Leaders focus on potential. Great leaders know that it is their job to insure the organization they lead reaches its full potential.” – S. Anthony Iannarino, The Sales Blog

Your sales team just decided to implement this awesome new live chat tool to connect with even more leads on your website! But now what? It’s understandable to have some concerns when you’re rolling out a new technology to your entire team. After all, it can seem like a big, risky undertaking getting everyone onboard. 

Miles Austin from Fill the Funnel shares his advice about rolling out new sales tools: “One of the surprises that I have encountered is that at times the tool that scores best in the technical department just doesn’t fit well with the culture and the pace of the organization. Comfort with the overall feel and use of your new tool can play a key role in the successful rollout.”

As the leader of the sales team, your job is to maximize the potential of your team. That’s why we’ve created this quick guide to help integrate live chat seamlessly into your sales process and grow your sales.

The Transition

I’m sure your sales team has mastered dealing with leads via phone call and email. Live chat with your potential leads works the same, just in much easier and efficient way. It’s important to establish the similarities and differences between live chat and your other channels early on, so you can prepare your team how to handle this new sales tool.

What’s similar?

  • Leads are what’s important. These contact methods are all ways of capturing leads for your sales teams!
  • Contact your customers from anywhere. Each channel is flexible and can be used to reach leads from a mobile device or at your desktop computer.
  • Professionalism is key. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because it’s chat, you can treat it like a text message to your best friend. You still want to remain professional, just understand it’s okay to show your personality. It’s much easier to do so through live chat than an email conversation.

What’s different?

  • You can multitask with live chat. You can be in many chats at once or even be doing a variety of other tasks while chatting with your visitors. Phone calls specifically require your direct attention to that one person in order to capture the lead. You’ll probably need to get used to being able to use your time more efficiently!
  • It’s okay to take your time and fully think out an answer before responding to a prospect’s question. On a sales call, you either have to put a prospect on hold to hunt down an answer, or endure awkward pauses as you fumble around. With email, you can think out your answer, but the back and forth time is brutal and makes it hard to offer immediate answers.

Live chat makes it okay to tell your visitor, “One moment!” and you aren’t forced to immediately respond just to respond. This is great for the visitor too because they aren’t tied down to the conversation so it isn’t as big of a burden on them if they have to wait.

  • Direct integration with your CRM. When looking for a chat tool, an added bonus would be that it integrates with your current CRM. This will help your workflow and make your sales team even more efficient in capturing those leads. No longer will you need to do manual entry of leads into the CRM after gathering customer data from a phone call or email.

Product Knowledge is Key!

Now, before your sales team even hops into a chat, make sure they have sufficient knowledge of the product and company. Visitors are coming to live chat for quick answers to their burning questions. If you have to redirect them back to email as you research the answer, they are losing out on the “wow factor” of instant answers from live chat. I know that some issues or questions do require you to get back to them, but the less this happens, the better experience the customer has.

Pro Tip: Setting up and using canned response for quick answers to FAQs and greetings are a great way to respond in a friendly, efficient manner.

Another reason you want to make sure your sales team is prepared for all questions is to help them better handle multiple chats at one time. Talking to multiple visitors at one time is one of the biggest advantages of chat. Unlike phone or email conversations where you are trying to close one sale at a time, a well prepared chat salesperson can gain multiple leads and close more sales in far less time. The more prepared you are with your product and sales process, the better you can manage multiple visitors at one time.

As the manager of your sales team, I’m sure you’re wondering, “How should I better prepare my sales team for this not-so-familiar lead capture platform?” The important thing to start with is having each member familiarize themselves with the chat dashboard and/or mobile app. Set them up with their notification options and show them the benefit of stored transcripts of their recently acquired leads. The chat experience should come natural because it’s similar to most text messaging experiences they’ve had. There isn’t much to learn and just having your team spend five minutes in the dashboard will allow them to set up everything they need to be successful with live chat.

Almost There…

The last thing you will want to do is make sure each team member downloads the mobile chat app. If you are an outbound sales team, your teammates are likely on the go constantly and not always at their desks. A mobile app allows each person to chat throughout the day and respond requests more often. Doing these few things will give each team member the confidence they need to start integrating live chat sales into their everyday routine.  

Once you have everyone aware of the new live chat tool, make sure they start using it a day-to-day basis. It’s easy to understand why your sales team would want to stay in their comfort zone, but if they don’t jump into it right away, there is a good chance it will be forgotten. Change is hard, but if you help them learn how to use live chat and integrate it into their normal routines, it will be much easier for them to adopt the technology moving forward. As a last resort, feel free to offer them pizza and beer as a thank you for trying new things!

We’re not asking that your sales team changes their methods. Stick to what you know best about closing a sale and helping a customer through your sales funnel. Use your previous sales experience you’ve gathered and now apply it to this new channel. Combining what has worked for you in the past and incorporating it into live chat, you’re more prepared than ever to take over the world and capture more leads!