How To Use AI For Sales Prospecting [+5 Best Tools For 2024]
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Introduction
If you’re like most sales reps, you’re coming up against the massive push to integrate AI into all our workflows. And for good reason. AI is a sea of change for automating and optimizing our sales prospecting efforts.
But how does AI impact sales prospecting in clear and practical ways? It's all about creative and tech-savvy people leveraging solutions to make their jobs that much easier.
Here, we’re covering the how, the who, and the where of AI in sales prospecting, including our five favorite platforms in 2024.
Understanding AI in Sales Prospecting
Sales prospecting is the bread and butter of most sales functions. But modern sales software has a way of radically shifting how we think of traditional practices.
What is sales prospecting, and how is it important?
Sales prospecting identifies and engages customers (prospects) who could find value in your brand or products. At the heart of this process is the sales pipeline through which you can nurture leads from first contact to final sale.
The steps in this pipeline include:
Identifying possible leads based on your ideal customer profile and research.
Qualifying these leads to determine if they fit your profiles.
Engaging leads through ongoing marketing efforts, such as emails, social media outreach, or other approaches. This step could include cool or informative assets like demos, direct meetings, or easily accessible marketing materials.
Nurturing leads through the pipeline by building relationships through strategic engagement at touch points.
Converting those leads into sales.
The idea of a sales pipeline is essential because it gives you a representation of your sales flow–a critical blueprint to guide strategy, optimization, and forecasting. This helps you create and optimize marketing strategies that speak to those customers.
How is AI enhancing sales prospecting?
According to McKinsey, two primary areas where AI has been implemented are product development and marketing/sales. In the latter's case, adoption has more than doubled in the past year.
This is where AI revolutionizes prospecting–drawing from the automated and data-driven capabilities of AI to boost core prospecting efforts. Modern salespeople are looking to AI to enhance processes like:
Qualifying leads quickly and accurately. AI eliminates manual labor in qualifying leads, saving time and improving consistency. Automating the process means that qualification standards are applied consistently across potential candidates, and the best leads rise to the top.
Streamlining outreach without sacrificing quality. AI can take outreach one step further by applying intelligence to engage customers based on complex behaviors.
Delivering real personalization shaped with data. Marketers are quickly learning how AI can help them personalize sales outreach with tailored messaging and human-like chatbots.
Using data to drive decisions. As salespeople, we love our data, but we can’t truly digest all of it on our own. That’s why 73% of professionals see AI helping them pull more insights from their data than they could alone. AI does this while providing a ready source of actionable suggestions based on customer behavioral insights.
These enhancements have real-world impacts. According to a Deloitte report, a cloud services company adopting AI into its sales prospect pipeline experienced a 20% increase in pipeline volume.
What are the benefits of AI in sales prospecting?
With AI, sales teams can improve their processes internally (regarding logistics and productivity) and externally (outreach and messaging).
With AI, you can:
Cut costs in terms of time, money, and resources.
Boost productivity so salespeople can do more with the same resources.
Draw from actual data to brainstorm creative assets like emails, social media posts, and engagement campaigns.
Tailor messaging to discrete audiences effectively.
Improve your ability to map email sequences for outreach and follow-up.
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The essential AI technologies driving sales prospecting
Marketing and sales platforms that leverage AI are most likely incorporating one or more of these intelligent automation technologies to revamp or streamline one or more processes completely:
If AI is intelligence, machine learning is the learning foundation on which it is built. These algorithms rely on historical data and models (language or analytical models) to provide deep insights into particular trends or data sets.
One area where machine learning contributes is predictive analytics, or the use of intelligent algorithms to predict future trends in data. For example, an AI providing predictive analytics can offer hypothetical scores to leads based on existing data to inform where and how marketing pros identify leads.
Gen AI represents a massive step forward in intelligent systems, and professionals are noticing… which is why 65% of respondents to a McKinsey survey noted their use of the technology. Gen AI is perfect for language learning and communication, content generation, and supporting conversational customer interactions.
Modern chatbots can have fully realized conversations with potential customers and react in real time, providing information or insight that guides the customer from an initial contact towards a more meaningful engagement.
Modern sales and marketing rely on immediacy. Real-time insights combine AI's speed and creativity to deliver a better customer experience to the prospect.
How to Implement AI in Sales Prospecting
The notion of “implementing AI” into a process like prospecting might seem daunting for non-specialists. And yet, 68% of sales professionals predict that most software will already have AI baked in–signaling that maybe sales professionals don’t have to worry too much about accessing the technology because it is already here.
That leaves you with the need to plan, adopt, and optimize your use of AI.
Steps to integrate AI tools into your sales process
While AI is an exciting tool, it is, after all, just a tool. You must know your ideal customer profile and how AI can help you prospect them.
Then, it’s all about finding the right tool for the right job. So, do you need:
Specific or Comprehensive Tools? Is it a niche feature that will bring those prospects in, or something more end-to-end (like Artisan) where AI is baked into the entire prospecting pipeline?
Broad or Focused Capabilities? If you’re looking for automated email outreach, you might not need an entire suite of automated tools better served for an omni-channel approach. For example, while Artisan provides AI support across the outbound cycle, another platform like Reply.io focuses on automating outreach.
Extensive Integrations? If you’re firmly rooted in a productivity or CRM environment, then it’s imperative for any solution to fit within your workflow. Most businesses fit within this model, but having an entire library of integrations might not be that important for others.
Expert Support and Usability? How familiar is your team with AI tools? If you want to adapt quickly, you will look for extensive usability, training, and educational resources.
Best Practices for Using AI in Sales
AI works primarily as a tool, but real expertise is required to make the most of it. That’s where marketers' skills and knowledge can apply best practices and create something truly engaging for their prospects.
Focus on personalization
Writing personalized emails takes time and energy that could be better spent on strategies or direct engagements with prospects. AI can streamline the process by building emails from pre-existing templates or approaches.
Artisan’s email writing features include proprietary playbooks that address personal connections like shared university backgrounds or offer thought-provoking and relevant industry questions that prompt conversations with prospects.
Leverage proprietary AI-crafted emails to make your prospecting content powerful and personal in a way that gets responses. Try Ava Now.
Make sure to follow up
When, where, and how to follow up with prospects requires data entry, planning, and scheduling hours. But, with AI tools (especially all-in-one solutions), you can automate outreach and follow-ups based on contexts, time-based criteria, or prospect behavior. In Artisan, you can automate three-step email sequences that will stop once that prospect responds.
Automated outreach allows you to focus on being thoughtful and creative rather than managing spreadsheets and calendars–a reality that, according to Salesforce, seven out of ten markets expect to become a reality.
Optimize, optimize, optimize
Above and beyond all, you should use AI to optimize all outbound materials to capitalize on what works and weed out approaches that down. From calls to emails and social media engagement, AI can help you deliver better information and value to prospects based on real insights.
Always rely on data
Personalization, follow-up, optimization… These best practices work because you can use data to tailor each to real insights rather than gut feelings or trends. With Artisan’s database of 300M+ B2B contacts, you’re never relying on anything but the best data to inform your decision-making.
Top 5 AI Tools for Sales Prospecting in 2024
1. Artisan
Key Features:
A proprietary database of 300M+ high-quality B2B contacts. Automated lead research and enrichment. Personalized and optimized email writing and delivery and white-glove support.
Use Cases:
Startups, Mid-Market Businesses, Enterprises, and Lead-Generating Agencies
Benefits
Artisan is an end-to-end outreach solution integrating AI at every step, including:
Prospecting workflows cover everything from research and identification to the final touch and sale.
Automation handling data entry without the need for manual intervention
Proprietary playbooks support high-quality ghostwriting personalized to each contact.
White-glove services provide tailored services that meet your prospecting needs, including personalized workflows for your prospecting pipeline.
Ava’s database of 300M+ B2B prospects, combined with built-in automation and extensive personalization playbooks, makes sales prospecting a simple, streamlined part of your workflow. Try Ava Now.
2. Seamless.ai
Key Features
AI-recommended prospects and pitches. Automated list-building. Buyer intent data. AI-driven copywriting.
Use Cases
Account Executives, Sales Development Representatives
Benefits
Seamless.ai is designed to streamline the work of sales professionals, including marketers and business development teams, who need better performance for their prospecting efforts:
AI-powered data verification ensures that prospecting data is up-to-date.
Pitch Intelligence provides data-backed outreach suggestions.
Automated list-building capabilities backed with AI, minimizing time spent researching and entering data.
3. Clay
Key Features
Real-time data enrichment. CRM integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.). Automated data management and outbound prospecting. AI-assisted research.
Use Cases
Sales and Marketing Teams, Recruiters, Business Development Teams
Benefits
Clay is an AI-powered relationship management platform designed to help users discover, organize, and deepen their connections across various platforms.
AI-powered research “claygents” can search through websites to find relevant information.
Personalized messaging tools that can fit into direct messaging or email campaigns.
Cross-database waterfall enrichment that uses sequential queries to maximize prospect research profiles.
4. Happysales
Key Features
Prospect Insights. Personalized Engagement via AI. Automated Response Management. Company Insights. AI Email and Script Generators.
Use Cases
Sales and Marketing Teams, Customer Success Teams.
Benefits
Happysales is an enigma. Currently only open for early access, Happysales includes a few functions advertised on its website:
Workflow optimization.
Outbound prospecting optimization.
A “company insights” database for large enterprises.
Two general-purpose AI generators for prospecting scripts and emails.
5. Drift
Key Features
Conversational Marketing. Revenue Orchestration. “Bionic” AI Chatbots. Website concierge services for booking and scheduling.
Use Cases
Sales and Marketing Teams in Manufacturing, Finance, Technology, and Professional Services.
Benefits
Drift supports businesses aiming to enhance their customer engagement and sales processes:
AI-powered chatbots and live chat features enable businesses to support conversational marketing.
Pipeline-spanning analytics, revenue orchestration, and automation (due to their being acquired by Salesloft).
Real-time prospect engagement with comprehensive analytics on buying signals.
Challenges and Considerations
Like any other technology, AI sales prospecting tools come with their own set of challenges:
Integrations. Solutions focusing on integration will typically include the most well-used platforms. For example, Artisan integrates with HubSpot and Salesforce and provides engineering services to support other integrations that our customers need.
Training and Culture. 39% of marketers don’t know how to use GenAI safely, and 43% claim they don’t know how to get the most value from it. That’s why support and educational services (like those offered by Artisan) are critical to ensuring a smooth transition and adoption phase.
Privacy. Whether you work in healthcare, financial services, or government-adjacent business, your solution must meet industry-specific standards and policies related to security and privacy (such as perimeter security, data obfuscation, or access controls).
Future Trends in AI Sales Prospecting
Sales prospecting is rapidly evolving, and in many ways, it’s impossible to tell where the technology will go. However, there are two directions in which we see innovation taking off:
AI Automation. Sophisticated AI systems will open up automation in an increasing pool of tasks and processes, including more sophisticated insights, integrations, and customer experiences. At some point, it’s unlikely that humans will handle manual tasks related to their pipeline again.
AI Employees. Artisan sees the future of AI prospecting as including AI-powered Sales and Business Development Representatives who can work side-by-side with human professionals to make outreach even quicker and more effective.
Supercharge your sales with Ava, our AI BDR. Experience next-level outreach and see your pipeline soar.