In the B2B marketplace, sales prospecting is crucial for continual growth and success. While consistently drumming up new leads is essential for a healthy sales pipeline, traditional prospecting tactics yield inconsistent results and tend to require time-consuming tasks. Many sales teams spend hours every week cold calling, manually searching websites and directories for contact information, and attending networking events.
Sales leaders looking for a more powerful, reliable way to identify potential customers and generate leads have begun to turn to artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline, automate, and accelerate the sales prospecting process.
In this article, we’ll explore the revolutionary role of AI in sales prospecting, including the most effective uses and benefits, as well as tips for successfully implementing AI into your sales prospecting strategy.
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What is AI Sales Prospecting?
Sales prospecting with AI is the process of using artificial intelligence to identify and engage with potential customers. Today, AI-powered tools are transforming sales prospecting into a more predictable, automatic process that requires significantly less manpower to execute. For example, AI tools can now:
Identify promising accounts
Perform advanced lead scoring
Generate outreach campaign templates
Schedule meetings
Predict behaviors and trends
Enrich large quantities of contact data
Follow up with leads
With AI, sales reps can spend less time on mundane tasks and focus their time selling to accounts most likely to convert to paying customers.
7 Top Benefits of Using AI for Sales Prospecting
By integrating AI into sales strategies, businesses can exceed efficiency goals, save money on hours of prospecting labor, and better equip their sales representatives with comprehensive B2B contact data and buyer insights.
Let’s look at a few primary benefits of AI for sales prospecting.
Simplify workflows. Sales teams can connect AI tools to their CRM to optimize workflows, streamline information sharing, and regularly enrich and centralize prospect data.
Save time. Traditional prospecting is tedious and time-consuming. Experts estimate that AI tools save sales teams an average of 2 hours daily on repetitive tasks.
Prevent burnout. When equipped with better information and the automation of tedious tasks, sales teams are 2.4 times less likely to feel overworked, effectively helping to lower turnover.
Exceed sales quotas. Teams that effectively leverage AI tools are 3.7 times more likely to meet and exceed sales quotas.
Boost conversions. AI tools can utilize predictive modeling, continuous learning, and advanced data analysis to identify high-quality leads. Teams that utilize AI see a 79% increase in conversion rates.
Personalize outreach at scale. Teams can use automated prospecting to analyze large quantities of customer data to personalize outreach and recommend relevant products, increasing customer engagement by 78%.
Better Data. With AI data enrichment, customer data can be continuously collected from sources like CRMs, social media, company webpages, and third-party databases to provide extensive information on customer pain points and needs while identifying key company decision-makers.
The primary goal of AI tools should not be to replace your sales teams or make them obsolete. In fact, human interaction is vital for B2B sales. Effective AI solutions should simply empower your sales reps to do what they do best: have conversations, make connections, and build trust and authority with potential customers.
7 Ways to Use AI in Sales Prospecting
Now that you know the many benefits of AI for sales prospecting, let’s look at a few actionable ways to leverage AI for your prospecting strategy.
Narrow in on your ICP
For a B2B business, an ideal customer profile (ICP) describes a company that would most benefit from your product or service and would be a profitable customer for your business.
Traditionally, developing an ICP required relying on surface-level data such as demographics, industry, or company size. With AI, however, businesses can create extremely specific ICP criteria and identify companies that are highly likely to benefit from their product. AI can analyze previous purchase history, website behavior, social media activity, and more to create a highly-nuanced ICP.
With more specific ICPs, sales representatives can avoid wasted time trying to sell to customers who aren’t a perfect fit. Instead, reps can spend their time and resources targeting promising accounts that have the need and budget for their product and identify decision-makers who have the authority to make the purchase.
Data Enrichment
The process of sales prospecting relies on sound, accurate data. Data enrichment is the process of optimizing existing data to ensure the information your team has access to is valid, updated, and comprehensive.
That’s what makes AI’s ability to enrich massive quantities of data at once so valuable. AI tools can automatically:
Fill in missing information
Identify inconsistencies
Delete duplicate or inaccurate information
Predict purchasing patterns
Enrich data from external sources
AI data enrichment offers sales teams a more comprehensive view of prospect lists, improving accuracy, consistency, and decision-making.
Improve Research
Before you can sell a prospect your product or service, you must first understand their pain points. Presenting a personalized solution to their problem is an excellent way to gain their attention, trust, and engagement with your business. AI tools can perform research to identify a prospect’s pain points and suggest relevant products as solutions.
Plus, AI can analyze vast datasets and alert sales reps to industry shakeups to provide sales reps with actionable insights on potential customers and advise on which sales techniques will perform best with each customer.
List Building
For a potential customer to make it onto your prospect list, certain criteria must first be met to determine if they’d be a good fit for your sales efforts.
AI tools and algorithms can scrape the web for you to research and identify new businesses that fit into your target market. Comprehensive prospect lists, generally created based on information such as industry, location, revenue, or technology usage, can optimize the entire sales process, as they provide reps access to better targeting and segmentation efforts for personalization.
Some sales automation platforms like Nimbler can automate list building by pulling many contacts that fit your ICP at once.
Automate Lead Scoring
Use AI lead scoring models to help your sales reps concentrate on leads most likely to convert to paying customers. With AI’s ability to consume vast quantities of data and identify patterns, sales teams can automate their lead scoring process and take the guesswork out of prospecting.
Each time a customer interacts with a business, AI scoring models can automatically adjust predictions and update sales reps on that prospect’s likelihood of purchase, improving sales accuracy and increasing conversion rates.
AI-powered lead scoring allows your sales reps to zero in on accounts highly likely to convert to paying customers.
Personalized Outreach at Scale
AI allows sales teams to personalize outreach to customers by analyzing real-time customer data, enabling representatives to:
Make personalized product recommendations
Address each customer by name
Deliver relevant content
Make prospects feel special
Further, generative AI tools can instantly create personalized emails tailored to buyer personas and streamline content creation, allowing businesses to deliver personalized experiences across diverse audiences.
Timely Follow Ups
Statistically, 80% of sales require five follow-up contacts before a purchase is made, and only 2% of sales are made during the first point of contact. Plus, factors such as the time of day and contacts per week are all crucial to get right when following up with a potential customer.
AI sales automation tools allow you to automate your follow-ups by automatically sending prospects a pre-written email or alerting teams to make a call to ensure no contacts are missed.
Not only do AI-powered follow-ups save your team members time and ensure constant customer contact, but they also allow your algorithms to learn more about potential prospects and create a more comprehensive picture of the prospect’s pain points and needs.
3 Helpful AI Prospecting Tools
There are an overwhelming number of AI tools available on the market. Choosing one platform can be difficult without clearly outlining your AI needs. Let’s look at three popular types of AI prospecting tools to simplify your selection process.
CRM with AI
When integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) software, AI can streamline workflows, optimize and enrich existing customer data, and improve analytics.
Let’s look at three CRMs that make the most of AI:
Hubspot’s CRM ChatSpot. ChatSpot’s AI features can automate tasks and inform decision-making by assisting with tasks like sending emails, generating content and insights, and creating analytical reports.
Salesforce’s Einstein 1. Salesforce’s CRM AI solution has pre-built options for users who need a ready-made solution but also caters to code-savvy users with customizable AI solutions for your CRM needs.
Zoho CRM. Zoho’s AI-powered platform is built to help sales, marketing, and support specialists streamline workflows. Plus, Zoho’s AI sales assistant, Zia, provides sales forecasting insights and assists sales teams with lead prioritization.
AI-Powered Outreach Platforms
AI-powered sales automation platforms can function independently or as an integration with your CRM. These AI tools can help your sales teams plan, execute, and automate targeted outreach campaigns.
Let’s look at a few platforms that offer AI-powered sales outreach.
Nimbler. Nimbler’s AI sales assistant can generate autonomous, hyper-personalized email campaigns, build outreach sequences, automatically reply to inbound messages, and provide extensive campaign tracking and reporting. Nimbler’s platform is perfect for sales teams looking for an all-in-one sales automation solution.
Outreach.io. Outreach’s sales execution platform helps account executives (AEs) and sales managers streamline sales workflows, connect data from multiple conversations, and provide sales insights to help teams create more effective campaigns.
Salesloft. Salesloft helps B2B sales teams streamline workflows and increase productivity. It offers automated email cadences, personalized outreach, and multi-channel engagement options, making it ideal for enterprise-level sales organizations.
Lead Scoring and Data Enrichment Tools
Digital lead scoring and data enrichment tools help businesses automatically assign a “score” to prospects based on how well they fit a business’ ICP. These AI-driven platforms combine existing customer data with information from external sources with the end goal of helping teams identify and prioritize the most qualified leads.
Let’s look at some platforms specializing in lead scoring and data enrichment for B2B sales teams.
Nimbler. Nimbler is a sales automation platform that enriches customer data to provide actionable insights and advanced lead scoring. Nimbler offers a database of 120M+ constantly enriched B2B contacts and can seamlessly connect with your CRM to enhance each of your contacts with up to 50 data points, including phone numbers, emails, job titles, industry information, and more. Plus, its automated outreach capabilities make it an all-in-one tool for sales teams.
Clearbit. Clearbit sources data from over 250 public and private data sources through machine learning algorithms and human QA to ensure data is regularly updated and refined.
Apollo. Apollo is an AI pipeline management tool that offers automatic lead scoring and prioritization through a set of custom criteria set by each business.
Best Practices for Adding AI to Your Prospecting Workflow
Let’s dive into proven techniques for successfully implementing AI into your sales prospecting strategy.
Set clear objectives. Before investing in AI software or platforms, ask yourself what you want to achieve with AI. Is your goal to improve overall efficiency? Are you looking to increase lead conversion rates or reduce sales team turnover?
Make sure the objectives you lay out are clearly defined and aligned with your overall business strategies. Further, your objectives should be realistic and measurable to ensure the AI solution you implement is working and has a positive ROI.
Select the right AI tools for your needs. When selecting AI software or platforms, take into consideration factors such as your budget, needs, integration capabilities, scalability, and security needs.
Choose a platform that offers the right solutions for your business needs. Don’t get too distracted by costly or complex products offering many features your team won’t use.
Invest in team training. Proper training your employees on your new AI software will help you achieve the best possible ROI. Team members need to understand not just how to use the AI tools provided but also how to leverage and act on the insights and recommendations provided.
Maintain human oversight. AI should be used to boost the productivity and effectiveness of your sales team, not replace them. Human connection still remains the most effective way to make sales and provide ethical and creative solutions to prospective customers.
Balancing your new AI-powered tools with the strengths and capabilities of your team is the best way to deliver personalized, expedient sales interactions.
Integrate gradually. You shouldn’t need to re-write an entire sales process around your new AI software. Your AI tools should be gradually integrated into existing sales processes and used to enhance and empower current strategies.
An effective integration process should be presented as a welcome addition to your sales team and will increase employee support and buy-in.
Monitor AI performance. Regularly track the success of your AI integration with your beginning objectives in mind. Measuring performance is useful to help you identify areas of improvement, success, and growth potential.
Stay informed on AI trends. AI capabilities and offerings are rapidly evolving and advancing. Staying on top of trends, new software, and potential uses for your AI tools can help your sales team keep a competitive edge, enhance your overall sales strategies, and provide areas for expanding new solutions to customers.
Transform AI Prospecting with Nimbler’s All-in-One Platform
Adding AI to your sales prospecting strategy will give your sales team the time and information necessary to increase conversions.
Nimbler provides an all-in-one solution for teams looking to take their prospecting strategies into the future. With a database of over 120M+ B2B contacts, Nimbler users receive data that’s verified in real time and can create fully automated outreach campaigns in minutes. Nimbler makes it easy to crush sales quotas and identify high-value accounts with enriched data, advanced lead scoring, and targeted insights into customer behavior.
Embrace AI sales prospecting with Nimbler and watch your sales teams excel. Try Nimbler for free today.
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