Integrate CRM with live chat software

Need for a live CRM platform

Today, customers and prospects expect businesses to go the extra mile to create a pleasurable experience—not just when they buy, but any time they interact with business at all.

It's no longer a mere transactional relationship between customers and businesses. It's evolved to having customized and hyper-personalized engagement at every touchpoint of interaction.

Not just in the quality of products/services you offer—customers expect a consistent experience across your organization, irrespective of silos, which prevent businesses from doing that. Also prospects don't want to wait for answers—they want them instantly.

Only when businesses understand the evolution of customer expectations will they be able to attract and satisfy customers. It's what the industry calls customer obsession, and it's the future of engagement.

This dynamic change has made existing tools and legacy businesses redundant and given leeway for the birth of customer engagement software.

This article covers the initial two phases in which a CRM with live chat software plays a significant role in getting leads and converting them into customers: marketing and sales.

Marketing: Identifying and qualifying leads

Concerning websites, marketing teams in any organization have two things to figure out. 1) Bring visitors to the website, and 2) Identify who's visiting them and qualify them.

To bring visitors, marketers do outreach campaigns that create buzz around their offerings. If they don't track who's visiting them and measure if visitors are qualified, they must rely on nature's course and trust their visitors to convert themselves. Even in a utopian world, that doesn't happen.

Marketers have to track and measure prospects for maximum conversions. Tracking and measuring go hand in hand, as they'll determine how the visitors move in their funnel.

If you see a good influx of visitors coming to your website but no conversions, you can identify what impedes visitor conversions. This is possible only when businesses measure and track their visitors.

How to qualify your visitors as potentials

Not everyone who visits your website will need your solution. Some might've dropped in accidentally without knowing who you are and what you do. Conversion also depends on how expensive your product is and how long your usual buying cycle is.

By tracking how visitors interact with your website, you can measure if they're potentials or not. But it's not as simple as black and white. Mostly they fall under multiple shades of gray and it's hard to qualify or discard them. To categorize them, you'll need a reference; that's when the ideal customer path comes to the rescue.

Every website has an ideal customer path, i.e., how a buying-intent potential would interact with and navigate your website.

By comparing your ideal customer path with your visitors' path, businesses can determine the visitors' interest and put them in the various potential stages for further follow-ups.

If you need help identifying your ideal customer path, track how your converted customers interact with your site. It'll give you a clear picture of how a potential should navigate your site. If you'd like to learn more, check out our domain insights on visitor tracking.

The qualified leads will then be pushed to the sales team for follow-up.

Sales: Following up with prospects

At this stage, the leads shared by the marketing team look at your offerings and decide if they're buying or not.

Being there for the potential and ready to engage with them when they're looking into your product plays a significant role in the sales funnel. Usually, if it's a high-ticket product, the prospecting stages and the buying cycles will be longer. It requires constant communication between businesses and prospects for better conversions.

The sales funnel stages are:

1.Securing the lead: Confirming the leads are interested in your solution and their businesses need your product.

2.Pitching your business value: Qualified from marketing, the leads will have a general idea about what your product is and how it can help. So at this stage, the sales team will focus on conveying the value of the product to their businesses in a personalized, customized way. The leads will take a closer look at the product by taking the trial out for a spin, setting up a sandbox environment to simulate real-time scenarios, etc.

3.Deal qualification: After they're satisfied with your product comes the deal qualification stage, where the sales teams discuss the pay plans, user licenses, feature requests specific to their businesses, customization options, etc. to share the proposal.

4.Negotiating the proposal: Negotiation happens over the shared proposal at this stage. Businesses will arrive at a common place where everyone's satisfied with the terms and the cost.

5.Closure: Leads accept the proposal and become customers. Sales teams close the deal and move the converted customers to the setting-up phase.

So from the moment a visitor lands on your website to the moment they close the deal, it requires constant, uniform communication between the two for successful conversion.

It might seem simple on paper, but imagine this from a practical perspective. It involves the marketing and sales teams working together, and while dealing with leads, it'd be impossible to have the conversation at the correct time without any tools. That's where live chat and CRM come into play.

CRM with live chat software

We hope that the necessity of having tools for customer engagement is undeniable now. Yes, you need the engagement tools, but what tools should you get? The best tools become your ally and make the engagement a joy. Zoho SalesIQ and Zoho CRM offers you exactly that.

Zoho SalesIQ and Zoho CRM, the best CRM and live chat software

Apple products were great with Intel silicons. But the limits of processing numbers were exceeded when Apple introduced its own M series chipset. Combining the powerful combination of hardware and software made the Apple lineup almost 30% better than the older editions.

The same can be said about SalesIQ and Zoho CRM too. SalesIQ integrates with other CRM software, which we'll discuss below. But the scope of live chat and customer relationship management software expands beyond expectations with the SalesIQ and Zoho CRM integration.

We'll further discuss what Zoho SalesIQ and Zoho CRM is and how the CRM and the live chat software integrates and give you the best customer engagement experience.

What is Zoho SalesIQ?

Zoho SalesIQ is an all-in-one live chat and analytics platform that makes conversation effortless for its users. It plays a significant role in identifying your visitors, filtering potentials, and understanding what they're looking for in your product.

A live chat tool can enable engagement, but how can it do the rest? On top of its live chat capabilities, SalesIQ also has a visitor insights module, which gives complete information about the visitors and how they navigate your website. With the combination of these modules, SalesIQ helps businesses identify and qualify leads.

Role of Zoho SalesIQ in marketing and sales funnels

Live visitor insights

The moment a visitor enters your website to check out your offerings, in SalesIQ's ring view, you'll get information such as if they're a new visitor or an old visitor, their visitor history with your brand, and how they've come to your website. Moreover, it tells you from where they're accessing your website, the pages they're visiting, how long they spend time with each page, and how they navigate your website.

Based on the above insights, you can set up lead scoring to qualify if they're interested or not.

Lead scoring

Based on how visitors interact with your website and how close they are to your ideal customer journey, SalesIQ's Lead scoring feature will assign scores to each visitor. You can segregate the leads with high scores for further follow-ups as the score is proportional to their interest in your product.

Proactive triggers

As with any engagement tool, users can converse when prospects/customers initiate it. But SalesIQ also lets businesses initiate the dialogue with the visitors via proactive triggers. Triggers helps catch visitors' attention and turn their focus on the business offerings.

The information collated from how the visitors interact with the website gives information about what the prospect is looking for. Moving from marketing to sales for further follow-ups gives the sales team everything they should know about the prospect.

Instead of throwing random words hoping something will resonate with the prospects, sales experts can personalize their conversation for better conversion. SalesIQ equips the marketing and sales teams to do just that.

Automatic chat routing and click-to-call

As sales teams will deal with prospects from multiple regions and time zones, chat and call routing features will help them be more accessible to people who need them. It cuts down the unnecessary frustrating delay in the whole routing debacle. Also, yes, SalesIQ has built-in audio call support.

Chatbot

Being the first line of communication, chatbots need no introduction. They help the marketing and support teams deal with the volume of queries they receive, solve mundane repeated queries, and scale across the organization without costing much.

Email signatures

For sales teams, continuous engagement is vital. While email makes continuous and personal engagement possible, it isn't instant. To balance it out, SalesIQ has email signatures that are live chat links your support team can share with prospects. When the prospects want to contact their salesperson, they can initiate a chat conversation via email signature. It gives the scope of an instant solution to the prospects.

What is Zoho CRM?

Zoho CRM, the end-to-end sales solution for businesses, helps you optimize your sales process, accelerate growth, and build long-lasting relationships. You can deliver personalized experiences that cultivate loyalty with CRM's omnichannel and analytical capabilities, powerful automation, and in-depth customization options.

Also, Zoho CRM streamlines and automates your entire customer-facing processes. From lead acquisition to nurturing and conversion to post-purchase service, Zoho CRM system lets you manage every aspect of your customer-facing operations from a central hub, eliminating data silos and barriers for your teams.

Role of Zoho CRM in sales funnels

Zoho CRM helps businesses of all sizes build better relationships with customers, increase the productivity of their sales reps, make smarter business decisions, streamline their sales activities under one roof, personalize their customers' journeys, enhance cross-team collaboration experience, shorten the length of their sales cycle, and improve revenue. It does all of this via features like a built-in AI sales assistant, sales pipeline management, marketing automation, analytics, and more.

Lead management is an essential aspect of a sales process to efficiently manage the time and efforts of sales reps in acquiring new leads/customers and retaining existing ones.

A sales process typically involves identifying quality leads from all the incoming leads so that sales reps don't have to shell out their valuable time and effort in pursuing the leads with minimal conversion chances. Once the desirable leads are identified, sales reps work on gathering more personalized details about the leads to learn more about their requirements. Once the unique requirements of the leads are known, sales reps reach out to them and offer personalized solutions and deals, and they ultimately aim to nurture the promising leads to conversion.

A lot of processes are involved within the overall sales process, and this is where Zoho CRM helps sales reps manage their leads efficiently. Let's take a look at a couple of examples.

Once the leads enter your CRM, the leads must be assigned to the right lead owners. Manually assigning leads would be a tiresome process. The assignment rules feature in Zoho CRM comes to your aid here. Based on your criteria, incoming leads will be auto-assigned to relevant owners as soon as they come in.

If you'd like to learn more, check out our SalesIQ and Zoho CRM integration page.

Zoho SalesIQ integrates with other CRMs too

Even though the integration between SalesIQ and Zoho CRM works the best, we cannot expect everyone to have Zoho CRM in their stack or ask them to migrate to Zoho CRM for the sake of SalesIQ. There are people and businesses loyal to their CRMs and have been comfortable with them for decades. To make sure they can also get the benefits of SalesIQ, Not just with Zoho CRM, SalesIQ integrates with non-Zoho CRM software too.

Salesforce

One of the world's top CRM software solutions, Salesforce is known for offering everything businesses would need to conduct their operations. Its comprehensive functionality, AppExchange ecosystem, and strong community make Salesforce a fierce competitor in the CRM segment. Zoho SalesIQ has direct integration with Salesforce CRM. If you'd like to know more about the integration and how to guides, check out our Salesforce-SalesIQ integration presentation.

Webhooks for other CRMs

Even if you're using another CRM that doesn't have a direct integration with SalesIQ and are comfortable with the product, you need not worry. You can integrate your favorite CRM with SalesIQ using webhooks.

If you'd like to take Zoho SalesIQ for a spin, sign up for a free 15-day trial and explore the powerful engagement application. If you want a demo, submit your request.