How to increase sales using an AI sales chatbot
Publish Date • May 27, 2024
AI sales chatbots are changing how businesses work. They can automate the sales process, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive more revenue.
These chatbots are like having a smart salesperson who can chat with customers 24/7 and guide them toward a purchase. This isn’t just some futuristic idea; it’s happening right now, and it can give your businesses a serious edge over your competition.
In this post, we’ll understand how AI chatbots supercharge the sales process and make customers happier. We’ll also help you create a custom AI sales chatbot for your business.
What is an AI sales chatbot?
AI sales chatbots are AI-powered conversational interfaces that engage with your prospects and guide them through the sales funnel. You can integrate them on your website or messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram to support your buyers where they are.
Some chatbots are rule-based, following predefined conversation flows to support customers. Others are more advanced, leveraging AI to offer personalized product recommendations, answer complex questions, and even close deals.
Technologies like natural language processing (NLP) help these advanced chatbots understand the intent and emotions behind customer messages. This enables them to provide more relevant and personalized responses, making the interaction feel natural and human-like.
At the same time, these chatbots continuously learn and improve their conversational skills over time, becoming more effective at handling sales conversations.
No wonder 84% of companies believe that AI chatbots will play a more important role in customer communication in the coming days.
You can train these sales chatbots using your website pages, product docs, etc. This is how they develop an understanding of your business. You can also set business goals and conversation rules to enhance bot performance.
We’ll see more about how to create an AI chatbot for sales later. First, let’s explore why you should be using these bots in the first place…
How does an AI sales chatbot improve sales?
Here are 5 ways AI sales chatbots can bring more sales opportunities and grow your business:
1. Lead identification and qualification
AI sales chatbots are experts at generating qualified leads. They can capture website visitor information like their name, company, role, and specific needs or challenges during the conversations. This information can help you understand your potential customers better.
Also, with this information, the sales bot can qualify leads based on the criteria you’ve defined. The bots can determine whether a visitor is a good fit for your product or service or if they have the budget and authority to make a purchase. And these captured quality leads help your sales team get more conversions.
2. Personalized engagement
AI sales chatbots don’t just answer questions like robots. They engage in conversations that feel surprisingly human. They use the context of a customer’s previous interactions to provide personalized responses.
As the conversation gets ahead, the AI chatbot seamlessly gathers information about the buyer’s pain points, challenges, and goals. It helps the bot understand their needs and give personalized recommendations. This increases sales as 80% of buyers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences.
3. Accelerates the sales cycle
Buyers now expect quick support. They don’t like to wait for a salesperson to get their questions answered. AI sales chatbots can help you fulfill this expectation.
Sales bots are always ready to engage with potential buyers. They can instantly respond to questions, provide detailed product information, and even offer personalized recommendations.
Take Chatsimple’s AI sales chatbot, for instance. This GPT-4o-powered sales agent provides lightning-fast responses that keep your buyers engaged in the conversation.
But it doesn’t stop there. The AI agent can schedule meetings with your sales reps directly through the chat interface.
Moreover, whenever a lead is captured, the chatbot notifies you with a personalized follow-up email draft and the conversation history. It helps you understand each lead and follow up immediately.
This way, sales bots remove friction and speed up the sales process.
4. Aligns sales and marketing
AI sales chatbots can be integrated with popular CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce. This can help you collect and store lead information in a centralized location, creating a bridge between your sales and marketing teams.
For marketing, the chatbot offers insights into customer preferences, pain points, and buying behavior. This information can be used to refine marketing campaigns, create more targeted content, and personalize the customer journey.
On the sales side, the chatbot provides a steady stream of qualified leads, along with details like prospects’ needs and interests. This allows sales reps to better understand each buyer, engage in more meaningful conversations, and close more deals.
This way, both the sales and marketing teams can work in sync to streamline processes and, ultimately, increase revenue.
5. Improves customer experience and retention
AI sales chatbots provide 24/7 support. This eliminates the frustrating wait times and resolves customers’ problems quickly. This instant support not only enhances customer satisfaction but also builds trust and loyalty towards your brand.
Also, AI sales chatbots gather valuable customer feedback and insights through conversations and feedback requests. You can use it to understand your customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points on a deeper level. This helps you improve your products and tailor your marketing messages to better resonate with your target audience, ultimately improving customer retention.
Moreover, AI chatbots can upsell and cross-sell new products. This helps you drive more profits from your existing customers while helping them find a better solution.
Disadvantages of AI Chatbots for sales and marketing
Now you know AI chatbots can support customers round the clock, free up your human agents, and automate your sales funnel. However, there are some disadvantages to using chatbots you must know about.
First of all, most chatbots can’t understand emotions. They become less effective in sensitive situations like handling a frustrated customer. They may answer simple questions, but most AI sales bots aren’t that good at answering complex queries that need human reasoning. Also, your bot can give wrong and outdated information, which can cause errors and hurt the customer experience.
In a survey of 1,554 consumers, 50% of participants said they often feel frustrated interacting with chatbots, and about 40% of these interactions were said to be negative. This type of experience can drive away customers and harm your business. That’s why you should invest in advanced AI chatbot software and continuously track its performance.
Here are 3 advanced AI sales chatbot examples
A chatbot that can speak like an experienced salesperson is an asset for your business. It can talk to hundreds of website visitors at once and convert them into your customers. Here are some of the best AI chatbots you can use on your website to support customers and streamline your sales process:
1. Chatsimple
Chatsimple’s GPT-4o-powered AI sales agent lives on your website and engages with your visitors 24/7 with accurate, hyper-personalized, human-like responses.
It helps your buyers find what they need and make quick purchasing decisions. It can recommend products, qualify and collect leads, schedule meetings, and follow them up to close sales. This way, it automates the sales funnel and reduces customer acquisition costs.
You can integrate it with messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, etc., to ensure you are where your customers are. The sales agent can speak 175+ languages, letting you support your global audience in the easiest and most affordable way possible.
For example, Gallery Vision, a global digital music distribution platform, uses Chatsimple’s AI sales agent to support website visitors and collect leads. The AI agent helped them boost conversations to 100+ per day and increase monthly leads by 1,000 over existing leads. Read the full case study here.
2. Tidio
Tidio’s AI sales chatbot, Lyro, can automate customer support by handling 70% of your customer queries. This way, it frees up your support agents and helps them focus on tasks that matter.
The chatbot can answer a range of questions in multiple channels in different languages like English, Spanish, French, German, etc. Since it can effectively support customers during demand spikes and decrease the average response times, it always keeps your customers happy.
You can train and launch the bot with just a few clicks. It notifies the human agents whenever a website visitor wants to talk to a real person, so you can easily jump into an ongoing conversation and guide visitors through the sales funnel.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot’s AI sales chatbot is a smart AI tool that can easily answer customer queries and support your website visitors. It can also help you qualify leads and book more meetings.
The chatbot answers common questions effectively. If you ask something complex and it doesn’t know the answer, it transfers the conversation to your human agents. This way, you can have more control over this AI tool and provide a stellar customer experience.
You can easily create this chatbot by using HubSpot’s templates without any programming. You can also customize the appearance and how it talks to align it with your brand. You can train it using your website URL within a minute, and it will be ready to handle all those repetitive customer queries.
Example of an AI sales chatbot
A chatbot that can speak like an experienced salesperson is an asset for your business. It can talk to hundreds of website visitors at once and convert them into your customers. If you need a really smart AI sales chatbot, you can consider Chatsimple’s AI sales agent.
This GPT-4o-powered AI sales agent lives on your website and engages with your visitors 24/7. It gives personalized responses, recommends products, qualifies leads, schedules meetings, and follows them up to close sales. This way, it automates the sales funnel and reduces customer acquisition costs.
For example, Gallery Vision, a global digital music distribution platform, uses Chatsimple’s AI sales agent to support website visitors and collect leads. The AI agent helped them boost conversations to 100+ per day and increase monthly leads by 1,000 over existing leads.
Smart AI sales chatbots can help your buyers find what they need and make quick purchasing decisions. You can read the full case study here.
Gallery Vision using Chatsimple's AI sales agent to support website visitors and collect leads.
How to create an AI sales chatbot?
You can easily create a chatbot for your business. It just takes a few clicks and less than 10 minutes. Let’s take the example of Chatsimple’s AI sales chatbot to understand the steps better:
1. Train your chatbot
Log in to Chatsimple and go to the Training Materials tab. Here, you just have to paste your website URL and click on Fetch URL. Next, select the website pages you want to use for training purposes and click on Train Selected URLs. You can also train the bot by adding files, sitemaps, or simple text. This will help the sales chatbot understand your company, products, and services in and out.
2. Set business goals
Now, you’ve to tell the sales bot what it has to do. It’s like giving your star salesperson targets. Do you want more meetings booked? More leads captured? More visits to a case study? Whatever it is, set clear goals.
You can do this by going to the Business Goals tab and adding your goals in the form of a call to action (CTA). For instance, if you want the sales agent to give a special offer to your website visitors, you can write a command like this:
“If users want to buy a product/service, provide them a coupon: X to get Y% off!”
3. Align it with your brand
Time to give your AI sales chatbot a touch of your brand’s personality. You can go to the Appearance tab and provide an agent name, upload a profile avatar, and customize the chatbot color to match your brand’s vibe.
You can also give the bot a unique personality. For instance, you can make it funny, professional, or quirky to reflect your brand’s voice.
To do this, you can go to the Advanced tab and give your agent a name and character. Let’s say you want the agent to be named Bob, who is a funny salesman.
Then, Chatsimple will suggest a prompt that you can edit and save.
Now, Bob will sell in a humorous and entertaining way, making your buyers laugh and want to buy what you’re selling.
4. Try your AI sales chatbot
Let’s test the bot. Head to the Try My AI Agent tab and ask it some tough questions. This will help you spot any areas where it needs a little more training. If you want to make specific changes, give it some directions in the Advanced tab.
5. Launch the bot on your website
To launch your bot on your website, you have to paste the given code snippet into your website’s HTML file right before the closing body tag. You can also connect it to WhatsApp, Instagram, Gmail, and Facebook Messenger.
Go through this video for a detailed guide on how to create your AI sales agent and boost online sales:
Your chatbot is ready
That’s it. Your chatbot is ready! In the Conversations tab, you can access all the sales agent conversations and improve the responses. There, you’ll also see visitors’ country flags, giving you insight into the geographic location of your website visitors. Cool, right?
Summing up
AI sales chatbots are a game-changer for businesses. They can give personalized responses, collect qualified leads, and speed up the sales process. Plus, they’re always there to help, which leads to satisfied customers who remain loyal to your brand. If you want to boost your sales and make your customers happier, you can go for Chatsimple’s AI sales chatbot. It will give you a serious edge over your competitors.