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5 Use Cases For Account-Based Chat

In ABM, personalization and customer experience is king, and Terminus Chat is your queen!

The main goal of ABM is to bring marketing and sales into better alignment and deliver personalized and engaging experiences. However, the buyer journey that we were once accustomed to has become a thing of the past. Buyers don’t follow a nice, linear buying path anymore, they may start at the awareness phase and skip directly to the decision phase. In other words, buyers are looking for answers and they are looking for them now. If they don’t get what they are looking for in a timely manner, they’ll ask your competitors and it’s off to the races. As a result, marketing and sales must adapt their processes to ensure they’re delivering a seamless and continuous buying experience. The homepage is the new landing. So, what is the missing piece in this new and unpredictable buyer’s journey that is going to help them make that happen?

Enter: Terminus Chat.

Terminus Chat extends its capabilities to your account-based marketing programs, connecting your contacts from your target accounts directly to the assigned sales representative in real-time. Terminus Chat is a practical and inexpensive addition to any ABM program that is looking to have an immediate impact on the sales funnel.

Terminus Chat can be a catalyst for your marketing and sales teams in a number of ways, so, let’s jump into the 5 use cases that can help make chat a game-changer for your ABM strategy:

1. Immediate Conversation to Engagement

We all know that filling out a web form can feel like you’re signing your life away to a slew of unwanted sales outreach. Forms can be an unnecessary barrier to a conversation, especially for prospects who may already be reluctant to speak with a sales rep.  By incorporating Terminus Chat into your overall ABM strategy, you give your prospects control over their buying experience and the immediate attention they deserve through real-time conversations.

account based chat

It is critical that the first touchpoint that your prospects encounter is not frustrating, whether it be on your website, opened email, or even a clicked ad. When practicing ABM, the last thing you want to do is direct one of your target accounts to a set of irrelevant pages, or to fill out the same boring and impersonal form that every prospect has to fill out.

It’s not about amassing hundreds of leads from anywhere and everything, but there’s nothing better than a hand-raiser coming from a target account, and chat helps you earn that conversion in a personalized way. The big picture here is that ABM Chat eliminates a common friction point by opening conversations, in real-time, through any digital channel, and can deliver the high-value experience that sophisticated buyers expect today.

account based chat

Terminus Chat is able to automatically recognize the account — based on IP address — and immediately alerts the assigned SDR or Account Executive that owns the account by sending push-notifications to either their mobile or desktop device. If the assigned sales rep is unavailable, a custom chatbot or colleague has the ability to hop into the conversation.

account based chat

We have all had the qualification conversation. Yeah, you know the one where Account Executives and Sales Leaders say that the leads that are coming in are wasting their time and have a low likelihood of closing. It’s not always easy to hear this but the good news is that Terminus chat is a great way to combat your qualification issue. By setting up specific qualification parameters and questions, your reps will be able to easily distinguish if the non-target accounts that are coming in through chat are viable candidates for your product. This shrinks unneeded sales cycles, pipeline inflation, minimizes “no-shows,” and gives your sales team the peace of mind that the leads they are receiving are qualified.

2.  Personalization From The First Touch

Terminus Chat takes a conversation between two businesses and turns it into a conversation between two human beings. This is done through personalization from the first interaction. Greet your target accounts by name automatically by using existing data from your CRM, tech stack, and firmographic data. By personalizing, you are able to disarm any hesitant and guarded prospects while also providing a human-to-human connection that will last throughout the lifetime of the relationship. Consumers love live chat because it’s quick and provides a must needed human touch. According to techjury, 75% of people prefer to live chat over any other channel.

Additionally, Terminus Chat can live and breathe just about anywhere with a little help from our Chat from Anywhere™ feature. Chat from Anywhere™ allows prospects to start real-time conversations from any digital link, including emails, display ads, sales proposals, landing pages, and social media posts. All of these channels become an instant catwalk to a conversation. Chat can even be a call to action directly in the body of an outbound email or a marketing campaign. Through our research, data shows that websites with chat see an 82% increase in conversations over those without it and a 256% increase in outbound email response rate.

account based chat

account based chat

Chat from Anywhere™ and ABM Chat is the medium for creating a premium buying experience that is free of the delays and disruptions that can occur in traditional efforts.

3. Full Funnel Execution

ABM, when done effectively, involves marketing, sales, and customer success. Each group’s interactions are critical to providing a complete user experience. Terminus ABM Chat helps tighten sales cycles and continues to serve account relationships beyond the initial sale, facilitating cross-selling, up-selling, and overall customer satisfaction.

The reality is that customers will always have one-off questions that can’t wait for a bi-weekly call, and searching through support documentation can be annoying. Terminus Chat can help route those questions to the right person in real-time, whether that’s a Customer Success Manager or Support Representative. ABM Chat provides the much-needed value for both your prospects and customers to add years to client relationships.

According to research conducted by eMarketer, 52% of consumers say they view companies more favorably when the customer service is more personalized to them and their interests. Additionally, according to OutboundEngine, your existing customers are more open to selling opportunities compared to net new leads. We’re talking an average selling success of 60-70%! The more customers you maintain, the larger the growth opportunity they represent and chat is your way in.

By including chat in your ABM strategy, you’re providing a vehicle to strengthen the connection between your prospects, customers, and your marketing, sales, and customer success teams. People want to do business with people that they know and can trust. The more relationships you have within multiple facets of your business, the better chance you stand when it comes down to crunch time.

You can also deliver a comfortable, personalized, and seamless experience for the key accounts that are visiting your website. Consistent messaging and shared access to client data are essential components in a full-funnel ABM strategy. If you would like to learn more about full-funnel ABM execution check out this handy infographic.

4. ABM Chat & Its Influence on ROI

ABM can be hard. Yet companies that successfully leverage ABM have a 25% higher engagement rate, with 91% of those companies seeing their average deal size increase, according to SiriusDecisions.

Seems like something worth the effort, right?

Well, here is why. By focusing your attention and resources on the accounts with active buyers that have a high probability to see value from your product or solution, you’re not wasting money, resources, and time on uncertain leads who may have no intention to buy. A healthy return on investment in ABM relies on giving accounts a personalized, VIP experience that begins with the first touchpoint, continues throughout the sales cycle, and eventually to post-sale.

According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, responding to a prospect within 5 minutes of initial contact resulted in a 900% increase in success versus responding to a prospect within 10 minutes of contact. Response times from web forms cannot compare to the instantaneous engagement that is provided by ABM Chat — especially when your reps can respond from anywhere.

Interestingly enough, techjury found that the average return for a single chat is $249. According to ICMI, website visitors that engage with your company via live chat are worth 4.5 times more than visitors who don’t.

The highest ROI is going to come from clients who stick around for a long duration of time, who can be continuously cross-sold, and up-sold to, and Terminus Chat plays an essential role in promoting a lasting relationship. Terminus Chat allows the client to talk to the right person at the right time.

5. The Consolidation Movement

As you think about all of the different software across your business, it can be a challenge to manage the 10 different logins, the inability to link data from one platform to the next, and not having a centralized view of all of the things you need to be looking at to be successful. This is especially true with ABM, where bringing together and actioning data is at the core of your success.

That’s why Terminus is creating a suite of software that you can house all under the same roof.  Terminus Chat allows you to bring your chat efforts to life with the data that you have access to through the Terminus ABM platform.

The days where you have to work with multiple software vendors to get what you need are slowly coming to a close and consolidation is looking like a more affordable option with more benefits for your business. Chat is a great place to start!

Closing Time

In conclusion, Terminus ABM Chat is a great way to personalize your outreach to your target accounts throughout the prospect and customer lifecycle. What are you waiting for?

Want to learn more about Terminus ABM Chat? Click our chatbot to get the conversation started with your assigned representative! 💬 👉

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