Developing a Live Chat Sales Plan

The serious website business owner is turning to live chat. While there are many good reasons for this, here are three important ones: sales, sales, sales! In this article, we will focus on the use of chat to sell your products. You will learn some tips on implementing and getting more sales.

We have all heard about the many advantages of offering live chat to your customers. Over all it just makes good business sense. How many of your customers would tell you that customer service is not important to them? It only makes sense that if customer service is high on their list of things they look for in an online business and they contact your business through live chat, your product line is important to them. Every live chat call to your business is a potential sale.

In today's competitive market, your business must take advantage of every opportunity to make that sale. Every contact you have through live chat is a potential sale either now or in the future. To do this requires two important things; a proactive sales plan and a well-trained staff.

Your proactive sales plan should consist of targeted product special deals. These special deals should be designed specifically for contacts made through your chat service. The offer can be one general offer, or better yet, specific offers targeting the reason someone is using your live chat service.

If a customer contacts you wanting to know if your product will do X, Y, or Z you have a potential up sale. If your chat customer has a legitimate complaint, offer them a newer product at a substantial savings. Have you ever thought about offering a trade-in special sale? Upgrade with our product and receive a 20% discount. The options are endless.

Just as important to the success of your sales plan is having a well-trained staff. Each person who goes online with a customer needs to know the special offers available at the time of customer contact. More importantly, the script your representative uses should have a place where they are required to let the customer know about your specials. This does not have to be a "hard sell" but an informational service. Keeping in mind that the goal is to convert prospects into buyer; always ask, "Are you interested?"

Your live cat sales plan needs to include how the efforts of your live chat staff are rewarded. The use of staff incentives should be included, after all, if your live chat staff is being asked to sell something they should be rewarded for doing so.

The use of live chat as a sales tool makes sense. You do need to keep in mind that as a sales plan this approach has both short-term and long-term results. The key to the success of this approach is immediate follow-up through email. While your customer may not buy on chat, they have heard about your offer. The seed has been sown.