How to get more sales without ads, spamming or sliding into anyone’s DMs

Every business spends a massive amount of time and money chasing new business. Ads, organic traffic strategies, email campaigns, branding, split testing, content marketing, SEO, the list goes on.

Sometimes the route to more sales is right under your nose. The people that all the above marketing strategies attracted in the past but never went anywhere are the hidden gold in your business.

Unlocking the cash trapped in your dormant cold lead database is the fastest path to increased sales and profits that hardly anyone pays attention to.

Why?

44% of Sales People Give Up After 1 Call Attempt.

Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/sales-follow-up-infographic

What’s more 80% give up after 4 attempts. Which means there are potentially hundreds or maybe thousands of prospects that were interested in your business and products that remain un-contacted and are sitting in your CRM flagged as dead or uncontactable.

Why aren’t they picking up?

Back in the good old days, your phone sat on your desk or on the kitchen wall and when it rang, you picked it up.

Fast forward to today and your cell phone shows you who’s calling and therein lays the problem. Most people vet call numbers before picking up. If it’s an unknown or witheld caller ID, they simply don’t answer, even if they filled in your contact form half an hour ago and desperately need what you’re selling.

Some of the businesses we talk to say they are happy with a 70% contact rate. That’s normal! Which means 30% of the people they fought to attract to their business go un-contacted.

Are these leads worth bothering with?

In an ideal world, you should talk to your leads the second they request a call. But the world is far from ideal, your sales team probably don’t work 24/7 so leads will go unserviced anywhere from a few hours to never.

The longer they remain un-contacted the colder they get and the more chance they have gone elsewhere.

Does that mean they are not worth bothering with?

Far from it!

Case Study 1 : Legal Claim : Housing Disrepair Leads

This client was a legal firm advertising to people that have issues with their government rental properties. They have a problem perhaps with damp or mould that the housing authority are ignoring or refusing to fix.

The client has a database of 10,000 un-contacted leads that filled in a form seeking help.

A test batch of 300 of those dead leads were contacted by our AI agent over 5 days via messaging channels (removing the unknown number resistance). This resulted in 41 new cases for the client worth £37,000. (Aud $71k)

Worth it? When you consider they still have 9,700 leads to process through the conversational AI engine, it’s safe to say it is definitely worth it.

If you extrapolate there is potentially £1.2million sitting in that database.

Case Study 2 : Legal Claim : Mis-Sold Car Finance

Up until recently, car companies in the UK could offer finance at whatever interest rates they chose. Which led to a lot of people getting ripped off with outrageous finance terms. The UK govt clamped down on this and made it possible to claim back the unreasonable costs.

The client has 65,000 un-contacted leads seeking help with their car finance.

2500 leads were passed through the conversational AI (CAI) agent over 7 days, this produced 51 new case bundles (conversions) worth £21,675 (Aud $41k)

Extrapolate that data and there is potentially £583k in that database.

Can you do the same with your cold leads?

Probably.

If you have captured leads with phone numbers and can export those to a CSV file, then you have the makings of a successful CAI campaign.

There are a few considerations that will impact how well your campaign performs, like age, reason why they are still there and so on.

If they are a finance lead and they never progressed because of bad credit, or they are a solar lead and don’t own the property then it doesn’t matter how clever the AI agent is, they won’t convert.

If the leads you have are simply not contacted, this is where CAI comes into its own.

How Does a Conversational AI Campaign work?

You take a CSV file that contains a name, phone number and the reason the lead got onto the database in the first place (ie enquired about business finance) then pass it to the CAI agent.

The agent then begins to message the leads to get them into a two way conversation. The beauty of having Large Language Model Conversational AI doing this, is that it can hold down a conversation about anything, but knows the objective, which is to qualify the lead and get them to a sales appointment.

CAI will keep trying until it gets through or gets told to go away which is way beyond the point that most human sales people would give up.

What else can I use CAI for?

While most people start with database reactivation, it usually becomes clear that CAI can be used for lots of other things like:

• Ad qualification : Connect CAI agents to online ads to qualify and set appointments 24/7
• Offline SMS Ad Response : Getting leads to SMS [Code] to redeem an offer gets them into a 2 way conversation with an AI agent
• After Hours Coverage : CAI can man your online customer support points after hours, so leads don’t get a canned response and move on to one of your competitors.
• CRM Nurture : CAI can contact your customers, make offers related to items they have bought in the past, let them know about new products they might be interested in. The 2 way engagement is far more effective than an email blast or generic message.
• Renewals : When policies and memberships fall due for renewal, CAI can contact the customer, engage and get them to renew.

What does a Conversational AI Campaign cost?

If you choose to work with us, the good news is there is no upfront set up cost. Our team can create and train your AI agent and get it ready to process your database records. You just need to supply the data.

If you want to have AI qualify inbound leads or respond to after hours enquiries, then our team will connect the AI Agent to the appropriate systems.

We work on a backend rev share basis, just like a commission only sales partner.

To make it absolutely zero risk for you, you only pay when you close one of these resurrected dead leads.

Sometimes we work on a per appointment set basis depending on the lead time and complexity of your sales funnel but we can work this out and find the best win-win scenario.

How can Conversational AI save me money?

What we typically find is CAI outperforms call centre staff and moving to this marketing automation allows you to reduce numbers.

You will:

• Save time for your sales staff by them not having to redial leads over and over saving time and call costs.
• Replace appointment setters.
• Increase the quality of leads your sales team speak to.
• Recover the cost of historical ad campaign. Converting cold leads means your ROAS increases on old campaigns no matter how long ago you ran the ads.

How Can I Get Started?

The first step is to work out if your use case stands up and whether CAI is appropriate.

The best way is to book a discovery call for an informal chat with me.

You can do this here: https://theonlinegroup.com.au/book-a-call

You can start converting your cold leads to cash right away, just get in touch.