When I started my business, I never got the whole qualifying leads question. I mean, how do I know what lead is qualified? What lead is unqualified? What constitutes a qualification for a lead?
In the past, I basically opened my calendar to anyone and I had tons of sales calls and that was great because I learned so much in the process.
But the truth is, as you grow, as you get more focused on what your services are and who your ideal client is, and then you can ask the right questions to make sure that you're not spending your time having sales calls with people that either can't afford your services, don't need your services, or are just not the right archetype for your services.
And that’s when you know it's time to put in some sort of qualification form.
Here’s the good news: It’s a lot easier than you think. 🥳
Where to put your qualification form.
There are a few places where you can put this qualification form into play.
One is when they're scheduling the meeting, have them fill out a pre-qualification form. Once they fill out the form, you can either qualify them after they schedule it or you can set your meeting to require approval using ScheduleOnce in the OnceHub environment. This means you can actually not complete the booking until you review the form.
But there's actually an easier way also through OnceHub. OnceHub has something called chatbots. This is actually a free option.
And it’s so powerful… I was wondering why I wasn't using this sooner?!
What is the purpose of a chat bot?
I'm going to define the purpose of the chatbot as twofold, but it can actually be a lot more.
One, it's to engage with your site visitors and qualify them.
Two, it's to engage with your site visitors and route them to the right place so that they can find the information they're looking for easily.
What we need to understand is that more and more people are using chatbots to find and navigate on a website. And so a chatbot can help you simplify your navigation.
(We love to simplify things, don't we?)
So how do we do this?
Well, the first thing you want to do is go into your OnceHub account (if you don't have one, you can set one up for free). And then under set up, you want to go to Chat Once and you'll find on the left hand navigation you have chatbots and then you have various targeting settings.
When you click on the create chatbot, you have three different options for a chatbot.
One is a standalone chabot. This is a chatbot that basically doesn’t require a website. It's on its own page. You can create a chatbot even if you don't have a website.
And this is great for you to qualify your leads and just ask them questions or point them to different places. Very similar to what people are using LinkTree for.
So you can ask them, Are you looking to do A? Here's a link to do A. Are you looking to do B? Here's a link to do B.
The second option is a popup chatbot that is activated with a button on your webpage like a regular chatbot.
And the third is a targeted chat bot that you can use for your entire website.
I'm going to talk about how I use the targeted chatbot because I think we'll learn best from this example.
How I use a chatbot
As I've been refining my services recently and defining how I want my business to run, I found that I could divide the kinds of customers that I have into two kinds.
One, people who come to my website for DIY options looking to solve their problems themselves. They just want the resources. I have tons of free resources, so why not make it easy for them?
And the second type of customers are people who are looking for my services, who know that they want me to set it up for them. And I also want to make that easier because while I do have a services page, it is constantly being updated (feel free to check out what the options are there at the moment).
And so the chatbot just gives me that simple flow of offering people the service that they want based on a few qualifying questions or a few self-directing questions.
Once they know the answers to those questions, I can give them the best link to giving them the solution that they want. If we look at the chatbot that I have set up, the first question that I ask them is, “do you want help?”.
Basically, that's the first question because I want to know if they actually want to interact with my chatbot. And if they don't, then that's fine, as well.
But if they do then, WOOHOO! GREAT!
The next questionI asked after they said “yes”, is “do you want to learn more about how I can help you simplify your workflow?”. And if they say, “yes”, I'll take them to the next segmentation option: I'll ask them, “do you want a DIY solution?”.
If they affirm they want a DIY solution, I present them with a list of all the solutions that I offer and they can choose which one is best for them, such as managing content, managing meeting scheduling, marketing and sales content, creating an online sales funnel, creating an online course, setting up finances. I have different options on my website based on the kind of categories that I have.
I actually have a lot more categories, but these are the main ones I've found so far that people want to come learn about. And if they want something else, then I'll update this chatbot (it’s SOOO easy to do).
All this enables people to binge on my content in a way that's convenient for them.
Now let's say they don't want DIY. Let's say they want to come and have me do the work for them (that's fine actually, you know, I love that!). The chatbot is set up to ask them a series of questions so I can guide them to the services they may want, based on the answers they picked.
I give people multiple options because not everybody's looking for one thing and you never know what somebody's looking for. This is a great way to show people your services without giving them way too much detail and overwhelming them.
Once they select whatever option they're looking for, I start asking them these qualification questions.
And now for the pre-qualifying questions
Why do I need them? So I can guide the right people to the right offer, saving me tons of time and headache that I would have gotten from sales calls.
Personally, I found that I like to work with small to medium sized businesses. Mostly I like working with businesses that are up to 10 people, but I've had clients that had up to 20 people as well. So I ask questions to see what size their organization is. To keep guiding them to the offer I want to show them that I think is best for their needs.
And the next question that I ask is a budget question. And that is, how much are you willing to invest? I have offers at three different tiers and based on the tiers, I know where to redirect them.
This self segmentation question also gives visitors an idea of my price range. If someone can’t afford my services, they will know before they get on a call. Saving us both time.
If somebody says that they're willing to invest up to a thousand dollars, where I am today as of this writing, it means that they can either do one of my DIY courses or they can set up a strategy call for one hour or two hours where they pick my brain.
From there I can redirect them to schedule one of those calls.
The second tier is the $1,000 to $3,000 range. And that's a great range for somebody who wants me for a well defined but not necessarily out of the box solution. I have hourly packages. I have a five hour package and a ten hour package and they're roughly within that range of 1000 to $3,000.
This gives potential customers the option to work with me in a limited capacity to solve their specific issues.
And then the last tier I have is more than $3,000. And that's basically where my predefined packages come in. These are the clients that I want to work with most. These are the people that understand the value of having a proper system set up and having a proper workflow in place and they're willing to invest to make sure that they can get the most out of whatever service I give them.
And once they click on the budget expectations, I tell them what I think is suitable for them via the chatbot. I will present the package that might be right for them and then offer to set up an introduction call to discuss.
Plus, they schedule a meeting from within the bot so they don't have to go look for where they can schedule a meeting with me. They don't have to go to my booking page.
Now, what I don't have on my bot is free text and just a live conversation, because a lot of my clients are not in the same time zone as I am and I really don't want to be online all the time. And in order for me to have a live conversation or semi live conversation with someone through a bot, they would have to give me their email. I'm not crazy about collecting emails although I have to say, hundreds of people have trusted me with their emails to get on my email list and I recently shared that I had a 98.1% open rate on the entire sequence, which I find phenomenal.
Food for thought:
One of the options that you do have is that you can have a live chat and have people interact with your team and if you have a team, then the chat can send notifications to your team members and the chat is assigned either round robin style or you define who each chatbot is assigned to.
Targeting your chatbots
The next thing after you set up a chatbot itself, is going back into the OnceHub set up for chatbots and defining targeting for your chatbots.
You can define different audiences and the audiences can be based on pages that they've landed on, countries that they're coming from - US based or UK based, for example. It could be all website visitors, it can be people who landed on a specific landing page. It could be the number of visits that they've had to your website or to a specific page, as well. Say somebody who's visited the website once, twice, three times (I wouldn't really base it on that because that's cookie based and that's not a hundred percent accurate).
It could be based on a contact field.
If you know their email address or you know their company size or anything that you've already collected about them in the past, and this is really great. If you have a membership site, you could use that to sort of target people directly with chatbots and give them information based on that.
Once you define the audience, you define which chatbot conversation goes to which audience.
I love that because you know that different chatbots are right for different audiences. You can have a different flow for people who have come from one specific landing page who have landed on your website and a different flow for people who have landed on your website from a different page. This is phenomenal for sales.
Some last tidbits about OnceHub chatbots
You can pick your brand colors for your chatbot. I chose the primary color from my website. You can choose the icon for the chat bot. You can give a name to the chatbot and your company name. You can choose a shape for the chatbot and a theme. On the free plan you'll have the OnceHub branding. The installation has got to be one of the simplest things in the world.
You will also get access to analytics: how many people entered, how many people interacted, how many people completed, and how many people booked a meeting. This will give you a lot of data as to how your chatbot is doing and what you can refine, especially if you have different chatbots targeting different people.
Wrapping up
I highly recommend OnceHub’s chatbots. It’s a powerful tool that can win back your time and save your sales calls for serious buyers. But at the same time, it helps your page visitors get around your website with ease, thus making the overall brand experience top-notch!
Give it a try and if you have questions, drop me a line.
