Modern B2B sales and marketing teams have realized that the age-old process of having website visitors fill out a form and wait for sales to track them down is broken. Companies are seeing qualified prospects fall through the cracks and are missing out on quality sales conversations, and customers are exhausted by the buying experience. A study by Harvard Business Review reported that “65% of B2B customers said that they spent as much time as they’d expected to need for the entire purchase just getting ready to speak with a sales rep.” Yikes!

Enter Conversational Marketing. It’s completely transforming the way B2B companies sell by empowering sales reps to identify and engage with their hottest prospects and have real-time sales meetings right on their website. Since this world of Conversational Marketing is new, we’ve put together The Ultimate Conversational Marketing Checklist to help guide teams on how to roll out a seamless, effective Conversational Marketing Program. Check it out:‍

Step 1: Assemble your stakeholders

• It’s important to get buy-in from both your Marketing and Sales teams early. If both sides are invested in Conversational Marketing, it’s going to be way more impactful.
• Marketers will be excited because their hard-earned website visitors are going to convert into more pipeline. Here are the marketers to get in the room: Demand Gen, Marketing Ops, Website Developer.
• Sales teams will have access to an entirely new channel for engaging with prospects. They’ll have more conversations and create more opportunities. Here are the sales people to get in the room: Head of Sales, Inside Sales Rep Manager, Sales Operations.
  

Step 2: Define success

• As a team, agree what success looks like for your Conversational Marketing program and prioritize the metrics that matter most to you.
• Keep in mind this common Conversational Marketing conversion funnel:

            - Website Visitors
            - Qualified Visitors
            - Conversations
            - Leads Created
            - Opportunities Created
            - Pipeline Created
            - Opportunities Won

Step 3: Identify your “Qualified” visitors

• The most effective Conversational Marketing programs have Sales Reps focus their time with “Qualified” (sales-ready) website visitors.
• Decide which visitors your company thinks are the most qualified. Qualified visitors could be those who:

            - Come from a high-spend marketing campaign
            - Explore a high-converting webpage, like your pricing page
            - Meet a certain set of criteria, like having a VP title or healthy Pardot grade
            - Are on your list of ABM Target Accounts

Step 4: Map out the visitor experience

• Now to the fun part … what do you want your sales-ready website visitors to experience?
• Think about the timing, tone, and placement of your Messenger throughout your website; this will inform the experiences that you build out in the next step.
  

Step 5: Build your experiences

• Hop into the Qualified app and start building your custom Conversational Marketing experiences.
• You can completely customize the experience with personalization, greetings, messages, branching, etc.
• Integrate with other business apps, like Salesforce Pardot, Salesforce CRM, and Clearbit, to make things even more powerful.
• You can also configure Bots and Meeting Schedulers so that your website can always be selling, even when your reps go home.
  

The finish line is in sight! Time to put on the final touches.

Step 6: Train your sales reps

• Get your Sales Reps in a room and orient them with your Conversational Marketing strategy and application.
• Map out shifts, so you always have good sales coverage.
• When your Sales Reps feel confident using the product, adoption will skyrocket and the program will be much more successful. Sales Reps get more at-bats and you get more pipeline. It’s a win-win!
  

Step 7: Launch!

• Flip the switch. Turn on Conversational Marketing on your website and activate your Sales Reps.
• Closely monitor your success metrics.
• Schedule a check-in with stakeholders in 30 days.
  

Remember: Conversational Marketing is a living, breathing program at your company. You’ll learn things along the way, like which greetings generate the most engagement and which experiences convert at the highest rate. Take those learnings and fine-tune your Conversational Marketing approach so you’re getting the most out of this new way of selling. Good luck!