How I Sell AI Receptionists Without Talking to Anyone
Interested to hear what everyone's conversion rates & marketing strategies are for their AI Receptionists and thought I'd share some insight into how we've achieved customers.
It's super interesting to see that there seems to be two sides:
- Half who focus on cold calling & outbound contact to try and initiate demos
- Other half who focus on inbound & gauging intent.
Marketing & SEO
For us we have a heavy push on long tail passive inbound acquisition. Since launch we've been steadily growing our SEO presence. We've put a lot of focus on SEO and we're currently at 500 impressions/day for our targeted keywords.
We have a 1.1% CTR so looking at around 165 visitors / mo from Google searches.
Our top keywords seem to be exactly what we are targeting for, covering "virtual receptionist", variations and some industry specific keywords starting to rank well.
Looking at some of our lower positions for industry specific terms, I can see some great opportunity for us to push rankings higher and get more high-intent traffic. Can see below that we're ranking well for "answering service for carpet cleaning", "ai receptionist for landscaping services", "cleaning company answering service" among others.
We will look to push into page 1 for these over the next month or so.
Paid Ads
We have been running various campaigns for trying to get high intent traffic. Initially I ran broad ads across a variety of interests and tried to direct to our site but realise the cost vs the CTRs & conversions was extremely bad. We refined our ads to be targeted specifically by industry, with custom approaches and landings for each.
You can see for example that the reddit ads we run achieve insanely good CTRs. 1.14% CTR on landscaping and a CPC of £0.68 is a level I never thought we'd achieve.
On Google we've been seeing really high CTRs (11%!!!) but the intent/conversions & engagement we measure just hasn't matched what I had hoped. I'm currently re-working the campaigns to try and get maximum conversions.
Solid High Impact Landing
Focused as much as I could on getting maximum conversions & trying to *force* the user to see how good our agents are. Went hard on ensuring that as soon as they see the homepage, they'd be presented with that option.
Way too many sites have "Book a demo". No one wants to book a demo. They want to see it now. You're not going to get HVAC folks visiting a homepage and then scheduling a call to listen to an agent that they probably already think will sound bad.
You need to be so confident in your agent that you want to shove it in front of people.
Analytics & Tracking
This is actually something I've had to start learning from scratch. GA4 is an absolute beast once you are able to learn how to visualize paths, see where visitors go and what they do.
One of the first things I did that really boosted how many people signed up & paid was the open homepage demo that anyone could click at any time and see how the receptionist sounded.
This instantly dispels the expectations of "It'll sound robotic!", "It'll make loads of mistakes!", "Its frustrating to talk to!".
Click button, speak to receptionist, be amazed.
I've recently created a custom event for demo starts so I can see which sources give us the most demo starts. It's still collecting data but it'll be extremely handy at some point.
Agency Outreach & Offers
At some point I had realized that:
A) Our technology is insanely good. Our AI Receptionist is sub-500 latency, sounds human, can integrate with a ton of tools straight out of the box. We use a custom stack. No Vapi, n8n or any of that garbage.
B) Outreach directly to trades can be hard to scale. Agencies do this well but agencies can't always build great tech and also don't want to spend time having to deal with tech problems and maintenance.
Combining these, I started offering (and still do) $1/mo voucher codes for subscriptions for 3 months to new agencies instead of the usual $29/mo.
They could build their agents in our platform, demo them to customers, and at worst, lose $3 over 3 months.
This creates both a fantastic sales force but also people who can help give feedback & help push the platform forward with improvements.
We've had a few agencies so far who have signed up and re-sold the agents for $200, $300, $500/mo to clients.
This also meant the agencies could ignore building, knowing they'll get great tech and instead focus on selling & generating revenues and cold outreach.
Development SDK & API
Given our tech is great, I also decided why not wrap it up and launch a development SDK. We've just launched it so unsure of uptake right now but allows anyone to code or "vibe code" an agent with our tech within seconds.
Hoping this will end up getting some reach with builders but still early days.
Actual Sales
So the important thing is really - How many sales have we actually achieved in the last month taking this into account?
| Total Visitors (Last 30 days) | 1,956 |
|---|---|
| Sign-Ups (Last 30 days) | 48 |
| Paid Conversions (Last 30 days) | 12 |
A lot of the sign-ups that don't convert I think are people just curious to see the platform and how it works. We started offering a totally free plan with free call time so that folks could also just login, see how to setup an agent and give it a test whirl.
They just don't have the ability to pick a phone number to assign if they don't shift onto a paid plan.
Learnings & Future
Overall, really happy with how things are going. Plan going forward is:
- Go very hard on SEO even more and try to get a really solid funnel of inbound visitors. I at least 1,000 impressions / day to ensure I have breadth. I'll then continue working on improving search positioning on some low KDs
- Launch the product into the UK market over the next few weeks (Currently US only)
- Work closer with agencies
- Find new distribution channels for contractors & trades
- Improve overall conversion rate. 1956 visitors -> 12 sales is roughly 0.6% conversion rate of visitors. Plan is to entirely focus on funnel of visitors -> demo starts -> sign up -> convert to paid