Rohan MathawanMany growing businesses face the universal challenge of managing their leads. As more people inquire about their products and services, lead qualification becomes difficult to achieve at scale. This is the question that every growing business asks themselves: How can we capture every qualified lead while making sure that our efforts aren’t being wasted on fruitless endeavors and unneeded activities?
The traditional method of engaging and qualifying leads with web-behavior driven lead scoring and outbound sales representatives naturally leads to gaps in communication. The conventional method may work for small customer pools, but with the vast number of potential customers who are looking to ask questions and receive special attention from sales reps, it simply fails to rise to the occasion.
To address this problem, AI-driven conversational marketing platforms have entered the market to help businesses meet the demands of their leads at scale. They help you nurture, qualify, and schedule meetings with leads, taking many repetitive and monotonous tasks away from your sales and marketing teams so that they can focus on high impact tasks.
Exceed.ai and Conversica are currently the industry leaders for AI sales assistants that automate lead engagement and follow up. In order to decide which tool makes sense for your business, it will be helpful to compare the capabilities of both tools.
Source: https://www.g2.com/compare/conversica-vs-exceed-ai
What Are Their Features?
Exceed.ai and Conversica both include an AI-powered email assistant that utilizes machine learning to constantly improve performance. Utilizing natural language processing to increase its knowledge base, the AI learns to respond and engage with every lead without the oversight of sales reps. This frees up their time to focus on having more meaningful conversations with qualified leads.
Furthermore, Marketing Profs reported that companies that use AI saw 52% improved lead conversions, and 59% better sales closing rates.
Website Chatbots and SMS Capabilities
While both Exceed.ai and Conversica offer chatbots and SMS capabilities, Exceed’s products had greater functionalities than Conversica’s. The latter’s chatbot and SMS utilizes traditional button options or preset text to lead the prospect to a desired action, but it did not have much flexibility when it came to unexpected responses.
With Exceed’s chatbot, a prospect could expect to ask questions and get appropriate responses in real-time without feeling like they are being led down a preset sequence. The prospect is able to decide what they’d like to do, and the chatbot will be able to engage, qualify, and schedule meetings if the prospect wants to talk to a sales rep for demos or more information. The best part is, Exceed collects all the responses and parses the data to determine lead qualification. This will allow the chatbot to gain more relevant information for the CRM and develop a more sophisticated approach each time it handles conversations with new prospects.
Scheduling Meetings and Handing Off Leads To Sales
While both AI sales assistants have the functionality of auto-scheduling meetings and handoff to sales teams, Conversica only offers the possibility of doing so while Exceed.ai offers built-in scheduling tools. With Exceed.ai, leads will not have to be confused and frustrated with third-party integrated tools and will find the process to be a seamless experience. It also benefits your business, because sales and marketing teams will not have to add another service to learn and keep track of.
Email Customization
Personalization is integral in connecting with customers and moving them down the funnel. It is important for businesses to understand their customers and deliver only relevant information to them. A recent study showed that personalized emails are 6x more likely to drive conversion. Knowing this, you must ask yourself these two questions: how much personalization do you want, and how much workflow flexibility do you want?
If your business does not require much customization options, Conversica may be right for you. It does not allow you to fully customize email copy, offer conversations that are based on custom built personas, and quality your leads before sending to sales reps. That being said, not every business needs the ability to personalize for their customers, so this tool may work if you need to send generic and simple emails.
If your business is looking for flexible customization with email copy, lead qualification functionality, custom playbooks, and many other capabilities, look to go with Exceed.ai. What also differentiates Exceed.ai from Conversica is its ability to manage out-of-office responses and follow up dates for those leads who are interested but might want to strike up a conversation later down the road.
When it comes to robust functionalities and customization options, Exceed.ai comes out on top – especially if your business is looking to add personalization to customer interactions.
Wrapping up: Determining What’s Right For Your Business
If your business does not need much consideration with leads, prefers minimal customization, and is indifferent to cross-channel qualification and communication, Conversica may be the platform of your choice. If your business is looking for a lot of personalization options with flexible customization, auto-scheduling, intelligent conversational AI, and smooth handoffs to sales teams, Exceed.ai is the platform that will help you improve lead qualification at scale.
Read customer reviews about Exceed.ai here!