Imagine this scenario:
You sign up for a WhatsApp Business account, hoping to engage more leads professionally. You pass your leads to your salespersons, giving them all the information—then one of them leaves your company, taking all your leads with them.

Sound familiar? It’s probably happened to you before. And if it hasn’t, it’s probably the stuff of your nightmares.

There are many things that can go wrong when you try to use WhatsApp Business as a key part of your contact strategy. It might not even seem worth it at first. But as online channels continue to grow as the preferred mediums of communication, it’s becoming impossible to escape it. WhatsApp is where your leads are, and if you don’t learn how to effectively integrate it into your lead-to-sale (L2S) process, you’re going to miss out big time.

In this article, you’ll find out:

• The reason why WhatsApp is the place to capture and engage your leads, now more than ever

• The problem with solely relying on the WhatsApp Messenger and WhatsApp Business free apps

• What WhatsApp Business API is and how it works

• The solution SalesCandy has developed to help you capitalise on this extremely useful tool

The Reason:
Why you need to up your WhatsApp game in 2021

At SalesCandy, we look at a lot of sales data from a large number of businesses across numerous industries. With hoards of data, we often stumble upon useful insights—one of which is this: Your leads want to communicate on WhatsApp.

The fact that WhatsApp is by far the most popular mobile messaging app in the world, with 2 billion monthly active users, is no surprise. According to the 2021 GWI Social Media Marketing Trends report, WhatsApp remains the top favourite across much of Southeast Asia, where 41% of internet users in Indonesia, 33% in Malaysia, and 37% in Singapore, say it is their favourite service, compared to all social media platforms including Facebook, LINE, WeChat, and Instagram.

We see a similar picture in the lead-to-sales journey. According to recent data on our SalesCandy app usage, it’s very clear that WhatsApp is hands down the medium by which salespersons carry out most of their actions with leads. In fact, since the start of 2021, 42% of all salesperson actions across our SalesCandy database have been WhatsApp actions—close to twice as many as call actions (27%).

All salesperson actions in the first half of 2021

This insight first came to us in late 2020, when we observed that salespeople were using WhatsApp as the main channel of communication with their leads. When you think about it, it does fit into the context of certain qualitative observations in the sales profession; any salesperson who has pursued leads is no stranger to the response, “I can’t talk right now, send me a WhatsApp message and I’ll get back to you,” or “I’m interested, send me more info on WhatsApp.”

Top 25 ‘Other’ tags

Bottomline: A large percentage of your user base prefers to communicate on WhatsApp, and you will lose a large chunk of sales if you don’t capitalise further on this market.

Challenge: How can you incorporate WhatsApp into your contact strategy in a way that is efficient and seamless, and gives you a competitive edge?

The Problem:
The WhatsApp Messenger and WhatsApp Business apps can only get you so far

When most people realise the value of WhatsApp as a sales platform, they might think: “OK, so I’ll just start contacting leads on WhatsApp,” or “Great, I have a WhatsApp Business account and my sales team has been instructed to follow up on leads using WhatsApp—so I must be ahead of the curve.”

Sure, your sales reps are on WhatsApp Messenger, and they can easily oblige leads who request to be contacted on WhatsApp, or they can use the platform as a supplementary means of communication if and when they find it appropriate. Plus, if you have WhatsApp Business with a verified business account, you can use a dedicated business number to present a professional brand image when interacting with leads in WhatsApp chat. If this sounds like your existing workflow, you’re already on the right track.

However, this basic use of WhatsApp Business is far from optimal, especially if you manage hundreds of leads distributed across more than a few salespersons.

Let’s consider some limitations, or pain points, that are generally observed in the lead and sales management effort, when a sizeable business uses only the WhatsApp Business app to contact prospects.

1. Lack of continuity in the lead’s user experience

• On the WhatsApp Business app, a business account can only be used on one device. If your business has multiple salespersons, only the device used to sign up for the WhatsApp Business account can be used to contact and receive leads on your business number. You would probably have to assign an admin to manually distribute the leads to the other salespersons, who would have to use their own individual numbers—which your leads will see.

• In the event that a lead is passed from one salesperson to another, all the lead’s information and chat history with the previous salesperson cannot be easily transferred to the new salesperson. They would need to conduct a manual information transfer, which is not only an inefficient use of resources but also subject to human error, and might create gaps in knowledge and obstruct the contact’s experience—for example, if the new salesperson asks the contact for information that had already been provided to the previous salesperson. This would be, not only an unnecessary annoyance for the lead, but also, yet another disruptive instance of being contacted from a new number.

2. Lack of management visibility on salesperson actions & performance attributes

• When multiple channels and platforms are used to communicate with leads, it can be very difficult to track and monitor all these actions and conversations. Sales managers would have to rely on their salespersons to report their actions and responses, which is not only subject to human error and manipulation, but also uses valuable time and resources that the salespersons could otherwise use on pursuing more leads.

• This lack of visibility also makes it hard to accurately attribute salesperson performance to specific actions, which in turn makes it difficult to identify problems and find solutions to improve results.

3. Lack of holistic integration within the lead-to-sale environment

• When you have to manually reroute leads from multiple lead sources, including WhatsApp Business, to the multiple salespersons in your team, a lot of time and resources will have to be spent just to organise this lead management process. If you handle more than 400 leads and 10 salespersons, you probably have or need an integrated lead management system (LMS) to automate and integrate all your lead-to-sale (L2S) processes, including lead generation, lead qualification, lead distribution, data organisation and reporting. If you use WhatsApp to capture leads, you should integrate it into an LMS to streamline your L2S environment and save considerable costs.

As you can see, using WhatsApp as a mere supplement to your contact strategy might help your conversions to some extent, but—considering all these limitations of the basic WhatsApp Business offering, combined with WhatsApp’s ubiquity as the preferred medium of contact—there is a glaring opportunity to integrate the platform into the very backbone of your lead-to-sales journey, so that it upholds every part of the process from lead generation to performance tracking and analysis.

Many companies are already aware of this opportunity, and are finding ways to create a seamless customer-centric experience with WhatsApp at the helm. One way to do this is to position WhatsApp as the first point of contact in ads, by using a QR code or a URL to direct users to WhatsApp in a single click, and generating leads with a simple, automated initial interaction. Another way is to set up WhatsApp Business to be accessible on multiple platforms, so that all salespersons in a company can follow up on leads using their own devices but from the same official business number. To do these things seamlessly and efficiently—which you’ll need to do in order to keep up with the rapid development of consumer expectations and win your share of the market—you’ll need to use WhatsApp Business API.

WhatsApp Business API: What it is & how it works

Fundamentally, an Application Programming Interface (API) is any software interface that enables two or more applications to communicate. WhatsApp Business API, like many other social media APIs, allows you to request specific types of information from your account (such as contact details and chat message content), and delivers it to you on another application—allowing you to use it in ways that reinforce your contact strategy and streamline your communications with your leads and customers.

To use WhatsApp Business API, you would need to first apply with WhatsApp for an API key. If you are a SalesCandy customer and want to use WhatsApp Business API within the SalesCandy system, we will save you the time and trouble and manage the application process for you.

The Solution:
Capture, consolidate & convert with the SalesCandy WhatsApp Business API

When you integrate WhatsApp Business API into the SalesCandy lead management system, SalesCandy will be able to use data from WhatsApp Business to help you enforce your contact strategy in three main ways: Capturing leads, consolidating salesperson actions, and converting more leads (through better service and data).

Here’s a closer look at what the SalesCandy WhatsApp Business API can do for your business:

1. Capture inbound leads directly in WhatsApp

• Once we integrate WhatsApp Business API with your SalesCandy account, you can automatically generate inbound leads directly within a WhatsApp chat. Using a URL or QR code, you can direct your audience straight to a WhatsApp chat with your business number, and display an automated message prompt with a custom menu of responses. The user can simply type in and send the corresponding response code, which will then automatically generate a lead and route it to the right salesperson who’s presently available for immediate follow-up.

• This removes your need to have multiple touch points across discordant platforms; no need to send them to a website just to fill up and submit a form that elicits a response from yet another channel. The first interaction the user experiences is a WhatsApp message; which, as we’ve seen, is where they’re most comfortable.
  

2. Consolidate all salespersons’ WhatsApp actions into one system

• With the SalesCandy WhatsApp Business API, your salespersons can send and receive WhatsApp messages within the SalesCandy app on their devices, under your verified business phone number. This ensures that your leads enjoy a seamless contact experience with your consistent, professional brand image.

• On top of that, sales managers can track and monitor all of these actions that take place in the app. In the SalesCandy Manager Portal, managers can view whole conversations and import transcripts and reports directly. Entire chat histories can also be preserved and transferred to salespersons, to maintain seamless continuity in the case of transferring leads.

• The salespersons’ experience will also be greatly streamlined. As WhatsApp exchanges are done directly in the SalesCandy app, there will be enhanced continuity in workflow, where salespersons can conduct multiple lead actions without having to switch apps—including updating lead statuses immediately after completing a WhatsApp action (lest they forget).

3. Convert more leads from the enhanced user experience & data analysis insights

• With a consolidated system and a consistent, professional brand image, what you’re really vying for is, of course, sales. This shift of WhatsApp’s role in your contact strategy impacts your lead conversions, mainly with respect to creating a seamless lead-to-sale user journey for the contact.

• Streamlining the lead-to-sale process works in favour of your backend processes, too. SalesCandy tracks all salesperson actions, by automatically logging main actions like calls and SMS, and enabling manual logging for other actions. Using WhatsApp Business API, we can add WhatsApp actions to the automatically collected data in particular detail, so that you can analyse actions down to the conversation specifics. This way, you can easily isolate, track, combine and analyse the data based on your preferred metrics, generate deeper insights into sales performance, improve your contact strategy—and, ultimately, increase conversion rates.

The ideal lead-to-sales journey is one that engages leads and facilitates conversion. In highly competitive industries—whether real estate, insurance, or finance and so on—leads are constantly facing swarms of options and alternatives. Ultimately, it’s the path of least resistance that will encourage leads to be proactive and responsive to your efforts. With WhatsApp Business API, you can cut through the noise and connect with your leads in an environment that feels familiar to them—in the simplest, most straightforward way they’ll experience yet.

SalesCandy is proud to be one of the first few SaaS providers in Southeast Asia to offer WhatsApp Business API integration, and has officially launched this new feature in June 2021.

Want to start capturing and converting more leads with WhatsApp Business API? Let us know and we’ll give you all the details.