Turning Questions Into a Stream of Inbound Leads And Easier Sales Calls

There’s always a perfect way to tell a story to your customers.

To explain how others facing their exact thoughts, questions and challenges reacted, and resolved those issues.

And in many cases, how those customers moved forward with your business with a successful campaign.

Once you find that perfect answer, it’s hard to make sure you give that same, perfect answer one hundred times later. Because you know that if it’s come up once it probably will come up one hundred more times.

Even that ‘perfect’ answer, given once, wasn’t really perfect. Given a day to focus just on how to expand it, and bring more value to people with similar questions and thoughts, could leave you with a much more valuable piece of content.

The magic of the process I’m about to walk you through is that if one potential customer has a question, and actually asked, dozens more had it too but didn’t bother engaging with you to find out the answer. They kept on browsing.

The Old Advice — Save Q&As

The advice commonly given has been to simply collate these questions across various systems.

Use an automated (canned reply) system to send replies to the question on your live chat/email with customers.

Use a nice Q&A feature on your site to feature short snippets of answers to most questions.

These solutions give you an answer that’s fairly solid, and answers the question in a way that the whole team can benefit from. But not in a way that gets you much new business.

A short answer on a page with lots of questions won’t drive much search traffic. It’s just not deep enough.

Just as importantly, a short answer won’t give you the opportunity to really expand the question and tackle related issues, thoughts, and tell that perfect story.

So Tell The Perfect Story, and Benefit From More Personalization

How about taking the time to write up a case study that illustrates it better, or a really detailed post going through the numbers in detail. You’ll be amazed how much more impact that has.

When it comes to sending replies to clients and potential customers, you’ll love pasting that link to a great resource into your emails instead of rehashing the same canned reply every time.

It also splits up the discussion — they read your custom comments in the email, the ones just for them, first. Then they go read, in more detail, the answer to their original question in a way that tackles it much more broadly, and possibly answers a dozen follow up questions too.

The key result here is two benefits:

• The dozens of people who wouldn’t have bothered emailing to ask their question can now read a detailed article explaining the answer to them;
• The people who would have emailed that question in, or contacted your live chat are further along in their thought process before they speak to you — they’re more likely to buy and more likely to be ready to take the conversation in the direction you want to go.

As a nice little bonus it gets your content out in front of more potential customers too! If you’re talking in detail about industry specific topics and doing a great job, people will engage with your content, share it and you’ll get more leads, over and over again, from answering a question that just used to take up your sales team’s time.