Build a No-Code Lead Qualification Bot to Boost Sales

In today’s competitive market, businesses need to meticulously align their marketing and sales team in order to achieve their goals and beat the competition. A lead qualification bot personalizing each prospect’s conversion journey is a chance to do just that!

Keep reading for lead qualification and scoring chatbot strategy using Landbot both your marketing and sales team will fall in love with.

What is a Lead Qualification Bot?

Lead qualification bot (or a lead scoring bot) is an automated conversational software that qualifies (scores) captured leads using pre-designed conversational flow. As the prospects engage in conversation composed of qualifying questions, the bot assigns value to and conditions their answers to qualify or disqualify them without human agent intervention.

Furthermore, the bot is able to react to the lead score instantly. For instance, it can initiate bot-to-human handoff for the hottest leads and send those “not ready to buy” towards engaging content or a free trial.

Lead qualification bot can function on the web, inside a mobile app, or on messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger and encompass a wealth of integrations to automate real-time data transfers. Hence, your marketing and sales team will be able to qualify or disqualify leads quickly and efficiently and thus have more time to focus on leads more likely to convert.

Why Disqualifying Leads Isn’t a Bad Thing

Many professionals are reluctant to disqualify prospects as shrinking the pipeline may seem a step in the opposite direction. The natural instinct us them to work through as many leads as possible to up our chances of conversion. However, it has been shown time and time again that that is not the best approach.

When it comes to closing sales, speed is essential. According to a study by Drift, there is an incredible tenfold decrease in odds to convert if you take longer than 5 minutes to respond. By disqualifying leads that are obviously not ready to buy just yet, you ensure that you get to those that are on time.

The most important asset of every sales team member is their time. Hence, investing it wisely on the highest quality leads is more likely to yield results that spreading the time thinly across tens or hundreds of random prospects.

Why Choose Lead Qualification Bot Over Other Methods?

Online forms are notoriously disliked and frustrating while live chat, or any other form of live communication, is labor-intensive.

Then there are chatbots.

Chatbots combine the interactive immediacy of human conversation with full-scale automation with multi-channel convenience. A single conversational flow can be integrated on your website, Facebook page, and WhatsApp account, guiding all prospects, may they be website visitors or others, through a structured qualifying conversation that produces a comprehensive lead score.

So, let’s look at how you can build a lead scoring chatbot without coding, so your marketing and sales team are always in control!

How to Build a Lead Qualification Bot without Coding

To build this lead qualification bot, I will be using, quite naturally, the Landbot chatbot development platform. So, if you want to follow along, sign up ( for free – no credit card required) to access the free trial.

This tutorial will teach you how to:

Integrate your bot with Google Sheets to export data
Validate business email
Assign a value to prospects’ answers to calculate the score
Diverge flow with conditional logic
Send Slack Notifications
Set up Human Takeover

Have a peek at the final end-user experience:

1. Select Channel & Create New Bot

First things first. On your Landbot dashboard, click “Build New Bot” and select your channel:

2. Optimize Welcome Message

When you access the builder, you will see a sample welcome message. It gives you a good idea of how the flow will look like.

Essentially, you will be building a series of interconnected blocks that will take the form of a conversation on the frontend.

I optimized my Welcome message block as follows, setting up the flow to divide based on the user’s language of preference:

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3. Create a New Data Entry with Google Sheets Integration

For the purpose of this tutorial, I decided to export my collected data to Google Spreadsheets.

TIP: When it comes to lead qualification, you can integrate Landbot with any CRM. Landbot offers a native Salesforce integration but you can also set up a webhook to connect any other system such as Airtable.

But back to the point.

Before you do anything in Landbot, create a new sheet in your Google Drive!

Now come back to the Landbot builder.

Draw an arrow from whichever language flow you want to build first. (It’s easier if you finish setting up one flow completely and then simply copy and translate it.)

Select “Google Sheets” option from the features menu:

If you are using this integration for the first time before anything else you need to click “ADD ACCOUNT” to connect your Google Drive account to Landbot. Otherwise, just select the account from the dropdown list in the field below.

After you select an account:

Pick the spreadsheet you want to integration
Designate the sheet within that spreadsheet you want to access
Pick the action you want to perform

In this case, we want to insert a new row and update the first column “Lead ID” with a Landbot variable @id which stores an automatically created conversation reference number.

After selecting the “Insert new row” action to perform, a new field called “NEW ROW VALUE” will appear. Here all you need to do is select the name of the column under which you want to store the information and assign it a designated variable from the list (or create a new one).

Since @id is a pre-existing Landbot system variable, all that needs to be done is to select it from the variable list:

The final setup will look as follows:

Click SAVE and continue!

4. Start Asking Questions

The advantage of the Landbot builder is that most of the common questions (such as date, address, email, phone number) have their own format-sensitive block. Hence, for example, the “Email” question block will only accept answers in the correct email format (including @ and .example).

The first question my lead qualification bot will ask is the prospect’s name. While this block doesn’t really have restricted format since names are diverse, it does come with already set “variable” under which I can store the collected data.

Better yet, I can use the @name variable to personalize the conversation right from the start.

You can continue to ask about the lead’s company name, the URL, phone number, postcode, etc. Whatever information you need to assess the quality of the prospect.

TIP: If you need to ensure that some of this information is in a specific format (so as not to cause problems in your system) such as all-lower-case or following a specific sequence of numbers or letters (e.g. postcode) to check validity, you can use the feature called Formulas. To see an example of how to apply formulas, check out sections 4 and 5 of Why & How to Build a Lead Generation Bot

5. Validate Email Using a Webhook

The next question I want my prospect to answer, and perhaps it’s the most important one, is their email address.

Landbot builder offers and email-designated block that checks for the format and comes with a pre-set variable.

However, since I want to ensure the prospect’s quality, I want the bot to also check if the email submitted is a business email. Sure, step one is to update the question to “Whats’s your business email?”. But we all know that won’t do the trick. If you want qualified leads, you need to ensure the contact information is valid.

To do that, you need to set up a webhook.

I know, webhook, or else API, sounds like something developer should deal with and not at all no-code. Bear with me though. Setting up a webhook with Landbot, especially the email validator one, is extremely simple. So simple, even a content marketer like myself can do that.

Draw an arrow from the email block and select “Webhooks” from the block menu:

Before anything else you need to choose an external email validator where you will send the submitted email address for verification. I am using Apilayer’s mailboxlayer.com. Naturally, you can choose any API, whatever you feel comfortable with.

Here, copy the highlighted information under “Validate Email Address” section and remove all the spaces between the individual lines to create a URL:

Copy URL

Now copy and paste the URL in the “URL & Method” field in the webhook settings in Landbot builder and set the action to “GET” as we are trying to retrieve information.

Next, activate the “Customize Body?” section to indicate what information you will be sending for verification. In the case of email, the customized body section will look like this:

{
"email":"@email"}

When done, scroll down and click the big purple TEST button to test the webhook setup.

If everything is working correctly, the status will be 200 and a bunch of data about the email address will appear in the “Test Response”.

Now, to ensure the email is a valid business email, I won’t need all of this information. So the next step is selecting the ones that matter to my objective.

Scroll even further and activate the section “Seve Response”.

Now, all you need to do is:

Click on “Select data from the response”
Select the data you want to save
Associate the data with Landbot variable to save it

If you don’t know, what the data points mean, you can always check the API documentation for explanations. For the purpose of verifying the lead’s email address, I chose to save the following information:

Score (presents email quality score on a scale 0 to 1)
Disposability (whether or not the email is temporary)
Free (checks whether or not the requested email address is a free email address)
SMTP check (detects whether or not the requested domain is configured to receive email)

I selected these options in the “Save Response” field and created a variable to store and represent them in the Landbot builder matrix.

6. Set Up Conditions Based on Email Validation Results

Now that we have the results, we can use them to prompt the lead to submit correct information in case there is an issue.

Draw an arrow from a green output of the Webhooks block and select “Conditions” from the block menu.

My first condition will regard the “free” status of the email address.

So, if this condition turns out to be correct – IF @email_free EQUALS True – then email the lead submitted is a generic free email. In that case, all you need to do is draw an arrow from the green output (because the condition was TRUE) and ask for the email again:

NOTE: Make sure your new “Email” questions links back to the Webhook for another check!

Besides checking whether or not the email is a business email, it’s also useful to check that email actually works.

Hence, if the lead’s answer successfully passes the first condition (meaning the @email_free status was FALSE), set up another one, this time conditioning the @email_smtp.

The second condition will be set as follows:

IF @email_smtp EQUALS False THEN…

If the conditions are true and @email_smtp does equal “False” it means the domain is not receiving emails. So, here you can give the lead the option to resubmit the email address or just go with it. You can still let them follow the conversation, no harm there as it will be clear their email is not valid and so not worth pursuing.

In any case, once that you collected the first piece of actionable data, you can already export it to Airtable.

NOTE: At this point, you can also set up a Google Analytics, for instance, to update “new event” on your lead acquisition dashboard in GA.

With Airtable brick integration, sections 1 and 2 remain the same. It’s in section number 3, we will need to do some updating.

First, you need to set the action to “Update Existing Row” since we have already created a row with the lead’s ID at the beginning of the conversation.

A new set of fields will appear:

Essentially, you need to indicate:

Which column (field) you want to search in Airtable (name of the column)
Which value (row) inside this column you want to update (variable associated with the column)
List of data you want to send to Airtable featuring “name of column” and the “@variable” you want to associate with that column in JSON format

{
"Name": "@name",
"Email": "@email",
"Email Score": "@email_score",
"Email Free Status": "@email_free",
"Email SMPT": "@email_smtp",
"Email Disposable": "@email_disposable"
}Check out the final result!

The bot can tell if I am submitting a generic free email as well as if I am submitting a fake paid one. When all the data is submitted correctly the info appears on our spreadsheet:

TIP: As you may have noticed, email validation took up quite a bit of space. If you want to keep your flow clean and organized, you can group individual blocks into a brick (see the screen recording below). Furthermore, you can rename the brick to not forget what’s inside it. But, the best of all, you can save that brick in your personal brick library and reuse it any other bot you create!

7. Set Up a Scoring System Using “Set a Variable” Block

Now that we have our email, let’s check out how you can give your bot lead scoring abilities.

All you need is the list of the questions you want to ask your lead, the scoring system you wish to use and lead scoring guide that will ensure you don't stray from best practices.

TIP: To make things easier for you, make sure you have your questions, answers, and answer score values ready!

Let’s take, for instance, our WhatsApp solution product as an example.

When it comes to WhatsApp, it’s important to differentiate between businesses who are:

Already using WhatsApp native solution
Already using WhatsApp solution with a different provider
Just discovering the idea of WhatsApp communication and want to learn more

So, in our sample lead scoring bot, I decided to use this question to set off the screening process.

Note: Insert Google Sheets integration at any point in your flow at which you want to upgrade your database. You can do it throughout or wait until the end but using the update action throughout will ensure you can capture partial data as well.

Usually, the businesses that are still in the exploratory learning phase and are not using WhatsApp, are not ready to speak to a sales rep or commit either. Here, the best chance of conversion is letting them explore and try the product on their own. So, instead of scoring right off the bet, I took advantage of the buttons and split the flow apart from the rest leading the “learners” directly to a demo, free trial, webinar series, or other interactive learning material.

***

The moral of this move is don’t complicate your life! If you can “assess” your leads by simply splitting the flow here and there, do that.

***

However, with the other two, I do need to do some calculations before I can assess the quality of the lead.

Therefore, before I ask another question, I need to set up a variable to capture the value of the score. You can quite easily do that using the “Set a Variable” block.

From your last block, draw a green arrow and select the “Set a Variable” option from the menu
Create the variable under which you want to store the lead score (e.g., @lead_score)
Set its value to 0

Only then you are ready to ask your first scoring question.

To calculate the score for each of the answers, draw an arrow from each button option and once again, select “Set a Variable” block. Only this time, instead of just setting the value, you will perform a calculation:

Set your variable to modify to @lead_score
Activate calculation option
Sum @lead_score with the numeric value of the answer in your scoring system

To continue the scoring, repeat the process after each question. The value of the @lead_score variable will grow with each calculation.

8. Set Up Conditions to Optimize & Personalize the Flow

After you have successfully scored your leads, you can use the score the personalize the journey of your prospect in real time.

One of the easiest ways to do that is using the conditional logic block (the same one we used in email validation).

Based on your scoring system, play around with the score value, and set each segment of your leads on a different route… which, if you ask me, is the true beauty of a lead qualification bot. It helps you pick out and cater to the hottest leads while allowing you to also care for and provide value to the rest.

For instance, you can create a simple either/or scenario:

Or set up a different journey for each segment using the more complex AND/OR conditions:

Depending on how detailed is your scoring system you can segment your leads into as many flows or paths as possible in order to maximize your conversion rate.

Oh, and don’t forget to upload your scoring to the Google Spreadsheet!

Your lead qualification bot scored the prospects and segmented them into more specific groups, but there is still more your little virtual assistant can do for you!

9. Send Slack/Email Notification

Setting up a Slack notification with Landbot couldn’t be easier.

Just draw an arrow from the last block and select the Slack notification block.

First, you will need to pair your company Slack account with Landbot. Once you do though, you can easily choose to send notifications to specific channels or specific people. This comes in handy if you have a designated person for each type of lead.

Last but not least, you need to configure the message of the notification which can be very simple such as “You have a new lead” or more elaborate, including some real data using the variables.

The email notification function is not much different from Slack, except it lets you send emails to your team as well as the leads.

Hence, your agents can receive a nice summary email about a new captured lead or, similarly, your leads can receive a reminder/summary.

Simply follow the instructions and configure each field as required.

10. Arrange bot-to-Human Handoff

Now here is where things get interesting. If the bot captures and qualifies the lead to be “creme de la creme” of incoming leads, you can lose no time at all and transfer it straight to a designated sales agent.

Setting up human takeover is no rocket science. Just add the block and, if you want, assign the takeover to a particular agent(s). If you don’t the bot will automatically pass the chat to an agent with least conversations.

Your agents will be able to review and manage all incoming conversations using the built-in chat manager:

The lead’s information is summarized on the right side (yellow rectangle)
You can review and respond to the chat in the middle section (green rectangle)
And you can filter and search chats based on channels, agents responsible or the leads name, email or phone number

To prepare for an instance when no agent is available (perhaps because the lead comes in at 1 am from the other side of the world), draw an arrow from the pink output of the Human Takeover block and prepare an alternative scenario… e.g., the possibility to book a meeting with Calendly!

11. Recreate The Flow in the Second Language

Remember how we split our flow into English vs Español?

Well, now that you defined the flow in one language, all you need to do is copy it and translate it. No need to reconfigure everything from scratch!

What’s Next?

Well, this is it.

Your guide on how to build a lead qualification bot with scoring functionalities. I bet you thought to build a chatbot will be much more difficult than this!

Using a lead scoring bot will help you manage and process all Facebook, WhatsApp, or site visitors interested in your product or service making the life of your sales and marketing teams significantly easier.

Now it’s your time to try and use a lead qualification bot. The results may astound you!

👇 Register with Landbot for free and build your first feedback/survey bot 👇