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Matt Hodges

Live Chat for Sales by Intercom - The quickest way to get more qualified leads

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Intercom has always been great for marketing and support teams. Today, we released 15 brand new features that make Intercom great for sales teams too. It’s the natural next step towards our mission of making internet business personal. Now your sales, marketing and support teams can communicate with your customers in one place.

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Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
Hey hunters, Matt from Intercom here. Hot on the heels of the release of our new customer service bot, Operator, we’re excited to announce our biggest release ever. Intercom has always been great for marketing and support teams. Today, we released 15 brand new features that make Intercom great for sales teams too. It’s a natural next step towards our mission of making internet business personal. Now your sales, marketing, and support teams can communicate with your customers all in one place. Powered by our Respond and Engage products, our new Live Chat for Sales solution is the best way to capture more of the right leads, automatically qualify, and convert them to customers. Here are some highlights of what’s new: - Lead qualification with Operator bot - Clearbit Reveal integration - Round Robin Assignment - Live Lead Qualification Profiles - Salesforce sync - Messenger Visibility - Lead reporting That’s just a snippet of what’s new. Head on over to our website for the full scoop: https://www.intercom.com/live-chat
Mike K
@mattnhodges sounds crazy cool! We've been using Intercom for quite a while now and will definitely experiment with this new set of features. Go, rock it! 💥🚀
Mike Ritchie
SeekWell
@mattnhodges What would you say is the biggest two or three differentiators from Drift? In other words, I am a current Drift customer why should I switch?
Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
@mihalkor thanks so much for your support! We really appreciate it!
Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
@seekwell_io great question :) here's our take https://www.intercom.com/live-ch...
Mike Ritchie
SeekWell
@mattnhodges I walked right into that one! One thing I noticed is you don't have a free tier for companies just getting started. I see the $49 a month option, which I must admit is reasonable considering what you offer, but Drift offers a completely free tier for a limited number of users. Just something to consider.
Taylor Banks
Love Intercom as a consumer / user, but as a "small" online shop owner, it's just not price-competitive with other "chat bots" that are more targeted at the ecom space. Hope that Intercom will consider dipping their toes into the smaller SMB market as they continue to evolve, as I'd really prefer to use their solution over lesser competitive offerings.
Alex Bass
@taylor_banks agreed with this. We can't even begin to recommend Intercom to most of our SMB clients because of the price. When you have Drift with a free tier and other services starting at $10-20/user/mo, Intercom is a very tough sell in the space. Doesn't the Intercom team want to get companies onboard when they are small as well? In years time they will grow to be larger and much more beneficial customers.
Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
@taylor_banks @alexhbass ultimately we want to cater to businesses of all shapes and sizes, but we also have to focus. Focus allows us to better solve problems for our customers today. Building for everyone is both hard and a slippery slope. Not to mention creating a pricing model that works for everyone. There's no perfect model in my experience :) For smaller businesses that meet our eligibility criteria we do offer all of our products at a flat-rate of $49/mo as part of our Early Stage program: https://www.intercom.com/early-s... This is not to say we won't ever expand our scope, in order to achieve our mission we have to, but we'll only do so when we feel we are in the right position and have the resources to build great solutions for them. We can only do so much at any given time and we're still a small company ourselves in a lot of respects. We're growing fast, but we're still just getting started :)
Alex Bass
@taylor_banks @mattnhodges thanks for that link. Definitely interesting. And I'll check it out. Don't love that it's time-sensitive because not all companies are focused on growing very rapidly, getting venture-backing, and moving fast. There are some more traditional businesses like Construction companies that could benefit from this. Glad to see you have some type of program in-place for smaller companies but with the timeframe there it makes it less accessible to very small traditional businesses. It feels like your product is more focused on SaaS businesses and less on the traditional SMB-type businesses. And you guys are dominating there, but there's more room to grow outside of that as well. Thanks for the reply!
John Alexander
Intercom is a critical part of our company. Both from an acquisition and customer success standpoint. I LOVE this update. Especially the new lead qualification fields! Even though I understand why, I really wish companies would start integrating into other CRMs rather than always going to Salesforce. Although its a unicorn in the industry most small teams cant afford salesforce and rely heavily on 3rd party integrations and cheaper CRM alternatives. Any plans to integrate into other CRMS or add new zapier triggers to help us?
Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
@johnalxndr what CRM do you use, mate? Salesforce was the natural first place for us to start based on demand from our own customers, but we are absolutely open to connecting with others.
John Alexander
@mattnhodges we use prosperworks here and love it!
Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
@johnalxndr 👍🏼
Pulkit Agrawal
@mattnhodges @johnalxndr also using Prosperworks and loving it! +1 for an integration there. Happy to connect you to Prosperworks team if you like?
Anton Eliasson
@johnalxndr @mattnhodges wouldn't it be possible to create your own integration with Zapier for that already? 1. Set rule in Intercom to tag a user (E.g "VIP sales team") 2. Create a zap that looks for the "VIP sales team" tag which pulls the data from Intercom 3. Send the data to your preferred CRM 4. Profit. Maybe I'm missing some crucial part here so let me know.
Pulkit Agrawal

Always happy when our partners do great stuff 👏🏽 and I'm really excited about the enhancements as a customer too. Think the improvements will be great for marketers, PMMs, demand gen folks and prospectors to drive MQLs.

Pros:

(1) Can collect great user data without a form (e.g. email for subscriptions) (2) Can set qualification criteria to assign leads

Cons:

(1) Not enough control on the way the bot asks questions (2) Can't see funnel or pipeline of leads (and stages) (3) Only SFDC integration

Gautham Ramakrishnan
Hey Matt, how's your take different from this tweet from 2015? ;) https://twitter.com/intercom/sta...
Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
@gautham_ramakrishnan what's the saying, "Everything changes. Nothing remains the same."? ;) This is us continuing to reinvent what the market currently calls and understands as "live chat", using modern messaging technology. Not sure where you are based, but I touch on this tension in my talk for the Inside Intercom World Tour. Join us in Chicago or SF if you can! https://www.intercom.com/tour
Lee Chapman
You guys are well on your way to CRM of the century domination!
Jonathan Grana
Go Fractional
@mattnhodges This is great! Thanks for sharing. Started playing around with it as soon as a saw the lead qualification section popup in Intercom. Two features that would make this feature even better which may be on your roadmap already are: - More natural chatbot for answering lead qualification questions instead of a form - Followup actions can include messages to send if certain conditions are meet (want to be able to send qualified leads a calendly link automatically while unqualified are sent info on next webinar)
Matt Hodges
Clarify
Hunter
@jonathangrana5 thanks, Jonathan! We're excited at the possibilities all the new features open up for our customers. Thoughts on your suggestions: 1. Tricky one and mixed feelings. We've consciously and deliberately designed Operator to not be perceived as human, hence the approach we've taken so far. More on that here: https://blog.intercom.com/announ... 2. Totally. We'd love this too, and we'll get there.
Jonathan Grana
Go Fractional
@mattnhodges Sounds great Matt. Thanks for sharing the article on #1. Looking forward to seeing #2 soon :)
Ganpat Sherawat
Awesome but expensive. :) :(