In this episode of The Sales Evangelist, we talk about how to take advantage of the power of chat when growing your business. Many organizations have struggled to capitalize on the power of chat, but Amir and Tom share the struggles they’ve had using chat and how we can overcome them. Tom Jenkins and Amir Reiter help companies scale their workforce without having to get offices, pay insurance and taxes, or worry about hiring and training. Instead, they offer technology and strategy. At CloudTask, they provide sales development reps, they manage account executives convenient and they manage the customer success/account reps responsible for renewals and upselling to existing customers. They comprise one office. If someone wants to hire five sales reps, five account executives or five support reps, they will all be in office and managed so that the customer gets what they want – representation and results.   By specializing in sales, customer success and customer support, CloudTask is the best of the breed. [00:51] THE POWER OF CHAT One of the biggest issues is a lack of clearly defined ownership. If you look at our partners at Drift.com for instance, their ability to work as a bot or as a human can confuse whether chat is owned by marketing or by sales. Marketing is typically used to drive traffic to forms, to blogs and to sign-ups. As such, marketing tends to prefer automation. Sales, however, relies on people first, so deciding who owns chat is often a hurdle. Failure to assign ownership then creates a failure to act or a failure to implement correctly. [02:19] We manage a lot of cloud chat programs and have noticed that many people view chat as just another tool for the reps to use in addition to calling, emailing, LinkedIn, etc. Rather, with a high volume of web traffic, chat is a key tool in the generation of qualified leads. In fact, because chat allows you to respond quickly with the right answers and in the right way, it can be your number one lead generation tool. [03:17] QUALIFY LEADS People today want answers now. They expect to be able to go onto a website and to be able to chat. It has worked well in the B2C world but is really moving quickly into the B2B world as well. We are finding that an MQL (marketing qualified lead) or SQL (sales qualified lead) that chats with a member of the sales team is 2-3 times more likely to close versus one that goes through the process of filling out a form. It makes sense. A form is stationary and available to anybody. With chat, you are able to quickly let people qualify themselves with a friendly discussion. For example, suppose someone wants to hire a sales rep. Within a few moments, we can discuss salaries and budgets and determine right away if it is something to pursue, or not. [04:54] CHAT CONVERSATION Chat does not replace cold calling or emailing but it does allow the person who visits your website to have a conversation with you and determine for themselves if they want to move forward. The desire to engage is up to the visitor. As the sales rep, you increase the level of engagement with your replies. Consider “I’m here to help sales leaders every day, how can I help you?” instead of “How are you?” People want to work with companies that can fix their problems. Target the message to visitors as much as you can in order to increase engagement with them. You will receive visitors who want to know more about the topic rather than starting from scratch.   You don’t want to write too much in a chat forum, of course. Start by keeping the conversation focused on the problems you are trying to solve for your prospects. [06:48] The initial engagement is absolutely key but response time is just as essential. Buyers are conducting research and they want answers.   Failure to respond within one minute, despite having the best response in the world, exponentially decreases the likelihood of obtaining a qualified lead. #saleschat CLICK TO TWEET   It is imperative to be super sharp and