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“We got a $300,000 opportunity this week from live chat on our site.”

I’m filled with pride as I hear our VP of sales make this statement. I worked hard for six months to get the sales team invested in live chat as a sales channel and I’m finally seeing the results.

It wasn’t easy, though. For many weeks, I sat in meetings or sent detailed reports trying to explain that while we had dozens of leads coming in through live chat, they weren’t being followed up on. I sadly watched the leads’ value diminish the longer they sat in the database.

But now that the sales team members were committed, live chat was proving to be a lucrative channel. I had members of the sales team asking me every week to add them as agents. They wanted in. They wanted in, because the most valuable leads are those that are on your website.

People visiting your website are there looking for something. If you can provide them with the answer they are seeking, you are going to win their favor. That’s where live chat comes in. The ability to connect directly with your visitor, at the moment they have questions about your product is an incredible driver of marketing-qualified leads and sales.

However, you only get out of live chat, what you put in: It’s difficult to realize the kind of results above without joint investment from your marketing and sales organizations. So, how do you get everyone involved? Below are the steps to getting leadership, sales, and marketing, on the live chat train.

1) Get People On Board With Live Chat

Identify an Owner and Then Determine the Benefits

You need a live chat champion. The champion will most likely live in the marketing team. Once this person is identified, it’s critical that they set expectations with leadership, the marketing team, and the sales team regarding what live chat will accomplish.

It depends on the stage and structure of your business, but there is a likely a gap that live chat will fill. Define your initial expectations for the benefits that chat will provide. Here are a few suggestions.

• Improved understanding of site effectiveness
• Better insight on site visitors
• Increased site conversion rate
• Increased # of leads
• Increased # of MQLs
• More sales opportunities

Choose one of these improvements as a goal and make it your focus for the roll out and testing of live chat. Then, set a specific amount of time and an approach to your test. At the end of that period, measure your results.

Test It Out

Get started with a trial. Most live chat providers have a trial and SnapEngage offers a 15-Day Free Trial. It’s incredibly easy to setup. The setup typically just requires adding a snippet of code to your website. Once you’re up and running, you can start to validate the improvements you’ve defined almost instantly.

As you conduct your test, there are a few ways to know if live chat is working:

• You are chatting daily with your site visitors and chat volume is increasing
• The bounce rate on the pages where chat is installed is decreasing
• Marketing is driving conversions from visitor to lead through live chat
• You learned something from your chat conversations about your market or how to improve your website
• Your sales team closed a deal with a lead that came through live chat
• The chat agents are consistently using the tool

Illustrate the Benefits

After you have conducted your test, report your findings and the improvements you experienced to the sales and marketing team. Then, project those improvements out over a longer period of time to provide a full picture of what the future with live chat might look like.

As I mentioned, people who use live chat as an acquisition and conversion channel often find it to be one of the most successful drivers of leads in regards to volume and quality. We’ve seen that clients who use chat, experience a 10-20% increase in conversion from visitor to lead. If you experience an increase in your site conversion rate of 10%, show the impact of that over time.

Here’s an example:

*http://ift.tt/1dZkDrx

That’s a huge increase in revenue opportunity–nearly $100K per year–just by improving the conversion rate with live chat. 

If you can illustrate these kinds of benefits to sales and marketing leadership, they will be pumped.

If you’re looking for more information to present to your sales and marketing leadership on live chat’s ability to bridge the gap between marketing and sales, you can also read our guide, How to Leverage Live Chat to Get More Out of Inbound Marketing.

2) Implement Successfully

Define ownership and accountability

For chat to be a successful channel for your business, accountability needs to be clear. Most importantly, there should be committed chat agents who will respond to inbound chats. Without that, chat provides no value.

Here is the most common accountability structure we see marketing and sales teams use when it comes to live chat:

• Marketing or Marketing Operations: Frequently, marketing is the cheerleader of chat. In this role, they are commonly responsible for implementing, training, and measurement.
• Lead or Business Development Reps (LDR/BDR): These are the committed chat agents. This team is responsible for managing the inbound chats, qualifying them, and then handing them off to sales.
• Sales Account Execs: Once the leads have been qualified and passed along, sales is responsible for the following up right away and moving qualified leads through the sales process.

For companies with existing LDR/BDR teams, chat is a no-brainer. It provides the entry-level employees with a less intimidating way to interact with prospects and the opportunity to get familiar with the product and frequently asked questions they might encounter, but in a controlled environment, which prepares them for the phones.

For companies without an existing front line for sales, you can enlist sales reps, marketers, or office admins.

Another option is to do what SnapEngage does and make everyone responsible for chat. This approach provides an incredible inside view on the market, the questions prospects are asking, how people are navigating the website, and the first impression of the site and product.

Install Properly

Customize the design of your live chat tool

Having all the design elements on your site working in harmony helps to present a unified structure and visual appeal. It has also been shown to help drive engagement. Make sure that live chat aligns with your existing web presence and brand style guide. 

Place chat on the most qualified pages

It’s possible to choose where your live chat panel appears and where it doesn’t. Taking a strategic approach to where you place live chat on your website will help gradually introduce your team to live chat and also help focus resources on your most qualified leads.”

Instead of installing across the entire website, install chat on only your most qualified pages. These are the pages that people who are further down the funnel are visiting, such as the product page, the pricing page, schedule a demo, or start a trial areas of your website.

Make it personal

Add names and pictures of your agents to make the experience more personal. It’s important to provide a human touch. By adding pictures and names, you establish credibility, which improves the likelihood of conversion.

Train Your Agents

It may sound obvious, but it’s important that you familiarize your chat agents with all of the features and settings. You can expect that live chat tools will have a general guide to chat. But beyond the general overview, it’s useful to find the unique tools that are going to create efficiency and collaboration for your team. Most live chat tools have features such as:

• Keyboard shortcuts to help make chatting more efficient
• Canned responses to ensure that your chat agents are leveraging existing marketing content to answer common questions
• Territory (or other) assignments and chat transfers to send chats to the proper team member  

Integrate with your CRM

Much of the power of chat for marketing and sales comes with integration. SnapEngage integrates with several marketing and sales software providers, like HubSpot. These integrations allow you to store all of your prospect and customer communication history, including chat activities, in one place.

It also provides the seamlessness of assigning leads to the proper team members and the ability for those team members to see a history of lead interactions (including detailed transcripts), so you always know what’s been said. It’s also possible to include chat activity as a lead scoring criteria to support your lead qualification process.

3) Measure and Improve

Continual measurement and improvement is critical to the success of a live chat program. As you roll out the program, be sure to define accountability and set up a scorecard to measure performance on a regular cadence.

Each group and individual should have a clear understanding of who is accountable for what. Again, the most basic action that the group needs to be accountable to is responding to chats.  

Also determine who will own measurement. When it comes to measuring how successful live chat is, you can start at a high level and look at volume and quality.

• # of chats
• % of visitor to chat
• # of leads (from chat source)
• % of chat to lead

If you want to go a bit deeper, you can follow your chat activity down the funnel and track a few sales-related metrics.

• # of sales opportunities (from chat source)
• % of lead to opportunity
• $ in pipeline (from chat source)
• # of closed sales (from chat source)
• $ in sales (from chat source)

Other, more specific things to monitor and measure are chat performance by different criteria such as:

• Site page
• Visitor geography
• Chat agent
• Product
• Etc.

You can derive a ton of valuable data about the effectiveness of live chat that will only help you optimize and improve your marketing and sales performance. It’s important to recognize that a live chat program isn’t a “set it and forget it” program.

Continual improvements can make a huge difference and will continue the interest and investment in live chat as a marketing and sales channel.

Work and a busy schedule can take a lot out of a person. Thankfully, vacation is a great time to slow down, recharge, spend time seeing your loved ones, and do things you wouldn’t normally have time to do.

While it can be tempting to fill your out-of-office schedule with travel and funtivities, there is something to be said about making time to tackle some of the things that have been collecting dust in your mental backlog. To help you get ahead for the upcoming year, we’ve put together a list of 20 ideas for productive things to do during your downtime while on vacation. Once you’ve picked your favorites, try using one of these awesome to-do list tools to keep yourself on course.

20 Productive Things to Do During Your Downtime

1) Play around with new technology.

There’s never a good time to learn how to Snapchat when you’ve got a billion other things going on, but learning those new technologies is important. For example, Snapchat gets 10 billion video views per day, according to a Bloomberg report. That’s more than Facebook.

So why not use your downtime over the holidays to download and play around with some of these new technologies? A few that we recommend include Snapchat, Instagram (read this post for some great Instagram Story tips), messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp, and photo editing apps to improve your content creation skills.

2) Write thank-you notes.

Take advantage of the opportunity to make someone’s day by writing them a meaningful, personal thank-you note. It’s a way to distinguish yourself in our increasingly informal, digital world.

Thank-you notes are an easy way to show your appreciation, but there are two roadblocks that cause people to not do it: They don’t have thank-you cards or they don’t know what to write. Let us help out:

1. Buy blank or thank-you notes in bulk. It’s as easy as searching “thank-you cards” on Amazon and buying your favorite pack. (Don’t forget to stock up on stamps, too!) Or, you could go digital using the Postagram app for iPhone: It lets you type up a quick thank-you note to someone, snap a photo, and then they receive an actual, physical card.
2. Here’s a thank-you note template from Hallmark.

3) Schedule all your appointments.

Go see your doctor, your dentist, and your barber or hair stylist. Take your pet to the vet for a check-up. Get the oil changed in your car. Think of all those minor inconveniences you just can’t seem to get to when you’re on your regular schedule, and check them off the list. (Or at least schedule them for the future.)

4) Make reservations for future plans and trips.

Whether you have a whole trip coming up or even just a dinner, spend some time doing the thoughtful research you may not otherwise have time to do — and make reservations as far in advance as possible. These things can end up sneaking up on you, so making plans early helps guarantee you won’t lose out on some cool opportunities. Not to mention, it’ll leave you feeling less stressed out down the line.

5) Get your planner or calendar organized for the new year.

Did you get a new planner or calendar for the upcoming year? The holidays are a perfect time to fill it out with the appointments and trips you’ve already planned. When you’re not spending time on everyday work tasks, you can experiment with new organizational formats such as the bullet journal to make sure you’re as productive as possible when you head back to the office.

6) Talk to your friends and family about what you do.

While you should take advantage of the time you have away from work to dial back and focus on other parts of your life, you don’t need to remove work from your mind completely. Talking about what you do with the people you love is different from actually doing it. Work is such an important part of our lives and takes up a huge chunk of our waking hours, so sometimes sharing that with family and friends can actually be a bonding exercise.

If your friends and family aren’t familiar with what you do or are interested in learning more, now’s a great time to fill them in on what you do all day, why you like it (or don’t like it), and what you’re hoping to do in the future. Who knows, you could pick up some great insights from people who are removed from your day-to-day.

(Inbound marketers, feel free to steal some ideas from “5 Ways to Explain Inbound Marketing to Your Family.”)

7) Call your long-distance friends.

You know that list of friends and family members you’ve been meaning to catch up with, but never seem to find the time? Open your phone, find a comfortable spot to sit, and give them a call with your full attention. Now’s the perfect time to connect with people you don’t see regularly but want to stay in touch with.

8) Start building a habit.

Some say it takes 21 days to build a habit. Others say it takes a lot longer. But exactly how long it takes doesn’t really matter. The point is, you have to put the work in up front if you want a habit to stick. So why not use the holidays to get started?

Whether you want to start flossing every day or writing in a journal before bed each night, take the time during your downtime to start habit-forming and set yourself up for success.

9) Learn a new skill for your job.

Most people have a skill they’ve always wanted to learn to advance their career, but simply haven’t gotten around to.

Ever wanted to learn basic coding? Codecademy’s HTML/CSS courses can be finished over the course of a holiday without interrupting family time.

Ever wanted to learn your way around Photoshop? Start by following along with a beginner’s tutorial like the one in this blog post. Unsure how to make anything besides a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel? Experiment with some Excel resources in this blog post. (And if you’re a marketer who’s not sure where to start, here’s a free ebook that analyzes today’s most in-demand marketing skills.)

If you really don’t have the time to dig into a new skill, you can at least use the time to set yourself up for starting to learn one in the new year. Spend some time browsing conferences or classes you could take and figuring out where you can fit them into your schedule.

10) Learn a new skill not for your job.

Skills that aren’t related to your job are usually even more fun to learn. What about learning how to paint art to decorate your home? Taking a new type of workout class? Learning a new language with an app like Duolingo — perhaps for a country you’ll be traveling to this year?

Try to pick something that uses parts of your brain that you don’t usually tap into during the workday. It can do wonders for your happiness, creativity, and wellbeing — and hey, you may even find a new passion or meet people who end up making a huge impact on your life.

11) Catch up on reading.

Here’s a classic but essential vacation tip: Catch up on those books or articles you’ve been wanting to get to so badly. It’s really hard to find time to read when you’re busy with work, but now that you’re on vacation, you can cuddle up with a blanket and a book. If you’re looking for suggestions, check out this list of must-read marketing books from TrackMaven.

12) Listen to podcasts.

Podcasts serve as an amazing way to pass the time on planes, trains, and automobiles during the heavy travel season. The key is picking and downloading what you want to listen to before you go on the trip, when you have WiFi. That way, you’re not draining your battery and data while on the move.

We recommend a good mix of genres: business, comedy, true crime, etc. Here are two lists of exceptional podcasts we’ve put together in the past year: “Want to be a Better Social Media Marketer? Listen to These 10 Podcasts” and “10 of the Best Podcasts About Business and Management.”

13) Organize your inbox.

There are a lot of ways to organize your inbox. If you use Gmail, my personal favorite is the Klinger method for getting to inbox zero and staying there. If inbox zero isn’t your cup of tea, here’s a list of 14 of the best tools for organizing your inbox.

Organizing your inbox isn’t the same as checking email, though. Don’t get sucked in! Organize your inbox, and then log off and enjoy your break. Don’t forget to let your colleagues and clients know you’ll be out — Here are some creative out-of-office messages we love.

14) Volunteer.

Serving others has a long list of intangible benefits, like pride, satisfaction, accomplishment, connections with others, strengthening your community, and improving the lives of others. There are health benefits, too: Along with social benefits, a growing body of research shows there’s a strong relationship between volunteering and physical health.

Don’t have a specific cause in mind? Check out your local library, youth center, animal shelter, homeless shelter, or hospital to see if they’re in need of volunteers. VolunteerMatch.org is another great place to find good causes in your local community for a wide variety of time commitments.

15) Find a quiet space to let your mind wander.

When we’re deep in our work routines, it can be hard to tear ourselves away from our immediate tasks and goals. But not removing ourselves from these things can mean we miss out on seeing interesting new connections and developing innovations. This is especially true during the busy weeks leading up to the holidays.

Take some time to remove yourself from your day-to-day — even from your family and friends — to be alone and reflect. Daydream about being your own customer, or your competitor, or what it’s like to be the product you produce. Analyze how you’ve been spending your time over the past few months and whether you’d like to make changes in the upcoming year.

16) Get exercise in.

I’m not going to get into the benefits of exercise (or we’d be here for a while), but the holiday season is an especially hard time to keep a consistent workout routine. Factors like cooler temperatures, less daylight, busy travel schedules, and food-oriented gatherings can all throw off your schedule. But staying active — even just a little bit each day — can be easy and fun. The American Heart Association recommends 40 minutes of aerobic exercise three to four times per week.

Not an athlete? Physical activity doesn’t have to be intense. Find an activity like walking, shoveling snow, vacuuming — heck, even shopping — that gets the blood flowing. Something is always better than nothing. And when you head back to the office, keep it up — here are 10 ways to sneak in exercise at work.

17) Set goals for next year.

It’s amazing how quickly the New Year can sneak up on you. Set aside some time during the holidays to reflect on the past year and make goals for the new one. Setting goals gives you a baseline for measuring success, and the motivation to stay on course when things get crazy.

Setting goals can be as simple as creating two lists: one of your accomplishments this past year, and one of your goals for the next. To get more specific, you can break larger goals into smaller ones by month. If you want to really dig in to your goals and ground them in reality, try setting SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound) and make a plan for staying on course.

18) Do any work-related tasks in the morning.

Although it’d be ideal to leave all your real work for when you’re back in the office, some people simply get more stressed out when they’re disconnected. The thought of missing an important email, or even just returning to an inbox that’s bursting at the seams, can be incredibly daunting for some.

If you’re one of those people, use the morning hours when everyone else is asleep to get your work-related tasks done. By the time everyone wakes up, you’ll have checked off a few key to-dos, and will be able to focus on spending time with family and friends.

19) Watch a documentary.

Holidays are a time for binge-watching all the TV you don’t have time for during the work grind, and we won’t begrudge you that. But when you’re ready for a break, check out a new documentary film. There are documentaries on almost every subject imaginable, and you might learn about a topic or issue that inspires you. Thrillist recommends several here.

20) Prepare meals in advance.

It’s typically healthier and more affordable to make your meals than to buy them, but when you’re busy with work, it’s hard to make time to prepare wholesome meals for yourself and your family. If you’re taking a staycation this holiday season, spend some time preparing meals that can be frozen or refrigerated to eat on the go or at the office. Here are some make-ahead breakfast, lunch, and dinner recipes, including vegan and gluten-free choices.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in December 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

What other ideas do you have for using your downtime during the holidays? Share with us in the comments.