How to Use AI for Sales Prospecting

While prospecting is a long game, sometimes it can be too long. It’s no wonder that more than 40% of salespeople say it’s the most challenging part of the sales process, with closing just a little behind at 36%.

It makes sense: closing is somewhat easier because you’ve already got one small “yes,” and now it’s time to move on to the bigger yes. Prospecting means sourcing, qualifying, and, often, hoping for the best.

With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI), you can shrink down the prospecting limbo and make room for memorable sale/post-sale experiences.

Read on to find out how AI can help with prospecting and when you should be careful with it.

Key Takeaways

AI helps identify, score, and contact leads, making your sales team’s job easier and more efficient.

Use AI to ensure quicker yet still personalized interactions, reducing customer frustration and boosting satisfaction.

By automating tedious tasks, AI reduces customer acquisition costs (CAC) and lets your salespeople focus on winning deals.

Keep the human touch, manage data quality, and continuously train your team to get the most out of AI without losing the personal connection.

How AI Can Make Your Sales Prospecting a Lot Easier

An All-Around Better Customer Experience

A terrible customer service experience is memorable for all the wrong reasons. Bad CX and poor customer service can cost companies big time. And we’re not just talking about money.

We’re talking negative reviews and customers jumping ship to competitors – all of which could impact your bottom line.

AI can help smooth things over with more consistent yet still personalized interactions. Ideally, that means promptly answering customer inquiries based on deep customer research.

Lessening the Burden on Sales Teams

According to G2 Industry Insights, 81% of salespeople believe AI saves them from manual tasks. Think about it: sales teams often get overwhelmed with data entry, follow-up emails, and lead qualification. AI can take over the mundane activities that can have even your best-sellers staring at the clock.

Administrative work is no longer a sales job. Not anymore, not with the technology surges we’ve been witnessing and the myriad tools you can use to outsource these tasks.

Sales jobs include 1) moving deals forward and 2) closing deals. Anything that hampers those should be out of the picture.

Reducing CAC

Keeping CAC in check is crucial for maintaining a healthy profit margin and ensuring your growth efforts don’t drain your finances.

Businesses that use AI in sales can see a reduction in their CAC. How? By speeding up what you can’t outsource. And, according to CRO Advisor and Generative AI Expert Adam Bloom, by enabling teams to close more deals with fewer resources.

From pinpointing the best leads to nurturing them with personalized content and automating follow-ups, AI ensures your sales process is as cost-effective as possible. By reducing the time and resources spent on CAC, your marketing dollars stretch further.

More Data, Better Data

“If your company works with large amounts of data, you can expect anywhere from 0.5 to 4 errors per 10,000 entries with double entry – and that’s assuming the data entry clerk is having a good day,” says the team at Reveal by OPIN Systems.

AI can give you richer, more accurate data by analyzing interactions, monitoring customer behavior, and summarizing chat conversations. This means you can get a 360-degree view of your prospects with much less human error. Of course, human oversight is still crucially important to ensure you’re working with the right insights. After all, your output quality matches your input quality.

A Smoother Multichannel Experience

Data from Zendesk shows that 73% of customers expect to start a conversation on one channel and continue it on another without having to repeat it.

Whether your customers are reaching out via email, chat, social media, or phone, AI ensures all interactions are tightly knit. This means no more frustrating repeats for your customers and a consistent platform experience.

A Few of The Many Prospecting Steps You Can Optimize with AI

Lead Generation

AI can scour the internet, social media, and internal databases to identify potential leads that match your target profile. This means your sales team gets a steady stream of high-quality leads a lot more easily than if they had to conduct social listening manually.

Lead Scoring

AI can evaluate and score leads based on their likelihood of converting, considering factors like previous interactions, demographics, and online behavior. This helps your team prioritize their efforts on the most promising opportunities. If you need a refresher on Lead Scoring, here’s how to build a Lead Scoring model that works for you.

Personalized Outreach

While “personalized” and “AI” might seem like an odd couple, they’re quite powerful together. Considering you know your ICP and have prompted it correctly, AI can craft personalized messages to each prospect’s needs and preferences, making your outreach feel more genuine without starting from scratch.

Sentiment Analysis

AI can analyze text from emails, social media, and other communications to gauge customer sentiment. This means you can understand how your prospects feel about your product, service, or even your latest marketing campaign. For example, if AI detects a lot of frustration in social media comments about your product’s pricing, you can adjust your strategy by offering a limited-time discount or flexible payment plans to address those concerns.

Dos and Don’ts of AI for Sales Prospecting

Do: Train Your Team

AI is a powerful tool, but only if your team knows how to use it. Let’s say that your AI tool analyzes customer interactions and suggests that certain phrases tend to convert leads better. That’s awesome. But without proper training, one of your salespeople might take these suggestions at face value and start using these phrases robotically in every interaction without considering the context.

Invest in training to ensure everyone understands the capabilities and limitations of your AI tools. This will help them use them as needed without blindly relying on them.

Do: Implement AI Solutions that Comply with Data Protection Regulations

Make sure any and every AI solution you implement is compliant with data protection regulations like GDPR, CPA, HIPAA, and any regulations that may apply to your (or your customers’) area. If your AI system isn’t properly secured, it could be vulnerable to hacks or data breaches. This can lead to the exposure of sensitive customer information, potentially resulting in a snowball of legal penalties and loss of customer trust.

Do: Manage It Periodically

Regularly review and adjust your AI tools to guarantee they work as intended and adapt to new data. You should analyze the outcomes of AI-driven campaigns to identify trends, successes, or misses.

In addition, you should continuously feed new data into your machine-learning models to improve their accuracy and relevance. This helps the tools adapt to new market conditions and customer behaviors, which will never stop changing.

Don’t: Replace Human Touch

AI can handle a lot, but it can’t replace the human element of sales. Arguably, it never will. Make sure your team is still engaging with prospects on a personal level – particularly during sales and post-sale. Use AI to improve these interactions, not replace them. Otherwise, you’ll be right back to square one.

Don’t: Overlook Data Quality

AI is only as good as the data it processes. Verify that your data is accurate, up-to-date, and relevant. Poor data quality can lead to poor AI performance, so keep your data clean and organized for better outputs.

AI-Powered Tools and Platforms to Simplify Sales Prospecting

AI Sales Assistants

AI assistants like Clara can help with the stuff that stacks up on your team’s to-do lists: scheduling meetings, sending follow-up emails, and managing CRM data. Think of them as virtual assistants on steroids.

Outbound Lead Generation Platforms

Platforms like RevBoss unite the best of the human approach with the best of AI. It works by automating things like sending and reporting so that the expert team can focus on delivering great messaging, laser-focused targeting, data analysis, and solid relationships.

Not to mention, RevBoss uses sales intelligence insights collected from internal knowledge, which now totals over 50,000 client campaigns. With AI, the RevBoss team (and your team) can achieve sales goals that much faster.

Chatbots

AI chatbots like Intercom can handle initial customer inquiries that don’t need detailed answers. They also qualify leads and even schedule appointments for you. They give instant responses and can operate 24/7, handing you over the leads who would like a human response.

Buyer Intelligence Platforms

At this point, spreadsheets are a nightmare – especially for sorting and tagging endless customer data. Buyer intelligence platforms like Humantic AI can analyze mounds of data to provide insights into buying behavior, decision-making criteria, preferences, and trends.

Here’s the Best Time to Use AI In the Sales Process

This point is important enough to justify its own post. But here’s a shorter version.

As long as it doesn’t harm your bonding with prospects, you can use AI throughout the sales process. However, the sales teams often waste the most time in the qualification stage. Similar to how designers and writers suffer the most during the initial first draft.

Sales teams waste a lot of time prospecting for bad-fit companies. That certainly starts with a poor-fit notion of a qualified prospect, which is a whole ‘nother article in itself.

That said, as long as your ICP is well-defined, AI can do a much better job for your team by:

Visiting a list of potentially good-fit domains
Checking each domain for a series of qualifying questions related to value props, pricing, and more
Qualify each domain as a “good fit” or “bad fit,” depending on what you’d like to learn.

This is a prime example of how AI can make a sales team more productive from the very first steps and why you shouldn’t use AI to the detriment of your team.

Over to You

AI can do a ton. We’re impressed at how far it’s come and how fast it’s allowing our team to do pretty cool things. But we still value our RevBuds and wouldn’t trade them for the most sophisticated language model out there.

Because, at least until the robots take over, the smartest companies will still be gathering forces from both artificial and real intelligence. And soon enough, the human touch will be a “boutique” feature.

The RevBoss team delivers value and happiness and leads to 100s of high-growth teams winning big deals all over the world. Schedule time with our RevBuds today, and stop prospecting from slowing down your sales cycle.