What’s this template for? This👇is a step-by-step guide for creating a custom bot, that allows you to capture and qualify leads around the clock, while your sales team are away. 😎
If a new lead writes in while your team is away and they don’t get a response, they can quickly grow cold; making that deal harder to close.
Luckily, you can create a custom bot that generates and nurtures leads while your team is out of office; whether they’re asleep, at an offsite or on vacation.
Your bot will keep prospects warm by setting expectations for when you’ll reply, and following up with helpful actions.
Note: Custom bots are completely customizable, as the name suggests. Feel free to tweak any steps in the template, to work better for your own leads.
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Here’s a template to get you started quickly:
Step 1: Choose your audience
First, you can target your bot to the right audience. To capture quality leads for your sales team, you’ll want to target your most engaged visitors on your site.
For example, your filters could be, ‘time on current page is greater than 5 seconds’ and ‘total visits is greater than 3.’
You can also target your bot to show on a specific page, like your contact page. Here, your filter could be ‘Current page URL contains contact.’
Note: If you’ve integrated with our powerful Clearbit Reveal app, you could target your bot to only appear for high value prospects, like those with over 100 employees, for example.
Step 2: Engage potential leads on your site
Your welcome path (path A) is the first message your visitors will get. Here, you should let your visitors know your team is out of office, and invite them to leave a message.
Pro tip: Keep your dialogue short, snappy and friendly.
Give your visitors a chance to opt in or out of leaving a message. For example, your reply buttons could be:
Note: Once a visitor interacts with your bot, they’ll become a lead.
Now, you can direct leads down different paths, based on their replies. Beside each of your reply buttons, just select ‘Choose a path’, then ‘Add path.’
Then, we’ll create a path for each of your replies. Don’t forget to give your paths a clear, descriptive name. Here, we’ll call path B ‘Wants to enter’ and path C ‘Doesn’t want to enter.’
Step 3: Send people down different paths based on their initial replies
Ok, now that you’ve created your two new paths, it’s time to set them up. Here’s how:
Path B - Yes (leave a message)
If someone wants to leave a message for you, you should ask is if they’re a current customer. This will help you separate your logged-out customers from your leads.
For each step, just add your question and your reply buttons, like this:
Once you’ve set up your question, you’ll need to add two more new paths for customers and leads. Again, give your paths clear titles, like ‘Support for customers’ and ‘Sales for leads.’
Path C - No (just browsing)
If leads prefer to browse, you should quickly end their interaction with your custom bot, so they can get on with browsing your site.
This helps ensure you don’t waste time qualifying and assigning less engaged leads.
Before ending your interaction, make sure to offer them value first. For example, you can add a follow up action, then add the content showcase app to link to a piece of content they might be interested in.
Then, you can add another follow up action to close the conversation.
Step 4: Send people down different paths based on who they are and what they need
Now, you can set up the paths you’d like people to take, depending on whether they’re a customer or a lead. This will help you separate your leads from your customers, to help you further accelerate your sales cycle.
You can also route different types of leads to the right sales teams, and guide each lead toward the perfect next step. These paths would look something like this:
Path D - Support for customers
If current customers need help, you should give them a fast route to support. Once you’ve welcomed them back, ask for their email address so you can identify them in Intercom.
Then, add a ‘Data field’ and select ‘email’, so you can capture their email.
Note: You can choose from any of the qualification data you’ve defined in your qualification settings.
Next, invite customers to leave a message and let them know they can search your Help Center to quickly find an answer.
Then, at the end of your path, you can set follow up actions to ensure your sales team don’t need to spend valuable time re-routing customers. For example, you can:
Assign these customers to your support team inbox.
And add the article search app, so they can search your Help Center for answers.
Path E - Sales for leads
It’s important to qualify leads who have questions, so you can route the right leads to the right sales teams. You can also help them take the right next step, based on who they are and how valuable they are to your business.
First, ask these leads for their email address, so your team can follow up if they leave your site.
Now, ask for a few more qualification details that will help you decide which leads are a good fit for which team, like their company name and size.
Then, thank your leads and let them know your team will be in touch as soon as they’re back in the office.
Now, you can create conditional follow up actions to route different types of leads to the right teams, and help each type of lead take the right next step for them.
For example, you might assign leads with less than 10 employees to your business development team by round robin, and let them self serve by searching your Help Center:
Next, you could assign companies with 10-100 employees to your sales team, and nurture them by adding the content showcase app and sharing your latest product release:
Finally, for high value companies with over 100 employees, you could assign them to your VIP sales team and invite them to book a meeting with that team:
Step 5: Schedule your bot to send while you’re out of the office
Once you’ve finished designing your paths, you can choose when you want your bot to trigger.
Just choose for your bot to trigger outside of your office hours, when your team aren’t available to reply. Or, you can choose a custom time.
Note: Scheduling only available on certain Intercom plans. See our plans and pricing here.
Now set your bot live to help you capture, qualify and nurture engaged leads while your team is out of office.
What’s next?
As soon as your sales team arrive back in the office, encourage them to follow up with high value leads who have booked a meeting or expressed interest in finding out more about your product/service.
Then, check your reports to see how your bot is performing.