforce, Drift, and more.
While chatbots are great for fielding general support questions, they are not that sophisticated when it comes to converting visitors into customers — something that live sales agents excel at.
How do you then know when to engage visitors with a live sales rep or qualify them first with a chatbot? After all, losing a high-quality lead because they didn’t bother engaging with your bot is not the outcome you want to see.
Optimizing Your Live Chat Funnel With AI
Enter Lift AI. Leveraging over 15 years of sales data across various industries, including more than one billion website visits and 14 million live sales engagements, Lift AI applies its proprietary machine scoring model to instantly qualify your visitors in real time. This AI model is so advanced that it's able to assign accurate scores even to anonymous visitors who don't exist in your CRM database and haven't performed any predetermined actions.
Once Lift AI scores your visitors, you can configure it to direct the most promising (high-score) visitors to your sales team while connecting everyone else to your chatbot marketing funnel. Best of all, Lift AI integrates with any chat or marketing software you use and installing it is as simple as adding a small JavaScript code snippet on your website.
Using Lift AI can result in up to a 10 times increase in chat conversions within 90 days, as reported by Lift AI's customers. For example, PointClickCare grew its conversions by 400%, attributing over $1M in revenue to Lift AI's technology. Another customer, Formstack, increased its sales pipeline by 420%
In the end, using Lift AI lets you drastically shorten your sales funnel and increase its efficiency at the same time. Essentially, you can connect promising buyers to your most effective conversion channels faster than ever (instantly). Your BDRs will become much more efficient with their time by introducing themselves to high-quality leads at the right moment, while everyone else will have the option of going through a chatbot or a self-help guide on their own.
How to Get Started with AI-Powered Chat Using Lift AI
In just five minutes, you can unlock the real-time buyer intent of every anonymous website visitor and start seeing results in less than 30 days. Here’s how to get started:
- Sign up for a trial: This initial step allows you to evaluate the platform’s capabilities and see firsthand how it can benefit your business.
- Install the JavaScript tag: Once you’ve signed up, the next step is to install a small JavaScript snippet on your website. The JavaScript tag enables Lift AI to start analyzing visitor behavior in real time.
- Connect integrations: After installing the JavaScript, you can integrate Lift AI with your existing tools, such as chat platforms (e.g., Drift, Intercom) and analytics tools. These integrations allow Lift AI to work seamlessly within your current technology stack, enhancing each tool's functionality.
- Configure playbooks: Configure intent-based playbooks that guide how different visitor segments will be handled. For example:
- High-intent visitors can be routed to live agents, who have the highest chance of converting visitors in real time.
- Medium-intent visitors can be routed to a mix of chatbots and live agents, where chatbots are tasked with escalating further qualified visitors to live agents for conversion
- Low-intent visitors can be deflected away from your live agents so they don’t waste time speaking with the wrong prospects, and instead, they can be routed to support or nurturing chatbots
- Start seeing visitor intent data: Once the setup is complete, Lift AI will begin scoring website visitors in real time based on their behavior and engagement. This data helps prioritize high-intent leads and ensures that your sales team focuses on the most promising prospects.
- Monitor and optimize: Continuously monitor the performance of your AI-powered live chat. The insights provided by Lift AI can help you refine and optimize your strategies for better results.
By following these steps, you can quickly implement Lift AI’s AI-powered live chat on your website and start benefiting from enhanced visitor engagement and increased conversions. Get in touch with us today and see how machine scoring through chat can optimize your sales funnel like never before.
