The footprint of Artificial Intelligence in the business world has steadily increased year after year. Gartner predicts that, by 2026, one in ten interactions handled initially by human agents will be automated through technology. One of the areas where Artificial Intelligence is already gaining ground is cold calling.
Next, we’ll explore AI cold calling and how it helps sales departments increase efficiency.
What is cold calling with Artificial Intelligence?
AI cold calling uses AI technology to make the traditional cold calling process more effective and less time-consuming. These tools can help the sales team collect information about leads and verify the information, lead scoring, call scheduling, etc.
With greater efficiency, sales professionals can reduce administrative work and close more deals – a win-win.
Benefits of cold calling with Artificial Intelligence
Here are some ways AI cold-calling tools can be helpful for sales departments.
Scope Automation
With Artificial Intelligence, you can present your offer to hundreds, if not thousands, of potential customers daily without your sales team initiating conversations. This can help save your employees time and hassle, as 48% of sales reps admit they are afraid of cold calling.
You can set up a voice bot to initiate the phone call, present your offer, and direct the call to an agent if the prospect is interested.
AI cold calling also works well with omnichannel communication. You can run your cold outreach campaign through text channels like live chat or email. You can then have AI pre-select potential customers who want to hear more information over the phone.
Helps detect and nurture suitable leads
Most sales professionals don’t like cold calling very much. In fact, 63% say it’s something they don’t like about their job. Because? It mainly comes down to three things:
- Not having the correct information before calls.
- Get leads that are too hard to reach.
- Receiving poor quality leads from marketing.
These are all valid reasons why cold calling can be challenging. Fortunately, these problems can be quickly addressed with Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence technology analyzes hundreds or thousands of potential customers and selects the highest conversion potential. This prevents sales agents from calling potential customers who are not interested in a specific offer or are not yet ready to buy.
In addition, conversational Artificial Intelligence, thanks to its NLP capabilities, helps evaluate the sentiment of a potential customer. Check if it is positive, negative, or neutral.
Boost the productivity levels of your sales teams
In HubSpot’s State of AI survey, two-thirds of business leaders said AI will rival the Industrial Revolution regarding its impact on productivity. From the sales department’s perspective, the most significant change lies in the automation of outreach and updates to lead and customer data. Those using Artificial Intelligence to carry out administrative and prospecting work already save two or more hours daily.
This means sales reps can redirect their attention, brainpower, and creativity to more demanding tasks: closing deals with “hot” prospects or upselling existing customers.
Have more personalized conversations
Regarding cold calling, your success often comes down to volume, meaning the more calls you have on hold, the better your chances of conversion. This makes customization difficult unless you use Artificial Intelligence.
These tools can analyze millions of data points, including interests, demographics, browsing, and purchase history. Artificial Intelligence helps you understand the needs of your potential customers and adapt your offer accordingly.
And we all know how much people value personalization. Unsurprisingly, 35% of Amazon sales come from product recommendations based on customers’ previous purchases.
Best Cold Calling Practices with Artificial Intelligence
Below, we explain how to use Artificial Intelligence to its full potential when running cold-calling campaigns.
1. Use Artificial Intelligence to Personalize Cold Calling Scripts
The larger your cold-calling contact list, the more likely you are to deal with many potential customer segments. These people (or companies) can vary in terms of goals, challenges, and psychographics.
If you use the same script for everyone, it is doubtful that you will achieve a reasonable conversion rate. Instead, use information from your CRM to identify these groups and customize your scripts to meet your needs.
For example, if you’re targeting B2B brands, you can ask AI to tailor your script to the prospect’s specific industry. Alternatively, you can experiment with tone of voice. For example, informally approach startups while maintaining a more formal style when communicating with financial and legal corporations.
2. Only target potential customers ready to buy
This is where using Artificial Intelligence integrated with your CRM can work wonders.
You can set up a voice bot to make cold calls and help you create leads while focusing on closing deals with your sales-qualified leads (SQL).
3. Update your prospect lists regularly
Your sales will be significantly affected if your prospect lists are complete with outdated or duplicate records. Use Artificial Intelligence to analyze your database for errors or profiles that have not been updated in a long time. Depending on the platform you use, you can:
- Run a chat command asking the Artificial Intelligence to display a list of questionable accounts for review.
- Ask it to delete them automatically.
That said, it’s also essential to keep updating your verified contacts. This can also be done with the help of Artificial Intelligence. Adding a simple note, such as “contact is on parental leave until August 31,” could go a long way.
4. Do your research before the call
It is difficult to find someone who says he is happy to receive cold calls. Most of us will hang up our phones when we hear someone trying to sell us something we don’t want. But this can change if a seller finds our point of interest, right?
That’s why it’s essential to do proper research before cold-calling your potential client. Automating sales calls can help you gather deeper insights about your prospects to create a pitch that appeals to your target audience.
5. Optimize your prices
Determining the right price is complex; companies rarely offer a single standard price for all their customers. If you do it wrong, you’ll have fewer closed sales.
Fortunately, you can use Artificial Intelligence to optimize your prices for different customer segments. You will use the algorithms to analyze some data, including:
- Past offers.
- Competitors’ prices.
- Individual customer preferences.
It then suggests an optimal price for that customer, improving your chances of making a sale.
6. Generate reports and use them to refine your cold-calling strategy
Use a conversational CRM bot to quickly get results from your latest cold-calling campaigns. What are they telling you? How many calls passed from the first interaction? How many contacts have they left you, and at what point in the conversation?
Dig more profound if the success rate is meager among a segment of prospects. Run an after-action review and use your insights to spot the “weakest link” in your sales workflow or assets.
