It is not a secret. The less time that Sales has to spend on administrative tasks during the sales process, the more time your reps will have to focus on selling which means you can hit your revenue targets sooner. With all the talk about ChatGPT and artificial intelligence (AI), sales community conversations have shifted to questions like, which are the best AI tools for outbound email generation? Sales professionals want to know what AI tools they can be leveraging, so they can do their job faster and close more deals. Therefore to help their search, we have created this list of AI tools below that will help maximize your sales team’s time.
Before we start…
As revenue operations experts, we like to advise and remind teams that technology is not going to solve all your problems and that you should have a strategy in place first before purchasing new tools.
Technology and AI tools can help make your sales process more efficient and maximize your sales team’s time as well as help you get the data insight you need for better coaching and making strategic decisions, but without a plan in place first, the tool may just end up contributing to your technical debt.
Therefore before moving to purchase any of the below tools, make sure you define the goal the software will help you to achieve, who will administer it, how it will be used, and also how it will integrate with your current tech stack and processes.
With that said, let’s dive in!
Email AI Tools – Do Outbound Faster
According to a study of 900+ companies led by InsideSales.com Labs and SalesForLife, salespeople send on average 36.2 emails per day. Imagine how much more time your sales team could devote to actually selling if their email generation process was streamlined. The below email AI tools can help your teams do just that.
ChatGPT – Free
For quick one-off emails ChatGPT is a great resource for getting an email started. This is especially helpful if it is at the end of your sales team’s day and they are working to get their last few emails out the door.
As an example I asked ChatGPT to write me an introduction email to a prospect that is a sales manager for an AI tool that would help his team send outbound emails faster. It gave me the below response.
The above example is a little long, so your team can ask it to make it more concise and change the tone, but that response happened in seconds. If your team is ever having writer’s block, point them to ChatGPT.
It should not be treated as a message that they can copy and paste verbatim and click send, but it is a great way to get started fast and speed up the overall process.
Regie.ai – Free Version
Regie.ai generates whole outbound campaigns. The free version gets your team started with the below features.
-
-
- 100 credits (1 credit = 10 words or 1 prospect lookup)
- 1 outbound campaign type
- Access to AI toolkit
-
The platform asks for the below information and then generates your outbound email campaign in less than a minute.
-
-
- Company Name & Description
- Number of email variations you would like
- Persona
- Pain Points
- Value Proposition
- Proof Point
-
You can even add in A/B testing and build in steps with calling and LinkedIn messages.
Lavender.ai – Free Trial Available
The whole reason your sales team is sending emails is to get responses, so they can get more meetings and demos booked, progress their prospect relationship further, or advance a deal. Lavender.ai focuses on helping your sales team get the positive responses they need to progress engagements further down the funnel.
The platform helps your sales team find red flags in their emails that will hurt their chances of a reply, guides them through the personalization process, and can help them get started with writing their email.
If sales sends on average 36.2 emails per day, the time it takes them to look up each recipient on LinkedIn to get more insights for better personalization can add up. Lavender assists your team by pulling these insights instantly and providing suggestions, so that your team can hit send faster without compromising message quality and their chances of getting a reply.
AI Assistants – Accelerate Speed to Lead & Increase Conversion
For hot inbound leads follow up response time is everything. Leads that are responded to within 5 minutes or less are 100x more likely to convert to opportunities. Your sales team may be on back-to-back calls for hours and may not be able to respond fast enough. If your business has a high volume of inbound hot leads, follow up can take up even more of Sales’ time.
According to People.ai, it takes about 18 minutes of sales activity to properly follow up with a Marketing Qualified Lead. If you have 12 leads come in per day and you have a smaller sales team of three people and you use round robin routing, that is four leads per salesperson, meaning 72 minutes a day for follow up.
That equals 6 hours a week that each rep is spending on hot lead follow up. Almost a whole work day. Which is why AI assistant tools can help maximize your sales team’s time so they can focus on selling and also increase your conversion rates with faster speed to lead rates.
Conversica
Conversica’s AI powered conversational sales tool allows you to have your Intelligent Virtual Assistant (IVA) follow up with inbound leads automatically and also further qualify prospects, freeing up Sales’ time.
The IVA can also automatically follow up with a lead two days later for example, to see if they had all their questions answered. Making sure that no leads fall through the cracks.
AI Powered Predictive Lead Scoring – Spend Less Time Prioritizing Leads
In Salesforce’s State of Sales Report 5th Edition, they found that sales professionals are spending 9.2% of their time on average per week just on prioritizing leads and opportunities. That is almost 15 hours a month per rep.
To help increase sales efficiency and minimize the amount of time spent on this task, we have included the below predictive lead scoring AI tools.
Toplyne
Toplyne uses your first-party data from product analytics, your CRM, and billing and uses their behavioral AI engine to combine it with third-party enrichment data to identify your top accounts to prioritize.
For CRM platforms it integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, LeadSquared, and also ActiveCampaign.
Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein
https://www.salesforce.com/products/sales-cloud/features/sales-cloud-einstein
If you already have Sales Cloud in either Enterprise, Performance, or Unlimited Editions, Einstein is available for purchase for an added cost. The lead scoring feature is just one of the many features that Einstein has to offer. It uses data science and machine learning to identify trends in your lead conversion history to then pinpoint which leads to prioritize currently.
For further details on how Einstein scores your leads, access the help article here.
6Sense
6Sense follows an Intent Scoring approach combined with AI to assign scoring values to prospective customers. An Intent Score measures an account’s readiness to buy based on how the contacts associated with that account are interacting with your content and team.
Then AI and machine learning track the engagements that matter to progress a deal further through the funnel as contacts and accounts advance. In addition, 6Sense matches anonymized traffic and keywords to accounts and evaluates their journey as they progress towards a buyer decision.
6Sense has a whole ecosystem of integrations including Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Marketo, Eloqua, Outreach, SalesLoft, and Folloze.
OPTIMIZE YOUR LEAD QUALIFICATION PROCESS
Get Better Deals in Fewer Conversations
AI Prospect & Customer Reference Matching
According to Gartner, references influencing a prospect’s B2B purchasing decision has an 80-85% likelihood, higher than any other marketing activity. When a prospect asks to speak with a customer reference, Sales then goes through their customer champions and recommends the ones that would be the best fit to talk with based on their role, company profile, use case, product interest, or all of the above.
Depending on your average deal size, each rep could be working on an average of 10-15 deals a month. If each buyer asks to speak with a customer reference that suddenly becomes a lot of added time into the rep’s workday and can delay sales cycles.
To help streamline this process and decrease the amount of time that it takes Sales to put together a list of customer references for each prospect, we have shared the below solution.
Deeto
In addition to increasing sales efficiency, Deeto has multiple impacts across go-to-market. You start by inviting your customer champions to join your instance, as they join they can share a testimonial quote which Deeto’s AI powered platform then generates into a review and a customer story for marketing assets that your team can then use for sales enablement.
When a prospect asks for a customer reference, Sales can use Deeto’s Smart Matching to instantly pair them with one of your rep’s champions that has a similar profile to the prospect. Deeto takes it a step further and also helps to streamline the booking process, so that your sales team can accelerate the process of the prospect and customer reference connecting.
Eliminating the time spent searching for the right list of customer references and removing the back and forth that happens with scheduling that can delay sales cycles.
More AI Tools for Sales Optimization
Using AI in sales is not a new concept. There are platforms that have been in the space for years that have been using AI to help sales achieve their goals and deserve an honorable mention.
HubSpot
https://www.hubspot.com
Manage your pipeline and customer relationships end-to-end to achieve your revenue goals.
Alyce
https://www.alyce.com/
Corporate gifting for B2B marketing and sales that uses their #5to9™ to create personalized gifting experiences based on your prospect’s or customer’s interests and hobbies.
Gong
https://www.gong.io/
Revenue intelligence to help your sales team identify the winning formula that leads to closed won deals faster.
Clari
https://www.clari.com/
Visualize your pipeline progression to get accurate insights for a better forecast, so you can better coach your team.
More AI Tools are coming out everyday and the sales software space is vast and complex, so there are many more tools available that are not listed here. To help you continue your research, we have included the below resources, so that you can find the best AI tools that will fit your business needs and help maximize your sales team’s time.
The Best AI Sales Tools
https://www.coldiq.com/ai-sales-tools
5 AI Sales Software Options That Can Help You Win In the Market In 2023
https://influencermarketinghub.com/ai-sales-software/
The 9 Best AI Sales Software Tools
https://www.growthmarketingpro.com/best-ai-sales-software-tools/
