How to Best Use AI for Sales Prospecting

The use of AI for sales prospecting is one of the most talked-about topics amongst sales leaders this year.

And honestly, it's because many companies aren't getting it right.

But sales prospecting is an EXCELLENT use case for AI. It just needs to be executed carefully, intentionally, and with the help of an exceptional tool and team to back it.

In this article, we'll help you approach incorporating AI into your sales processes and help you do so in a way that's both strategic and effective.

We'll specifically dive into…

• How AI Is Revamping Sales Prospecting
• How Human BDRs and AI BDRs Can Work Best Together
• Features to Look For in an AI Sales Prospecting Tool
• The Top Five AI Sales Prospecting Tools
• The Best Practices for Using AI for Sales Prospecting

Let's do this!

How AI is Revamping Sales Prospecting

Sales prospecting has often been one of the most grind-heavy tasks in sales. There's a deep hustle required to master tasks like finding leads, following up, and building first connections.

And with the help of AI, those mundane lead finding and follow-up tasks can be automated instantly, leaving sales teams time to master imperative higher-value activities like perfecting their pitch, overcoming objections, and measuring and iterating on success.

AI can even help sales teams become even more effective with those high-value activities by handling tasks like analyzing customer data patterns to identify high-intent prospects, providing a real-time analysis of buyer behavior to help reps know exactly when to follow up and how, and even handling pipeline reporting.

But that's a lot, right? And knowing where and how to start can feel overwhelming.

Fortunately, utilizing AI BDRs is one of the most approachable ways to start implementing AI into your prospecting process, and it requires no technical expertise.

At Motion, we offer an entire team of AI employees that can help sales teams, customer success teams, revenue operation (revops) teams, and more. Additionally, our top AI engineers and implementation team can also work with you on your business needs, and custom-create AI Employees specific to your business so you have a unique competitive advantage over competitors.

How Human BDRs & AI BDRs Can Work Best Together

AI employees are designed to work alongside human employees, not replace them. The collaboration between human and AI BDRs can lead to increased productivity and efficiency, and result in more closed deals, but there's a balance that needs to be perfected to do so.

Below, we dive into the specific ways human BDRs and AI BDRs can work well together.

Tackling Large Volumes of Tasks

The nature of BDR work is inherently task-intensive. From identifying potential leads to sending follow-up emails and scheduling calls, the volume of tasks can quickly become overwhelming. AI can automate many of these repetitive tasks, allowing human BDRs to focus on more strategic and high-impact activities.

Processing Large Quantities of Data

BDRs are frequently swamped with a deluge of information, from their target customers' pain points to prospect activity, and learning when and how to best act on it. Sifting through this manually is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. AI has the capability to swiftly process large volumes of data, offering actionable insights for more informed decision-making.

Finding Ways to See Success in Cold Outreach

Once a dependable approach, cold outreach is now met with increasing indifference. Prospects are more prone to disregard unsolicited messages, resulting in diminished response rates. AI can be leveraged to pinpoint optimal outreach times and to compose tailored messages that better engage potential clients.

Personalizing Outreach at Scale

AI tools are adept at analyzing historical interactions and customer behaviors to craft highly personalized outreach strategies. This level of personalization can lead to a substantial increase in engagement rates, making it easier for BDRs to connect with prospects and cultivate meaningful relationships. Furthermore, AI can write in your exact tone of voice, so you sound consistent and personable.

Features to Look For in an AI Sales Prospecting Tool

With so many AI sales prospecting tools on the market, it's challenging to sort through and identify the best options. Later in this article, we'll share four of our favorite AI sales prospecting tools, but below, we wanted to call out all the most critical aspects sales leaders should be considering when selecting an AI partner.

Scalability

Your AI sales prospecting tool should be scalable to grow with your business. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, the tool should handle increasing volumes of data and users seamlessly. Look for solutions that offer flexible pricing and can adapt to your changing needs.

Integrations

Integrations are a crucial component in the optimization of your AI sales prospecting tool. A seamless connection to your CRM, email marketing platforms, project management solution, meeting assistants, and other tools is essential. This ensures a streamlined workflow and consistent data synchronization, which in turn bolsters your sales process.

Motion, for example, offers hundreds of integrations with tools many sales teams use daily via our API and integrations. Motion specifically natively integrates with tools like Salesforce, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Zoom, Zapier, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and iCloud Calendar.

Robust Data Privacy & Security

Data privacy is a paramount concern in sales, which is why finding an AI tool that prioritizes data security and compliance is a necessity. For instance, Motion offers enterprise-grade security and data protection.

Motion is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ensuring the highest security standards through an independent audit by a top security firm. All data is fully encrypted in transit and at rest to keep your information safe.

The Top Four AI Sales Prospecting Tools

Below, we're recapping the top AI sales tools and diving into their most loved features. We also took the time to deep dive into user reviews and showcase some of the areas where each tool is thriving, as well as the areas where they could improve.

Motion AI

As already mentioned, Motion offers an entire team of AI employees that can help a variety of different departments within your organization.

One of our AI employees, Chip, is an AI sales representative. Chip helps teams by streamlining routine tasks, taking much of the burden of sales operations off AE and SDRs. In doing so, this empowers sales experts to concentrate on their core strength—building relationships. Some common tasks you'll see Chip handle are CRM updates based on calls and emails, lead research and custom outreach via email, and post-call coaching of SDRs and BDRs.

Key Features

• Develop custom-built AI Employees specific to your own business needs with the help of Motion's Engineering Team
• Expansive feature set for work and project management, including AI Projects, AI Tasks, AI Calendars, AI Notes, AI Docs, AI SOPs, AI Search, AI Reports, and more.
• Create your own AI Employees and Skills in minutes with no technical requirements, based on templated skills
• Access hundreds of integrations with tools you already use
• Feel secure with enterprise-grade security

User Feedback

Motion is an incredibly expansive tool that makes it an ideal place to manage AI employees because it already houses the knowledge of your organization or business. Their AI employees, for example, can take meeting recordings (that Motion also captures), extract key tasks, assign them to teammates, and write a summary to Slack so people who are interested in continuing the discussion can do so offline. That is just an example workflow amongst tens of thousands.

With that being said, small business owners have found Motion to be a bit expensive. However, it's important to note that once you've implemented Motion, you should be able to cancel many of your other tools, which will ultimately save your team money.

Apollo.io

Apollo.io is an AI-powered sales platform that helps revenue teams find and engage leads, automate outreach, manage deals, and enrich data. It integrates with a wide range of tools and offers a comprehensive feature set to support every stage of the sales cycle. With Apollo, teams are booking more meetings, increasing their email open rates, and finding more direct contact information

Apollo's end-to-end platform helps businesses of all sizes, including Autodesk, Cyera, and DocuSign.

Key Features

• Find the right people and book quality meetings
• Turn conversations into deals with AI assistance
• Keep your data up-to-date, all the time, with enrichment
• Run your entire sales cycle on unified customer data

User Feedback

Apollo's robust feature set and intuitive interface are its hallmarks. The platform is highly adaptable, allowing you to customize it to your team's unique requirements.

However, users often question the accuracy of contact data and are disappointed in the fact that they often just provide business phone numbers, as opposed to direct lines.

Piperdrive

Piperdrive is an AI-powered CRM that seamlessly integrates with your existing sales tools. It automates data entry and follow-ups, allowing BDRs to concentrate on high-impact activities. The platform's intuitive interface and robust features make it a valuable asset for any sales team looking to streamline their processes.

Key Features

• Customer relationship management
• Sales pipeline and deals
• Automation
• Insights and reporting
• Email and communication tracking

User Feedback

Pipedrive is consistently praised for the fact that it's extremely approachable and easy to use. Additionally, users love its drag-and-drop sales pipeline, which allows them to intuitively manage deals and track progress with minimal training.

As far as negatives are concerned, Pipedrive is best used by small to medium-sized businesses, so its enterprise functionality is limited. Finally, users often comment that it lacks a ton of features, preventing it from being a fully comprehensive CRM solution.

UserGems

UserGems employs AI to rank and prioritize leads according to their conversion potential. This empowers BDRs to concentrate on the most promising prospects, heightening their likelihood of success. The platform also furnishes comprehensive analytics and reports, enabling you to monitor performance and fine-tune your approaches.

Key Features

• Choose your signal-based campaigns
• Create, enrich, and capture signals
• Accounts and contact scoring
• Add to campaigns and draft messaging

User Feedback

UserGems has a ton of really positive user reviews. Their clients love how the product can surface warm leads at exactly the right time. The platform's intuitive interface and comprehensive database make tracking and reaching out to these individuals a seamless process.

Of course, there are areas where users feel the tool could improve. Specifically, multiple people have commented that the amount of data the tool provides can feel a bit overwhelming.

Artisan

Artisan is an outbound email sales platform that relies on an AI BDR to handle the entire outbound demand generation process. Artisan's AI BDR can create Target Customer Personas, prospect with a database of over 300,000,000 contacts, create and send highly bespoke email sequences, and even directly book meetings on account execs' calendars.

Key Features

• Over 300 million B2B data contacts
• Email warmup
• Automated multichannel outreach
• Outbound automation

User Feedback

Of all the tools we've reviewed, Artisan, unfortunately, has the least favorable reviews. Users do appreciate the amount of time the tool saves their team, and how easy it is to set up a campaign. Alternatively, some users report that the outreach efforts are of low quality and it's clear that they were created by AI.

Best Practices for Using AI for Sales Prospecting

Because AI is already taking sales prospecting by storm, we're unfortunately already hearing quite a few stories of it being used improperly and negatively impacting a company's reputation as a result. We highly encourage you to think through each of the areas below to ensure you're using AI as tactfully and professionally as possible.

Ensure Your Personalization Efforts Are Accurate

Personalization is a critical component of effective sales prospecting. AI tools can help by analyzing customer data to create tailored messages. However, it's important to ensure the accuracy of this data. Inaccurate personalization can result in a poor customer experience and diminish the effectiveness of your outreach.

Work with a Team of AI Engineers

Teaming up with AI engineers can greatly amplify the effectiveness of your sales prospecting. They are adept at fine-tuning AI algorithms to meet your specific needs and ensure peak performance. Regular consultations with these experts can keep you ahead of the curve and maximize your ROI.

Motion offers support to its clients from its world-class engineering team and can help them create custom AI employees for their business needs.

Remember That Every Customer Touchpoint Matters

Each interaction with a potential customer is a chance to foster trust and solidify a relationship. AI is a powerful tool in ensuring that every touchpoint is both timely and pertinent. From the first contact to subsequent emails, each message should be meticulously composed to captivate the prospect and propel them through the sales pipeline. Double-check all of your AI-drafted content, enhance and edit when necessary, and even remove AI content when you're at a pivotal selling moment.

Think Past ChatGPT for AI Sales Prospecting

While ChatGPT is a powerful AI tool for text generation, it is only one piece of the AI puzzle in sales prospecting. To truly excel, BDRs need a comprehensive solution that goes beyond text generation. This means integrating tools that can handle the entire sales process, from lead identification to follow-up.

Additionally, it's important to remember that sales is a workflow. You don't want your reps to just randomly use ChatGPT for their one-off requests. The result of this would be lack knowledge sharing and best pracrices across the team. Instead, they should consistently automate their most important tasks in a workflow that is built and run on an AI tool that uniquely understands your business, customers, tone, and preferences.

Get Started with AI Sales Reps From Motion

With Motion, you can employ an army of AI Employees to 10x your output in minutes. Utilize any of the seven AI employees mentioned in this post, or custom-build AI Employees specific to your own business needs with the help of Motion's forward-deployed engineers.

Take the first step towards optimizing your workflow. Try Motion for free today and experience the power of AI employees for yourself.