We caught up with David Price, Group Managing Director, and Hemma Sornum, Group Marketing Lead, from GBS Corporate Training & Brighton School of Business and Management. They told us they had doubled the number of sales qualified leads (SQLs) passed to their sales team, and the leads being of a much higher quality than previously. Here’s how it went…
Who are GBS Corporate Training and Brighton School of Business and Management?
GBS Corporate Training provides its clients with a range of innovative Leadership and Management learning solutions designed to target personal development and improve business performance. This arm of the business deals with corporate clients and requires prospects to be able to find appropriate courses for a diverse range of roles and responsibilities.
Brighton School of Business and Management is a qualifications centre where individuals can enrol onto professionally and nationally recognised qualifications, such as the Pearson Higher National Diploma and BA (Hons) Top Up courses, as well as a host of other professional qualifications such as management and leadership awards, certificates and diplomas. Some of their customers don’t know exactly what they’re looking for in terms of course selection and have lots of questions around dates, fees and entry requirements.
Initial problem 🔎
“We needed to maximise a change of traffic to our website. Initially, we started off using Leadoo with GBS, and that was because we didn’t feel we were engaging directly with people who were visiting our site. We have two types of courses within GBS; in-house courses (where businesses can choose to have an off-the-shelf or completely customised learning programme delivered to groups of staff either virtually or face-to-face), and public courses, which are targeted towards individuals and are offered either virtually or in central locations, with fixed dates and time,” explains David.
“We observed that as time went on, attendance to these publicly offered individual courses was beginning to dwindle and, for some of the courses, we were just about breaking even. So, we changed tack and decided to stop delivering the public courses, except for in two distinct areas: leadership and quality management. This made sense as they were the most popular courses we offered.”
“Then we noticed, after reviewing our analytics, that our bounce rate was really high. People were visiting in numbers, but not staying long. We wondered if they couldn’t find what they were looking for. Despite 10,000 visitors a month, surprisingly few were converting into leads, let alone making any actual sales of the courses, and so we knew we needed to do something about that sooner, rather than later,” he continues.
“Quite by chance, and not long after we had had that realisation, one of Leadoo’s sales team sent me an InMail on LinkedIn saying he’d quite like to chat to us. To be perfectly honest, I put them off a couple of times – I just thought he was like any other salesperson offering me a magic wand to get more business. He was quite persuasive and eventually I agreed to a 3 month trial, which we would not continue with if results weren’t forthcoming,” David finishes.
Objectives 🎯
1. increase the number of SQLs received via the site
This was their number one priority at the beginning of their Leadoo journey, but they also set two more overall objectives:
2. To activate and engage more visitors on the site
3. To find out the needs of each visitor so we can help direct them to the correct course or answer their FAQs
Solutions ✨
When a client joins Leadoo, they are given their own, dedicated Onboarding Manager who is responsible for setting up all their initial solutions.
“We had a meeting with Helen, our Onboarding Manager, who set up the whole process and all of the initial conversations for all of our chatbots. She really understood exactly what we wanted in terms of the terminology, tone and content that we wanted in each of the questions, as well as the overall context of the business and why people visit,” David explains.
Hemma weighs in on the initial bots offered too:
“When David and I went through what Helen had produced for us, it was a really simple exercise, because there were hardly any changes to be made and she was also really good with talking me specifically through working the backend of Leadoo, the BotBuilder and the Conversation Analytics. She also made sure the questions and the flow worked, right through to the end of the contact.”
Helen Azoia, Onboarding Manager at Leadoo, explains the solutions initially implemented for GBS:
“For GBS, the B2B arm of the business, we started with InpageBot. InpageBots work really well for content specific queries, helping to answer the questions people might have for individual courses e.g. dates, costs, mode of study etc. We focused on the most popular course pages first to funnel them really well before moving on to the pages with less traffic. InpageBots are also great for breaking up content on a page (such as within blog or front page text) and helps to answer questions/demonstrate the value of the solutions offered. For example, if I work for a company and I’m looking for a course provider that can meet my needs, the InpageBot allows me to access the answers to the questions I have without having to wait. This means customers know what to expect and makes it super easy for the customer to interact and show interest, and as soon as they do that, we’ve gained more information. That information can be passed on to sales teams as qualified leads, plus all the additional information provided by Smart Profiles.
We then implemented a ChatBot to sweep up any that don’t enter the funnel, with a subtle presence across the whole site, allowing for consistency in customer experience without being in-your-face,” Helen explains.
“For Brighton School of Business and Management, we also use an InpageBot and ChatBot. We did this as they told us they were receiving a lot of general enquiries, and wanted to filter the FAQs out so they’re only dealing directly with the hottest leads – individuals who are ready to enrol. This also collects information which allows for retargeting when customers visit the site at a later stage and allows BSBM to keep in touch with these potential prospects and start to nurture the relationship with that client based on their barriers. And, as expected, the quality of leads is excellent – they’re getting hot hot hot leads,” she finishes.
Psst, if you click here 👉 you can check out more on our onboarding process and read all about how we look after our clients throughout the onboarding process.
Results 📈
🚀 90+% of all enquiries now come through a Leadoo bot
🚀 Within 2 hours of going live, the first enquiries were sitting in the inbox
🚀 100% increase in the number of SQLs passed to the sales team
David comments on the results:
“The impact was immediate. We could suddenly see everything – we could see who was visiting and leaving, even those who were looking for courses which we no longer offered, and that allowed us to make changes to our paid advertising to reach better customers – those who would be interested in the courses we had invested in. It also helped us keep a dialogue open for those who would have left the site without finding what they needed,”
“And even though some visitors weren’t directly interested in our courses, now we had Leadoo we could utilise these people as leads. For the first time, we were able to use the information to our advantage and we started to get a number of individual enquiries coming through, as well as organisations, who wanted our services. We were capturing prospects that we know we wouldn’t normally have been able to get hold of, and were now equipped with more information than ever before. The enquiries, due to the structure of the bots, were also much more specific and timely, particularly as we came out of lockdown,” he continues.
“We were so happy with Leadoo at our 3 month review that we decided to bring Brighton School of Business and Management on board, too. It’s had the same impact on our B2C focused site; better quality leads, and more of them, and a real understanding of who visitors are so we can tweak our paid adverts, and our site, to meet their needs,” he finishes.
What’s next for GBS and Leadoo?
“In the last optimisation meeting that we had with Abbie, our Customer Success Manager, we went through Smart Profiles in depth and exactly what we need to look at, for example, the filters that we can really make the most of to understand the visitors on our site. So, that’s the next thing on the plan that we’re going to really take control over, and we’re going to work with Abbie to make that happen,” smiles Hemma.
