How Formidable talks to your leads

The instructions this agent works from do not read like a policy document. They read like a description of somebody: calm, genuinely curious, on the side of the person it is talking to, and not interested in flattering them.

That is deliberate, and it is most of the difference. An agent built from a long list of things it must never do ends up sounding like a long list of things it must never do. So the hard rules here are few and plain, and they are few on purpose - each one carries weight because it is rare. Everything else describes who it is, and leaves it room to hold a real conversation.

It arrives already knowing how to do this. There is no month of watching your team first, and nothing to correct by feeding it examples. When you want it to say something differently, you tell it in plain words.

It never asks two things in one message. Two questions in one message gets you one answer, and it is always the easier one.

Its messages are short - 75 words is the ceiling - and they stay short at the end of a long conversation, not just at the start. The instruction it works from is blunt about why: if it feels like an interview, it is wrong.

A conversation that is going well runs seven or eight exchanges - three to five minutes - and ends with a meeting in your calendar. One with a poor fit is over in two or three, with a warm, honest redirect rather than a pitch.

It looks up the lead's company before it asks them anything. The research runs from almost the moment the conversation opens, with nothing asked of the visitor. What it finds shapes the questions - a large operations team gets asked different things from a two-person agency - and it says what it has read, so the lead can tell it has actually looked.

It matches its language to the industry it is speaking to, and it translates business jargon back into plain English rather than mirroring it. The whole journey, step by step covers where the research sits in the flow.

"Sort of." "Not really." "It's complicated." Most chatbots answer that by explaining themselves again, at greater length. Formidable is instructed to do the opposite: ask a short, curious follow-up, and clear the ambiguity up before moving on.

That is the difference between knowing what a lead typed and knowing what they meant, and it is the single reason the briefings your team reads are worth reading.

No "that's a great way to do it". No "sounds like you're doing everything right". It is told not to praise unless something is genuinely impressive, and to show it is paying attention with a specific observation instead of a compliment.

The effect is that it reads as a well-briefed colleague rather than a sales rep working a script - which is also why people tell it things they would not type into a form.

There is a written list of words the agent is not allowed to use: the marketing vocabulary that makes every piece of software sound like every other piece of software. The list is part of the instructions it is built from, and what gets written for you is checked against it automatically before it ever goes live.

That is a large part of why it does not read like a brochure. It is a rule, not a hope.

Not only the promising ones. Every lead comes out qualified against your criteria, rated on each one with the evidence behind the rating, so nobody is left as an unknown. What your team receives is on the Formidable Dashboard page.

These are written into every agent by code rather than by instruction, so no amount of persuasion from a visitor can talk it out of them, and you cannot switch them off:

Abuse or hate speech.

The conversation is ended politely.

Bots and automated form fills.

No meeting is offered.

People looking for a job.

Sent to your careers page.

People selling you their own services.

Closed, and never passed to your sales team.

It works from a knowledge base your team builds with us, and that knowledge base is deliberately restricted - so it will not quote a price nobody agreed or make a claim we cannot back. When it does not know something, it says so and hands the lead to your team.

It will not change its personality because a visitor asks it to. And it never contacts your leads outside the conversation on your own site: Formidable sends no emails to them, ever. Anything that happens after the chat is your team's, on your schedule.

You have just read how it asks. The pages below cover the rest of it - what you set up, where the work lands, and the journey in between.

• InstallationIt arrives already knowing how to run a sales conversation. Here is what you adjust.
• Formidable DashboardWhere the conversations, the briefings and the booked meetings land.
• How it worksThe whole journey from form fill to booked meeting, in six steps.