When it comes to sales processes, AI technology has quickly shifted from a nice-to-have addition to a necessity. A HubSpot report confirms it, with 76% of sales professionals agreeing that most people will start using AI to simplify their work in the near future.
AI can streamline sales and pipeline management in many ways, and our team has seen this firsthand. We’ve used AI to fully automate a four-step campaign for our outbound sales sequences and get a 5.1% positive response rate.
We want to help other sales teams revolutionize their sales processes, so in this guide, we’ll explain how to use AI for sales and pipeline management. We’ll discuss concrete use cases and recommend a sales automation tool that can help your team handle all pipeline stages with ease. ⚙️
AI for Sales and Pipeline Management—The Basics
A sales pipeline represents the stages a prospect goes through in your sales process, from initial prospecting to closing the deal and following up. By using AI to manage and optimize sales pipelines, you can enjoy the following benefits:
- More precise sales forecasting—Thanks to its ability to analyze vast amounts of historical data, AI can quickly uncover trends and help you optimize resource allocation and prepare for what’s ahead
- Enhanced conversions—By analyzing prospect behavior and identifying patterns, AI can predict which accounts are likely to convert, ensuring sales teams don’t waste time and effort on low-potential accounts
- Easier deal management—AI can process data in real time, helping you spot bottlenecks early on and resolve them before they jeopardize your efficiency
- Higher customer retention—AI can effortlessly collect comprehensive data on your customers and help you create personalized experiences, resulting in improved retention and loyalty
If you don’t optimize your sales pipeline, you could end up missing opportunities to sell, wasting time and money, and offering poor customer experience.
How To Use AI for Sales and Pipeline Management
Sales pipelines typically consist of the following stages:
- Lead generation
- Lead qualification
- Outreach
- Proposal and negotiation
- Closing the deal
- Post-sales
AI can support and simplify each of these stages to help you optimize the entire pipeline, focus on personalization, and enhance conversions. We’ll walk you through exactly how you can use AI in different pipeline stages to ensure smooth customer journeys. ⛵
Lead Generation
Identifying potential customers requires thorough research. You need to understand your leads’ behaviors, needs, preferences, and challenges to ensure your sales campaigns are going in the right direction.
Manually researching a few leads is doable, but as the number of leads increases, the process becomes time-consuming. To help your presales and sales teams handle this stage more efficiently, you should add AI to your lead generation processes.
With a quality AI tool, you can collect and analyze vast amounts of lead info at a fraction of the time your SDRs would spend on research. The technology can help you search the internet in seconds and collect specific data points that would allow your SDRs to identify and prioritize high-potential accounts.
Lead Qualification
Narrowing down the pool of leads ensures your sales team maintains a laser-sharp focus on accounts that are likely to convert to prevent time and energy waste.
Traditionally, lead qualification involved SDRs asking leads a series of questions to determine if they fit into the ideal customer profile. This method can be problematic because:
- It lacks scalability—There’s only a certain number of leads an SDR can manually qualify. After that, you’ll either have to hire more SDRs or automate lead qualification
- It’s time-consuming—Depending on the number and complexity of your leads, manual lead qualification can take a lot of time
Thanks to its ability to process huge amounts of data from various sources and make predictions based on it, AI can improve your lead qualification processes. Using AI-powered tools, you can choose specific criteria to qualify your leads against, such as company size or job experience, and put lead qualification on autopilot. ✈️
Outreach
The quality of your messaging can turn leads into customers or completely deter them from your company. People seek personalized experiences, so approaching them with generic and bland messages isn’t the best way to get their attention.
Personalizing a message sounds easy if you’re reaching out to a few leads, but it gets way more complicated when you have hundreds of accounts on your outreach list. This is where AI shines—with your input, it can create a unique message for each lead, addressing their unique challenges or needs.
For example, you can use prompts in ChatGPT to instruct it to write outreach messages. A much better option is to use a quality sales tool with built-in AI features that leverage the data you have on leads to take your outreach automation to new levels.
💡 Bonus read: Want to use ChatGPT in sales? Discover our guides on ChatGPT prompts for email responses and lead-scoring techniques.
Proposal and Negotiation
Proposal and negotiation are pipeline stages that also revolve around personalization. You need to create a tailored offer for each lead and, if necessary, negotiate pricing and conditions.
All this can’t happen without valuable insights into market trends, competitors’ offers and pricing strategies, and your leads’ preferences and behaviors. With a quality AI tool, you can easily obtain this info and use it to create sales proposals that win over customers, as well as make informed decisions while negotiating.
AI tools can also write sales proposals or at least proposal templates for you, ensuring they have all the necessary elements and leaving no room for uncertainties.
Closing the Deal
Closing a deal requires SDRs to highlight the unique value of your product or service and ensure it aligns with what leads are looking for. Leads may have some objections, and SDRs need to handle these as well to ensure conversions. After closing the deal, SDRs need to draw up contracts, which can also be time-consuming. ⏰
AI can circumvent these obstacles and be a valuable assistant in sealing the deal. Here’s how it can help:
- Recognizing buying signals—Whether you’re communicating with leads via cold calls or email, there are tell-tale signs an account is ready to close. For example, leads may ask you additional questions about your offer or mention they’re unhappy with their current solution. Some AI tools can recognize these signals so that you give extra attention to these leads
- Identifying barriers and handling objections—Some leads may be hesitant to purchase your solution due to reasons like pricing, satisfaction with the current solution, or a lack of need. AI tools can efficiently handle these objections to re-emphasize your solution’s unique value and get them to purchase your offer
- Writing contracts—After a lead agrees to do business with you, you can leverage AI tools to write personalized contracts with the conditions you previously agreed upon. Such tools can draw up unique contracts for each lead or create a contract template you can quickly adjust to a particular customer
Post-Sales
To ensure customer satisfaction and retention, you’ll want to follow up with your customers to double-check if they’re happy with their purchase and if there’s anything you can do to improve their experience. Depending on your customer’s feedback, this can also be an excellent opportunity to upsell or cross-sell products.
AI can help you nurture customers by:
- Writing personalized follow-up emails and appropriate email responses
- Handling potential complaints from customers
- Asking customers for feedback
- Writing emails focusing on upselling and cross-selling products
How To Choose the Right AI Tool for Sales and Pipeline Management
There are plenty of tools that can help you manage your sales pipelines. While this abundance of options allows you to find a tool that aligns with your needs to the letter, it can also be overwhelming—you may face a choice overload. Here are a few criteria to look for in a tool to ensure you’re making the right choice:
One sales tool that ticks all the boxes is Clay. This sales automation platform can help you manage pipelines and run high-performing campaigns from start to finish. 💪
Why Clay Should Be Your Go-To AI Sales Solution
As an innovative sales automation platform, Clay boarded the AI train a while ago to allow you to make your campaigns more efficient. Here are a few notable AI-powered options you’ll get with Clay:
- Claygent
- OpenAI integration
- AI message writer
Claygent
Claygent is Clay’s AI-based assistant that removes the need for manual research, saving your team tons of time. It can:
- Answer your questions regarding people and companies so you can simplify lead generation and qualification
- Summarize vast amounts of info to save you time
- Make interferences based on your inputs
- Generate outbound campaign ideas
With Claygent, you can quickly obtain the info you need to personalize outreach and impress leads. Here are some specific questions Clay users have asked Claygent to customize messaging:
- When did the company last raise money?
- Who are the investors of this company?
- Who are happy customers listed as case studies?
- Does this company have a podcast?
OpenAI Integration
Clay fully integrates with the company behind ChatGPT—OpenAI. This handy integration allows you to effortlessly complete different actions, such as:
AI Message Writer
Clay comes with a built-in AI message writer based on OpenAI, which can help you personalize your outreach and send unique emails to your leads. Here’s how to use it:
- Choose from Clay’s 50+ data enrichment integrations to obtain quality lead information from various sources
- Use Clay’s AI message drafter to write hyper-personalized messages based on this information
Depending on your needs, you can mention more general data points in your messages, such as a lead’s job title or industry. But you can also be much more detailed and bring up a lead’s podcast appearance, research on a company’s mission, or a recent social media post. 👌
Clay’s AI message writer can also come in handy in the post-sale stage of your pipeline—you can use it to write follow-up emails and ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
Once you generate your emails, you can:
- Send them to your CRM system
- Push them to your email sequencer
- Save them as a CSV file
Clay’s Valuable Integrations for Maximum Functionality
One of the many reasons users love Clay is its ability to integrate with over 200 tools, including CRMs, marketing and outreach solutions, and e-commerce platforms. All these integrations allow you to expand Clay’s functionalities and maintain updated records of your potential and existing customers.
As there’s no efficient sales pipeline without quality data, over 50 of Clay’s integrations focus solely on data enrichment. This means you can pull information on your leads from dozens of sources, enjoying fantastic data coverage. Effortlessly find all kinds of lead data, from email addresses to social media accounts and recent news.
You can later leverage this data in all sales pipeline stages, not just lead generation. For example, you can qualify leads based on the specific info you’ve found with Clay’s integrations.
To fully automate the enrichment process with Clay, use waterfall enrichment—this convenient feature allows you to search multiple databases to find specific information. You choose the databases and the info you need, so you remain in complete control while Clay does the heavy lifting. 🕶️
Choose Between Free and Paid Pricing Plans
If you like the sound of Clay but you’re still not 100% sure if it’s what you’re looking for, use its free forever plan to explore some of its options. When you’re ready to upgrade, select one of the following four paid plans:
All plans are credit-based—you use credits to purchase actions and data points. Each plan comes with a different number of credits, but what they all have in common is cost optimization. As you pay for individual actions and data points, you control how you spend your money and ensure it’s not wasted. 💸
Thanks to its multifunctionality and robust AI features, Clay has had a huge fanbase from day one, and many sales pros have achieved fantastic results with the platform. Here’s what one user managed to get with Clay:
Set up Your Account Today
If you’re ready to optimize your sales pipelines with Clay’s rich feature set, you can create your account in a few easy steps:
- Visit the signup page
- Enter your name, email address, and password
- Explore the platform’s options
If you want to see the platform’s complete offer and understand how you can benefit from each option, visit Clay University for detailed feature walkthroughs. Check out the Claybooks to see some of the awesome workflows you can build with Clay and other tools.
We also recommend joining the Slack community to connect with other users and see how they use Clay in their work.
💡 Keep reading: Want to know more about leveraging AI in sales? Check out the following guides:
When it comes to sales processes, AI technology has quickly shifted from a nice-to-have addition to a necessity. A HubSpot report confirms it, with 76% of sales professionals agreeing that most people will start using AI to simplify their work in the near future.
AI can streamline sales and pipeline management in many ways, and our team has seen this firsthand. We’ve used AI to fully automate a four-step campaign for our outbound sales sequences and get a 5.1% positive response rate.
We want to help other sales teams revolutionize their sales processes, so in this guide, we’ll explain how to use AI for sales and pipeline management. We’ll discuss concrete use cases and recommend a sales automation tool that can help your team handle all pipeline stages with ease. ⚙️
AI for Sales and Pipeline Management—The Basics
A sales pipeline represents the stages a prospect goes through in your sales process, from initial prospecting to closing the deal and following up. By using AI to manage and optimize sales pipelines, you can enjoy the following benefits:
- More precise sales forecasting—Thanks to its ability to analyze vast amounts of historical data, AI can quickly uncover trends and help you optimize resource allocation and prepare for what’s ahead
- Enhanced conversions—By analyzing prospect behavior and identifying patterns, AI can predict which accounts are likely to convert, ensuring sales teams don’t waste time and effort on low-potential accounts
- Easier deal management—AI can process data in real time, helping you spot bottlenecks early on and resolve them before they jeopardize your efficiency
- Higher customer retention—AI can effortlessly collect comprehensive data on your customers and help you create personalized experiences, resulting in improved retention and loyalty
If you don’t optimize your sales pipeline, you could end up missing opportunities to sell, wasting time and money, and offering poor customer experience.
How To Use AI for Sales and Pipeline Management
Sales pipelines typically consist of the following stages:
- Lead generation
- Lead qualification
- Outreach
- Proposal and negotiation
- Closing the deal
- Post-sales
AI can support and simplify each of these stages to help you optimize the entire pipeline, focus on personalization, and enhance conversions. We’ll walk you through exactly how you can use AI in different pipeline stages to ensure smooth customer journeys. ⛵
Lead Generation
Identifying potential customers requires thorough research. You need to understand your leads’ behaviors, needs, preferences, and challenges to ensure your sales campaigns are going in the right direction.
Manually researching a few leads is doable, but as the number of leads increases, the process becomes time-consuming. To help your presales and sales teams handle this stage more efficiently, you should add AI to your lead generation processes.
With a quality AI tool, you can collect and analyze vast amounts of lead info at a fraction of the time your SDRs would spend on research. The technology can help you search the internet in seconds and collect specific data points that would allow your SDRs to identify and prioritize high-potential accounts.
Lead Qualification
Narrowing down the pool of leads ensures your sales team maintains a laser-sharp focus on accounts that are likely to convert to prevent time and energy waste.
Traditionally, lead qualification involved SDRs asking leads a series of questions to determine if they fit into the ideal customer profile. This method can be problematic because:
- It lacks scalability—There’s only a certain number of leads an SDR can manually qualify. After that, you’ll either have to hire more SDRs or automate lead qualification
- It’s time-consuming—Depending on the number and complexity of your leads, manual lead qualification can take a lot of time
Thanks to its ability to process huge amounts of data from various sources and make predictions based on it, AI can improve your lead qualification processes. Using AI-powered tools, you can choose specific criteria to qualify your leads against, such as company size or job experience, and put lead qualification on autopilot. ✈️
Outreach
The quality of your messaging can turn leads into customers or completely deter them from your company. People seek personalized experiences, so approaching them with generic and bland messages isn’t the best way to get their attention.
Personalizing a message sounds easy if you’re reaching out to a few leads, but it gets way more complicated when you have hundreds of accounts on your outreach list. This is where AI shines—with your input, it can create a unique message for each lead, addressing their unique challenges or needs.
For example, you can use prompts in ChatGPT to instruct it to write outreach messages. A much better option is to use a quality sales tool with built-in AI features that leverage the data you have on leads to take your outreach automation to new levels.
💡 Bonus read: Want to use ChatGPT in sales? Discover our guides on ChatGPT prompts for email responses and lead-scoring techniques.
Proposal and Negotiation
Proposal and negotiation are pipeline stages that also revolve around personalization. You need to create a tailored offer for each lead and, if necessary, negotiate pricing and conditions.
All this can’t happen without valuable insights into market trends, competitors’ offers and pricing strategies, and your leads’ preferences and behaviors. With a quality AI tool, you can easily obtain this info and use it to create sales proposals that win over customers, as well as make informed decisions while negotiating.
AI tools can also write sales proposals or at least proposal templates for you, ensuring they have all the necessary elements and leaving no room for uncertainties.
Closing the Deal
Closing a deal requires SDRs to highlight the unique value of your product or service and ensure it aligns with what leads are looking for. Leads may have some objections, and SDRs need to handle these as well to ensure conversions. After closing the deal, SDRs need to draw up contracts, which can also be time-consuming. ⏰
AI can circumvent these obstacles and be a valuable assistant in sealing the deal. Here’s how it can help:
- Recognizing buying signals—Whether you’re communicating with leads via cold calls or email, there are tell-tale signs an account is ready to close. For example, leads may ask you additional questions about your offer or mention they’re unhappy with their current solution. Some AI tools can recognize these signals so that you give extra attention to these leads
- Identifying barriers and handling objections—Some leads may be hesitant to purchase your solution due to reasons like pricing, satisfaction with the current solution, or a lack of need. AI tools can efficiently handle these objections to re-emphasize your solution’s unique value and get them to purchase your offer
- Writing contracts—After a lead agrees to do business with you, you can leverage AI tools to write personalized contracts with the conditions you previously agreed upon. Such tools can draw up unique contracts for each lead or create a contract template you can quickly adjust to a particular customer
Post-Sales
To ensure customer satisfaction and retention, you’ll want to follow up with your customers to double-check if they’re happy with their purchase and if there’s anything you can do to improve their experience. Depending on your customer’s feedback, this can also be an excellent opportunity to upsell or cross-sell products.
AI can help you nurture customers by:
- Writing personalized follow-up emails and appropriate email responses
- Handling potential complaints from customers
- Asking customers for feedback
- Writing emails focusing on upselling and cross-selling products
How To Choose the Right AI Tool for Sales and Pipeline Management
There are plenty of tools that can help you manage your sales pipelines. While this abundance of options allows you to find a tool that aligns with your needs to the letter, it can also be overwhelming—you may face a choice overload. Here are a few criteria to look for in a tool to ensure you’re making the right choice:
One sales tool that ticks all the boxes is Clay. This sales automation platform can help you manage pipelines and run high-performing campaigns from start to finish. 💪
Why Clay Should Be Your Go-To AI Sales Solution
As an innovative sales automation platform, Clay boarded the AI train a while ago to allow you to make your campaigns more efficient. Here are a few notable AI-powered options you’ll get with Clay:
- Claygent
- OpenAI integration
- AI message writer
Claygent
Claygent is Clay’s AI-based assistant that removes the need for manual research, saving your team tons of time. It can:
- Answer your questions regarding people and companies so you can simplify lead generation and qualification
- Summarize vast amounts of info to save you time
- Make interferences based on your inputs
- Generate outbound campaign ideas
With Claygent, you can quickly obtain the info you need to personalize outreach and impress leads. Here are some specific questions Clay users have asked Claygent to customize messaging:
- When did the company last raise money?
- Who are the investors of this company?
- Who are happy customers listed as case studies?
- Does this company have a podcast?
OpenAI Integration
Clay fully integrates with the company behind ChatGPT—OpenAI. This handy integration allows you to effortlessly complete different actions, such as:
AI Message Writer
Clay comes with a built-in AI message writer based on OpenAI, which can help you personalize your outreach and send unique emails to your leads. Here’s how to use it:
- Choose from Clay’s 50+ data enrichment integrations to obtain quality lead information from various sources
- Use Clay’s AI message drafter to write hyper-personalized messages based on this information
Depending on your needs, you can mention more general data points in your messages, such as a lead’s job title or industry. But you can also be much more detailed and bring up a lead’s podcast appearance, research on a company’s mission, or a recent social media post. 👌
Clay’s AI message writer can also come in handy in the post-sale stage of your pipeline—you can use it to write follow-up emails and ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
Once you generate your emails, you can:
- Send them to your CRM system
- Push them to your email sequencer
- Save them as a CSV file
Clay’s Valuable Integrations for Maximum Functionality
One of the many reasons users love Clay is its ability to integrate with over 200 tools, including CRMs, marketing and outreach solutions, and e-commerce platforms. All these integrations allow you to expand Clay’s functionalities and maintain updated records of your potential and existing customers.
As there’s no efficient sales pipeline without quality data, over 50 of Clay’s integrations focus solely on data enrichment. This means you can pull information on your leads from dozens of sources, enjoying fantastic data coverage. Effortlessly find all kinds of lead data, from email addresses to social media accounts and recent news.
You can later leverage this data in all sales pipeline stages, not just lead generation. For example, you can qualify leads based on the specific info you’ve found with Clay’s integrations.
To fully automate the enrichment process with Clay, use waterfall enrichment—this convenient feature allows you to search multiple databases to find specific information. You choose the databases and the info you need, so you remain in complete control while Clay does the heavy lifting. 🕶️
Choose Between Free and Paid Pricing Plans
If you like the sound of Clay but you’re still not 100% sure if it’s what you’re looking for, use its free forever plan to explore some of its options. When you’re ready to upgrade, select one of the following four paid plans:
All plans are credit-based—you use credits to purchase actions and data points. Each plan comes with a different number of credits, but what they all have in common is cost optimization. As you pay for individual actions and data points, you control how you spend your money and ensure it’s not wasted. 💸
Thanks to its multifunctionality and robust AI features, Clay has had a huge fanbase from day one, and many sales pros have achieved fantastic results with the platform. Here’s what one user managed to get with Clay:
Set up Your Account Today
If you’re ready to optimize your sales pipelines with Clay’s rich feature set, you can create your account in a few easy steps:
- Visit the signup page
- Enter your name, email address, and password
- Explore the platform’s options
If you want to see the platform’s complete offer and understand how you can benefit from each option, visit Clay University for detailed feature walkthroughs. Check out the Claybooks to see some of the awesome workflows you can build with Clay and other tools.
We also recommend joining the Slack community to connect with other users and see how they use Clay in their work.
💡 Keep reading: Want to know more about leveraging AI in sales? Check out the following guides:
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