Leads power any B2B sales team and business. Sometimes, though, your leads seem to move in slow motion. That’s why many B2B sales teams are using AI-driven lead generation.
AI-powered tools increase productivity for marketing and sales teams because they automate repetitive tasks, such as finding email addresses and writing follow-up emails. Here’s how and why B2B businesses are currently using AI for lead generation.
Why Use AI for Lead Gen
There are three main reasons to use AI-powered tools for B2B lead gen.
First, AI-powered tools are a productivity powerhouse. They automate the repetitive tasks of lead gen, like finding qualified leads and sourcing their email addresses. Sales leaders reported that their sales reps spend more than 11 hours researching and following up weekly. That frees up teams for work that actually requires human intervention, like live events, phone calls, and networking.
Second, AI provides data-driven insights. Because AI can quickly churn through mountains of data from many sources, it can spot patterns in customer conversations and information to make accurate predictions that might’ve been missed.
Third, it helps B2B businesses reach more leads with personalized messaging and outreach. The key to maximum sales impact is reaching the right people with the right information at the right time. AI tools can help businesses uncover information about leads faster, so they can personalize the messaging sooner and make a bigger impact.
For example, automatically personalize cold emails, chatbot messaging, and social media posts based on historical analysis and comments in real-time, surface leads who’re subtly signaling they’re ready to buy even if they haven’t reached your traditional sales thresholds, and suggest content to engage leads more effectively.
Integrating AI-powered tools into the lead-gen process helps teams run more productive, informed, data-driven, and personalized sales processes. This helps B2B businesses generate higher-quality leads with fewer resources (people, time, and money).
How to Use AI for Lead Gen
AI-powered tools can speed up research, collation, and data analysis as they can do that work much faster than any human can. Here are just a few of the ways it can help.
- Prospecting: Dynamically build a lead list that fits a quickly evolving customer profile. Sales and marketing will always be in touch with the right people using these lists.
- Qualification: Analyze potential customers’ lead scoring data faster to predict whether they’re a good fit and ready for sales.
- Deeper analysis: Find deeper patterns in customer interactions and historical data to offer ways to improve all lead touch points and improve pipeline conversions.
- Data management: With so much data available now digitally, businesses can use AI-powered tools to gather, collate, and integrate all the data they have no matter where it’s located.
5 Real-Life Ways to Use AI for Lead Gen
Here are five ways your B2B clients can use AI for lead generation right now.
- Build a list of primed leads. Creating lead lists can be difficult and challenging when it’s only using superficial or inaccurate data. Outreach and lead scoring go down with this bad data. Tools like Gong and 6sense help B2B businesses connect all available data and build a precise and accurate lead-gen list faster and more efficiently. Sales, marketing, and customer success teams can all use these lists in tier work to support their processes.
- Improve lead outreach and follow-up. Based on signal analysis, AI automatically surfaces the right leads to reach out to at the right time. This helps businesses stay in touch with leads based on what they’re actually doing and not based on an outdated schedule.
- Automate outreach messaging. This is a significant time saver for sales teams. It allows sales teams to reach more leads in less time because it can automatically draft personalized emails based on previous conversations. Reps can do it all in a few clicks instead of a few minutes and save any copy and pasting they might’ve done for sales scripts. With a few clicks and minimal editing, messages are ready to go.
- Align primed leads with marketing outcomes. Marketing teams often struggle to align business outcomes with leads and ensure success for both. They may send out incorrect messaging that misses the mark with people because they’re at a different buying stage. AI tools can quickly re-analyze buying intent and automatically signal changes to marketing teams so they can pivot faster and get better results.
- Speed up sales conversations. Sales reps often need access to as much data as possible to surface insights they can use in conversations. AI tools can help quickly connect the dots between data sets to engage with leads. For example, generate a report from historical customer data about what the 10 highest CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) customers have in common or discover five trends in the industry that would interest low-scoring leads.
AI-Powered Lead Gen Is Leading the Way
B2B businesses are discovering the enhanced precision and efficiency of AI-powered lead gen. Whether they use a generative AI tool to surface insights and messaging or subscribe to an AI revenue generation tool like Gong or 6sense, they’re starting to see the value of higher data processing in lead gen.
AI tools can provide deeper insights about leads and take over more of the routine lead-gen tasks that chew up a lot of sales teams’ time. AI should lead to healthier B2B sales pipelines and increased profits, but only time will tell.
