Search engines have long been the compass guiding consumers through their buying journey. But what if there is a way to dominate this technology to reach potential customers? Enter generative AI, a game-changer increasingly transforming how consumers discover their needs. We've compiled this guide to help you navigate how to use AI for sales prospecting. Let’s begin!
Implications of AI in Sales
The emergence of AI presents wide-reaching implications in sales, and some can be terrifying. Is AI capable of displacing actual salespeople’s jobs? The concern is not exactly for the sales industry alone. Still, many sales professionals are worried about AI's increasing popularity. HubSpot’s 2023 State of AI in Sales revealed that 42% of salespeople fear AI could replace them. Despite the looming massive job displacement, several salespeople still consider AI a powerful resource in the modern sales landscape.
Regardless of your feelings about AI, it is here to stay. It's obvious! AI is already demonstrating a promising future in several fields. Sales professionals must learn to use AI-powered resources to support their responsibilities and achieve exceptional outcomes. In the succeeding section, we will discuss using AI for sales prospecting.
1. Use advanced tools to improve your data and unlock new possibilities.
Enriching your data with AI gives you a 360-degree view of prospects, leads, customers, and processes, allowing for smarter decision-making. Take advantage of tools like HubSpot's AI-powered predictive scoring, which identifies high-potential leads based on your defined criteria, helping you prioritize your efforts for maximum impact.
Zoho's DataPrep takes AI-powered data enrichment a step further. It goes beyond simply analyzing data; it uses AI to unlock hidden insights. Imagine automatically extracting lead sentiment and key interests from your existing CRM information. DataPrep creates these valuable "new data points" for you, allowing you to personalize outreach, prioritize high-potential leads, and build more effective lead-scoring models. The bottom line? Stronger relationships with qualified leads lead to more sales.
2. Enhance performance with AI-powered conversation intelligence.
Most sophisticated conversation intelligence software leverages some AI models to analyze sales calls and pull critical insights. For example, HubSpot's conversation intelligence feature uses AI to answer the "why behind sales performance."
3. Turn pipeline management from guesswork to growth engine.
Let's be honest. Even the most diligent sales reps need help with perfectly accurate forecasts. Traditional methods often lead to inaccurate pipelines. Here's where AI steps in. Artificial intelligence can significantly reduce the chance of errors in your sales team's forecasts, giving you a clearer picture of your pipeline's health and future growth potential.
Here are some AI tools for pipeline management and forecasting:
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a popular sales CRM and pipeline management software with forecasting capabilities. The platform offers a customizable Forecast View that you can regularly check for quick adjustments and planning.With top-tier plans, you will also get the Insights Revenue Forecast tool, which lets you predict future revenue. Finally, Pipedrive's best feature is its integration with other business tools.
Anaplan
Anaplan is a comprehensive planning and sales forecasting tool that helps businesses manage their performance. It combines data from different systems and tracks sales pipelines and forecasts in real-time.
The software uses predictive analytics to help businesses find growth opportunities and use resources effectively. Anaplan also has easy-to-read dashboards that show performance quickly, assisting users to make decisions faster.
SPOTIO
Spotio is sales engagement software for B2B and B2C sales teams. It offers sales pipeline management and tracking features to predict future sales. With Spotio, you will get an accurate picture of your sales performance, which is crucial for forecasting.
Moreover, it simplifies lead management with route planning and mapping, which aids in accurate sales forecasting. Spotio also provides real-time location and activity tracking features to boost your overall sales process.
4. Streamline and optimize sales engagement.
Sales engagement is all about building relationships with potential customers. AI can transform this process by unlocking valuable data insights. Firstly, AI helps you better understand customer needs and pain points. This knowledge fuels every aspect of your interaction, from crafting a targeted pitch to person-lazing sales content.
Secondly, AI empowers you to automate repetitive tasks and personalize interactions at scale, allowing you to focus on building strong customer relationships.
5. Personalize Email Outreach
To effectively use AI for sales prospecting, you must integrate email outreach into your workflow. You can use several AI sales tools to accomplish each step, but here, we'll walk through the most popular ones.
SimilarWeb Chrome Extension
The first step in your outreach campaign is finding your prospects. The SimilarWeb Chrome Extension helps by identifying key metrics, like monthly site visitors and domain authority. You can use this information for prospecting in several ways.
BuzzStream
With BuzzS ream, you can dig further into a website's stats and identify its social metric, including the number of followers by platform. Plus, you can view an influencer's complete online profile to understand their reach and engagement level.
All you need to do is enter the website URL into the Name field, and Buzzstream will give you all the information you need, including PageRank, number of followers, inbound links, and more. That means you can verify the contact quality, but you'll still need another tool to find their email address.
HubSpot Sales
The HubSpot Sales Chrome extension offers an easy way to follow up with prospects who do respond—or take some other action within your email.
Once you set up your free HubSpot Sales profile, you can use the Sales extension within Gmail to help you manage leads and prospects through your email outreach. The standout feature for our purposes is that you can select to receive instant desktop notifications that will alert you to follow up as soon as a targeted lead completes a desired action, like opening an email, clicking a link, or downloading an attachment. Ultimately, follow-up allows you to further the connection while thinking about it, which can increase your conversion rates.
We hope this curated list of AI for sales prospecting applications will guide you in integrating AI into your business operations.
