You've put in the hard work to craft your lead conversion strategy, pouring over detailed playbooks, optimizing the buying journey, and implementing carefully considered stage-gates. Your intentions are sound: you want to ensure only qualified prospects move forward, maximizing both the buyer’s value and your team’s time.
But there's a catch – the very mechanisms you've put in place to qualify leads might be the exact barriers preventing them from converting. What you think is a “gate” is really just inviting prospects to find their own detour on a path that could end somewhere you were trying to avoid in the first place (think unflattering Reddit threads or a competitor’s “review” of your product).
This B2B catch-22 is best illustrated with form fills. These gates serve a purpose: they clarify a buyer's true needs and filter out poor-fit or low-intent buyers. But they also create friction by either:
- Driving away potential customers who aren't ready to give up information and risk overcommitting their time (or email inbox and phone number), or
- Failing to start a conversation at one of the most pivotal parts of the buying journey—when a customer reaches out for help.
This tension between qualification, response time, and conversion has long seemed unsolvable. You couldn't abandon your vetting process or throw tons of reps into 1:1, 24/7, real-time lead handling, but you also couldn't ignore the leads slipping through your fingers. So you settled.
But what if there was a way to qualify and route leads without putting up barriers?
Below we outline five reasons why form fills fall short, five reasons why conversational AI appointment setting can offer a new solution to an old problem, and one path to implement the solution for your business.
Why Form Fills Fall Short
Forcing leads to fill out forms might create higher barriers to conversion than you think. While getting contact info is crucial, extensive forms can scare away many potential leads who aren't ready to commit. Here's why:
- The "Give-Before-You-Get" Problem: Forms ask for all the information upfront, before trust or rapport is built. Leads, especially in the early research phase, want to control their buying journey. Lengthy, forced form fills can feel one-sided, like putting money into a machine without knowing what you'll get back, causing leads to hesitate and possibly abandon your process.
- The "Low Human Connection" Problem: Forms are passive and transactional, failing to trigger social presence. Without a sense of human interaction, leads may feel disconnected and undervalued, reducing their willingness to engage further.
- The "Limited Understanding" Problem: Forms capture limited data points and miss the nuances of a lead’s needs. This lack of depth can prevent sales teams from tailoring their approach effectively, leading to missed opportunities.
- The "Rigid and Impersonal" Problem:
Forms ask the same questions to everyone, regardless of their needs. They are rigid and can’t adapt to the flow of information, frustrating leads who have unique questions or concerns that aren't addressed. Even if you do pick a form solution (e.g., Typeform) that allows you to create different paths based on lead responses, you end up with a massive “if/then” tree of possibilities, which becomes cumbersome to build and maintain.
- The "Delayed Lead Response" Problem:
Without instant responses, you miss the most critical moments in the buying journey: the moment when the buyer took action and wants to talk. Not responding right away can leave the lead feeling frustrated or annoyed and send them directly to other competitors who engage more promptly.
Five Key Solutions with Conversational AI
- Immediate, Personalized Engagement:
This approach builds trust from the beginning, encouraging leads to engage without feeling pressured. Leads get instant feedback, guidance, and answers during conversations. This helps them move forward confidently in their decision-making process, reducing frustration and increasing engagement.
- Value-First Communication:
By personalizing initial conversations to probe the lead’s intent, AI conversations can build rapport faster. Through tone, empathy, and active listening, conversations create emotional connections, making leads feel understood and valued.
- Sequenced Discovery:
By asking questions in a logical sequence, AI conversations can unpack buyer data without overwhelming them. This method gathers important information about their problem states, fit, buying stage, and intent that seems “fair” based on the flow of the conversation.
- Tailored and Effective Handoff:
This deeper insight allows for more tailored and effective handoffs to the proper internal sales rep. It enables better sales strategies for the person who can actually help close the buying journey.
- Better Behavioral Buying Data:
Capturing these early conversations and logging them provides tremendous insights into what’s going through the buyer’s mind in these critical early stages. This data essentially provides a “pre-discovery” call level of information and is invaluable for refining future strategies.
How to Implement Conversational AI as a Form Replacement
Ready to transform your lead conversion process with Conversational AI? Follow these steps:
1. Map Out Your Lead Capture Forms
Identify where you currently use forms, such as:
- Content downloads
- Contact us pages
- Demo requests
- Newsletter sign-ups
- Webinar registrations
Remove questions and fields that are overly intrusive to leads for the current state of their engagement; those will be discovered in the following steps. For example, if someone is trying to sign up for a newsletter or webinar, all you really need to capture is their name and email. The rest can be discovered via conversation at a more fair pace for the lead.
2. Build Your Conversational Conversion Workflow:
Use Scheduler AI’s workflow builder to create your Conversational Conversion Workflow for each trigger. The builder will guide you through setting up:
- Personalized “hooks”/conversation starters
- Discovery questions
- Qualification criteria
- Disqualification instructions
- Re-engagement direction
- Routing & booking instructions
3. Trigger Your Newly Created Workflow:
To ensure your conversational AI workflows are effectively integrated into your existing processes, follow these steps:
- For Content Downloads:
Attach the campaign ID to a CRM workflow or Zap. (Anywhere you can make an API call, you can kick off an AI workflow). This integration will automatically trigger your AI workflow whenever a content download is requested, allowing immediate, personalized engagement through email or text message.
4. Add Your AI Workflow to Webchat on Your Site:
Replace traditional forms with AI-driven webchat for real-time engagement:
- For Contact Us Pages:
Add the webchat script to your website's "Contact Us" page. This script will initiate a real-time conversation with leads, replacing the static form. - For Demo Requests:
Implement the web chat script on your demo request page. This ensures that visitors can immediately discuss their needs and schedule a demo through an engaging conversation.
5. Enhance Key Website Pages:
To maximize the impact of your conversational AI:
- On the Pricing Page:
Implement the webchat script to float on the pricing page. This allows potential customers to ask questions and get instant responses while they review your pricing options. - On the Home Page:
Add the webchat script to your home page. This ensures that visitors have immediate access to personalized assistance, improving their overall site experience and increasing the likelihood of conversion.
Want to learn more about how conversational AI agents can book demos? Feel free to chat with ours here and see if it makes sense to join up with a member of our team to craft your own.
