Sales Funnel and Chatbot: How to Use Them and 3 Examples of Articles
Sales Funnel and Chatbot: Friends or Rivals? 🤔
Many people who haven’t yet adopted chatbots have a somewhat limited view of the tool. It’s common to think they only work for simpler situations, but that’s not quite true.
A chatbot can handle every stage of the sales funnel, far beyond just initial interactions, routing to human agents, or filling out a form.
Today, we’ll show the relationship between sales funnels and chatbots, with examples of articles for you to use at each stage of the sales funnel, okay?
But first, a quick concept:
What is the Sales Funnel, and what are its Stages?
In modern marketing concepts, we understand that a person interacts with a brand in different ways before reaching a purchase.
These interactions, these moments that lead to a sale, are what we call the sales funnel.
There are various types of sales funnels, but they all share three main stages: top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel.
- Top of the funnel: This is when your potential customer realizes they have a need.
- Middle of the funnel: At this stage, they are considering a solution.
- Bottom of the funnel: Now they are evaluating purchasing a product to address their need.
Today, the most popular method in digital marketing is inbound marketing, which interprets the sales funnel with a structure similar to these three stages.
According to inbound marketing, the sales funnel—or the customer journey—is divided into four main stages:
- Attract
- Convert
- Close
- Delight
Let’s delve deeper into each:
Attract
The first phase of the inbound sales funnel is attraction—the top of the funnel, where your potential customer realizes they have a need that must be addressed.
Here’s a practical example: You work with professional climate control services, and your future client owns a supermarket during Brasília’s scorching summer.
As the season begins, they notice declining beer sales.
Upon asking their customers, the most common feedback is that the beer is getting warm.
This future client starts researching how to better organize their inventory or increase cooling efficiency. They’ve just identified a problem.
Your marketing actions at the top of the funnel should reflect this moment in their customer journey.
Convert
In this sales funnel phase, your client is considering solving their problem but isn’t yet ready to invest in a professional refrigeration system.
At this stage, they’re exploring solutions that don’t involve spending money. Your company could offer them inventory organization guides or a free diagnostic service.
Conversion here involves turning your potential client into a lead. Through practical materials like these, your potential customer—also called a prospect—will leave their contact information.
Once that happens, you start nurturing the lead by providing materials and offers to guide them to the next stage:
Close
In this third stage of the inbound sales funnel, your potential customer has consumed your content, understands that solving their problem requires professional help, and is now considering hiring your services.
In our example, the supermarket owner realizes it’s tough to compete with Brasília’s summer heat and probably needs maintenance for their air conditioning system or even a new unit installed.
Your chances of closing the sale are higher since you’ve established authority in your sector and demonstrated your ability to solve their problem.
Delight
The final part of the sales funnel begins after the sale. Now that your client has had a positive experience with your brand, you need to stay engaged to retain them and encourage referrals.
The first step in post-sales delight is providing a seamless experience. Your service must be top-notch, hassle-free, and delivered at the agreed price.
You can go further with post-sales efforts by offering free technical visits, materials to ensure the optimal functioning of your service, and fast support whenever needed.
How Can a Chatbot Operate in the Sales Funnel?
All clear so far? To dive deeper into the sales funnel topic, we recommend three articles covering each stage:
➡️ Top of Funnel: Strategies and Content for This Sales Stage
➡️ Middle of Funnel: What It Is and How to Create This Type of Content
➡️ Bottom of Funnel: How to Create Content for This Stage
Each of these is worth the read.
Now, let’s discuss the relationship between sales funnels and chatbots: where does the tool support you at each stage?
We’ll show you key chatbot strategies for the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel, tying them into the inbound marketing customer journey.
Starting with what matters most—sales support:
Sales Support
A chatbot has great potential for assisting your company’s sales efforts.
While this support is most evident in bottom-of-funnel strategies—requiring closer interaction with the sales team—it also applies to the top and middle stages.
Here’s how chatbots and the sales funnel relate at each stage of the customer journey:
Top of Funnel
The collaboration between sales and marketing teams is essential in every company.
These two departments can’t work in isolation, as the sales team provides critical support for the needs of prospects and clients.
In online business, capturing visitors often requires around-the-clock effort. According to research by The Chatbot, 64% of consumers highlight 24/7 availability as the most valuable feature of chatbots.
That said, the sales team’s primary focus should be selling. Therefore, the top of the funnel is mainly the marketing team’s responsibility.
A chatbot is particularly useful here, boosting lead conversion significantly—helping you generate up to three times more leads on your site.
In the chatbot and sales funnel relationship, the top of the funnel benefits from:
- Advanced lead generation, with up to 202% improvement;
- Automated responses to simple website inquiries;
- Separation of commercial contacts (e.g., support or service inquiries);
- WhatsApp contact automation;
- Site navigation assistance;
- Material offerings;
- Routing to specific website sections.
Middle of Funnel
In the consideration stage of the sales funnel, it’s crucial to nurture the lead you’ve captured—and a chatbot can significantly assist with this.
Offering personalization and quick responses increases your chances of maintaining the lead’s interest.
According to recent Tidio research, 62% of consumers prefer interacting with a chatbot over waiting in line for a human agent.
Here’s how chatbots support the middle of the funnel:
- Lead segmentation for more efficient nurturing;
- Lead qualification through questions tied to middle-of-funnel materials;
- Personalized messages on middle-of-funnel landing pages;
- Immediate responses on commercial pages;
- Analytics of past interactions to tailor future sales messages.
Bottom of Funnel
At the bottom of the funnel, your client is ready to make a purchase. Arguments here need to be direct and personalized based on prior interactions.
This is where chatbots and sales funnels synergize, delivering a tailored approach for your leads.
Personalization is the key focus of chatbots. According to McKinsey, personalized approaches can improve marketing spend efficiency by up to 30%.
This synergy supports the bottom of the funnel by:
- Delivering qualified leads;
- Routing to appropriate teams;
- Seamless transition to live chat if needed;
- Automated support for free trials, depending on the tool used;
- Retaining interaction history, depending on the chatbot chosen.
🔎 Also Read: Sales Cycle: What It Is, How to Shorten It, and Close Deals Faster?
Support in Customer Service
Generating more leads is the chatbot functionality that drives the most sales for companies that use them.
However, this is not the only purpose a chatbot can serve.
Integrating a chatbot with the sales funnel can also mean focusing on post-sales, support, and diverse customer service needs.
Chatbots can handle these tasks without overloading your support team by initiating first contact, routing the customer to the correct department, and operating during non-business hours.
We have an article that dives into this topic, including 10 examples of online chat tools and a discussion about what works best: online chat or chatbot?
➡️ 10 Online Chat Platforms to Drive Sales and Build Relationships in 2023
Lead Qualification
In every stage of the sales funnel using a chatbot, lead qualification is always present, and it can begin as early as the top of the funnel.
Let’s revisit the example of the air conditioning company. It provides machines and services for businesses and offices and has no interest in working with residential customers.
However, this common error—assuming a B2B company is B2C—is often made by consumers. You might receive dozens of residential quote requests, consuming time to sort them out.
A chatbot can resolve this issue at any stage of the sales funnel with simple workflows that include qualification questions.
🔎 For further reading: How to Capture Qualified Leads for Sales in 2023
Examples of Articles for Chatbots at Every Stage of the Sales Funnel
See how the relationship between the sales funnel and chatbot can benefit your company? I hope so!
Having a chatbot is even a matter of UX—user experience. The studies I mentioned throughout the article clearly show that your visitors want fast service, any day of the week.
Maintaining a team like this is impossible for most companies—even the largest ones.
To make the relationship even clearer, I’ve compiled some examples of articles for chatbots that cover every stage of the sales funnel. Take a look:
Articles for Chatbots at the Top of the Funnel
At this stage, your primary focus is on building connections with your website visitors. Here’s an example of a good chatbot article for a landing page:
Articles for Chatbots at the Middle of the Funnel
This example is for more in-depth landing pages that focus on lead qualification and nurturing.
The article is more detailed, and so is the material you’re offering. Always remember you’re speaking to someone who already has a small history of interaction with your company.
Articles for Chatbots at the Bottom of the Funnel
Our last stop: articles for chatbots at the bottom of the funnel.
Here, it’s essential to understand that your lead is ready to take action—it’s now or never!
Let’s assume the lead is on a commercial contact page, okay? Check out the example below:
So, did I manage to clearly explain how the relationship between the sales funnel and chatbot works?
But why end our conversation here? We have another article on this topic that will be incredibly helpful: How a Chatbot Automates Lead Pre-Qualification.
I’ll see you there, okay? Take care!
