Overview
A sales assistant helps your website visitors get immediate answers to product questions, qualifies them as potential leads, and captures their contact information — all without requiring a human sales rep to be online. This guide walks you through creating and deploying one from scratch.What You Will Build
By the end of this guide, you will have:- An AI assistant with a sales-focused system prompt
- A knowledge base loaded with your product information
- An embeddable widget configured with a lead capture form
- Analytics to monitor lead quality and conversation performance
Step-by-Step Setup
Create the Assistant
Go to your workspace and click New Assistant. Give it a name like “Sales Assistant” or your company name followed by “Sales.”Set the visibility to Public so it can be accessed via the widget.
Write the System Prompt
The system prompt defines how your assistant behaves. For a sales assistant, focus on being helpful, asking qualifying questions, and guiding visitors toward next steps.Here is a template you can customize:
Connect a Knowledge Base
Create a project and upload your product documentation, pricing pages, FAQ documents, feature comparisons, and case studies. Then connect the project to your sales assistant.The assistant uses this knowledge base to answer product-specific questions accurately rather than making up information.Good content to upload:
- Product feature descriptions
- Pricing tiers and comparison tables
- FAQ documents
- Case studies and testimonials
- Integration documentation
- Competitor comparison sheets
Configure the Widget
Go to your assistant’s Widget Settings and configure:
- Enable the widget — Toggle widget access on
- Set allowed domains — Add your website domain(s)
- Welcome message — Write a greeting that encourages engagement:
- Suggested questions — Add 3-4 common questions visitors ask:
- “What does [Product] do?”
- “How much does it cost?”
- “Can I see a demo?”
- “How is this different from [Competitor]?”
Set Up Lead Capture
Enable the lead form in your widget settings. Configure the fields you want to collect:
Choose when the form appears:
| Field | Recommended | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | First and last name |
| Yes (required) | Primary contact method | |
| Phone | Optional | Useful for high-intent leads |
| Company | Recommended | Helps sales team prepare |
- After N messages — Show the form after the visitor has engaged (recommended: 3-5 messages)
- On demand — Let visitors choose when to share their info
Deploy to Your Website
Add the widget script tag to your website:See the Widget Installation guide for platform-specific instructions.
Monitoring Performance
After deploying your sales assistant, monitor these metrics in the IllumiChat dashboard:| Metric | What It Tells You | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Conversations started | Widget engagement rate | Growing over time |
| Avg. messages per conversation | Depth of engagement | 4-8 messages |
| Lead form completions | Conversion rate | 10-30% of conversations |
| Response accuracy | Quality of answers | Review weekly |
Improving Lead Quality
Refine the system prompt
Refine the system prompt
If you are getting too many unqualified leads, add more qualifying criteria to the system prompt. If you are getting too few leads, make the prompt more encouraging and lower the bar for suggesting the contact form.
Update the knowledge base
Update the knowledge base
Review conversations where the assistant could not answer a question. Add that information to your knowledge base to improve future responses.
Optimize suggested questions
Optimize suggested questions
Track which suggested questions lead to the highest conversion rates and prioritize those. Remove questions that lead to dead-end conversations.
Set up webhook notifications
Set up webhook notifications
Configure a webhook for the
contact.created event to get instant notifications when a new lead is captured. Route these to your CRM or Slack channel for immediate follow-up.