733 - AI-Powered Chat Revolutionizes Sales, with Alan Zhao
Welcome back to sales transformation brought to you by Leadium. In this episode, we welcome once again, Alan Jo from Warmly to discuss the impact of 8i chatbots on increasing website conversions. Colin, the floor is yours.
Collin Mirchell:Alright. Welcome back to another episode of sales transformation brought to you by Leadium. I'm your host, Colin Mitchell. Today, I've got Alan Zhou on. He is the cofounder over at Warmly.
Collin Mirchell:Alan, welcome to the show.
Alan Zhao:It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Collin Mirchell:I'm curious because I'm sure you've looked into this. How many conversions are missed out from web traffic where people are hitting the site and never fill out a form, never schedule a time? Frankly, folks may not even know that that person was ever even on the website.
Alan Zhao:It yeah. It's it's definitely a lot. It's not just the conversions that for the people who are in market today that you're missing. And we have some statistics with with customers of ours, like, for our one of our first customers in the case study. It's like we have 3 x enterprise cut pipeline within a month.
Alan Zhao:So when you're running some of these large campaigns that bring people to your site, then you can quickly, especially with these tools that help you engage with them instantaneously, or at least know that they're there so you can reach out to your own channels, then you can quickly capture that. Like, for that day, we're just gonna focus on manning chat. That day, like, when we see people coming through, we're gonna call them as soon as they hit our website. We're gonna link to message them. And so through that action alone, our 1st customer in 3 x enterprise pipeline, and it was done through it's like campaign mechanism.
Alan Zhao:On a daily basis, other customers of ours have said that it's not just the revenue that you lose out today for people who are in buy mode, but it's the relationships that you should be forming today that you're not. That's revenue for tomorrow. And that is, like, inestimable, honestly, because everyday people come to your site.
Collin Mirchell:Yeah. And, who who are typically manning these these chats or running these motions? Right? Is it is it SDR? Is it AE?
Collin Mirchell:Like, I mean, it probably depends on the size of your team. But what are you seeing from the customers that you guys have as far as who's responsible for running this motion, you know, manning the chat, and, you know, making sure that they're getting as many conversions as possible through, you know, having this data?
Alan Zhao:Yeah. It it depends on how the company is set up. Like, if you have full cycle AEs or you have dedicated SDR teams, typically, we've seen it be at the SDR teams that man the chats. And, you could set up different Slack channels of our different accounts, mapping, territory mapping, or just based off the coverage. So if you're an AE and all of your named accounts will be going to a certain channel that you're a part of, then you would see them come through.
Alan Zhao:And it's really important to know that this deal or this person or this buyer, this persona is on the pricing, the case studies page. Like, they're they're thinking about you right now. You could chat to them live and say, hey. Let me know if you there's any updates with you since our last conversation. Did you have a chance to talk to your VP of marketing about this?
Alan Zhao:I see you're on a case studies page, which talks about the marketing ROI. Let me know if you have any questions. Like, it's just it's very hyper curated, so you can create that experience for the AE. But generally speaking, for a high velocity, like like I said, if you have high website traffic and I speak comes through all the time from various different channels, whether it's paid ads, blog content, podcasts, whatever, get more referral links that also help you, siphon off traffic to the right channels of people that need to know. Then, that tends to be SDRs that picks up the phone, We call it warm calling here that picks up the the the warmly warm calling phone.
Alan Zhao:Then we'll chat to them and say, you're on the pricing page. I saw you came from, you know, like, you you were searching for this topic. Let me know if you need any help.
Collin Mirchell:Yeah. And are they are they calling them in real time, like, while they're on the site?
Alan Zhao:Yes. Real time. Real time, we we have we have this playbook, basically. And and the funny thing is what we realized is warm calling as we call it, which is when you call somebody on the website or you chat to them first because calling is kind of strange. That's that people aren't used to that behavior yet.
Alan Zhao:But really, it's just you're there. I'm free, you're free. I'm a real person. You don't need to wait 2 weeks after you schedule the demo for us to have this conversation like you did right now. We're gonna chat.
Alan Zhao:It's making you more personalized after a couple exchanges. If you wanna have a video call, I can turn on my video and show you that I'm real. And that way, we're having a call. So that's what I'm calling.
Collin Mirchell:Yeah. And so in some cases, this could be, the SDR that send them maybe the email in the first place if it's, you know, cold email, or it could be, you know, whoever ran a discovery call, maybe they've already done a demo and now they're checking pricing and case studies and all those sort of things. So it's it's the actual person that they've already been engaged with or are familiar with depending on, you know, how engaged they've been with that particular person.
Alan Zhao:That's exactly right. Like, it we we hook into the CRM, and so we know who's the owner of whichever accounts. And so so the right person can get pinged when their accounts or the person is on the page.
Collin Mirchell:Yeah. And so in a lot of cases, you know, obviously not everybody's just gonna be sitting there, you know, waiting for those Slack pings all day. Right? They have meetings or, you know, call blocks, whatever it is that they have going on. But they can get that Slack notification.
Collin Mirchell:They can send them a message and say, hey. I see maybe you have some questions about pricing. You're checking out some case studies. You know, are you free in the next 5 minutes if I were to give you a call? And is that, you know, typical what people are doing?
Alan Zhao:Yep. That and you brought up a really good point, which is typically reps are very busy. I mean, in sales, it's all timing. Right? So you need to know how to prioritize your time.
Alan Zhao:One of the issues that we ran into is that just because someone's looking at your site or case, it doesn't mean they wanna have a conversation right now. And it may not be worth diverting a rep's attention away from the exact thing that they're doing right now because they'll get pinged all day for this. Yeah. So we solve that problem by creating an AI chatbot, and it basically is like a rep assistant. So it'll outreach on the rep's behalf when key people on-site and can set a parameters on what needs to happen to show high intent.
Alan Zhao:Like, they are on the book a demo page or they're on the pricing page. This is their 5th visit back or an ICP account, and they've already had, like, a booked meeting, like, something. You can get really granular with this. When these things are met, the AI will reach out on the rest's behalf in your voice and then basically say exactly what you're going to say. It's nothing complicated, especially in chat.
Alan Zhao:You treat it like text message. Just like, hey, what's up? Not paragraphs of things to to
Collin Mirchell:Right.
Alan Zhao:Reach a person. And that's been really effective because once the people come to the site, maybe out of a 100 people, only 5 really want to have a conversation right now. That AI is going to find out the 5 and then wrap to the rep. At that point, the rep knows this person not only is on my site, but responded to, in theory, the theoretical me that reached out to them. That means I need to respond back because they're also one of my target counts.
Collin Mirchell:Yeah. And is is the prospect aware that it's AI, or does it think that it's the rep?
Alan Zhao:Based off the responses, it thinks that it's the rep. It doesn't know that it's Yeah. Because everything on the UI looks to be as the same as a person.
Collin Mirchell:Right. Okay. That's what I figured. Now and then what about if the, AI is engaging with the prospect? Seems like they wanna have a conversation, but the rep's not available to jump in.
Alan Zhao:Yeah. So this is really important. This is where good coverage needs to come in. And then then we work with the team to make sure we structure that. You do have coverage throughout the 9 to 5.
Alan Zhao:And if you so choose to have coverage, like, past that as well in the evenings because a lot of people are not really browsing tools during the day. They'll do it in the evenings. And so that we would recommend, and we have people we work with who are, you know, offshore. They can provide coverage. They're fantastic SDRs.
Alan Zhao:Very sharp, very fast and friendly and also cost effective too. So that's a strategy there. Make sure you have 24 hour coverage, but the AI is really softening off the most important traffic to them.
Collin Mirchell:Got it. Interesting. Well, this is, this is a big problem that you guys are are looking to solve, and sounds like you're putting a dent into it. Really appreciate you coming on the show, Alan. Any final thoughts, and then where's the best place for people to connect with you and learn more?
Alan Zhao:Awesome. Pleasure to be on. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can learn more about Warmly. We have a batch of folks who are pushing out a lot of content.
Alan Zhao:So we have Max Greenwald, Keegan Otter, and many others. But, yeah, LinkedIn is the best place.
Collin Mirchell:Awesome. Appreciate it. We'll drop the links there in the show notes to make it easy. If you enjoyed today's episode, please write us a review, share the show with your friends so we can help more sellers and sales leaders transform the way that they sell.
