In today’s fast-paced world of sales, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) 🧠 alongside human skills is the only way to move forward. This powerful combo can really shake up how we work, making things more efficient and personalized while emphasizing the importance of customer feedback in refining strategies.

There are 5 key areas to outbound lead generation:

• finding leads,
• reaching out through digital channels,
• cold calling,
• responding to leads and setting up meetings.

In this blog, we are going to explore exactly how and where to leverage AI vs. people, in this case, SDRs, to achieve the most optimum results for your sales process and improve your products. 🤜🤛

The Game Changer: Using AI to Find Leads 🔎

AI has totally changed how we find potential customers. It can analyze loads of data and spot leads who fit our ideal customer profile. This targeted approach not only ensures our marketing strategy is directed in the right way but also emphasizes customer segmentation analysis to better understand market fit.

Plus, AI takes care of the tedious and time-consuming job of collecting customer feedback, freeing up sales teams to group this data meaningfully, design outreach strategies, and plan for actual outreach.

We have tested this out at Leadle and found that AI is 95-98% accurate in getting prospects who fit our ICP in a fifth of the time that it takes our Market Research Executives, significantly helping to increase customer engagement. 🎯

AI Helps with Personalization at Scale: The unicorn of cold outreach

AI will play a key role when we reach out on digital platforms like LinkedIn and emails. It can personalize messages for each individual, picking up individual information about the prospect's likes, needs, and previous interactions, making every message personal and unique, which is critical in building customer relationships.

We have been testing an ABM campaign internally with AI, and our communication has hit the mark every single time, generating positive feedback. Our meeting booking rate through LinkedIn and Email has nearly doubled, showing a clear improvement in our product roadmap based on customer needs. And this is with an SDR devoting half their day to digital outreach, leaving the rest of their day free for cold-calling!! 💌

The Human Touch in Cold Calling ☎️

Even with AI’s capabilities, cold calling highlights the importance of human elements like empathy, tone variations, and real-time customer interactions—the key product features for successful sales. In a world where we mostly communicate digitally, a human voice can stand out. This is why cold-calling, supported by AI's ability to gather customer data rapidly, remains the most effective method of getting in front of a prospect, demonstrating how sales teams' high-level engagement can lead to increased customer retention.

Our sales teams can turn an ordinary call into a great sales opportunity by understanding the subtle hints customers feel and showing empathy, further supported by the real-time insights gathered through AI. Interestingly, we have seen that using AI has also increased our meeting booking ratio by 50%. 👥

Turning Leads into meetings: Here’s Where Human Skills Shine 🌟

The final stages of the sales process, like dealing with interested leads and setting up meetings, rely on human skills. Understanding a lead's specific concerns, providing tailored answers to their questions, and building trust by projecting confidence and empathy are things that humans excel at.

Although AI can guide us to potential leads, it's ultimately the human touch, informed by valuable insights from AI-driven customer feedback analysis, that turns these leads into productive meetings and strong relationships, enhancing the bottom line. 💼

Conclusion: Adapt or die! 💡

The future of sales lies in cleverly combining AI's capabilities and human skills. To be crystal clear, this combination of using AI and SDRs is not the future of sales.

It is the HERE AND NOW.

Leveraging this approach allows your sales and marketing teams to gather customer insights more effectively, build deeper customer relationships, and outperform your competitors by maintaining a strong focus on customer engagement and retention through constant improvements to your products and services. 🏁

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