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Understand the value of B2B conversational selling and build a B2B chatbot

• Is face-to-face conversational selling a dead practice?
• Conversational selling in the modern marketing world
• How to use chatbots in conversational selling
• Build a B2B chatbot

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“Whatever happened to real, face-to-face conversation?” This might be a phrase reserved for older generations that fear the technological revolution will leave the children of the future incapable of face-to-face conversation. Indeed, there is plenty of content (yet little proven evidence) that reinforces this dystopian idea.

While we shouldn’t forget the importance of ‘real’, face-to-face conversation, most of us will agree that technology improves our conversational skills, rather than limits them.

Conversational selling, for example, is the process of retaining your customers and attracting new ones through one-to-one conversations. It’s therefore typically been performed face-to-face, but thanks to technology, conversational selling no longer requires physically meeting with someone. The internet and mobile devices allow us to have real-time conversations with potential leads from practically anywhere in the world.

This isn’t to say that B2B companies should neglect physical meetings with leads or potential clients when possible, as this is still arguably the most effective form of driving engagement. No matter how closely online communication can mimic real conversation, it will never fully replicate it.

So, how can technology enable and enhance conversational selling for B2B companies today?

Conversational selling in the modern marketing world

Cold calling has been a go-to method for conversational selling. But when only 28% of people who are cold-called engage in conversations and just 1% of calls ultimately convert into leads (and even less for attaining actual customers), we’re not sure if there’s really much ‘conversation’ going on.

Currently, email, arranged calls and physical meetings are the main sources of conversational selling. But these methods are also far from ideal. For online marketing, open rates hover around the 18% range, while click-through rates sit on average at just 3.16%. Face-to-face meetings still reign supreme—95% of people say face-to-face meetings are essential for long-term business relationships while the conversion rate for in-person meetings is 40%. Of course, arranging physical meetings takes up considerably more time, effort and money than sending an email or making a call, meaning you simply can’t arrange as many as you might like.

On landing pages, resources like case studies, eBooks, and whitepapers are often locked behind lead capture forms. Modern lead capture forms have, on average, 11 mandatory form fields. If that seems like too many to you, you’re not alone - the average landing page form conversion rate is just 2.35%, leading 84% of businesses to think their lead generation strategies are inefficient. These inbound leads are left to wait until a sales team member responds to them, which can take hours, days, weeks or potentially forever if they’re waiting on a response to a query that never gets solved.

Customers want information provided to them in a way that feels natural. They don’t want to feel obliged to hand over personal information or wait around for an email response to get that information. That's why real-time online conversation, having enveloped the consumer world, is taking hold of the enterprise. Instant messaging platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack are revolutionising office communications, while live chat services make it much easier to answer customer support queries. And now, chatbots are facilitating a brand-new interface for conversational selling.

Instant messaging and chatbots

As the name implies, instant messaging platforms better facilitate real-time conversation,  making it far more conversational than a platform like email. The first instant messaging platforms were AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) in 1997 and MSN Messenger in 1999. But it has now evolved to a point where any number of people can communicate in real time from anywhere in the world on free platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It’s understandable that instant messaging has become so popular; online conversations have a more natural flow, enabling quicker information sharing and more personable interactions.

Chatbot technology combines the essence of instant messaging with artificial intelligence. Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG), which, combined, allow chatbots to derive the meaning and intent of the written text. There is already a huge range of chatbots, from a companion for insomnia sufferers (created by a mattress company, no less) to a medical diagnoses practitioner. In the marketing sphere, chatbots are also booming, and for good reason. Chatbots can:

• Put your company on the biggest platforms 

The top four messaging apps (WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Viber) have surpassed the top four social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) for global monthly active users. 65% of smartphone users don’t download any new apps in a month, but the apps they do download and keep are the ‘core’ apps like Facebook, Messenger and Twitter. So, a chatbot on Messenger or LinkedIn will give you access to as wide an audience as possible.

• Improve the customer experience

Whether it’s providing information, content or support, chatbots put the customer first. In any and all these situations, chatbots provide real-time assistance the same way a salesperson would in a physical store, except chatbots can serve hundreds of customers at once, 24 hours a day! Chatbots can be programmed to give automated answers to repetitive questions immediately, and forward more specific questions on to real employees when actions that require human intervention must be taken. This transition creates a seamless experience for the customer – and one they’re much more likely to remember.

• Improve lead generation

Chatbots can also initiate the conversation, rather than just answering customer queries. With cookies, consumer information is linked to almost every web visit and transaction. Chatbots can use this information to personalise their conversations with customers, assisting them along the buying journey in a conversational manner. This adds up to create more engaging conversations, improving your company’s brand image and overall lead generation.

Build a B2B chatbot

In 2016, Facebook introduced chatbots to Messenger, opening the doors for developers around the world to create their own bots within the app. In the six months following their announcement, more than 30,000 bots were created. Another tech giant, Microsoft, has some of the best NLP technology around and allows developers to leverage that technology through the Microsoft Bot Framework.

In 2018, you don’t need to be a developer to build a chatbot. You can do so without any coding proficiency and in as little as 10 minutes. Companies like ManyChat make it easy to build a chatbot to function on Facebook Messenger. They have their own helpful how-to guide, but let’s break down how a small B2B business owner might use a Messenger bot.

1.   Identify the purpose

Arguably the most important step—you need to decide what you’re going to use your chatbot for. There’s no point jumping on the chatbot bandwagon for the sake of it—you need to know what it’s going to provide visitors to your Facebook company page. This could be:

• Help and advice on technical topics
• Links to your website pages (blog/services/solutions)
• Additional content for further reading/learning
• Information on the company – its history, upcoming events, webinars, etc.
• E-commerce if your company sells product copies (or product demos)

It could be a combination of all of these—your chatbot can be as simple or as complex as you design it to be. Remember, though, that this is for Facebook users. As such, they may have different wants and needs to regular visitors to your website.

2.   Write your welcome message

Once you’ve identified your chatbot’s purpose, the first step is to create your welcome message. This is the first thing that website visitors will ‘hear’ from your chatbot when they visit your Facebook business page. You might use your welcoming message to try and direct traffic to your main website, your blog or services page. Just make sure it feels like a conversation… don’t simply list what your company does. Suggest questions they can ask the bot to try and elicit a response and get the conversation started.

ManyChat lets you add buttons the same way you would add calls to action to the end of your blog, prompting the user to take further action. You can also add media like images, videos and audio to your welcoming message in the hopes of boosting interest and engagement.

3.   Automate your replies

Finally, you’ll want to create set responses that trigger when certain phrases (or keywords) are typed in. If you’re a company that serves multiple industries, you might want to suggest blog content around ‘Construction’ or ‘IT’ when these phrases are mentioned, for example.

Automated replies are essential (and highly effective) in getting a conversation going between you and the customer. The more you add, the more you can craft a realistic conversation.

Modern conversational selling with meaning

Like many other elements in the marketing and business spheres, conversational selling is changing to fit in with the modern world. Depending on your platform, your chatbots can use the latest AI technologies to push the boundaries of what’s possible for conversational selling. If you don’t have the developer firepower, you might just want to build a simple chatbot that sits on your company website or social media page to give visitors a warm welcome and suggest ways to interact with your business.

Those that are able to embrace chatbots and conversational selling can put their business at an advantage today and prepare themselves for the future.

Fifty Five and Five offer a full suite of marketing services for B2B technology companies. Whether you need a chatbot to engage customers or some compelling content to drive traffic to your site, we can help. View our full range of services and get in touch with us to find out more.

by aidan.danaher

What does a Top Microsoft partner company look like?

• The top Microsoft partner companies in terms of marketing; where they are, how big they are and how old
• Get our insights on the best Microsoft partners and improve your marketing

To find the top Microsoft partner companies in terms of marketing, Fifty Five and Five take an annual look at the digital marketing efforts of partners from around the world and rank them across three criteria: their website, their blog and their social media engagement.

What you’ll find is lots of valuable information and data about who is performing particularly good inbound marketing across the partner network. What you might find slightly less of, however, is specific data about the businesses that are doing particularly well – and how they compare to yours. Those looking to get differentiate themselves would do well to find out exactly who, where and how big their competition is. So that’s what we’re going to uncover in this post.

Where are they?

If you take a look at the geographical distribution of our Top 50 partners, you’ll quickly discover a few things. The first, and perhaps most obvious of these is that most companies in the Top 50 are based in the United States. In fact, as much as 32 of the companies in the Top 50 are American (64%). Of these, nine are based in California, three in Texas and one in Washington state.

The next largest concentration of Top 50 Microsoft Partners in the study came from the UK, with nine companies (18%) of the total included. The remaining nine companies are split in totals of one or two between Australia, South Africa, Canada, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.

How old are they?

You might be tempted to think that the best performing Microsoft Partners are the oldest, most established companies – but that’s not always strictly the case. Sure, the top performers are hardly brand-new tech start-ups, as the highest-performing blogs and social channels are built on consistency over time. But there’s a fairly broad scope of companies here – showing that there’s plenty of potential for even the smaller and less defined organisations to achieve digital marketing excellence.

The median age of companies in the Top 50 is 17, though there’s a huge range of different ages within this. The oldest on the list, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) was founded back in 1939, and the most recent, Bettercloud, arrived on the scene just seven years ago in 2011.

Bettercloud itself managed to beat plenty of competitors and landed itself a healthy spot as number 8 in the Top 50 – thanks in large part to its impressive social media score. So,  there’s no reason why younger companies can’t achieve digital marketing success.

How big are companies in the Top 50?

Just as with the average age of Top 50 Microsoft partner companies, there’s a varied range of sizes of companies all achieving success. The smallest companies, of which there are nine, consist of between 11 and 50 employees, while some others are much larger. In fact, two notable businesses even have over 10,000 employees.

Those who read reports like ours on Microsoft’s most competent partners, may well conclude that the top contenders are simply operating in a different league to theirs. Barring the possibility of committing more employees to a marketing department, a larger organisation is not representative of marketing success. It’s companies that have the right marketers in their team—willing to commit the proper amount of time and dedication to digital marketing—that are seeing success.

If companies numbering as small as 11-50 employees can have better digital marketing strategies than their 38,500 competitors, it’s surely proof that it’s perfectly possible to make limited resources go a long way.

Who are the Top 250?

Though we write our annual report to celebrate the inbound marketing strategies of the Top 50 best performing Microsoft Partners, we actually produce a list of the Top 250.

The majority (73%) of our Top 250 Microsoft Partner Companies consisted of between 11 and 200 employees, versus the 50% in the Top 50.

It’s difficult to draw any direct conclusions from this comparison – and it may simply be a result of the differing sample sizes. What is clear, however, is that smaller companies are well represented among the best performing Microsoft Partner Companies – by both metrics.

Get the details on the best Microsoft Partners and improve your marketing

The Fifty-Five and Five Inbound Marketing Excellence report gives insight and understanding into what it is that makes these top performing companies’ digital marketing campaigns so successful.

In the four years since the report was published, it’s quickly become a staple of the industry, delivering vital knowledge that helps companies improve their own inbound marketing strategies.

by Matthew Rooke

How to build a great employee advocacy programme

• Tapping into the power of your employees to share company content
• Building an employee advocacy programme strategy
• Step-by-step guidance

Gaining consumer trust should be the priority of every brand. A way of increasing consumer trust is putting together a well thought out and strategic employee advocacy programme.

The power of an employee advocacy programme

The Edelman Trust Barometer has revealed that people are three times more likely to trust company information shared by an employee of that company over the CEO. LinkedIn network activity can back this up even further as the click-through rate (CTR) on a piece of content is twice as high when shared by an employee vs. a generic company account.

Tapping into the power of your employees to share company content should be next on your to-do list! But first you need to empower them, you need to cultivate the right climate for them to feel confident enough to share quality content with their own social networks. Because on average, employee networks have ten times more connections than a company has followers. Now that’s going to expand your reach if you encouraged every employee to share content.

Your employee advocacy programme strategy

Bear in mind that when you first start employee advocacy, your people will be reluctant to dive in. It’s not because they don’t want to be a part of it. It’s more likely that they feel their contribution will be insignificant. Therefore, training is important. People can’t appreciate how a tiny ‘like’ or ‘share’ can really impact the grand scheme of marketing your brand. Also, people are worried about what they can and can’t share about work. Educate, train, give them confidence and before you know it you’ll have an army of brand ambassadors!

So, assuming you’ve got your army out on the front line – here’s what you need to do to build a great employee advocacy programme.

Step 1: Create a solid content strategy

Before you ask your people to advocate for your brand, you should do so with a stash of content behind you – ready to go. This is an obvious one, but we’ve included some tweaks.

Two things really matter here – subject and format:

• Subject
  Try to create exciting or thought-provoking content that employees will want to share. You could aim for a mix of company related, industry related and general content. It’s a little bit salesy if all people ever share is company specific articles, not to mention drab. Sure, you might get lots of likes and shares this way, but once their peers start noticing a robotic pattern your engagement numbers could drop. Your goal here is to drive engagement with employees and their networks, so match the content with their interests for better results.
• Format
  Your employees will need a variety of content to post to keep things fun and easy and different formats serve different audiences. Videos are best shared on Instagram, blog posts on LinkedIn and news on Twitter. Social media is for quick snackable content on the go, so try not to flood feeds with 1000-word blogs, instead use social media to hook new audiences, and reel them back to your blog or website for further info.

Step 2: Identify your digital avatar

To get true engagement from your employees you must understand them as social media users. That way you can target them with certain pieces of content for massive impact. We’ve deciphered six types of users that are worth knowing about.

The Ghost: Randomly appears to scatter a few likes here and there, is an avid social media user but keeps a low profile. Target this user with photos and quick links. Or encourage them to simply ‘like’ content.

The Activist: Understands the power of social media and uses it as a weapon to change the world. Target them with newsworthy topics from your company.

The Bleeding Heart: Writes long poetic captions beneath their posts, using their profile as an emotional outlet. This user loves sharing an emotional connection with their followers. Flush them with inspirational content to start the conversation.

The Social Butterfly: Has 3000 friends on Facebook and a dazzling Instagram account. Loves social media and knows just about everyone. (This person is probably already sharing your content.)

The Early Adopter: They did everything before it was ‘cool’. Their pure iciness however is contagious. People look to them for all that is shiny, new and worth talking about. New launch? This person has an army of fans waiting for the down-low.

The Family Man: Bound to have a loyal band of devoted family and friends, this person uses social media to keep in touch with close ones around the world. Their peers are interested in what they have to say so bear this in mind when you want instant engagement with your content.

Step 3: Educate and train

Hold 101 trainings, such as lunch-and-learns and webinars to train employees on how to use social media for work. That way you let them know what’s in it for them:

Being an employee advocate can boost their professional reputations as well as impact the business. In fact, people who share consistently always end up being positioned as thought leaders in the industry, gaining a significant following. The business will also gain traction and start to gain more awareness, boosting sales and attracting top quality hires.

Step 4: Launch your programme

You’ve set your goals, you’ve prepared enough content and you’re ready to launch! Remember the following when your mid-air:

Exploit the channels you already have available, that way you can guarantee a captive audience. And always get leadership involved whenever you can. Arm senior executives, CEOs and MDs with material to share – so they can set a solid example.

Keep momentum

Employee advocacy is another way of engaging with your customers, but remember, like any other content strategy, it requires consistency. It’s paramount to return every so often to your advocates with new insights into how well they’re doing.

Mobilising your workforce to become brand advocates takes a lot of dedication and a positive mindset to get going. But with careful planning you can place your content strategically in the right hands, to be deployed at the right time. This will give you maximum impact, and you’ll boost employee engagement while you’re at it. Not too shabby.

For more advice on marketing your brand, contact Fifty Five and Five today or read our case studies to learn how we’ve helped tech companies around the world boost sales and get better ROI from their marketing.

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by aidan.danaher