Episode 7: AI Qualify: Keep Every Texting Conversation Focused on the Right Leads

Chris: All right, welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today, we are, uh, digging into one of the biggest, most frustrating problems in sales and support. It's what I'd call the response trap.

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah. I know exactly what you mean.

Chris: Yeah, the feeling your inbox is just blowing up, but maybe, what? Ninety percent of those conversations are just noise, they're distractions or completely unqualified leads.

Elizabeth: It's the classic signal-to-noise problem. We see teams burning, I mean, the majority of their day just filtering incoming texts.

Chris: And that leaves them with almost no energy for the actual high-value stuff, the closings.

Elizabeth: Exactly.

Chris: So we're looking at a solution today that claims to, you know, fix this math. It's a new feature called AI Qualify from Sales Message.

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm.

Chris: Now, usually, when I hear AI in sales, I immediately think of those, like, generic chatbots that just end up annoying customers.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Chris: How is this any different?

Elizabeth: Well, the difference is really where it sits in the workflow. This isn't just an autoresponder, you know, blasting out the same reply to everyone. AI Qualify is embedded directly into what they call agent templates. You can think of those as the blueprints for your automated conversations.

Chris: ’Cause it's acting like a, a gatekeeper inside the conversation flow.

Elizabeth: Precisely. And it's not just reading the text the customer sends. The big differentiator here is context.

Chris: Context.

Elizabeth: It pulls data from your integrations, like HubSpot or other CRMs. So when a text comes in, the AI is looking at what the person said, plus what you already know about them.

Chris: Oh, I see. Like their deal stage or company size, that kind of thing.

Elizabeth: Exactly that.

Chris: That is a crucial distinction.

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm.

Chris: I mean, a standard bot has no idea if I'm a VIP client or just some cold lead. This one does.

Elizabeth: It does.

Chris: But once it makes that evaluation, does it just, you know, give the sales rep a score to look at?

Elizabeth: Uh—

Chris: ’Cause that doesn't really save a ton of time.

Elizabeth: And that's where the real efficiency kicks in. It doesn't just score, it acts.

Chris: It acts.

Elizabeth: If the AI decides the contact is qualified, it instantly routes that conversation to a human agent's inbox. But if they're disqualified—

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth: …say they don't meet the budget criteria, or they're in the wrong region, the AI handles the rejection itself.

Chris: So it breaks up with them for you?

Elizabeth: In a polite, professional way, yes. It effectively closes the loop, so your team never even sees the distraction in the first place.

Chris: You know, there's a secondary benefit here that I think is really undervalued: consistency.

Elizabeth: Oh, absolutely.

Chris: Humans are just—we're terrible at being consistent. A sales rep at 9:00 a.m. on a Monday might qualify a lead very differently than they do at 4:30 on a Friday.

Elizabeth: That is a huge hidden cost in sales teams. It's subjectivity.

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Elizabeth: AI Qualify completely standardizes that logic.

Chris: Right.

Elizabeth: If you set the criteria that a lead must have a budget over, say, $10,000, the AI applies that rule every single time without fatigue or bias.

Chris: So let's look at where this applies in the real world. The source material we have highlights healthcare.

Elizabeth: Right, and it's IPA ready, which is, you know, non-negotiable in that space.

Chris: Uh-huh.

Elizabeth: You could imagine a patient intake scenario.

Chris: Okay.

Elizabeth: The AI can verify insurance types or appointment needs before a human scheduler ever even has to look at it.

Chris: Or in financial services.

Elizabeth: Right.

Chris: You don't want a senior advisor spending 20 minutes on a chat, only to find out the client doesn't meet the minimum asset requirement.

Elizabeth: Precisely. It protects the expert's time. Now, for anyone who might be intimidated by, you know, configuring AI, the setup is surprisingly grounded.

Chris: How grounded are we talking?

Elizabeth: The documentation suggests it takes about 10 to 20 minutes.

Chris: That's remarkably fast.

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm.

Chris: But for now, the output is binary, right? It's either qualified or disqualified. There's no in between.

Elizabeth: For this first version, yes, it's a strict gate, but the roadmap is pretty interesting.

Chris: Oh.

Elizabeth: Within the next three to six months, they're planning to introduce advanced scoring, so instead of just a hard no, you might get a maybe pile or, like, a, a lead score of 80 out of 100.

Chris: That adds a lot more nuance. But for now, the tool really forces you to be crystal clear about who you want to talk to.

Elizabeth: It does. It forces you to strictly define your ideal customer profile.

Chris: And that actually leads to the thought I want to leave you with today. We often complain about being too busy, but if you hand off all that filtering to an AI, you lose the excuse of being busy.

Elizabeth: That's a good point.

Chris: You're left only with the qualified leads, who are actually ready to talk, ready to buy. So the question is: Are you ready to be that productive?

Elizabeth: It definitely changes the pressure. You have to be on for every single conversation.

Chris: A massive thank you to Sales Message for the source material on this, and thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next week on The Deep Dive.

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