The way B2B companies attract and nurture leads has been swept up in the AI wave – welcome to AI lead generation, the future of attracting prospects, nurturing leads, and closing sales.
There are plenty of AI lead generation tools on the market. But the most effective way to bring your lead generation pipeline into the current century is with an AI chatbot or AI agent.
Deploying a chatbot for lead generation is a cost-effective way to scale your operations: one chatbot can engage with multiple leads at once, working 24/7 to qualify new contacts.
They’re available all the time, in every language. And they provide a personalized experience for your website visitors – long gone are the days of cut-and-paste Q&A bots.
The AI advantage isn’t just who implements AI-powered sales tools, but who can implement them effectively.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through a few ways that AI technology can enhance your lead generation efforts.
What is AI lead generation?
AI lead generation is the use of artificial intelligence technologies to identify and attract potential customers to a business.
You can think of AI lead generation tools – like chatbots and AI agents – as an employee that’s working around the clock. They can interact with website visitors, answering their questions, gathering their information, and directing them to relevant products or pages.
What is an AI agent?
While you may be familiar with the term ‘chatbot’, ‘AI agent’ has only just become popular across non-technical industries.
An artificial intelligence (AI) agent is a software application that autonomously performs tasks. They can automate processes and make decisions on behalf of a user – like deter an undesirable lead, or book a meeting after qualifying a lead.
You can read more about AI agents and their impact on the workforce here: What is an AI Agent?
How to deploy an AI agent for lead generation
Powered by advanced machine learning algorithms, AI agents can expand beyond single use cases. It can be implemented throughout the lead generation process, and every stage of the sales funnel.
But in this article, we’ll hone in on 3 high-impact ways your team can deploy an AI agent for lead generation:
- Building lead lists
- Sending personalized communications
- Qualifying leads
Plenty of companies commit to integrating AI technology into their business, but few use it to its full potential.
Sourcing high quality leads is the cornerstone of B2B lead generation – and AI algorithms can help you with both sourcing and qualifying.
If you’re in a competitive market, integrating the latest technology is how your business can outlast its competitors.
Build lead lists
Monitor social media
An AI chatbot can gather and monitor data coming from your social media channels, as well as directly interact with prospects.
From visitors across platforms, it can consolidate prospects, score them, and deliver relevant lists to your sales team. If your team wants to automate the first few touchpoints, then your chatbot can directly contact certain lead segments.
Capture lead information
If you’ve ever interacted with a website’s chatbot, you’ve likely had to enter your contact information. Not only does it capture a lead, but visitors can find it useful to be sent relevant follow-up materials regarding their questions.
Instead of waiting for lead generation to manifest, your AI agent can directly engage with visitors. Even if they only came to ask a few questions, using a chatbot instead of an FAQ page will dramatically grow your lead generation
If an AI agent or salesperson finds missing contact information in your marketing data, they can consolidate information from any of your software platforms to complete the user profile.
Since AI agents are available across channels – websites, emails, or messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook Messenger – your lead generation bot can even ask prospects how they would prefer to be contacted. If they’re more responsive on WhatsApp than email, it’s no extra effort for a chatbot.
Write and send personalized communication
Distribute lead magnets
AI agents are a perfect venue to bring the right lead magnets to the right people. Instead of waiting for potential customers to organically land on your white paper, an agent can select the most relevant lead magnet from internal libraries.
A website visitor with a .edu email address can be sent an ebook about the latest trends in higher education for your services. Or your bot can send a demo or YouTube video for a related use case after the user explains what they’re looking for.
An AI agent is able to identify your target audience from a brief conversation, and deliver lead magnets to the right audience at the right time.
Communicate across messaging channels
Once deployed across your messaging channels – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, or Instagram – your AI bot is free to engage with prospects across the map.
Bringing your targeted messaging to the platforms your customers use is an easy way to increase reach and engagement while saving your marketing and sales teams’ time.
Orchestrate email campaigns
While automating emails is an old trick, an AI agent can take it a step further and personalize marketing messages.
And if given the task, they can even facilitate entire email campaigns. The AI algorithms that power a chatbot can independently conduct targeted outbound marketing campaigns by segmenting potential leads, choosing a method and frequency of contact, and sending personalized messages.
Emails are always going to be part of the sales process. But don’t waste time – of sales teams and marketing teams – by ignoring AI-powered shortcuts.
Qualify leads
Build an ideal customer profile
An AI chatbot can help construct a data-driven ideal customer profile (ICP) – through a combination of analyzing customer data and market insights, a chatbot can suggest requirements to your strategy team.
Your chatbot engages with enough users to bring in unique data about their profiles – like their interests in your company, their employee count, and their industry. It can integrate with your existing software to track their behavior across your website.
A chatbot also has access to your CRM and existing customer profiles. Using this data, it can analyze and suggest new parameters for your team’s ICPs.
Score leads
Lead scoring is a task that your company should already have automated.
An AI chatbot or agent can score prospects in real time as it converses with them (or registers their behavior on your site).
It can automatically consolidate any relevant information into your determined score and update it in your team’s CRM. If a lead hits a certain threshold, a chatbot can alert the necessary team members.
Improve lead qualification
A back-and-forth conversation is an easy and engaging way to get information about your potential customers.
AI algorithms are easily fed your criteria for prospective leads, and they can improve their detection systems with time. AI software is able to analyze customer behavior in a precise manner impossible to humans.
As it learns, an AI agent will gain valuable insights about your lead generation – they may register that qualified leads tend to come from unexpected email accounts, or use certain language in their requests.
An effective AI agent will be integrated with your CRM system, so once they’ve qualified or disqualified a lead, it will automatically update internal records.
If your sales teams aren’t using AI-powered lead generation tools, they’re wasting time on tasks that can be successfully automated.
Benefits of using AI agents for lead generation
In B2B lead generation, connecting with the right prospects is everything.
AI generation software like chatbots and agents allow you to 1) automate repetitive tasks, 2) enhance your research and strategy, and 3) generate leads at a faster and more accurate rate than a non-AI-powered sales team.
Well-deployed AI-powered marketing efforts can improve your B2B lead generation several-fold. Why? It’s not just artificial intelligence – AI agents and chatbots have several features that are distinct from traditional sales processes. Here are a few of their key features:
24/7 support
If you have prospects across time zones, you need a chatbot. If you get queries and requests outside of traditional business hours, you need a chatbot. The reason why chatbots originally exploded for customer service is largely because of their constant, ever-present support for users.
Using AI for lead generation means your marketing efforts never stop. A bot can engage with prospects on the other side of the world, day or night.
Multilingual
If your prospects are multilingual, your lead generation strategies should be, too.
One of the key features of AI for lead generation is that your outreach becomes instantaneously multilingual. The best chatbot platforms will allow you to automatically translate into over 100 languages.
And more importantly, a good platform will easily accommodate custom translations. If you have a complex SaaS offering, you know that automatic translation won’t always maintain original meaning. Custom translations allow you to accurately communicate your offering, even across an endless variety of conversation and language.
Instantaneous support
Email is great – except for the inevitable time delays. No one likes waiting. So much so that wait times are proven to negatively impact the entire sales process.
Customers who are forced to wait are 18% less satisfied with their overall experience – even if the rest of the interaction goes perfectly.
AI lead generation software allows you to converse with multiple leads without delay. Even when handling prospects in the same time zone, there’s only so fast your sales team can engage with each.
It’s a simple feature, but it’s impactful. The best AI lead generation takes away the ‘waiting tax’.
Omnichannel service
Company websites aren’t the only place you can deploy an AI agent. If you use a platform with open integration capabilities, you can connect your bot anywhere your prospects are.
They can facilitate LinkedIn outreach, send messages and content over WhatsApp, or send emails.
Lead generation strategies should account for the expansion of digital communication. Marketing teams should be constantly evolving the channels they use to target prospects. The best AI lead generation software can automate a wide variety of channel communication – and continue evolving alongside our digital communications.
Automatic qualifying
A core benefit of using AI for lead generation is its ability to intelligently qualify and disqualify leads.
Instead of making your sales professionals analyze current customer data, assign your agent. AI lead generation software is adept at picking up similarities between your successful customers, including aspects that may fly under the radar to the human eye.
Simultaneous interactions
If your company is scaling rapidly, automated interactions are a necessity – and if they’re AI-powered, they can actually be effective. Personalized, targeted marketing efforts were once impossible to automate, but that’s no longer the case.
Save sales reps’ time
Your sales team has more valuable tasks to do than sort through the results of email campaigns.
Using AI for lead generation ensures that repetitive tasks are banished from your reps’ calendars. But this isn’t limited to emails – every step of the lead generation process benefits from AI-powered sales tools.
From building and sending materials to attract leads, all the way to closing sales, AI agents are able to enhance the speed and efficiency of the entire lead generation process. What matters most is ensuring proper integration with your existing systems.
How to set up a chatbot for lead generation
Pick a platform
If you’re brand new to chatbots and agents, you’ll want to start with an AI chatbot platform to build your agent. Even if you have a developer team, starting with a platform allows you to gain a solid base in terms of security and integrations.
Once you pick a chatbot platform (you can check out our top 9 chatbot platforms for guidance), you need to find a builder.
You can build a chatbot yourself, make use of your company’s in-house developer, or arrange for an agency or independent contractor to build one for you.
Connect your chatbot to your internal systems
An effective lead generation chatbot needs to be seamlessly integrated with your platforms, systems, and channels.
A chatbot that operates semi-independently of your day-to-day operations isn’t going to see anywhere near its maximum ROI.
If you pick an extensible platform, your team will be able to connect your AI technology to any and all internal processes that you want to see automated.
AI lead generation tools
While a chatbot can accomplish a lot alone, it can be helpful to team it up with other AI lead generation software. There’s plenty of AI lead generation software options: AI tools built into your existing software, AI-powered predictive analytics, and independent AI lead generation software.
There are plenty of AI tools on the market. But if you want the best of AI lead generation, you can connect your AI agent to your AI-enhanced sales platforms.
If you’re considering AI for lead generation, you may want to start at a low level of implementation. In this case, you can investigate what AI-enhancement options exist within the software you already use.
Whether you want to integrate an AI agent, or use these tools in isolation, here are a few options:
Hubspot
Hubspot is notable, not just for its ubiquity, but for its integrated CRM.
Like most major platforms, Hubspot has begun to offer AI features throughout their platform. Their two main options are their Content Assistant and ChatSpot.ai.
Their Content Assistant can help write email subject lines, blogs, and meta descriptions. But their offering is multimodal, allowing users to craft social media posts and – allegedly – entire websites.
ChatSpot.ai serves the CRM side of Hubspot. It allows users to add contacts and companies to their CRM, create custom sales and marketing reports, and draft personalized sales emails.
If you want to connect an AI agent – so that all your systems are integrated – it can provide connections between your Hubspot data and your other platforms. It can provide insights and end internal updates and messages based on new data.
Salesforce
The Salesforce AI solution is Einstein Copilot, another option for automating CRM work. Similar to Hubspot’s offering, Einstein can help with sales – it can write personalized emails, generate summaries of sales calls, and collect insights and predictions.
For commerce, it can generate product descriptions and recommend relevant products. And for marketing, it can customize outreach campaigns.
You can integrate an AI agent with your Salesforce workflows to streamline your CRM, lead generation, and track your sales pipelines. An AI agent can then map these to your other platforms, provide insights, and communicate this information through other channels.
Kartra
The Kartra platform was designed for digitally-sold products and services, and it’s adept at lead management. Similar to Hubspot, it allows you to organize your prospects and leads, as well as segment them based on their actions or your own criteria.
Kartra supports lead tagging, provides customizable templates for web pages, and segmented email marketing.
How to get buy-in from your team
Using AI for lead generation should never be seen as a threat to your sales team – it exists to enhance their day-to-day workflows.
Sales and marketing teams are free to spend more of their time on high level tasks – opportunities that require complex or strategic management – when routine tasks are automated with AI lead generation software.
The human side of the AI equation is equally as important. If employees aren't enthusiastic to see the results of new tech, they won't be inclined to use it to its full potential. A major step in implementing real AI solutions is to ensure team members are properly trained in using the software and incentivized to maximize its potential.
Improve your ROI today, not next year
AI-powered processes can expedite your business processes, if you properly integrate them into your existing workflows and platforms.
Our specialty is making AI work for you. Our platform allows you to connect AI-powered agents throughout your business, whether it’s a bot for internal HR bot, customer service, or lead generation.
If you’re interested in infusing AI across your business processes, contact our sales team.
FAQ
What is AI for lead generation?
AI-powered lead generation includes AI chatbots and agents, AI assistants, and other sales software. AI tools are used at every stage of the lead generation process, increasing outreach efforts and sales leads.
What is the best AI lead generation tool?
While there are plenty of options on the market, an AI chatbot or AI agent is the most comprehensive AI technology for B2B lead generation. The best AI lead generation tool will be able to seamlessly integrate into your existing systems.
What are the best AI marketing strategies?
Infusing AI into your marketing strategies is best done through a comprehensive AI tool like a chatbot or AI agents. This software allows your company to automate repetitive tasks and enhance strategy through your business processes.
How can I use AI to get quality leads?
Lead generation tools like AI agents are able to identify and qualify leads. Since they can analyze customer data and prospect data, they’re able to find underlying patterns and accurately predict high quality leads.
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