How to Sell Live Chat to Local Businesses

If you are an IT provider or re-seller and have the opportunity to offer live chat tools, is it even worth it to share with a local business? 

Small, local businesses are often associated with word of mouth, referral marketing, whereas live chat thrives when companies drive traffic and leads online.

Despite this perceived chasm, it’s definitely possible to offer live chat to local business and should actually be a great opportunity for all sides. The reason why is that local businesses need to go online, and live chat is a simple way to start engaging with digital lead generation. 

How to Promote Live Chat

When considering how to sell something, the best place to start is with pain. What are the pains of local business owners? What keeps them up at night? If you can offer a solution to a problem, you’ll have no problem making sales. 

For local businesses, there are three primary pains that web chat can address.

Revenue growth

Every local business needs to drive more revenue. It’s difficult today, because local businesses are competing with giants like Amazon and WalMart. Typically resources are tight and it’s a fight to keep new clients and customers coming in the door.

With live chat, local businesses have a golden opportunity to capture new customers. Think about your own experience. If you are looking for a solution in your community and search online, you’ll find the different options and then make a plan to call or visit one that seemed to fit your needs. 

But what if when you searched there was a helpful chat box speaking directly to what you were looking for? You’d be more likely to engage and share your contact information. 

Small, local businesses need this technology to catch people browsing online before going into a store.

Saving time

If there is anything a local business owner wants more than money it’s time. There is never enough time in a day when you have to wear so many hats to keep things going. This is why live chat is appealing for a local business.

With live chat you have a convenient way to engage and screen leads without getting sucked into major time commitments.

Live chat is an efficient way for customers to find answers without taking up much of the staff’s time.

Differentiation

Another pain for a local business is figuring out how to stand out. With live chat, a business has the ability to differentiate from the others by providing a better customer experience.

Customers want to be able to get answers from the comfort of their device. The local business who does this is going to be ahead of the competition and will create a good experience for their customers.

Getting started

The best part of live chat for small businesses is it’s not hard to get started. With very little time to spare, live chat gives a solid solution for some of businesses’ most glaring pains and is not hard to implement.

Get Smith.ai Live Web Chat risk-free

It's time to try live chat on your website. Just one new client captured via chat can pay for a year (or more) of Smith.ai's live web chat service. We provide fully staffed live website chat with professional agents. Outsourced live chat is best for small businesses like law firms, e-commerce businesses, IT consultants, financial planners, property managers, realtors, and marketing agencies (to name just a few!).

Our live agents are highly skilled and can answer common questions about your business, qualify new leads, schedule appointments, take payments, and more. You stay in the loop when chat transcripts are sent to you after each conversation and logged in your CRM. There's no setup fee, services are month-to-month, and have no annual contract. Plans start at just $140/month and are risk-free with our 14-day money-back guarantee.