Generating 5k ebook downloads with Salesbot

Interview with Jacqueline Phillips, Head of Global Marketing at Kommo.

Jacqueline Phillips is the Head of Marketing at Kommo. Last year, she released a book called Delivered about how people increasingly abandon phone calls and email and instead choose to socialize and conduct business over messengers.

But first, she takes us back to how Kommo’s messaging philosophy started. “At some point,” Jacqueline says, “Kommo’s founders realized there was a messaging trend. They saw that marketing and support relied on messaging to form customer relationships. However, sales weren't taking advantage of chat and were left out of the communication chain.”

For this reason, Jacqueline and her team started investigating messaging: “We wanted to know ‘How does messaging work? What are the statistics? Could it work for business? If yes, B2B or B2C?’”

As a team, they poured all their efforts into researching this potential new approach for sales and decided to write Delivered to share their findings within the company and the wider world. She explains: “Based on what we found while researching and writing Delivered, we even decided to pivot our product to focus on Messenger-Based Sales.”

Since then, Kommo made it their mission to close the chat gap between marketing and support. They added features and integrations to the CRM, enabling sales teams to provide a seamless, cohesive buying journey from the first chat message to working with a salesperson and closing the deal.

Jacqueline explains that the ultimate aim of this book wasn’t to sell it — in fact, it was free. The book was written to prove to themselves that people were interested in this communication channel for sales.

But they didn’t stop at theory. Jacqueline’s team also wanted to test a messenger-based strategy in the real world. So, they decided to use a salesbot for delivering the book and the CRM for marketing.

“We wanted to provide readers with an experience of making a transaction over chat. In this case, getting the book on your favorite messenger,” She explains, “We couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, in theory, messengers are good for business’ and recommend it to people. We needed to see it for ourselves. So, we connected all messengers in our own CRM, built a landing page with messengers, and gave visitors access to chat with us. We also built the automation and saw for ourselves how Kommo’s pipeline could work with messengers.”

According to Jacqueline, the biggest challenges that she had faced in the whole process of creating and publishing the book was automating it and making the experience of Delivered “super easy for the reader.”

The Head of Marketing explains that if she didn’t use Salesbot — Kommo’s chatbot, she wouldn’t be able to track the book’s success. However, using the CRM for marketing allowed her to track how many readers there were, where they came from, and which stage they were at.

She emphasizes that connecting with the readers personally was critical: “This whole thing was really about putting messenger-based sales to the test. If we had just published a book on Amazon and counted our money, it would have told us something, but it wouldn’t have been a conversation. The way we did it gave us real feedback.”

To get as many downloads as possible and spread the word about the book, Jacqueline, along with her development team, decided to build and automate the Digital Pipeline and Salesbot.

She takes us through some important tips on building a digital pipeline:

1. Always start with a spreadsheet. “Think of it as your sketchpad. It will help you develop a clear plan before building anything.”
2. In your spreadsheet, identify the stages: “What is point A, and what is point B? What must be done to get from the first point to the second one?”
3. Point out the differences between the stages: “Every stage needs to be different and have a certain call to action, and you need to understand what needs to be accomplished in every stage.”
4. Start building your communication chain: “Ask yourself, what kind of messages will the reader receive at every stage? What do I want people to do at this stage?”

The moment that potential readers clicked to download the book, they’d land in Jacqueline’s pipeline, which was broken into 6 stages:

Goal: Get the reader to interact with the bot.

When the reader clicks the button on the landing page to open the chat with the salesbot, a lead is created inside Kommo.

Because messenger apps such as Facebook are very strict about sending messages, Salesbot was set up to ask questions and get some initial engagement. Once the potential reader answered, they were sent to the next stage.

Goal: Download the book

In the download stage, Salesbot sent a message with a link to the book. After receiving the download link, they were moved to the next stage.

Goal: Share about the book on social media

The reader would then receive a thank you message and be asked to share it on social media, including Facebook and Twitter.

Goal: Gather feedback about the book

A week after downloading the book, readers were asked to share their opinions of the book. They were then allowed to ask the authors questions or join the messenger-based sales community. Based on their responses, they were routed to the right stage.

Goal: Connect with authors

If readers had a question for the authors, they would be moved to this stage, and a real human would be alerted.

Goal: Get readers to join the Facebook group

The final call to action was to encourage readers to join the Messenger-Based Sales group on Facebook. It was one of the things Jacqueline and her team were also striving to build.

Goal: Overcome cases when Salesbot got tripped up

Whenever Salesbot was confused, it sent readers to this stage and notified the team members it needed help. This stage was crucial for training Salesbot — every time a reader was sent here, the team improved the bot.

After only one month, Delivered was downloaded by more than 5000 readers. Jacqueline explains that the team spent almost nothing on advertising, and the book was promoted only for the first 3 weeks. Indeed, most of the downloads came from organic traffic, word of mouth, and sharing.

The team was also pleased by how responsive readers were to chat. “The whole experience of getting the book turned out great. People gave us a lot of great feedback,” She says, “Salesbot did a perfect job.”

More than half of downloads were done over messenger apps:

• Facebook Messenger: 2600
• Telegram: 428
• Viber: 70
• Skype: 4

Jacqueline highlights that the most amazing thing about Digital Pipeline and Salesbot is that there is no need to monitor them. The user doesn’t need to open their Kommo account unless they get an alert.

“With Salesbot, you get to give a personalized experience that is your vision because you’re building it out of your imagination,” She says, “Once you set it up, it just runs by itself. It’s so scalable — as long as you get leads, it will run no matter how many leads you put in.”

Set up isn’t hard, but if you’re feeling intimidated, reach out to one of our amazing Kommo's partners — they’re ready and willing to get your team using CRM for marketing today.