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AI Sales
AI and Cold Outreach: How to use AI to increase your sales
Mihaela Cicvaric
April 7, 2024
November 2, 2023
|
7 min. read
Mihaela Cicvaric
LAST UPDATED
August 29, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.
Personalized messages have a 32.7% higher response rate.
And sending mass emails has a 93% higher response rate in comparison to single recipients.
Here comes the problem: Where are you going to find the time to personalize all your emails?
Enter AI cold outreach, the solution to your problems.
How is AI involved in cold outreach?
Outreach AI is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to improve outreach tasks and make outreach campaigns more effective.
It automates and optimizes processes like campaign creation, and email personalization, and helps businesses generate more responses and grow faster.
For example, let's say you have a business and want to email potential customers. AI tools can help you automatically create hyper-personalized multichannel sequences based on your value proposition, and your recipient’s info.
This saves you hours of manual work, avoids the blank-page anxiety, and increases your reply rates.
AI personalization
AI personalization helps you build ultra-targeted and hyper-personalized outreach sequences at scale.
It allows you to create custom campaigns with personalized icebreakers that resonate with individual prospects.
This level of customization and personalization increases the chances of capturing prospects' attention, generating higher reply rates, and ultimately driving better outcomes for your outreach efforts.
Why is AI important in cold outreach?
AI can be leveraged to optimize your outreach and increase your reply rates in several ways.
You can use AI-powered outreach tools, such as lemlist, to generate highly personalized multichannel campaigns without the need to be an outreach expert or have any prospecting experience.
By tailoring messages to individual recipients, AI increases the relevance and resonance of outreach efforts, leading to higher engagement and response rates.
With AI, you can save up to 1 hour per campaign creation and focus on other tasks that matter to your business.
According to Gartner, Inc., by 2025, 75% of B2B sales organizations are expected to incorporate AI-guided selling solutions to enhance their traditional sales playbooks.
✅ Pros of AI in Outreach
Save time
Save resources
Save money
Generate more revenue
Book more meetings
6 use cases of AI for your business
95% of salespeople would meet their sales goals faster if they could reduce time spent on non-revenue-generating activities like admin, note taking, and updating CRMs.
This is where AI comes into play.
Here are 6 of the most frequent and powerful use cases of AI in sales.
1. Define your target audience with AI
You can use AI to understand who is your target audience, what challenges they face, and how your offering meets their needs.
By honing in on your ICP and buyer personas, you'll create messages that resonate and forge genuine connections.
You can use ChatGPT to create your buyer personas with this prompt:
You're a senior consultant with 20+ years of experience. You're a master at creating the most unique and unusual growth strategies. You've helped the fastest-growing companies in the world skyrocket their growth and customer acquisition. Your tone of voice should be actionable, no-fluff, approachable, casual, and storyteller.
Generate 5 detailed buyer personas for an individual who would be interested in [DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE].
The buyer personas should include the following information: 1. Name: (insert the name of the persona) 2. Position: (insert position or role of the persona) 3. Professional background: (describe the professional background, experience, or expertise of the persona) 4. Goals and objectives: (specify the goals and objectives that the persona wants to achieve in their professional life) 5. How they heard about [YOUR COMPANY NAME]: (indicate the channels or sources through which the persona became aware of your company) 6. Path to purchase: (describe the typical journey or steps the persona takes when considering and making a purchase related to your product or service) 7. Potential barriers: (identify the factors or concerns that might hold the persona back from buying your product or service)
Remember to provide sufficient detail and context to ensure the generated personas are accurate and useful. Please present the buyer personas in the form of a table.
For example, we ran this prompt for lemlist and got 5 detailed buyer personas. Here’s an example of one of them:
You can speed up the process of defining your business’s ideal customer profile with lemlist's free ICP generator.
You can even try it out for yourself right now ⬇️
All you need is your value proposition and your product or service description.
The ICP generator will create 3 buyer personas that you can download, analyze, and use to personalize your cold outreach.
Use them to customize email copy, increase reply rates, get more LinkedIn connections, and boost your business revenue.
3. Reach your target audience
Once you know who your target audience is, you’ll need to track them down.
Reaching out to your leads on the channel where they are most active, such as LinkedIn, increases your chances of getting replies and accelerates your growth.
But, manually searching for LinkedIn prospects
❌ takes too much time
❌ is an endless back-and-forth
❌ doesn't always provide your leads' contact information
With the help of AI, you can get access to databases that contain millions of LinkedIn profiles with easy search and advanced filtering.
You can also use Taplio to connect with individuals based on your specific criteria or preferences.
Wondering which AI email assistant is the best for your business? What tool can help you boost efficiency and let you focus on more revenue-driven tasks?
If you’re not using AI to speed up your writing processes, you’re already behind.
We know you want to, try out this cold email generator.
Tips: You can also use simple prompts to power your sales pitches, calls, and LinkedIn messages so that you can back to the human side of sales.
For example, you can use AI prompts to improve your CTA, such as:
Write 3 calls to action for the following outreach email. Ensure each CTA directs the recipient to take a specific action or next step. Use a friendly but assertive tone. Keep the writing concise and clear. Each CTA should be up to 5 words.
Outreach email: [Paste]
Or, you want to beat the competition over cold call:
You are an experienced sales representative for [ClickUp]. You are looking to win over a project manager who previously used [Trello] for all their [project management] needs but hated that they couldn't integrate with Google Drive, or customize their workspaces. Write a list of 5 talking points that would be helpful to convince the customer to move to [ClickUp].
Or, simply network your way to sales via LinkedIn:
Write a short, 50-100 word message to [Graham, the content marketing manager] at [Benevity], congratulating them on their new position. Based on their profile summary, ask how your [Content Marketing Agency] can help in the new company, and list the top 3 ways [Content Marketing Agencies] can help in-house [content marketing managers] look great to their boss.
PROSPECT: [Paste linkedin URL.]
AI prompts like this should give you a massive leg-up when it comes to building yourself the best, automated base to start outreach with. And then, you do what you do best: close those deals.
Clay is an automated sales prospecting platform that creates personalized messages via data from multiple sources.
What will you be getting from Clay?
enrich your customer data from 50+ data sources (tech stack, OpenAI GPT-3, Google, etc.)
identify qualified leads through data about the latest events, such as fundraising
add contacts to personalized campaigns in Customer.io, your outreach tool, or CRM
Free trial ✅
Aside from a 14-day free trial, Clay also offers a totally free plan.
Starter, Explorer, and Pro plans range from $149 to $800, and increase depending on the amount of monthly credits you choose to purchase. Meaning that pricing can get quite expensive.
Here’s a quick recap of everything you can do to harness the power of AI in your cold outreach:
Use AI to craft personalized messages for your prospects, addressing their specific needs and interests to create a stronger connection and boost response rates.
Automate your follow-ups to stay on prospects’ minds, increasing the chances of getting a reply.
Thoroughly research AI outreach tools to find the perfect match for your needs, considering features, compatibility, and value for investment.
Embrace AI as your digital assistant, helping you connect with prospects on a more personal level, and optimize your sales performance!
Mihaela Cicvaric
Content Marketing Manager @ lempire | Sharing everything you need to get replies to your cold emails
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