How to Build an AI Sales Assistant that Engages with Leads 24/7: From Concept to Launch

Acquiring new leads is a pivotal aspect of business growth. However, the real challenge lies in efficiently managing and converting these leads while maintaining a stellar customer experience, all without squandering valuable resources and time.

Yet, in spite of these apparent priorities, many marketing and sales departments grapple with sluggish lead response times and often find themselves engaging with leads who aren't quite ready. The deluge of incoming leads can easily overwhelm the sales process, leading to friction between these two departments. Marketing teams, after putting in considerable effort to acquire these leads, are disheartened to see them go to waste. On the other hand, sales teams grow weary of spending valuable time on prospects who aren't quite ripe for the sale while potentially lucrative leads slip through the cracks of the sales cycle due to wait times.

The good news is that these issues are far from insurmountable, especially in an age where artificial intelligence is more accessible than ever.

Enter the conversational AI sales assistant, a game-changer for both teams. This virtual assistant not only delivers a delightful, personalized customer experience in real-time for every lead but also works on-the-fly to assess and rank prospects, identifying the best sales opportunities and helping boost conversion rates.

In this piece, you will discover one of the many ways you can use generative AI for sales strategies. We'll guide you through the process of creating an AI sales assistant that engages with your potential customers 24/7 and assists in closing deals, all without overwhelming even the least tech-savvy sales managers and RevOps leaders.

The Importance of AI Sales Assistants

AI sales reps have emerged as a game-changer in the contemporary business landscape, wielding considerable influence over customer interactions, operational efficiencies, and revenue generation.

Here's a closer look at why AI sales chatbots are a significant force to reckon with: 

1. Streamlined Operations: AI-driven chatbots work tirelessly, handling a diverse array of customer inquiries and sales tasks around the clock, bypassing the need for time off or breaks. This relentless availability significantly amplifies the operational efficiency of customer support, sales, and marketing functions.
2. Cost-Savings: By automating repetitive routine tasks and managing routine customer questions, chatbots diminish the demand for large customer service or sales teams. The result? Noteworthy cost savings in labor and operational overhead.
3. Real-time Responsiveness: In today's fast-paced world, customers demand swift responses to their queries. AI chatbots offer immediate answers, elevating customer satisfaction and delivering on the vital expectation for quick response times that research underscores as pivotal for customer acquisition and retention.
4. Scalability at its Best: As businesses expand, so does the volume of customer inquiries. AI chatbots effortlessly manage vast amounts of enquiries, ensuring that customer support remains prompt and effective during periods of growth.
5. Unmatched Consistency: Chatbots offer uniform, consistent responses to customer inquiries, effectively mitigating the risk of human errors and ensuring that customers receive accurate, standardized information.
6. Personal Touch: With their advanced capabilities, AI chatbots can personalize customer interactions by analyzing data and tailoring responses to individual customer preferences through relevant content, significantly elevating customer engagement and brand loyalty.
7. Data-Driven Insights: Chatbots collect valuable amounts of customer data during interactions, enabling businesses to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. These actionable insights inform strategic decisions in marketing and product development.
8. Lead Generation and Sales: AI sales assistant tools can effectively engage with potential leads, address product and service queries, and expertly guide customers through the sales process. This translates to higher conversion rates, better sales performance, and increased revenue.
9. Round-the-Clock Availability: Customers value businesses that are accessible 24/7. AI chatbots ensure customers can access assistance or information at any hour, even beyond standard business schedules.
10. Reduced Lead Response Times: By efficiently handling routine inquiries, chatbots considerably trim down wait times for customers seeking human assistance. This delivers a superior customer experience and leads to heightened satisfaction levels. 
11. Enhanced Customer Retention: Delivering swift, efficient support through chatbots contributes to improved customer retention rates. Satisfied customers are more inclined to stay loyal to a brand.

In a nutshell, AI sales chatbots are a powerful tool for elevating customer service standards, optimizing business workflows, and propelling revenue growth. They enable businesses to align with contemporary customer expectations for instant, personalized, and efficient support, ultimately ushering in heightened customer satisfaction and enduring success.

A virtual sales assistant like that is hard to resist. The good news is, in this day and age, you can build your own AI sales assistant with minimal coding.

Don't believe us?

Keep reading!

How to Train Your AI Sales Assistant without Coding

First off, if you haven't crossed paths with it yet, Landbot is like a chatbot wizard for non-techies as well as an effective "make-life-easier" assistant for programmers. It lets you create a variety of assistants, from basic rule-based ones to the smart, AI-powered kind, and it's a piece of cake to use, thanks to its super-friendly visual interface.

Here, take a sneak peek:

Inside the Landbot builder, making a bot feels like playing with virtual LEGO blocks. And if you're curious to see how it all comes together, swing by the Landbot Academy. They've got short and sweet video tutorials and some handy courses to help you wrap your mind around it.

Now, let's talk ChatGPT. If you haven't heard of it, you've been missing out. This brainy tech from OpenAI has turned the tech world upside down in just a few short months. More and more businesses are catching on and plugging into the potential of ChatGPT and its APIs. And guess what? Landbot is right there in the mix.

We've gone a step further and whipped up a few handy build-it-yourself ChatGPT tutorials. But we understand that in business, time is money, and keeping things simple is a win.

So, here's the deal: Our new AI-powered sales chatbot block taps into ChatGPT's superpowers, all without you needing to get your hands dirty with the nitty-gritty. Simply put, Landbot Builder takes care of the heavy lifting.

Want to see it in action?

We'll walk you through it.

Understanding AI-Powered Sales Rep Feature

The AI-Powered Sales Lead Gen block is a Landbot feature that enables you to leverage generative AI for sales by building either:

• A stand-alone AI Lead Gen Assistant for your sales team;
• Integrate the AI Lead Gen Assistant feature inside a multi-functional chatbot. 

Simply put, to get the ball rolling, all you have to do is define a series of questions you need to obtain from your lead, so your AI assistant can do the collecting, scoring, and any other processing you need to make your sales agents more efficient and happier. If you want to follow along, sign up for free here.

Launching a Stand-Alone AI Sales Chatbot

If your chatbot's primary function is to gather information from incoming leads and nothing more, this AI-powered solution is tailor-made for you.

It's essentially the streamlined version of the AI-powered Lead Gen block, designed to spare you the complexities of GPT API solutions and even Landbot's chatbot builder, which can be a tad less intimidating.

A quick heads-up, though: This AI Lead Gen Assistant "shortcut" is exclusively accessible for bots on the Web and WhatsApp.

So, how does it get the job done?

As soon as you log into your Landbot account (or sign up to enjoy a FREE trial), you'll be greeted by the Home screen, as illustrated below. All you have to do is click on "AI Lead Gen Assistant," conveniently positioned in the upper right corner.

Once you click on it, you will be asked to choose the preferred channel for your bot: 

Depending on the channel you select, the interface of the AI Sales rep will be slightly different.

Before continuing, let’s look at the differences together.

Website Chatbot

On a website, a chatbot requires a touch of proactivity to grab attention. As a result, the web version has an extra section for you to include the “Welcome Message.”

It serves as the initial proactive message that greets your potential leads and customers upon encountering the chatbot. This message comes pre-defined (consistent for every interaction), but the beauty lies in your ability to customize it according to your preferences.

Below is the Welcome Message field is the main section where you define your AI Sales Rep questions and, on the right-hand side is a real-time testing space that allows you to interact with your bot as you work on it. 

WhatsApp Chatbot

If you select WhatsApp as your channel, the interface is a bit simpler. There’s no space for a Welcome Message as the proactive step to start the WhatsApp conversation is up to the customer. 

Also, the testing happens directly on WhatsApp so the testing field you saw on the Web bot interface is missing. 

To test the WhatsApp bot, you need to press “Publish” to save all the changes and then press “Test this bot.” 

Note: Not sure how to set up your WhatsApp Testing channel with Landbot? Visit our Landbot Academy Course. 

1. Select Your AI Sales Assistant Use Case

As you noticed, upon opening the assistant, you are required to define the Smart questions to ask your lead. All you need to do is loosely define the question (artificial intelligence will take care of the full formulation) and then create a variable under which you want to save the answer associated with it.

You can add as many questions as you need. 

However, before you start, you can speed up your bot creation further by pre-setting your use case. Simply click on the “Use template” button on top:

The following pop-up screen will appear, giving you a choice between four different use cases to help you process your lead.

For instance, if you select the “Pre-meeting discovery chat” option, the bot will generate the following questions to get you started: 

2. Define Your AI Sales Assistant Settings

Once you set up the questions you want your AI sales chatbot to ask your incoming leads, you can move on to define your assistant's settings.

To do so, simply click to expand the “Define your assistant's settings” section below the questions:

This section gives you an opportunity to further improve the capabilities of your sales chatbot. It provides ChatGPT with more information and guidelines about how to interact with your leads and represent your company accurately.

Within this section, you can:

1. Summarize your company’s offering. Think of it as an elevator pitch. This will give your bot a better idea of what it’s representing. 

2. Provide information to answer your leads’ frequently asked questions. More often than not, leads have questions they want answers to before they commit to a meeting, demo, or sales call. This section allows you to simply copy and paste a list of questions and answers your prospects are likely to ask, giving your AI sales rep ammunition to tackle them in real-time. 

3. Define a “Goodbye” message. In this section, you can choose how to close the automated conversation with your lead. 

4. Enter your company name. Your bot needs to know who is it working for, so make sure you feed it the name of your company. 

5. Define the name of the AI sales representative. Who is your AI Sales rep? Make sure to pick a name that resonates with your target audience. 

6. Further personalize customer conversations by providing extra directions, rules, or prompts for the AI sales assistant to use. This section offers you the opportunity to add any further clarifications you want your AI sales assistant to take into account. If you select the “pre-meeting discovery chat” use case, these are the auto-suggested rules you will see. To learn more about writing prompts for generative AI like chatGPT, read our guide.

However, feel free to modify them in any way you see fit. The rules can revolve around the content of the conversation or even the formatting of questions and answers. The more information you give to your bot, the lesser the chances of misinterpretation or confusion.

7. Define an “Error” message your assistant can resort to if necessary. Even the best-trained bots need to be ready for crisis. Make sure to define an error message to give your bot an out in case it doesn’t understand what your prospect is saying. 

8. Activate sending your sales team a notification for every engaged lead. Want to be notified of what your AI Sales assistant is up to? Feel free to activate email notifications to keep you appraised about its sales activity.

That is it! Now you are ready to click “Publish” and test your creation!

Integrating the AI Lead Gen Assistant Block into a Greater Conversational Flow

If you need a bit more from your AI sales assistant, you can integrate the stand-alone feature as one of the blocks inside a more complex chatbot interface and connect it to other features and integrations available inside Landbot's builder.

1. Open Landbot Builder and Search for the Block

Access the project inside Landbot builder where you want to integrate the AI Lead Gen Assistant block and select it from suggested features.

The feature will appear as one block within a larger flow. When you click on it, an editor will open on the left side of the interface. This block editor contains all of the edit sections that are available in the stand-alone feature.

Thus, all you need to do here is go about customizing the block the same way we outlined above. It’s that simple. 

Once you are done, click “APPLY,” and your bot will be fed all the information you defined inside that block.

2. Leverage Other Landbot Features and Integration to Power-Up Your Sales Assistant

The advantage of implementing the AI Lead Generation block inside a greater sales assistant flow is access to all the other key features the Landbot builder has to offer.

For instance, you can leverage any of the flow operations blocks to process the responses collected by your AI sales assistant in real-time. You can use the Conditional Logic block or the Lead Scoring block to divert the leads to follow paths tailored to their needs and the stage of the sales funnel.

The next perk comes with integrations. Using the native integrations block, you can link your AI assistant and export the data it collects to CRMs like Hubspot, or Salesforce. Or, if the lead passes the scoring, you can send them directly to Calendly to book their demo.

Last but not least, we have the famous Landbot power-ups, which allow you to, for instance, send qualified leads to live agents instantly (via Human Takeover) or pass the baton to your IT team to do some serious personalization with custom Code block.

The possibilities offered by these advanced features are almost endless.

Conclusion

In the competitive world of business, efficiently managing and converting leads while ensuring a top-notch customer experience is crucial. Many teams struggle with slow lead response times and friction between marketing and sales. The solution lies in AI-powered sales assistants that offer real-time, personalized engagement and efficient lead assessment. These tools streamline operations by handling repetitive tasks, offering valuable insights, saving costs, enhancing responsiveness, and boosting customer retention, conversion rates, and revenue.

AI sales assistant tools are the key to revolutionizing customer interactions and your sales performance.

The good news is, that you can start building your AI sales rep today!