AI technologies and tools are evolving beyond our imagination. While most people dread the ‘AI takeover,’ lead generation is one field that can benefit the most from artificial intelligence.
Marketers and sales teams are bound to perform numerous repetitive lead generation tasks. That’s when AI tools for lead generation help take such mundane tasks off their plate.
The following guide takes you through the various stages of lead generation and the perfect AI tools that let you win top-tier clients effortlessly.
Why is AI important in lead generation?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) have taken over the business world in the past decade. AI-powered solutions, from voice assistants to chatbots, have made people more productive by automating everyday tasks.
ML is a subset of AI that uses computational methods and algorithms to ‘learn’ how humans perform several activities.
McKinsey’s latest reports suggest the adoption of AI more than doubled in the past five years, with over 60% of organizations now taking AI advantage.
Speaking of AI is incomplete without the mention of ChatGPT.
So what is ChatGPT, and can you use it for lead generation?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that lets you have human-like conversations thanks to its natural language understanding. From writing lead-generation emails to social media outreach messages, the use cases of ChatGPT are limitless (read on to know the exact use cases of the tool for lead generation).
Inbound vs. Outbound lead generation
Let’s understand the differences between the two lead generation approaches.
What is inbound lead generation?
Inbound lead generation aims to bring potential customers to your website and engage them using organic methods like content marketing, SEO, targeted ads, lead magnets, opt-in forms, etc. The key is to provide valuable content that attracts, educates, and converts leads naturally.
Inbound techniques include social media marketing, SEO, blog posts, thought leadership articles, newsletters, website copy, landing pages, eBooks, and other lead magnets.
What is outbound lead generation?
Outbound lead generation is when you actively reach out to potential customers or prospects to generate leads. Unlike inbound methods that focus on organically attracting leads, outbound lead generation involves proactive efforts.
Outbound techniques include social media, emails, cold calling, and cold messaging.
How to use AI to boost your outbound lead generation
Outbound lead generation is not a cakewalk. And that’s why AI can be just what’s needed to perform outbound lead generation more efficiently.
The next few sections go over each and every step of AI for lead generation, give you the best AI tools to automate tasks, and show how ChatGPT can make things easier with examples you can steal.
1. Buyer identification
Identifying your targeted prospects requires Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) analysis, buyer persona mapping, and manual back-and-forth filtering that can be handed off to AI.
Here’s how AI can help you identify and pick prospects:
AI can build targeted, up-to-date buyer personas/profiles by researching and learning from data.
To create and replicate accurate ICPs that speed up your outreach processes.
Perform primary prospect research and fetch tailored data to help pin down prospects using personalized communication.
AI tools for buyer identification in lead generation
UXPpressia helps you create and update AI-driven personas in minutes. The tool uses the GPT-3.5-turbo model powered by Open AI API to respond to user requests and generate rich and accurate persona images.
You can easily expand the generated AI persona by aligning it to your use case and making adjustments then and there.
Delve is a reliable tool for AI-driven personas. It creates buyer personas automatically based on your Google Analytics data. The tool implements segmentation methods based on demographics, psychographics, geographic locations, etc., to generate pursue-worthy buyer personas.
How can ChatGPT help with buyer identification?
Can ChatGPT “build” a buyer persona and identify your target ICP? Let’s find out with this real-time example below.
We asked ChatGPT to create a buyer persona of a Director of Operations (our targeted audience) in a large MNC:
As you can see, ChatGPT creates a detailed buyer persona that includes your ideal buyer’s potential challenges, motivations, pain points, and demographics.
You could also use additional prompts to understand your ideal buyer’s preferred communication channels, as shown below:
Further, you can prompt ChatGPT to cite sources of information. This way, you get assurance that your personas are based on hard facts.
2. Prospecting
Since prospecting involves scraping through truckloads of data to find the right prospects, smart AI-led software can handle this task more efficiently.
Here’s how AI can help with prospecting:
AI can help identify patterns in your customers’ past purchase histories and behavior based on your business data. It can pinpoint at what time and stage of the sales funnel a prospect is most likely to purchase.
Fasten decision-making and research by listing the right people you must add to your outreach methods.
Identify high-value prospects based on similar attributes and patterns of your past customers.
AI tool for prospecting in lead generation – 6sense
6sense uses Predictive AI technology to target prospect accounts using industry-leading high-intent data. The tool tracks over 300 million profiles across 40 million companies across the globe.
Discovery data is passed through multiple validation levels to ensure data quality and precision. 6sense helps build prospective workflows within your existing CRM and Sales Engagement platforms.
How can ChatGPT help with prospecting?
Here are some prospecting use cases that can involve using ChatGPT:
To find the right prospects:
Use case #1: To find suitable prospects based on past customers.
Suppose you’re running an account-based marketing campaign and want to find prospect accounts sharing similar attributes as your high-value customers.
You can use the prompt: ‘Find [X] companies like [Company Name] or gather a list of companies of the same [scope] as [Company Name].’
Here’s how ChatGPT responds to ‘Find 5 companies like Infosys or gather a list of companies of the same funding as Infosys.’
Use case #2: To narrow down high-intent prospects from a list.
You can ask ChatGPT to analyze your prospect list and find if the companies or contacts meet the required criteria. Like below:
Use case #3: Ask ChatGPT to find companies that meet your required criteria.
If you have a fixed prospect criterion, ChatGPT can perform the research for you and fetch a list of suitable companies, like the one below:
Note: The ChatGPT model is trained on data up to September 2021. That’s why you may double-check if the information is still relevant.
Did you know almost 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn? So it’s highly likely your target audience lies there, leaving you a better chance of successful lead generation.
But what helps?
LinkedIn data scraping using a pro-outreach tool like Expandi helps you scrape people and companies from LinkedIn search results, groups, posts, and the Linkedin Sales Navigator.
The result? A high-intent prospect list that’s all set for you to implement outreach methods.
Enrich leads with AI-driven insights
ChatGPT can help you enrich leads by adding additional information, for example, up-to-date contact data, website details, the latest news about the company, etc.
Database cleaning and list management
Prospecting involves preparing prospect lists, updating, and managing data. ChatGPT, along with Google Sheets (using a third-party connection tool) can help you update and manage databases and extract information.
You could further use the chat tool to format prospect names, summarize long paragraphs, fix text, and more.
Read more about Database cleaning and list management using ChatGPT here.
3. Outreach
Cold outreach is one outbound lead generation area where most salespeople and marketers feel the least productive. Why? That’s because they’re either always busy framing personalized outreach messages or cannot segment customers the right way.
That’s until AI came into the picture.
Here’s how AI can help with outreach:
Saves you time from repetitive, mundane tasks such as crafting initial emails and follow-up messages.
Segment prospects based on their past-purchase histories, preferences, communication channels, demographics, etc.
Personalize messaging in a way that appeals to prospects.
FastOutreach helps you scale your outreach methods with personalized, AI-generated messaging. You can use it to attract your prospects with cold messages and emails.
The AI tool is trained on trillions of lines of data, thus enabling you to generate personalized messages and book more sales calls.
How can ChatGPT help with outreach?
We’ve listed four outreach use cases for you using ChatGPT. Let’s get started:
Use case #1: Segmentation
Since segmentation lets you personalize your outreach methods, ChatGPT can identify patterns and behaviors of prospect interactions and segment your prospect list.
We asked ChatGPT to segment a list of prospect companies based on a particular demographic:
Use case #2: Personalization
Regardless of B2B or B2C selling, remember you’re ultimately selling to a human. And as humans, we love personalized content across all touchpoints.
So ChatGPT can help salespeople and marketers personalize outreach techniques by providing expert insights, like the one below:
For example:
Let’s say you use Expandi to scrape members of a LinkedIn group – ‘SaaS Marketing Hub,’ You aim to find SaaS CMOs and send them personalized LinkedIn connection messages.
You can ask ChatGPT to write a connection message highlighting your mutual presence in the group. Here’s how:
We’re not done yet.
When you’re happy with ChatGPT’s output, you can use the message in Expandi to automate your LinkedIn outreach. The benefit? Not only is this approach more human-like, but it also provides a prospect with a natural reason to accept the connection.
Use case #3: Cold emailing
ChatGPT can generate hyper-personalized cold email templates, optimize email subject lines, and write follow-up emails for cold emailing.
Here’s a sample prompt if you’re looking to generate cold emails that work:
Use case #4: Cold LinkedIn messaging
LinkedIn is more than just a job-seeking place for professionals. It’s the most powerful social media channel to connect with industry leaders one-on-one.
ChatGPT can frame highly personalized cold LinkedIn messages for potential leads with creative calls to action. For example:
Now that you have your cold outreach messages and emails ready to be sent to prospects, did you know you can connect them to double your chances of conversion?
Smart Sequences let you create intelligent scenarios to help your outreach methods. For example, scenarios based on actions like LinkedIn profile visits or LinkedIn post interactions that trigger personalized LinkedIn connection requests.
Expandi also allows you to easily send Linkedin messages, InMails, and emails by building a ‘smart sequence.’
What’s more? You can combine over nine different actions and put your outreach on auto-pilot mode!
4. Lead qualification
Leads are not worth chasing if they don’t meet set criteria. AI-led tools can qualify leads at scale and save salespeople’s time so they concentrate on more productive tasks.
Here’s how AI can help with lead qualification:
Automatically qualify leads based on how far along and at what stage they are in the buyer’s journey or the sales funnel.
An AI chatbot can be prebuilt to ask potential leads questions to find out if they meet the needed criteria.
AI tools could auto-send qualified leads appointments or product demo notifications to move them closer to a sale.
Pathmonk helps you pre-qualify leads using AI to analyze pre-qualifiers like lead scores, expected deal values, the likelihood of purchases, etc. It creates a workflow where your website visitors are automatically checked for qualification so you don’t miss a potential high-quality lead.
How can ChatGPT help with lead qualification?
Think about it. ChatGPT is currently the trending AI conversational tool, and no better system can qualify leads through conversations than a chatbot.
It can help you identify sales opportunities, analyze conversations, and prioritize high-intent leads.
Here are some real-time use cases of using ChatGPT for lead qualification:
Integrate it with your existing CRM for a more efficient lead qualification platform.
Use ChatGPT to respond to prospect queries and book product walkthroughs and appointments.
Sales reps can use ChatGPT to analyze customer conversations and notice patterns to use in their lead generation process.
We asked ChatGPT to create lead qualification questions for our target market – a growing SaaS company’s Marketing Managers:
5. Pitching
Pitching is the make-or-break stage of lead generation. This stage indicates if your qualified lead trusts your solution or product enough to proceed doing business with you.
So how does AI have your back?
Here’s how AI can help with pitching:
AI tools for sales presentations can auto-generate sales pitch decks based on your set criteria or past decks that successfully converted leads.
Conversational AI tools, like ChatGPT and other chatbots, let you personalize your sales scripts based on a lead’s interests, needs, and pain points.
Offer real-time insights, such as how much time a qualified lead spent reading your sales pitch, open and re-open rates, etc.
Beautiful.ai lets you design sales presentations and pitch decks in minutes using its pre-made templates, AI-generated images, and text.
The tool automates designs on every slide so that your pitch stays very much on brand. AI ensures your team stays productive and does not waste hours formatting text and designing slides.
You can also track the effectiveness of your pitch through the tool’s real-time analytics and improve your future pitching strategies.
How can ChatGPT help with sales pitching?
Did you know ChatGPT helps elevate your otherwise bland sales pitches? If you or your team has been facing writer’s block while creating sales pitch decks, below is a ChatGPT prompt to help overcome the problem:
6. Closing the sale
Using AI to close a sale faster is like having a human assistant to help you at every step. Look for AI sales assistants that can ease you out of time-consuming tasks like to-and-fro follow-ups, writing opening lines, personalizing messages, etc.
Here’s how AI can help close a sale:
Automate repetitive tasks so sales reps can spend more time on productive actions.
Can help sales and marketing managers build accurate sales forecasts that can rapidly move the deal down the sales funnel.
AI sales tools help close deals faster by providing insights and information needed for sales conversations.
Can analyze the effectiveness of conversations between sales reps and qualified leads. This way, sales reps know who is worth pursuing and how to modify their pitches.
Dooly is a sales enablement platform built on AI that gathers valuable prospect data to improve your chances of closing more deals.
The AI sales assistant tool integrates into your current CRM to maintain a better flow of teamwork, and improve collaboration and sales productivity. Dooly also has unlimited playbooks to guide you and the team through sales calls.
How can ChatGPT help with closing a sale?
You’ve successfully closed a sale and used AI to help you along the way. You’re now looking to finalize the sale and ask the customer to take the final step, for example, signing the contract.
That’s when ChatGPT comes into the picture.
Below is a prompt we used to create a legal service contract that you can use as the foundation of your final contract:
7. Nurturing
You know the importance of nurturing hot leads and customers so they do not forget about you.
AI does the trick with nurturing by letting you create personalized follow-up messages for LinkedIn, custom emails, and running omnichannel campaigns to get the leads/customers to re-engage with your business.
With Expandi’s Smart Sequences, you can develop outreach and nurturing systems across multiple touchpoints on LinkedIn and email. Create different scenarios based on the lead’s behavior and increase your chances of booking a sales call.
When discussing LinkedIn outbound lead generation, it is important to consider individuals who are not yet ready to be moved into the “closing” stage but show promising potential for future conversion. These prospects can be effectively nurtured by Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). If they are qualified as Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), they are more likely to accept SDR connection requests. This presents a great opportunity to engage them through valuable LinkedIn content. SDRs can share top-notch content to build trust with their LinkedIn audience who have not yet converted. I am confident that some of these prospects will convert into customers within the next few months.
Here are more ways AI and AI-led tools can help with nurturing:
Personalize interactions with prospects/qualified leads/customers based on past purchases and behaviors.
Build nurturing campaigns using email marketing, follow-up campaigns, etc.
Track engagement across multiple touchpoints and notify lead generation and nurturing opportunities. For example, opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, and re-sell.
Conversica’s AI lead nurturing solution lets you nurture leads via email and run various other nurturing campaigns, such as:
Reaching out to past customers.
Re-engaging deals or inactive leads.
Remarketing services or products to current customers.
Requesting feedback on customer experience.
How can ChatGPT help with nurturing?
One of the best ways to nurture and re-engage inactive leads and past customers is by asking for feedback.
Here’s how we asked ChatGPT to create a feedback email to re-engage customers:
How to use AI to boost your inbound lead generation
It’s time you aced inbound lead generation using many more AI capabilities. Let’s get into it.
1. Attracting visitors
This is the awareness stage. Creating engaging landing pages, blog posts, case studies, and other website elements act as lead magnets to attract your website visitors and make them aware of your solutions.
Here’s how AI can help in attracting visitors:
AI tools can provide competitive keywords you can use on your webpage to attract visitors and get them to learn about your offering.
AI can help you create better content across all customer touchpoints by analyzing your competitor’s websites and social media sites.
Conversational AI, like chatbots, acts as customer service personnel by answering your visitors’ questions 24/7.
How can ChatGPT help in attracting visitors?
Let’s discuss four ChatGPT real-time use cases you can implement immediately to attract the right traffic:
Use case #1: Content creation
No more staring at the blank screen to create high-converting content. ChatGPT can help you create super engaging content for all your sales needs, from social media to blog posts and website copy.
Here’s our prompt for ChatGPT to create our landing page headline and its response:
Use case #2: Search engine optimization (SEO)
ChatGPT can save your team’s time by researching high-search volume keywords you can incorporate into your blog posts and website pages.
Here’s how it’s done:
Use case #3: Social media marketing
Social media is a must-have marketing strategy for every business in this day and age. It has been a silent enabler, from building healthy prospect connections to achieving your sales goals.
Here’s a ChatGPT prompt if you’re looking to create a social media content strategy that generates sales:
Use case #4: Paid advertising
Paid ads on Google and social media sites need ad copy to be engaging and impactful, considering the restricted character limit.
In this example, we’ve asked ChatGPT to create a short and high-converting ad copy for our Linkedin automation software:
Alps.ai is an AI-led optimization and content suggestion tool that can help your rank higher on the search engine results page and attract targeted traffic.
The tool also pinpoints improvement areas to achieve maximum goals. For example, suggesting changes to the home page headline, CTA, meta description, etc.
2. Converting visitors into leads
You’ve succeeded at attracting a visitor to stay on your page. But does your task end here? No! This is the stage where your visitors must be coerced to take action.
You must now entice them to learn more about your offering and convert to an active lead.
Wondering if AI has a way?
Here’s how AI can help in converting visitors to leads:
Conversation AI chatbots can convert visitors by asking the right questions and leading them to desired solution pages where they can book a demo.
Content-specific AI tools can help you create high-converting landing pages.
Automate lead-capturing forms on home and landing pages. Sales teams can use this information for their lead generation strategies.
How can ChatGPT help convert visitors to leads?
We have two actual use cases you can use to feed your conversion efforts:
Use case #1: Landing pages
ChatGPT can generate relevant text for your landing page copy or improve your existing content to upgrade it with the latest keywords.
The most critical aspect of a landing page is the call to action. Let’s ask ChatGPT to create a few CTAs for a landing page:
Use case #2: Forms and lead capture
In-page and pop-up forms are popularly used to capture lead information.
Here’s the prompt you can use the understand what questions to include in your forms:
Tiledesk lets you attract website visitors and convert them to pursue-ready leads using its pop-up conversational AI chatbot.
The tool is a great way to interact with visitors and proactively trigger chat options based on their actions. You can further use a form builder to get other critical details from your potential lead and use it to pursue them.
3. Nurturing leads
How do you nurture leads who’ve visited your site and shown any interest in your offering?
Email marketing campaigns, such as engagement emails, follow-up emails, and following up using mediums like LinkedIn and phone calls, are some ways that work.
Here’s how AI can help nurture leads:
Specific AI tools can help you write content for lead-nurturing emails by analyzing your competition.
Automate actions (send follow-up messages or emails) based on specific lead triggers, for example, when they fill out a form, download a PDF, sign up for a free demo, etc.
Auto-send lead nurture emails, such as welcome emails, product recommendations, discount alerts, etc.
How can ChatGPT help nurture leads for inbound lead generation?
We have just the right use cases for you.
Use case #1: Email marketing
As sales executives and marketers, you have better things to do than writing lead nurturing emails and strategizing email marketing strategies back and forth.
Here’s a ChatGPT prompt to help you create an email marketing strategy to start nurturing leads:
Use case #2: Marketing automation
Marketing automation for lead nurturing can have various goals. For example, remind free trial users to sign up for the paid version, educate leads with resources, drive traffic to product pages, and more.
ChatGPT can streamline your marketing automation efforts by integrating it with platforms like WhatsApp, CRM systems, LinkedIn, etc.
By combining ChatGPT’s AI-generated text with a tool like Expandi, you can automate marketing campaigns for LinkedIn and emails to nurture leads and achieve an all-time high conversion rate!
Copy.ai is an extraordinary AI-text generation tool you can seamlessly use for your email lead nurturing tasks. All you must do is choose a template, provide context, and let Copy.ai generate a personalized follow-up email ready to be sent to your leads.
The tool also helps customize LinkedIn messages to increase the chances of conversion.
Conclusion
AI’s abilities are limitless. It’s high time we stopped fearing AI and instead embraced its capabilities and used it for our benefit.
AI is a support system for sales and marketing teams looking to leverage AI for lead generation by automating time-consuming manual tasks and being more productive–all this while still booking more sales calls.
Expandi has paved the way to make lead generation easy and accessible. Combining it with AI tools like ChatGPT can do wonders!
AI can be used in lead generation to perform prospect research, score leads, nurture high-quality leads, create optimized sales pitches, automate outreach campaigns, etc.
2. How do AI chatbots help in lead generation?
A lead generation chatbot can help you capture vital information about leads, such as contact details, preferences, and expectations. To attract visitors, you can deploy an AI chatbot on your home or landing pages.
3. What are the AI tools for lead generation?
AI tools like ChatGPT, Copy.ai, Outreach, Tiledesk, Expandi, Alps.ai, and many more can be used at various stages of lead generation.
