In this article, we’ll explore Viber sales and its advantages over traditional sales channels such as phone and email. If you plan to use Viber for sales, keep reading to discover how it can shorten your sales cycle, especially when connected with respond.io!

Viber Sales: Why Use Viber for Sales vs Traditional Methods

Salespeople have been using phones and email to carry out sales for the past few decades and while those methods get the job done, they are bound by many limitations. Ideally, phone calls need both parties to be in conducive environments and free at the same time.

Sales calls usually aren’t recorded, leaving room for forgetting or misinterpreting things. Even if they were, it would be time-consuming and difficult to go through audio conversations for information.

Likewise, transferring files over a phone call is impossible, requiring another channel to do so. Lastly, phone calls can be costly, especially if they are international. It’s easy to see why people prefer to text instead of calling these days.

Emails have their own set of problems. They have a tendency to end up in the junk folder or go missing because of spam filters. People also check emails far less frequently than instant messages, meaning conversations take longer to progress.

Conversation threads are often scattered or untraceable, making it difficult for agents to track customers’ conversation histories. For instance, businesses must CC all parties or reply to all recipients to retain a thread in one email.

When customers don’t reply to the same thread with all parties CCed in, send new emails instead of replying, or use another email address, the messages might not reach the correct recipients or anyone at all — this miscommunication can lead to lost deals.

And with emails' more formal writing style, it's harder to foster trust and build relationships between salespeople and customers. Unsurprisingly, their open rates are 600% lower than instant messages!

Since people are more responsive to instant messages, it becomes easier to communicate and build relationships over these channels. This brings us to our proposed solution for improving the sales process of your business: Viber.

Benefits of Using Viber for Sales

Viber has 260 million monthly active users and is one of the most popular messaging apps in certain parts of the world, namely East Europe, South Europe and Southeast Asia. If your audience is there, Viber will be the most convenient channel for you to them.

With a Viber Chatbot aka Viber Business Account connected to a messaging platform like respond.io to carry out your sales conversations, you’ll gain access to useful features that speed up your business' sales pipeline.

All contacts and chats are stored in a central database which allows salespeople to easily identify customers, trace their chat history and resume conversations where they left off. Your business also maintains this data when agents resign.

Since your agents will be sharing the company’s official Viber account, they will use your business’ name when speaking to contacts, which is helpful for building confidence and trust. If the need arises, managers can step in to advise on or guide tricky conversations.

Read receipts are supported so you know when contacts have read your messages. If they don’t reply, this helps determine if they’ve lost interest or haven’t seen your messages. You won’t have to spend time reaching out to on unresponsive contacts again.

But before we put Viber Chatbot on respond.io into use, there are some things you need to know.

Viber Sales: What You Should Know

As part of Viber’s anti-spam features, businesses can’t simply import existing contacts into their list. Viber’s Business Chatbots are not searchable as well. To build your contact list, you need customers to send you the first message.

Once contact has been established, relationships can be built over 1:1 chats or Viber Communities. When the need arises, you can send mass updates using broadcasts.

At the moment, all chatbot-initiated messages are free with no restrictions, however, this will change in the coming months. From September 2022 onwards, there will be a 24-hour window for session messages.

<call-out>Furthermore, new chatbots created after 05/02/2024 will need to pay for every chatbot-initiated message and a maintenance fee of EUR 100.00, per Viber’s updated Chatbot Commercial Model.<call-out>

Now that we know what a Viber Chatbot is capable of, let’s explore how we can use its integration with respond.io to improve your sales process.

Viber Sales on respond.io: Quick Wins

Respond.io is a powerful platform loaded with features to make life easier for various business use cases, especially when it comes to sales. Here are some examples of how you can take advantage of our Viber Chatbot connection.

Shorten Your Sales Cycle with Automation

Workflows are a key feature of respond.io, and for a good reason. They allow you to automate repetitive tasks, which frees up your workforce to spend time on more important duties.

For example, you can use automated Workflow to determine which sales funnel or route a contact falls into by automating lead qualification, routing and assigning contacts to the right salespeople.

Since customers communicating with businesses on instant messaging apps expect to receive fast replies, you can set up auto-replies to let customers know when you’re away or to welcome new customers.

Integrate Viber Inbox with Your Sales CRM

Workflows allow you to integrate respond.io with your existing sales CRM and other tools to exchange information. With this integration, you can accomplish the following:

• Generate sales deals in a CRM like Hubspot or Salesforce
• Qualify contacts with data enrichment tools such as Clearbit
• Calculate price quotations for a custom plan during client consultations

The possibilities of what you can accomplish are endless!

Funnel Inbound Leads to Your Inbox

Since customers need to send businesses the first message to become a contact, respond.io can generate QR codes for this purpose. QR codes are a useful way to get customers to message you on a channel they spend a lot of time on.

These QR codes can be placed on websites and promotional messages or printed and displayed in physical locations. Because contacts take the initiative to reach out first, you can be sure they’re interested in your offerings.

Use respond.io’s web chat widget on your website to funnel contacts to your Viber inbox. When contacts click on the Viber icon, it launches the app if it is installed on their desktop or mobile device, or displays a QR code they can scan to start chatting with you.

Get a Holistic View of Your Contacts with Contact Merge

Most people have more than one messaging app on their phones and may have previously used other messaging channels to reach you.

With respond.io’s Contact Merge, combine your contacts' details and conversations from multiple channels into a single view. This ensures you’ll never miss a message from them, no matter which channel they reach out on.

Mobile App for Agents on the Go

Respond.io has a mobile app that allows agents to answer customer inquiries and follow up on leads from Viber on their cellphones. With all the same features as the desktop version, agents can effortlessly send and answer messages on the go, wherever they are.

Agents will receive a push notification every time they receive a new message or are assigned new Contacts, allowing them to stay updated and avoid missing messages.

To get the respond.io app, download it from Google Play Store for Android and Apple App Store for iOS.

We hope you found this article handy and that it helps bring your Viber sales to the next level! Don’t have a respond.io account yet? Sign up for a free trial.

Further Reading

If you found this helpful, here are some additional articles to prepare you for your Viber sales journey:

• Ultimate Guide to Viber for Business.
• Viber Bulk Message: How To Send A Viber Broadcast.
• Viber Widget: How to Use Viber Web Chat for Business.