How AI can help you with sales prospecting
“There is no easy button in sales. Prospecting is hard, emotionally draining work, and it is the price you have to pay to earn a high income.”
― Jeb Blount
How do salespeople find customers? This is called prospecting during which salespeople find potential customers, evaluate prospects’ propensity to buy, and then qualify them as leads. Salesmen (and women) know that the payoff period is at the end. They look for them anywhere and anytime — cold calls, emails, events, social media, etc. — constantly turning over rocks and looking for their next opportunity.
According to Crunchbase, top salespeople spend an average of 6 hours every week researching their prospects. There are also recommendations to those salespeople who work on the entire sales process to spend 30–40 percent of their week prospecting for leads. How do these companies find prospect information?
Without going too deep into the marketing tricks of how companies prospect, nowadays many firms use Customer Relationship Management or other sales pipeline software to track their prospect information. First, a prospect provides his/her contact information as part of a sales inquiry on a company’s website, via phone, or while accessing digital content. This prospect is given a score by internally predetermined criteria or data points to indicate a sales-qualified lead. While the prospect interacts more with the business, point values are assigned to each of those interaction criteria, ultimately leaving with a final score for each lead. By reviewing the results of the final score, firms can narrow the pool of prospects to those likely to buy. This is called prospect scoring when companies evaluate whether a potential customer can buy the firm’s offerings and how likely it is that he/she will buy.
The first step in the sales process sounds like a lot of work and effort!
Most of the time, the salespeople could be wrong about a prospect, and the time spent on finding and qualifying could lead to a closed door.
But when one door closes, another door is opened with the help of AI. Let’s have a look at how AI has changed the game of prospecting.
Hello, is it leads you are looking for?
Even Lionel Richie is wondering where the AI leads are hiding…
Let’s go through prospecting powered by AI to see this step enhanced in the sales process. Those of you who have missed the first blog post about this process can find the blog post here.
So, why use AI for prospecting?
First, AI is well suited to analyze both structured and unstructured data used in segmenting consumers and generating lists of prospects. For example, natural language processing can analyze text data (e.g., email inquiries, social media posts, news releases) and identify the text’s keywords, themes, or current interests. AI systems can also analyze speech or image data originating from photos, videos, or conversations.
Such an easy way to differentiate between potential leads and those who won’t buy. But how is it done?
Machine learning is increasing the efficacy of these segmentation algorithms by updating and improving their performance without humans reprogramming them.
Second, AI is capable of developing and applying predictive algorithms to engage in lead scoring. AI systems can analyze previous prospect data and determine what actual online and offline characteristics have the highest probability of resulting in conversions. Machine learning allows AI continuously to update the rules for generating and scoring leads, storing this information in the AI knowledge base to allow for continual improvement. Sounds almost too good to be true!
Finally, leveraging networks theory can help to identify important or influential people in social media to find connections between leads. By automatically scraping a social platform, salespeople can find hidden connections or determine the right person to discuss the next steps in the sales process.
How does this translate to a real-life example? 6sense Sales Intelligence is a software company that supports companies to drive sales and marketing alignment by giving sales representatives access to all the account data and insights they need to engage the right buyers with the right message at the right time.
AI is changing the way we think about prospecting and helping salespeople to be more effective in organizing their customer profiles and scoring leads.
Keep an eye out or set your AI robot to remind you for the next blog post about pre-approach and approach to selling. You can also subscribe to our newsletter so you will be automatically reminded about a new post.
And that is how our AI is constantly prospecting.
