Article • 4 min read
How to boost your sales success rate with live chat
Chat provides a direct line between a rep and their prospective customers. Sales teams can use chat to generate leads, improve sales conversion rates and identify upselling opportunities.
By Caroline Chromik, Senior Product Marketing Associate
Last updated February 23, 2024
When most people think of live chat, they think of customer support. But it’s also a sales rep’s secret weapon. That’s because chat provides a direct line between a rep and their prospective customers. Sales teams can use chat to generate leads, improve sales conversion rates and identify upselling opportunities.
With the new Zendesk Sell-Chat integration, the benefits of live chat are easier than ever for reps to take advantage of. With both tools connected, you can chat with website visitors and add them to your pipeline directly from your CRM interface. You can even identify opportunities for upselling by matching open chats to existing customers in your Sell account. It’s a no-brainer solution for increasing sales.
Unlock a new source of lead generation
With the Sell-Chat integration, live chat can be added to your company’s website and managed directly from the Sell platform. Your sales reps can chat with site visitors without leaving the interface, unlocking a new source of lead generation that doesn’t require any additional apps or added effort.
Even better, conversations can be converted into new leads by clicking ‘Create lead’ directly from the chatbox itself. Sell will automatically create a new contact card for the lead and port over any existing information, such as the contact’s name and email address. A complete transcript of your chat conversations will also be saved automatically to your lead’s card.
When the time come to follow up with the lead, reps will have all the relevant information they need to convert the lead into a customer.
Close deals faster
Beyond lead generation, adding Chat to Sell speeds up the sales cycle by creating a direct line between reps and their prospects.
You can exchange information with website visitors in real time and carry the conversation seamlessly across channels – email, voice, text and more. Because all conversation history with a lead is stored on their contact card, reps will always have the information they need to engage with prospects quickly, consistently and efficiently. Reps who can build meaningful connections with prospects in less time are able to close sales faster.
Not to mention that chat has been proven to increase an organisation’s conversion rates. One organisation that used Zendesk Chat to contact leads during the sales process reported a 29% increase in conversions.
When sales reps connect proactively with website visitors, they make themselves available to answer a potential customer’s questions and concerns. Leads can get the information they need to inform their purchase decision more quickly, effectively shortening the length of the sales cycle.
Identify more upselling opportunities
When Chat is connected to Sell, you don’t have to rely on your memory to recognise leads. If the website visitor you’re chatting to is already registered in your Sell database, the Chat tool will automatically let you know.
Once Sell recognises that the visitor is in the system, the tool will let you click through to their profile to find key data such as:
How long they’ve been a customer;
What products they’ve purchased in the past; and
How many times they’ve visited that particular pricing page.
As an example, let’s pretend that you’re a sales rep for a company that sells administrative software to corporate offices. A website visitor lands on the pricing page for your time-keeping program, and Zendesk Chat notifies you that the visitor is already a customer of yours.
You pull up the customer’s information and discover that:
They’ve been a customer for a year.
They pay a monthly fee to use your company’s task-management tool.
They’ve visited the pricing page for your time-keeping program on five separate occasions.
Equipped with all this information, you can send a targeted and personalised message to the customer explaining the benefits of supplementing task management with time-keeping software. You can share customer success stories or even offer a discount for bundling the two products.
As a sales rep, it’s not always obvious when a customer could benefit from a new product or expansion to their existing package. But with the ability to match open chats to existing customers, identifying opportunities for upselling is easier than ever.
Attract more leads and win more sales with Zendesk’s Sell + Chat
Live chat isn’t just for support teams. It’s also a powerful way for sales reps to connect with potential customers in real time. Website visitors can be turned into leads the second that they show any interest in your product. Plus, any interaction that your reps have with leads via the chat is automatically saved to the CRM, making it easy to personalise follow-ups and identify upselling opportunities.
