The most successful conversational SMS scripts we often come across focus on one thing: providing leverage. A well crafted sms script provides leverage to the marketing funnel, and bridges the gap between marketing generated leads, and sales ready opportunities. The goal of the Verse platform is to conversationally qualify customers that are generated at the top of the marketing funnel, and pass on the hottest qualified leads over to sales, so that sales teams can spend their time purposely. The best scripts keep this in mind, and focus on the things that bog down sales people most. If a script contains too many questions in it, it may fatigue the consumer, just as a long lead form would on your landing page. A script should be optimized to be quick conversations that provide the most leverage. Even a one question script provides a ton of leverage to the sales reps by getting ahold of a lead (so sales rep doesn't waste time chasing unresponsive leads), and confirming the lead's interest with a simple question. Of course our platform can do much more than that, but hopefully that puts into context how to best and most efficiently optimize your custom script.
First things first.
We always want our custom scripts to achieve the following:
Help filter out leads that don't meet your criteria.
Help filter out leads that are not interested, just browsing around, submitted their info by mistake, etc..
Gather information that is absolutely necessary to have before a lead should be handled by your sales reps, or required for appointments with your sales reps to be successful..
Disposition Unqualified leads appropriately, so that your CRM can keep information structured and in sync. Best used for long term marketing and remarking opportunities with your database. For example, bucket your leads with the following dispositions:
Inaccurate Contact Info
{{Custom Criteria}} Not Met
Just Browsing, Not Ready Yet
etc..
We want to try and stray away from:
Icebreakers/Unnecessary Filler Questions
Questions that may lead to off script interactions best handled by the customer, like “how is the shading on your roof?”
Questions that go too far asking for personal details/information (i.e. Social Security, Bank Info, Account Numbers, Insurance Policy Numbers, etc.)
Questions that result in the same answer over 95% of the time.
The 3-5 Questions Rule
Typically, our initial recommendation for an ideal amount of custom questions is 3-5. We have found that this number is just enough to insert Qualifying Questions to filter out leads and also information-gathering questions without bombarding leads with too many questions. This also allows us to then maximize our opportunities for qualification by getting to the point of hand-off with a lead a lot sooner than what a longer script would allow for.
We would advise that once a script is going over the 3-5 question threshold, you will start to see a drop in the conversion rate on our end as a result of the following factors:
Higher Chance of Leads Going Unresponsive due to the number of questions
Leads getting turned off by the number of questions needing to be answered over text
Additional Questions are being asked by leads that our representatives cannot handle.
Below is an example of a great conversation with a lead, utilizing a concise, yet well designed and effective script.
