Qualified Leads through Conversational Marketing - Sean Whiteley - Hard Corps Marketing Show #103

When you think of conversational marketing, do you think of bots? Do you think that bots will replace sales development reps? As a potential customer, would you want to only be able to talk to a bot when you arrive on a website? A Serial Entrepreneur, a Leader in Conversational Marketing, and Co-Founder at Qualified.com, Sean Whiteley, sets the record straight about bots and humans with conversational marketing! How can bots assist humans with getting qualified leads? Listen and find out!   Takeaways: People may be expensive, but they are still your most valuable commodity. Think about it, do you actually want to talk to a bot yourself? Should you ask your customers to do the same? If someone is a good fit for your business and they are on your site, you should not have them fill out a form and then leave your site, you should talk to them in the moment when they are on your site. Bots are great for finding out qualifying information and for booking meetings with your team, when your team is out of the office. Lines are blurring between the revenue team and the marketing team. If the two are not aligned, then operations will not perform. You can make a small change in your initial response time and it directly correlates to the amount of pipeline you are generating. Bots help to make sure that the human interaction will be meaningful for both the potential buyer and the seller. The B2C world has set a very high bar in terms of delivering personalized and instantaneous customer experiences. B2B has to adapt to provide a similar level of customer experience that people today are expecting. For businesses just starting out, be careful of how much you chase after a revenue model and certain finance goals. You can miss out on taking a moment to find your product market fit.  Be sure to enjoy the time in your career journey.   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanwhiteley/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanwhiteley Qualified.com: https://www.qualified.com/   Busted Myths: Bots will replace SDR’s. - This is NOT the case. People are a company’s most valuable asset and they are still the best option to have conversations about your business, your products, and services. The shift is that a human’s time is valuable, so bots can be used to ask lower level qualifying questions to ensure that the human is still having their time maximized and talking to an ideal customer. Bots drive pipeline. - This is incorrect. Bots do not drive pipeline, but rather build the data behind the pipeline.