There are a lot folks out there with preconceived notions around what it means to have live messaging as a part of your sales and marketing strategy. Let’s get to the bottom of some of them.

When thinking about live chat and live messaging either on a website for your business or through another platform, a lot of people think they’re going to spend a lot of time burning cycles on customer support questions, on talking with unqualified prospects. And largely, that’s untrue.

The majority of the time that is going to be spent at first – at least for most businesses – is waiting. There is not going to be a need for a huge staff to come in and take over all these messages at first.

The truth is the vast majority of businesses do not have the volume of traffic that’s going to create this huge influx of customers immediately asking for customer support or coming in with complaints. If that is the case, then probably there are some other issues we need to address that are in no way related to live messaging.

However, the thing that we need to note is the people who are coming through on your website and asking a question directly through a chat pane mostly are going to be people who are either sales-interested or in the exploratory phase of their research. Notice that I don’t say sales-ready, because they might be sales-interested in a way that wouldn’t have merited filling out a form yet. This is perfect! You are getting the chance to help someone out while they are forming their mental construct of who your company is, what you do, and how supportive you are likely to be in the future.

I’ll often get questions that are related to pricing or comparisons to other products or something very specific about some feature or service. These questions typically do not come outright with a contact form submission. It doesn’t come along with their company website, revenue, or “# of seats” for instance. It’s just a quick question. More often than not, what I find is this leads to either “Okay, great, I have my answer” or in many cases… an extended conversation, and that’s really what we’re looking for.

The most common misconception or preconceived notion is that you are going to get this huge influx of irrelevant conversations. Out of the same side of their mouths, a lot of folks who are saying that are also begging for more sales leads and warm bodies to speak with. We have to step outside our own biases and think about what the easiest way for a customer might be to open up a product or sales related question, and then clear that path.