SharpSpring Archives - PROSAR Inbound Inc.

16 October 2020

Chatting Up Conversions

Header image for SharpSpring information on PROSAR website.

The process of understanding a prospect’s needs and then communicating how you can effectively satisfy them, is what leads to earning their business. Conversations have always led to conversions. But now, virtually all of those conversations are happening remotely – via email, social media, telephone, online video and interactive websites. (Note: The SharpSpring platform has strategic in-app solutions such as automated emails, social monitoring and management, sales dialer, video calling, and read on about SharpSpring’s chatbots.)

Understanding Chatbot Workflow Logic

Chatbots are an automated communication service. They allow users to search for answers about your content, and they provide a series of answers and means of collecting data. Whenever you create a new chatbot, SharpSpring provides a default chatbot workflow. This workflow is made to be a general-purpose chatbot that can be used in nearly every circumstance.

Conversations through chatbots use a specific logic path. A chatbot workflow starts with a welcome message, progresses to an initial question, provides specific answers, allows the user to respond, collects any necessary information, and then displays a message that ends the conversation. This logic path best emulates person-to-person communication.

Though chatbots have a certain amount of customizability available to them, their general structure cannot be changed, and few parts of the workflow can be deleted outright. These limitations are in place to prevent chatbots from suffering from logic breaks in the workflow. You can modify the chatbots welcome message, questions and answers, but not change the overall structure.

Once the chatbot asks a question, it will display a number of outputs. These outputs are premade answers and act as a sort of multiple-choice answer to the question. All answers are valid, and they will each branch off into a different set of responses and information gathering. You can add, modify, and delete outputs to better customize answers to a question and provide different ways to continue a conversation.

It may sound a little complicated, logic can seem that way, but it is actually quite easy to set-up chat bots and customize them to get results.

[dt_quote type=”pullquote” layout=”left” font_size=”big” animation=”none” size=”1″]Drive 24/7 conversions with a network of unique chatbots that know who you’re engaging with, what they need, and where they are in your sales process.[/dt_quote]

Configure Actions to Provide, and Gather, Information

Actions follow a chatbot response. Actions are the core of a chatbot workflow. They are how you provide information, collect visitor data, and otherwise facilitate human interaction with a visitor. While chatbots will function without actions, the majority of your logic branches will need actions to help a visitor with their problem.

Customize Chatbots for Specific Audiences

You can cater to target audience segments by customizing chatbots to address their specific needs. Beyond customizing a chatbot’s dialogue and actions, you can choose who sees it.

	Audience		Description
	Everyone		This chatbot will be shown to everyone who visits your site.
	New Visitors		This chatbot will be shown to anyone who visits your site anonymously.
	Returning Visitors		This chatbot will be shown only to known leads who are being tracked.
	Leads in Pipeline		This chatbot will be shown only to leads in an open opportunity.
	Customers		This chatbot will be shown only to customers.
	Custom Fields		This chatbot will be shown only to leads with a determined custom value.

Customizable Reporting to Continuously Improve Performance

Detailed reports can be configured in many ways, [link to reports] to measure each chatbot’s effectiveness and contribution to revenue. Reports can be scheduled, saved and edited to better guide your ongoing strategy.

	Benefits of Chatbots
	Boost engagement with customizable chat workflows
	Trigger automation and progressively profile site visitors
	Keep your sales team running 24/7
	Transfer sales-ready leads right to Live Chat using Slack
	Integrate the power of forms, media centre, lead scoring, and workflows
	Drive relevant and timely communication at every stage of your funnel

Article includes content from Forest Myers of SharpSpring.
PROSAR Inbound Inc. is a SharpSpring Partner.

2 June 2020

Improving Customer Communications with Video Calls

Although nothing beats meeting with people to fully communicate, understand each other, and form well-rounded impressions. Communicating via email and text is efficient and can be very effective once a relationship is established. Phone calls are much better at discussing complex issues and getting to know a person, while video calls provide the benefit of voice, facial expression, as well as shared screens and group presentations.

Communication has always been the key to marketing and sales. Now, and for the foreseeable future, video calls have never been more important. Here are some tips for making effective and professional use of video calls.

Making Good Video Calls

Since we’re all spending more time in virtual meetings, consider these tips for good video calls:

Look Professional: If it’s a business call, show respect for the other participants, your company and yourself — dress accordingly for your business and role. Video calls from home can be a little more relaxed, but you still want to be seen as competent and professional so hygiene, grooming and pants are strongly recommended.
Be Prepared: Keeping people’s attention can be more difficult online so don’t create downtime or lags searching for information or trying to remember what you wanted to say. Have all resources close at hand and ready, make notes beforehand and include your goals for the meeting to keep you on track content-wise and strategically.
Set the Scene: A cluttered or discordant background make it difficult to focus on you; it may also make it difficult to take you seriously. A plain background is your best backdrop. Good lighting is critical, but from the front not back. Avoid lights and windows behind you.
Watch the Time: The informal nature of a video call versus an in-person meeting can foster long, boring affairs. Be mindful of the time and what is being accomplished. Keep to the agenda schedule for your input and move others along if you are the chair.
Watch your Mouth: Video calls are often recorded, so think twice before you speak.
Take Notes: Just as you would in a regular meeting, take notes to remember key points and action items that involve you. Ensure your notes are in sync with the meeting minutes.

Making Good Video Calls with SharpSpring

SharpSpring has complemented its Sales Optimizer with in-application video calling. It makes it easy to connect with others on their laptop or desktop. Recipients don’t need to use SharpSpring and there is no software to download. Their browser will ask permission to use their laptop’s mic and speaker and that’s it… you’re face-to-face creating relationships and opportunities.

Getting connected for online meetings and meaningful conversations is simple. Reach out to leads in your SharpSpring CRM with the click of a button, invite anyone via email, even invite people to video calls already in progress. Easily contact team members by clicking Video Call in the top toolbar.

SharpSpring Video Call Features

A full complement of video call features will help you succeed online:

19 July 2019

SharpSpring Makes it Easier to Close Sales with its New Meetings App

Booking meetings is the name of the game in sales. To help you excel at booking appointments and converting prospects to clients, SharpSpring has gone a few steps further than apps that automate the appointment booking process. It has created a fully automated process of triggered emails, tasks, notifications, follow-up and integrated it with their comprehensive marketing automation solution.

Creating and Sharing Meetings with SharpSpring Meetings

Invite clients and prospects to book a meeting with you in a professional, seamless and automated fashion. Use a text link (perhaps in your email signature with “Book a consultation now!”) or a button — either are easily created within the app. You can place the text link/button in an email, on your website or a landing page, wherever you want people to connect online and automatically book a meeting with you.

In addition, you can share meetings that you have created. Each share meeting link is unique to a specific meeting. Just like the initial meeting booking links, meetings can be shared via emails, websites and landing pages.

There is no limit to the number of users. A sales team of 2, 4 or 42 can have profiles for all staff, each with their own settings and personalized links to book meetings.

Customize Meeting App Settings

Set in advance the dates and times you are available, when and how you are notified of booked meetings, and which calendars are synced with your booked meetings. These settings can be modified at any time.

Sales managers can be notified and view all activity, monitoring follow-up, results and prospect nurturing.

You can even customize which domains the meetings are set to, as well as the color for meeting calendars.

And, big bonus, the SharpSpring Meetings app is completely free with the SharpSpring Marketing Automation subscription. To learn more about SharpSpring and their Meetings app, contact PROSAR today.

Learn more about marketing automation and its effect on email best practices in our article The New Email Paradigm: Do More with Less

PROSAR Inbound Inc. is a SharpSpring Partner.

14 July 2019

SharpSpring’s New Sales Optimizer

Sales managers are responsible for creating and implementing a sales process that consistently delivers results. But how do you outline what actions your team should take to close the deal, and when? More importantly, how do you streamline and control the process? SharpSpring has the answer!

SharpSpring Sales Optimizer ensures every salesperson follows best practices for conversion by automatically creating tasks and actions that move opportunities through the pipeline. This suite of tools is designed to give you control over both the cadence and quality of sales communication in ways never before possible.

Comprehensive Workflow Tool that Triggers Notifications, Tasks and Actions

Getting rid of those headaches starts with designing your ideal sales process in the visual workflow builder, a tool that empowers you to easily outline every step your team needs to take, from opportunity creation to a closed-won sale.

Your sales team now has access to the same powerful automation tools the marketing team uses, so they can convert those hard-earned leads to sales.

Workflows not only allow you to delegate how and when tasks are executed, but you can also automate actions like creating an opportunity and moving a deal to a new pipeline stage. Automatically generate new opportunities based on a hot lead’s engagement with your content, or move an opportunity to a new pipeline stage after they submit a signed contract. Allow automation to fill in the gaps and keep leads engaged without a second thought.

This enables your team to spend less time on the admin work involved in pipeline management so they can focus on what really matters – winning deals.

Manage Your Message with SharpSpring Sales Optimizer

Now that you’ve painted your horizon in an opportunity workflow, it’s time to add the little details that really seal the deal. When assigning actions in your workflow, you can easily control what emails and media center assets your salesperson sends out. With every auto-assigned sales task, you can link the specific email template they should send and any content assets relevant to that stage in the buyer’s journey. This makes it easy to align sales communication with the marketing team’s content strategy, so you have ultimate control over the message you want to convey.

Don’t worry, there’s still room for your salesperson to add their own flair – after all, you can’t automate a personal connection. From the Task Manager, the salesperson will have the option to send a Smart Mail template as-is or go into the email editor and customize it for a particular lead.

Streamline Task Management Through Entire Marketing – Sales Process

Having a more personal touch in your messaging is important for one-to-one engagement, but manually creating these repetitive phone and email tasks leaves too much room for human error. One missed follow-up email or phone call, and a sales-ready opportunity could fall through the cracks. With Sales Optimizer, rest assured that all your leads and opportunities are properly managed with the exact cadence you’ve laid out.

Follow-up tasks are auto-generated and flow seamlessly into every salesperson’s Task Manager. Even better, when leads engage with your website, their tasks float to the top of the list so your team can reach out just in time while your brand is top of mind. Sales Optimizer turns your website into a two-way communicator that’s patched in directly with your sales team, making prioritization easy and effective.

Capitalize on Hot Lead Engagement

Prioritizing who to reach out to is now easier than ever from the Activity Feed with instant visibility into which leads have automated tasks associated with them. Lead owners are able to see which leads are currently engaging and what they are engaging with, so they can respond accordingly.

If a lead opens an email or engages with your social media, this not only shows up in real-time on the Activity Feed, but it’s also highlighted when the lead owner has a follow-up task. This way it’s easy to time your sales follow-up at pivotal moments in the buyer’s journey.

Keep Your Team Accountable

Powerful new automation features sound great, but how do you make sure everything is going according to plan? Keep your team on track with detailed task reports that provide insight into which automated tasks are being completed or rescheduled during a given time.

Instantly see if your sales rep sent an email when you assigned a phone call, for example, so you can make sure everyone follows the correct process. You can also identify any holes in your sales plan based on the outcome of automated tasks. Are deals closing on target?

Close More Deals With SharpSpring’s Sales Optimizer

Designing, implementing and fine-tuning your sales process can be a difficult feat. Make it easier – and more effective – with Sales Optimizer. To see exactly how the power of automation can benefit your bottom line, contact PROSAR today.

There is an endless supply of shiny new apps to help you manage your business and grow sales. Some are awesome, many are horrible, many are good, but not optimal for your business. Read our blog on Choosing New Tech Solutions for Business Growth — 5 Things Not To Do.

Article written by Nicholas Mangold, Product Marketing Specialist at SharpSpring.

PROSAR Inbound Inc. is a SharpSpring Partner.

26 February 201912 August 2022

3 Ways to Activate Your Website

Business person using laptop with icons of website, email, customer, data, marketing automation for PROSAR blog

It’s common practice to check out a company’s website before deciding to use their product or service. We all do it; either to learn specific information about the product/service, gain further insight into its use, or simply to feel more comfortable with the company before making a purchase or commitment. This is true for both B2C and B2B, online and in-store purchases, packaged goods and professional services.

Understandably, companies are doing their best to create websites that engage with targeted audiences. Savvy organizations are:

Presenting what they do in a stylish and easy to navigate manner.
Making their website easy to use on tablets and smartphones.
Ensuring their website is accessible for people with disabilities (a legal requirement for some organizations).
Incorporating meta information and strategically worded content to build a solid foundation for SEO.
Engaging readers with relevant and interesting information.
Positioning their brand with messaging and imagery for greater impact.

So, let’s assume you’ve done all the above and have a good looking, informative website that provides a good user-experience on any device. Good for you… however, you can do more. If you expect your website to play an active role in your marketing, it needs to go beyond passively presenting and further engage your audience.

Here are three areas where your website can play a more active role in increasing awareness, improving your message and brand, and facilitating growth. Note that PROSAR is a SharpSpring Partner, so naturally we recommend SharpSpring as a cost-efficient and comprehensive marketing automation solution, but there are many good automated marketing platforms such as HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo, etc.; and software specifically for email such as MailChimp.

Automated Emails

Going beyond an auto-reply email greeting when someone completes a form, your website can assist in nurturing relationships and prompting conversations when people have indicated an interest.

In their pre-purchase research, consumers may visit several websites looking for something specific or simply wanting to feel comfortable before they commit. Most consumers don’t announce that they are ready to buy, but they do provide signals. Wouldn’t it be ideal if your website could help identify those potential customers and reach out to them?

When a known user returns to your website within 24 hours or visits specific pages, a personalized and customized email could automatically be sent them. Perhaps providing details on the products they were looking at, informing them of an incentive (price, warranty, added value, etc.), suggesting an appointment, call or chat to answer questions… there are many ways to engage and determine how you can help them.
When someone downloads a resource from your website it can trigger a scheduled series of personalized and tailored emails with tips, related products/services, articles of interest, other relevant resources.
On an e-commerce website, an abandoned shopping cart or product comparisons could trigger a series of emails designed to provide information and insight, or bundling cost advantages on the specific products.

Workflows are series of emails crafted in advance and triggered by prospects’ specific behaviours. The flowchart can be as simple or complicated as you wish, with every if-this-then-that sequence of decisions triggering different emails. The prospects’ actions control what emails are sent to help them with their purchase decision.

Notifications should be added to the workflow so that marketing and sales staff can be alerted when and how a prospect would like information or assistance. Notifications can even alert when a prospect is on the website browsing.

Automated emails are not an excuse to force your information on unwilling recipients; the objective is to provide information to those who are seeking it. Harassment is not good business, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) imposes strict and sensible regulations on how a company can engage with people via email, you can read more about CASL here.

Dynamic Content
On your website, as in your daily life, what you say and how you say it matters. When we speak, we typically cater our words to the audience we are addressing. Most websites are static in nature (ours included these days!). They are filled with relevant, but generic content. Many larger companies have people dedicated to their website and social media accounts, so content can be updated, making it more relevant and topical. However, it is typically focused on a single targeted audience, or worded to address as large a segment of the public as possible.

Personas are being used more and more by organizations to better understand and target specific audience segments. SharpSpring tools enable different versions of emails and website pages so that headlines, text and images can be customized for specific audience segments. When the website identifies a user, it will present the content that relates to that persona. One of the underlining benefits of marketing automation is the ability to target your ideal customer personas and treat them as individuals.

Dynamic content facilitates more appropriate and persuasive communication with targeted audience segments. It also improves SEO by tailoring versions of your content with specific search terms. Such strategically worded content impacts being found online, effectively presenting your message, and converting leads to customers.

Conversion Process

Combining personas, dynamic content, workflows and email campaigns with tracking, lead scoring and a full CRM tool (Client Relationship Management) provides a platform to nurture and convert prospects. This complete package is how things come together to more effectively (and efficiently) manage prospects and customers. By tracking user behaviour and notifying marketing and sales staff, your website plays an important role in supporting your customers and identifying prospects.

Marketers can identify trends and create customized content and workflows (emails and landing pages) to address them. Salespeople are notified of potential interest and reminded of customers who have not been active, triggering workflows to engage and retain lapsed customers.

Your website can be more than a 24/7 online brochure. It can be actively participate in the marketing and sales process by attracting, engaging and converting leads, as well as maintaining existing customers. Unlike social media, your website is a stable hub that you control. It is an ideal resource to go beyond passive information presentation and effectively engage with your targeted audiences.