How to Pitch a Chatbot to Existing Clients

In 2020, the chatbot market was worth $3.2 billion.

Now, it’s predicted to be worth $14.9 billion by 2025 (source).

On top of this, it looks like 50% of enterprises will spend more on chatbots than they will on mobile or app development (source).

If there ever was a time to take advantage of the growing chatbot market, it’s now.

Many organisations are perfectly poised to stake their claim in one of tech’s most vibrant and exciting markets.

As businesses look to adopt chatbots across their sales, customer service, HR, and IT departments, a hole needs to be filled.

Following a similar trend to when websites first became widespread, businesses are looking to experts they can trust to assist with their chatbot endeavours.

Marketing agencies, consulting firms, and similar organisations are perfectly poised to stake their claim in one of tech’s most vibrant and exciting markets.

As close to every business starts to adopt chatbots, it will likely be marketing agencies that help automate inefficiencies.

So, how do you pitch a chatbot to an existing client?

Pitching chatbots to existing clients, an overview

Any chatbot pitch should answer the following questions:

1. How does the chatbot solve immediate challenges?
2. How does the chatbot solve long term challenges?
3. How can the lead easily work with the chatbot?

Provided you cover those three bases effectively, the chatbot will practically sell itself.

So, how do we prepare the world’s most captivating chatbot pitch?

To keep things simple, follow the PDC format:

Pain - Understand the pain.

Demo - Demo the chatbot, leave them speechless.

Champion - Arm the person, on the client-side of things, who will be requesting your chatbot.

Step 1: Understanding the pain

The great thing about chatbots is that they aren’t a one-off solution, they can apply to all areas of a business.

While any initial pitch should be hyper-focused around a single pain point, it’s good to bear in mind other pains your client has mentioned/likely faces.

There are different types of pains you’ll likely come across:

Productivity pain points

Your prospect is worried they, and their team, are spending too long on low-value tasks.

For example, the customer service team spending hours manually copy-pasting replies to FAQs.

Financial pain points

Your prospect either feels something is costing them too much or they’re not receiving maximum value from it.

For example, their website’s live chat is eating up too many resources or their website conversion rate is too low.

Process pain points

Your prospect is slowed down by menial tasks and processes, preventing them from reaching their true potential.

For example, a technical and complex onboarding process slowing down HR (here’s a case study of this exact pain point).

Of course, many pain points are going to fit within multiple of these three categories.

Step 2: A demo to remember

Geek’s tip: Pitch the immediate, tease the longevity. Make it clear how your chatbot solves their pain today while teeing itself to solve future pains?

Exciting times: it’s demo day!

Dust off your best speaking voice, throw on your lucky socks, and get ready to blow some minds.

A great chatbot demo follows a VFNP format:

1. Value
2. Features
3. Niche
4. Potential

1 - Value

Chatbot demos are best kept simple. Focus on a single pain and make it clear as day how the chatbot solves it. People remember the first 5 and last 5 minutes of a 30-minute conversation the most, so make your first 5 count by clearly solving their pain.

Imagine they’re going to forget everything apart from one thing you say. Make that one thing provide such clear value it’s tough to argue against your chatbot.

2 - Features

Show off a range of exciting and relevant features. If you’re using a platform such as ubisend, you’re going to have a wealth of features to choose from (seriously). Don’t overload the client with everything, only the ones that demonstrate the most value.

Start with simpler features before moving onto more impressive ones. Why? The simpler features make the value clear, the exciting features seal the deal.

3 - Niche

Be sure to have tailored the demo chatbot to your client’s niche. It’s easier for a client to get behind a project that can be easily visualised at their business. The best way to make this visualization easy? Niche down.

Take time to match their brand colours and include chatbot responses and questions they will deal with on a daily basis.

Does your client operate in the pet market? Do a bit of research into the different common questions and processes within this market. You don't have to create a perfect final product, just something that is clearly relevant to your prospect's business.

4 - Potential

Towards the end of the demo, once you’ve run through your chatbot and how it tackles the lead’s challenge, take 5 minutes to briefly go over future options.

Talk through the potential of turning your chatbot multi-channel or/and multilingual. Mention extra features you didn’t fully touch on.

This is where you hammer the sale home with added extras; make sure you don’t go too crazy and drown out the initial value.

Here’s a rough idea of the VFNP structure in action, when demoing a sales chatbot to a prospect in the eCommerce industry:

1. Showcase the chatbot answering questions about a product. (Value)
2. Showcase the chatbot recommending alternative products via a carousel (Features)
3. Showcase the chatbot guiding users through the purchasing processing (Niche)
4. Showcase a mock integration and dashboard that provides a range of user data for analysis (Potential)

A ubisend partner and looking for tips on demoing a chatbot? Ask your partnership manager for the ‘How to demo a chatbot’ handout.

Step 3: Arm your champion

The champion is the individual, or small team, at the client’s business that will be internally pitching your chatbot. You’ll likely demo to them, they will take the information and pass it on.

On occasion, your champion will be the key decision-maker(s), or they will be present when you demo. While this shortens the purchase process, still follow up using the same tactics here.

The information you give to your champion will be used to further convince the decision-makers of the benefit of chatbots. No reason to not give it to them directly if it fits the circumstances.

Arm your champion with the following information:

1. A concise email answering any questions that popped up during the demo
2. A relevant case study or two (feel free to borrow a few from our case studies section)
3. A project timeline*.

*This doesn’t have to be a work of art but having it nicely designed often helps. Don’t forget to include any potential future iterations to help demonstrate the longevity of your chatbot.

Optional choice: Productising

There are vast amounts of psychological research into the benefits and values of productising your offerings.

Take The Named Process Effect. The Named Process Effect is sales psychology that refers to the human mind associating a named object with one that has value (read more on this here).

Let’s take a customer service chatbot offering. It’s far easier for your champion to pitch an ‘FAQ service chatbot’ than ‘an agency that will build a chatbot for us.’

This gives your champion and their stakeholders something to hold onto and picture when discussing the idea.

On top of this, it’s often easier to evaluate a product over a service, even if the product and service fit the same purpose.

Naturally to productise or not to productise is usually down to the individual agency and their circumstances.

An agency that is mostly service driven may not want to step away from their usual pricing methodology for their chatbot services, and vice-versa.

We understand this and have designed our partnership programme in mind. Set your own prices, make your own decisions, do what’s right for your business.

Sell chatbot packages, each tailored for a different sector, or simply bolster your web dev services with chatbots.

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