How Your Company Can Use AI for Sales Prospecting

One of the most important parts of any company sales process is sales prospecting. Sales prospecting involves searching for, identifying, qualifying, and reaching out to new prospects — that is, potential customers that you think are likely to buy from you.

As with other areas of marketing and sales, sales prospecting works a lot better with the help of some good digital tools — including AI. In fact, 37% of organizations using AI noted a cost decrease in marketing and sales functions.

But what does AI-enhanced sales prospecting look like, and what’s the best way to approach it? We have the answers here:

• What is AI for sales prospecting?
• The benefits of using AI for sales prospecting
• How to use AI for sales prospecting
• 3 ways to use ChatGPT for sales prospecting

You can also subscribe to Revenue Weekly, our email newsletter, to get more marketing tips delivered straight to your inbox.

What is AI for sales prospecting?

AI for sales prospecting uses a combo of machine learning, AI algorithms, natural language processing (NLP), and predictive analytics to automate and assist you with:

• Finding new prospects
• Analyzing lead data
• Nurturing your leads
• Building relationships with your prospects through personalized communication

The benefits of using AI for sales prospecting

When done correctly, responsibly, and ethically, companies will reap the following benefits from using AI for sales prospecting:

• Improved efficiency and productivity: AI for sales prospecting can automate administrative and repetitive tasks such as data entry, email follow-ups, and meeting scheduling. In fact, more than half of U.S. marketers using AI tools cited improved workflow efficiency as a leading benefit. Using AI for sales prospecting streamlines your process and improves your team’s productivity.
• Cost and time savings: Thanks to a more efficient sales prospecting process, you get to reduce costs and time spent on low-value tasks. Your team can then have more time to focus on high-value, strategic tasks to improve your bottom line.
• Better insights and decision-making: With the help of AI, sales and marketing teams can unify their data and have better prospect and customer insights. AI for sales prospecting can also analyze historical sales data and customer behavior, providing your team insights on which leads to prioritize based on how likely they’ll convert. Your sales team is also equipped with valuable insights that enable them to tailor their approach and upselling or cross-selling strategy.
• Enhanced interactions with prospects and customers: With 72% of consumers admitting that they only engage with personalized messaging, it makes sense for businesses to tailor their marketing messages to their prospects. AI tools for sales prospecting can power your personalization strategy, thus improving your interactions with your customers and nurturing your relationships with them. As a result, you increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

How to use AI for sales prospecting

Let’s talk about how you can use AI to improve your sales prospecting process:

• Finding sales prospects
• Prioritizing sales prospects
• Personalizing your outreach and communications
• Evaluating and improving your sales performance

Finding sales prospects

The first step to identifying your sales prospects is finding them. That can seem like a daunting task if you’re not sure where to look. Thankfully, AI can help with lead generation and sourcing top prospects.

For instance, one way of finding viable prospects is to use social listening tools, like Sprinklr, which now harness the power of AI. These tools can help you find people on social media who are talking favorably about your brand or expressing a need for your products or services.

Prioritizing sales prospects

Identifying your sales prospects also involves prioritizing them based on which ones are most likely to convert. You don’t want to waste time on weak leads who don’t convert, and then watch your strong leads drift away in the meantime. Instead, you want to focus on the leads who are most likely to convert.

That’s where lead scoring comes in. You’ve probably heard of lead scoring before — it’s the process of assigning numerical values to your leads to rank them based on how likely they are to convert. But many lead scoring tools harness AI capabilities to help you streamline the process.

These tools can significantly speed up the sales prospecting process since you spend less time figuring out which prospects to target.

Personalizing your outreach and communications

Another use case for AI for sales prospecting is personalization. Personalize your email copy, social media messages, and outreach to resonate with your audience.

You can do this by tapping AI to generate drafts of these messages based on your prospect’s data:

• What are their interests?
• What have they purchased before?
• What items did they leave in their cart?

Evaluating and improving your sales prospecting

Then, you also measure and improve your sales prospecting efforts’ performance. AI-powered tools can provide you with insights and report on important metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates.

With these insights, you can learn more about your audience, refine your messaging, and optimize your sales prospecting efforts. Our proprietary platform, RevenueCloudFX, can track all these and consolidate your marketing and sales data to keep both teams aligned.

With RevenueCloudFX, you can measure your efforts’ success and therefore improve on them!

3 ways to use ChatGPT for sales prospecting

So, how can you harness generative AI tools to assist with your sales prospecting process? Let’s look at three ways you can use ChatGPT for sales prospecting.

1. Drafting email and transcript templates

Firstly, ChatGPT can be very useful for helping you write cold email and phone call transcripts. You can simply give the program a prompt like “In less than 150 words, write an informal prospecting email that promotes [your brand] services.” Then ChatGPT will come up with something that matches your request.

As you can see, the above example is a great start to a prospecting email. Of course, you probably wouldn’t want to go with exactly what the AI spits out. It needs work — for example, in the second paragraph, I’d want to rewrite it so that it doesn’t keep repeating the words “motor” and “lamination” quite so much.

Still, it’s a good template to work with. You could take this text and rework it to produce a good sales prospecting email.

2. Assisting with headline generation

Another way you can use sales AI is to let it help you generate email headers. Even though the headline of an email is short, it’s one of the most important parts. Without a good headline, your prospects won’t open the email and read what’s written inside.

Thankfully, ChatGPT has your back. Just like with the email body, you can simply ask it to generate an email headline, and it’ll do exactly that.

When I asked for a headline for the email example in the last section, ChatGPT returned the header in the above screenshot. Overall, this is a passable header. Is it everything it could be? No. I think I would rework it to make it less bland. It has the word “boost,” but that’s basically the only compelling word there.

Still, it gives me a base template that I can work from, which speeds up the process a little.

3. Simulating particular styles and voices

Finally, you can use ChatGPT to help you figure out certain styles or voices. What kind of tone do you want to take with your emails or phone calls? Do you want them to sound elegant? Casual? Formal? Funny? The answer to that question depends entirely on your choice of branding.

Whatever it is, though, ChatGPT can help you get a feel for it. You can simply ask ChatGPT to create a short email blurb in whatever voice, and it will do it. Case in point:

ChatGPT didn’t really adhere to the “short” part of my request, but that’s okay. It gave me what I wanted — a look at what a “funny, but still professional” tone of voice would sound like in an email. Using that, I could then go and write my own separate email, but I could harness that same style that ChatGPT demonstrated for me.

A word of caution about generative AI

Whenever we talk about ChatGPT, I feel it’s worth pointing out its limitations. As useful of a tool as it is, it’s not actually as intelligent as you probably think.

ChatGPT is very articulate — it’s good at mimicking the way humans string words together. That can trick us into thinking that it’s as good at writing as humans are. We see a string of long words that are correctly capitalized and punctuated, and our brains go, “It’s just like a human writer!”

But that’s simply not true. ChatGPT’s great at sounding human, sure. But importantly, it doesn’t understand what it’s saying. It doesn’t know what words mean — only what patterns they most commonly appear in.

So, while the copy it comes up with may be articulate, is it genuinely meaningful? Is it persuasive? Does it contain any truly new or original ideas (something pivotal to marketing, which is always evolving)?

Most of the time, the honest answer is no. So, use ChatGPT for the things it’s good at — drafting basic templates and mimicking certain writing styles. But don’t rely on it to do all your marketing writing for you, or you’ll end up having a hard time earning customers.

WebFX is a Partner in Driving Results

Hear from HydroWorx, who saw a 131% increase in organic forms by partnering with WebFX

Watch the Video Testimonial

WebFX can give your sales prospecting a boost

With or without AI-enhanced sales prospecting, you might find yourself struggling to find and convert new prospects. If so, WebFX can help.

We offer top-of-the-line digital marketing services designed to drive conversions and generate revenue for your business. When you partner with us, you’ll get access not only to our specialized services, but also to our marketing software, RevenueCloudFX.

Interested in partnering with us? Call 888-601-5359 or contact us online today to get started!