Demand generation is exhaustive.
To create a profitable business, demand gen leaders need to consistently bring in high-quality leads at a high volume. You want to bring in enough leads to fill your entire sales pipeline, but traditional lead generation methods can be expensive and time-consuming.
You may have even Googled, “Can you automate lead generation?”
With AI lead generation, you can offload some of the stress of generating sales leads and increase the velocity of your pipeline.
Let’s dive into what AI lead generation is and how you can use it in your organization.
What is AI lead generation?
If you are new to AI leads, it’s easy to be wary of using them in your business.
AI, artificial intelligence, refers to systems and technology that can perform tasks and solve problems that often require human intelligence. The beauty of AI is that it can complete tasks and solve problems faster than humans—and it learns along the way, so its outputs and outcomes are always improving.
Before AI can take action, it needs to be fed data to evaluate. This is also true for AI lead gen tools. These tools require users to share specific inputs so the AI can produce the desired output. When it comes to lead gen, AI often helps you find the fastest route to new leads and new revenue.
How to use AI at different stages of the lead creation process
Creating leads for your sales team takes effort. After generating new leads, you typically have to score those leads and help sales nurture them into profitable opportunities. Thankfully, AI can help you at these different stages of the process.
Generation
AI lead generation is the obvious way that artificial intelligence can help you bring in new customers. You can feed an AI lead generation tool a list of your best customers or customers you’d like to have and get a new target list sent your way quickly and efficiently.
Scoring
Prioritizing which targets and leads to go after first can be challenging for sales professionals. Your sales team wants to make the biggest impact on their pipeline first, but getting a huge list of targets and leads can be overwhelming. AI lead generation tools can help you score them to determine which opportunities are worth chasing first. When your organization invests in the right tools, you’ll always know where to begin.
Nurture
Once you have leads in your pipeline, how do you keep them excited and engaged in the buying process? AI can help you deliver timely and relevant messaging to your leads to ensure they are ready to take meetings and purchase when the time is right.
Where traditional AI leads fall short
When thinking about AI lead lists, something is often missing from the results you get.
Most AI lead generation tools work with firmographic data to determine which companies would fit your organization. Data like industry, workforce size, geography, etc., all make a significant difference in your ideal customer profile. But what’s more telling beyond the superficial characteristics are how those companies behave..
Companies need their AI tools to focus on exegraphics, the characteristics that define how organizations execute their mission. For example, is a company an early adopter of technology? If your software is new, but you are working on a contract with a company that is often the last to adopt new technology, you’re spending your energy in the wrong place.
Exegraphic data includes information such as:
- Early adopter
- Growth rate
- Tech centrity
- Compliance focus
- Customer care investment
- Employee retention
- and much more!
All of these signals can help you make better decisions on whom to target and what to say during your outreach.
6 AI lead generation tools you need to know
Now that you understand the value of AI lead generation, it’s important to have the tools you need to make AI lead generation a reality for your organization. Here are six helpful tools you can use at your organization:
1. Rev
Your organization has built a target market based on the current customers on your roster. With Rev, you can dive deeper into the exegraphics of your existing customers and identify new targets with your new aiCP (AI customer profile).
To take advantage of Rev, customers upload a list of their best accounts into our Sales Development Platform. Our AI reviews that seed list and creates a mathematical model of your best customer. We call that your aiCP. The aiCP surfaces the exegraphics for your best customers, revealing deep insights into what makes your best customers your best. Once the aiCP is created, Rev’s Sales Development Platform generates a prioritized target account list of all the other companies that match your aiCP—so you know who to target next..
Companies like Splunk have seen significant sales growth by using Rev in their business.
Rev seamlessly integrates with the tools your sales team already uses, making it easy to implement at your organization.
If you are trying to accomplish wins like 50% growth in net-new accounts, you need to add Rev to your sales technology stack.
2. Collective[i]
Once you know what companies to target, you need to understand who to contact at those organizations. Finding clean contact information is one of the most important parts of the lead generation process. Without clear ways to communicate with prospective customers, sales teams cannot book demos and create additional pipeline.
Collective[i] exists to help sales professionals with their contact problems. You can use Collective[i] to uncover issues in your legacy data and create better data for new leads. By investing in a tool like this, your organization will be off to a great start with prospects.
3. Seamless.ai
Another company you can use to gather contact information is Seamless.ai. Seamless.ai works across the web to find the contacts sales professionals need to do their job. It’s easy to find contact information based on the titles you’re looking for. For example, you can look for marketing directors at a certain company.
Seamless.ai has a Chrome extension that allows you to find contact information based on social media profiles quickly.
Lastly, Seamless.ai can pull up helpful information about prospects and their companies, making it easier to find details when you’re ready to pitch a new organization.
4. Kronologic
If you’ve worked in sales, you know how stressful booking time on a prospect’s calendar can be. Even sending someone a link to a calendar scheduling tool can be complicated for some prospects. Kronologic takes the guesswork out of setting up meetings by helping your sales team connect with prospects at the height of their engagement with the organization.
Potential customers can one-click accept proposed meeting times, and your sales team gets more revenue-driven meetings on their busy calendars.
5. Drift
One of the best things that has come out of AI are advances in conversational marketing. Drift is a popular AI-driven tool for marketers, sales professionals, and customer service leaders. Drift embeds in websites and applications to make connecting with prospects and customers easier.
Current and potential customers can interact with Drift to be routed to appropriate live chats and premade chatbots. When your prospects need to connect with a sales representative, they can use your organization’s Drift bot to send requests and get information about your organization.
6. Conversica
Another option for companies wanting to invest in conversational marketing, sales and customer success is Conversica. Conversica is an assistant that’s powered by AI and ready to help you close more deals. With Conversica, you can easily understand who your hottest prospects are while saving sales time during the conversation period.
Conversica can connect with your potential customers to create more hand raisers. Once sales professionals are ready to be more involved in the process, they know who to contact first using Conversica’s suite of tools.
Conclusion: Lead generation AI strategies you can use
To meet aggressive revenue goals, your organization needs to optimize its lead generation strategy. Relying on sales development teams to fill the pipeline or hoping that demand generation professionals can do the work independently isn’t helpful. You need high-quality, high volume leads, and that requires technology to streamline the experience. If you’ve been struggling to consistently provide the quantity and quality of leads to help you predictively grow your pipeline, it’s time to invest in a new process. AI lead generation can feel scary, but it doesn’t have to be. Having the right AI tools integrated into your strategy can create sales success.