According to Marketing Wizdom, only 2% of sales occur after the first meeting. The statistic is clear as day—if SDRs don’t make further contact with their leads after the initial outreach, they’ll hardly ever make a sale. 👎
While following up is often the deciding step for landing more sales, many companies struggle with it because they don’t have the proper resources. Sending out follow-up messages or making hundreds of calls takes time and money, and businesses don’t always have enough staff to do the heavy lifting. This leads to many missed sales opportunities.
This is where AI comes into play—the technology can automate communication with leads so they receive continuous engagement. Take our team as an example—we’ve used AI in email communication for years and achieved impressive results, cutting the number of sent emails in half and doubling positive responses.
Supported by that experience, this guide will focus on AI lead follow-up to help other sales pros save time and boost conversions. 📈
What Is AI Lead Follow-Up?
AI lead follow-up involves using AI technology to follow up with your lead accounts, make yourself visible, and, more importantly, help them resolve any issues or answer their questions. You can do this via various communication channels, including email, phone calls, LinkedIn messages, or in-person meetings. ☑️
When you start relying on technology, you’ll be able to overcome the common challenges of traditional follow-ups that involve a lot of manual work, such as:
- Lack of personalization—Generic follow-ups are no longer acceptable for leads. They want personalized experiences, and traditional follow-ups don’t prioritize personalization because it’s time-consuming
- Employee overload—Following up isn’t the only task on your SDR’s to-do list. If they have too much on their plate as-is, the number of follow-ups they’re supposed to handle might stress them out, which could result in a drop in motivation
- Late responses—Time is money, and if you wait too long to follow up with a lead, they may lose interest in your offer. Even if they don’t, a better-organized business may get to them before you do
What Are the Benefits of AI Lead Follow-Up?
Giving your sales reps a break from all the repetitive and manual tasks is just one of the reasons to add AI to your sales toolbox. Here are the benefits that will make a tangible difference in your follow-up game:
How Does AI Support Lead Follow-Ups?
Following up with a lead is so much more than sending them a second, third, or fourth message or calling them non-stop. It’s about providing value to engage the lead, make them interested in your product, and guide them through the sales funnel. AI can help with this in several ways:
- Collecting lead data
- Creating personalized messages and subject lines
- Suggesting the right approach
- Optimizing timing
Collecting Lead Data
One of the main goals of following up with leads is keeping them engaged and nurturing the relationship until they’re ready to purchase from you. To keep your leads hooked and give them value, you need to learn what they need, appreciate, struggle with, how much they use social media, and what their tech stack consists of.
Having this data on hand means you can:
- Offer them tailored content recommendations
- Send them relevant case studies
- Help them solve problems
With machine learning, AI can automate lead data collection. In only a few seconds, an AI web scraper can gather and save data from various online sources, from company websites to social media. 🤖
Depending on your previous interactions with a lead, you can use the data to customize the follow-up to pull the right strings. For example, if you sell a marketing tool and your lead just posted about being unhappy with their current marketing solution because it’s complicated, you can use this info in your email follow-ups. Subtly present your tool as the better option because it has a clean layout or a customizable interface.
Creating Personalized Messages and Call Scripts
Follow-up messages and calls need to be context-appropriate and personalized, and this is exactly what makes them so complicated. You can’t approach every lead the same way, and you may not have the time to revisit your previous interactions and personalize accordingly.
There are many different situations in which you might need to follow up:
- You haven’t received a response to your initial outreach message or call
- You met a lead at an event and now want to continue the conversation
- You interacted with a lead but then got ghosted, yikes
Instead of having your whole team dig up old messages and sales call transcriptions, AI chatbots like ChatGPT can analyze previous interactions with leads and generate personalized messages and call scripts based on them.
But let’s say you met a lead in person and haven’t interacted with them via email. Now what? You can still write prompts and instruct the chatbot to generate a message according to your face-to-face conversation.
💡 Bonus read: Want to know how to use ChatGPT in sales? Read our articles on ChatGPT prompts for emails and lead scoring and learn its role in sales and business development and responding to emails.
Suggesting the Right Approach
Following up can be tricky because you need to be persistent, but you don’t want to come across as annoying and drive your leads away. You need to know how to read your leads to recognize signals that indicate whether or not they want to purchase.
Realistically, most SDRs won’t have time to conduct an in-depth analysis of each lead interaction to brainstorm the right approach for their follow-ups, which could lead to missed opportunities for conversion.
AI shines in this area—gen AI can conduct a detailed speech and text analysis to determine a lead’s tone and identify buying intent signals. Based on the analysis, AI can suggest the best way to approach the lead with your follow-up.
For example, AI can spot signs of hesitation and generate a follow-up that gives the lead a gentle nudge in the right direction and resolves potential issues. AI technology can also help you deal with objections or provide more details about your offer, which is always a nice touch.
Optimizing Timing
The timing of your follow-ups can directly affect their performance. If you follow up with a lead a day after the initial message or call, they could see you as pushy. On the other hand, you don’t want to wait months to reach out again because, by that time, your lead will likely lose interest. 🙅
How long you’ll wait before reaching out is just a bigger-scale factor. Your follow-up performance also depends on smaller decisions, such as the time of day, the day of the week, or the leads’ time zones if you’re an international business.
Keeping track of all this is almost impossible, especially if you have many leads you need to follow up with. Luckily, AI can take over for you and optimize the timing and frequency of your follow-ups. It can:
- Send you automated reminders when it’s time to follow up with a lead
- Analyze your previous interactions with each lead to create a unique follow-up schedule
- Keep track of a lead’s time zone to ensure you follow up when they’re active
Potential Challenges of Adding AI to Lead Follow-Ups
AI can make your follow-up processes so much easier, but there are a few challenges to be aware of and prepare for to get the most out of everything the technology has to offer:
Tips for Finding the Right AI Lead Follow-Up Tool
Great! You’ve decided to start using AI to automate manual processes and support your reps with fresh, accurate information. Now, it’s time to choose the tool to take over.
Here are a few tips to help you select the best solution for managing AI sales follow-up:
- Ensure the tool supports integrations—The AI tool you choose should be able to connect to other platforms SDRs often use, such as CRMs or data providers. Integrating your AI tool with these platforms allows you to create a unified system with a streamlined data flow
- Prioritize multifunctionality—Follow-ups are only one part of a sales process. To centralize work, look for a sales tool that can go beyond automating follow-ups and help you conduct lead research, enrich existing databases, and simplify cold outreach
- Consider ease of use—Opt for a user-friendly tool that doesn’t require extensive training to start seeing results as soon as possible. Comprehensive resources are always a bonus to ensure your SDRs can see the features in action
To save you time, we have just the solution for you—Clay. The AI-powered sales tool can handle lead follow-up and more to ensure high-performing campaigns. You don’t have leads yet? Don’t sweat it! Clay can help you find leads, turn them into prospects, and land in their inbox with a message that speaks to their heart. 💌
Clay’s Outreach & Follow-Up Capabilities
Clay is an AI sales platform with plenty of features to support every step of your sales pipelines and campaigns.
When it comes to email outreach and follow-ups, Clay has an ace up its sleeve—an AI email writer.
With this feature, you can automate writing emails, whether for cold outreach or follow-ups. Clay will help you collect and then pull lead data to write emails—this means you don’t have to copy and paste information into prompts or jump back and forth between apps.
Besides helping you write the body of your emails, AI email writer can also create resonating subject lines to ensure your outreach and follow-up messages don’t go unnoticed. 👁️
Once your messages are ready, quickly send them to your email sequencer or CRM tool or save them as a CSV file.
Want to see how a Clay expert does this in practice? Check out this video guide:
Clay’s built-in data enrichment and scraping features let you add value to every lead follow-up, whether via email, SMS, or call. You can cite research and case studies, mention relevant recent news, or reference your recipient’s time spent in their current position—options are endless.
Make Clay’s AI Your Valuable Team Member
Besides giving your sales reps the right support to nurture and engage with your leads, Clay helps you collect and enrich lead data to build extensive records.
One of the best-known options is Claygent—a unique AI research agent and multifunctional personal assistant that can help you collect valuable info for following up with leads via any channel. The Claygent can:
- Answer questions about your leads
- Summarize the info it finds on the internet
- Find case studies
- Clean data
- Generate outbound sales campaign ideas
Clay also integrates with OpenAI to let you complete specific actions without leaving the platform, like generating text for your follow-up messages using ChatGPT.
Enrich Your Leads and Scrape the Web Using Clay
We’ve mentioned that follow-ups need to be personalized to spark interest. To make your follow-ups stand out, you need quality, up-to-date, and accurate data on your leads, and this is exactly what Clay’s data scraping and enrichment features can provide.
In addition to Claygent, which can help you collect specific data on a lead, Clay’s Chrome extension is another powerful scraping feature. Use it to scrape entire pages from company websites, social media, or any page on the internet by relying on premade or customized recipes. ⛏️
As for enrichment, Clay fully integrates with 50+ data providers to let you pull information from dozens of databases directly into your Clay table without leaving the platform. The best part is that you don’t have to create additional accounts or pay for subscriptions—you can access all providers within your Clay account.
Depending on your needs, you can access specific providers individually, which is especially convenient if you already know where you want to look.
If you’re looking for better data coverage and want to automate enrichment, rely on Clay’s waterfall enrichment to access multiple providers one by one until you get the info you need.
Here’s how it works:
- Select the data you want to find (like email addresses or phone numbers)
- Choose the providers you want Clay to search through
- Wait until Clay finds a valid match and stops the search
Choose the Perfect Plan for Your Team
With Clay’s free forever plan, your team can try out and use its core features without spending a cent. If you’d like to get access to more advanced options, choose one of the four paid plans:
All plans support unlimited users. ♾️
Sales pros love Clay due to its affordability and feature versatility. Here’s what one user says about it:
Sign Up for Clay—Your All-in-One Sales Toolbox
Don’t wait another day to streamline your email communication and sales campaigns. Here’s how to create your Clay account:
- Go to the signup page
- Enter your name, email address, and password
- Start exploring the platform
Clay has created an extensive resource library named Clay University, which is a great starting point if you want to learn more about the platform’s offer. If you’d like to see how others use Clay and maybe get some ideas for your campaigns, join Clay’s Slack community.
To find valuable tips on making your campaigns more efficient by integrating Clay into your workflows, take a look at Claybooks.
💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about using AI in different sales processes? Check out our guides below:
According to Marketing Wizdom, only 2% of sales occur after the first meeting. The statistic is clear as day—if SDRs don’t make further contact with their leads after the initial outreach, they’ll hardly ever make a sale. 👎
While following up is often the deciding step for landing more sales, many companies struggle with it because they don’t have the proper resources. Sending out follow-up messages or making hundreds of calls takes time and money, and businesses don’t always have enough staff to do the heavy lifting. This leads to many missed sales opportunities.
This is where AI comes into play—the technology can automate communication with leads so they receive continuous engagement. Take our team as an example—we’ve used AI in email communication for years and achieved impressive results, cutting the number of sent emails in half and doubling positive responses.
Supported by that experience, this guide will focus on AI lead follow-up to help other sales pros save time and boost conversions. 📈
What Is AI Lead Follow-Up?
AI lead follow-up involves using AI technology to follow up with your lead accounts, make yourself visible, and, more importantly, help them resolve any issues or answer their questions. You can do this via various communication channels, including email, phone calls, LinkedIn messages, or in-person meetings. ☑️
When you start relying on technology, you’ll be able to overcome the common challenges of traditional follow-ups that involve a lot of manual work, such as:
- Lack of personalization—Generic follow-ups are no longer acceptable for leads. They want personalized experiences, and traditional follow-ups don’t prioritize personalization because it’s time-consuming
- Employee overload—Following up isn’t the only task on your SDR’s to-do list. If they have too much on their plate as-is, the number of follow-ups they’re supposed to handle might stress them out, which could result in a drop in motivation
- Late responses—Time is money, and if you wait too long to follow up with a lead, they may lose interest in your offer. Even if they don’t, a better-organized business may get to them before you do
What Are the Benefits of AI Lead Follow-Up?
Giving your sales reps a break from all the repetitive and manual tasks is just one of the reasons to add AI to your sales toolbox. Here are the benefits that will make a tangible difference in your follow-up game:
How Does AI Support Lead Follow-Ups?
Following up with a lead is so much more than sending them a second, third, or fourth message or calling them non-stop. It’s about providing value to engage the lead, make them interested in your product, and guide them through the sales funnel. AI can help with this in several ways:
- Collecting lead data
- Creating personalized messages and subject lines
- Suggesting the right approach
- Optimizing timing
Collecting Lead Data
One of the main goals of following up with leads is keeping them engaged and nurturing the relationship until they’re ready to purchase from you. To keep your leads hooked and give them value, you need to learn what they need, appreciate, struggle with, how much they use social media, and what their tech stack consists of.
Having this data on hand means you can:
- Offer them tailored content recommendations
- Send them relevant case studies
- Help them solve problems
With machine learning, AI can automate lead data collection. In only a few seconds, an AI web scraper can gather and save data from various online sources, from company websites to social media. 🤖
Depending on your previous interactions with a lead, you can use the data to customize the follow-up to pull the right strings. For example, if you sell a marketing tool and your lead just posted about being unhappy with their current marketing solution because it’s complicated, you can use this info in your email follow-ups. Subtly present your tool as the better option because it has a clean layout or a customizable interface.
Creating Personalized Messages and Call Scripts
Follow-up messages and calls need to be context-appropriate and personalized, and this is exactly what makes them so complicated. You can’t approach every lead the same way, and you may not have the time to revisit your previous interactions and personalize accordingly.
There are many different situations in which you might need to follow up:
- You haven’t received a response to your initial outreach message or call
- You met a lead at an event and now want to continue the conversation
- You interacted with a lead but then got ghosted, yikes
Instead of having your whole team dig up old messages and sales call transcriptions, AI chatbots like ChatGPT can analyze previous interactions with leads and generate personalized messages and call scripts based on them.
But let’s say you met a lead in person and haven’t interacted with them via email. Now what? You can still write prompts and instruct the chatbot to generate a message according to your face-to-face conversation.
💡 Bonus read: Want to know how to use ChatGPT in sales? Read our articles on ChatGPT prompts for emails and lead scoring and learn its role in sales and business development and responding to emails.
Suggesting the Right Approach
Following up can be tricky because you need to be persistent, but you don’t want to come across as annoying and drive your leads away. You need to know how to read your leads to recognize signals that indicate whether or not they want to purchase.
Realistically, most SDRs won’t have time to conduct an in-depth analysis of each lead interaction to brainstorm the right approach for their follow-ups, which could lead to missed opportunities for conversion.
AI shines in this area—gen AI can conduct a detailed speech and text analysis to determine a lead’s tone and identify buying intent signals. Based on the analysis, AI can suggest the best way to approach the lead with your follow-up.
For example, AI can spot signs of hesitation and generate a follow-up that gives the lead a gentle nudge in the right direction and resolves potential issues. AI technology can also help you deal with objections or provide more details about your offer, which is always a nice touch.
Optimizing Timing
The timing of your follow-ups can directly affect their performance. If you follow up with a lead a day after the initial message or call, they could see you as pushy. On the other hand, you don’t want to wait months to reach out again because, by that time, your lead will likely lose interest. 🙅
How long you’ll wait before reaching out is just a bigger-scale factor. Your follow-up performance also depends on smaller decisions, such as the time of day, the day of the week, or the leads’ time zones if you’re an international business.
Keeping track of all this is almost impossible, especially if you have many leads you need to follow up with. Luckily, AI can take over for you and optimize the timing and frequency of your follow-ups. It can:
- Send you automated reminders when it’s time to follow up with a lead
- Analyze your previous interactions with each lead to create a unique follow-up schedule
- Keep track of a lead’s time zone to ensure you follow up when they’re active
Potential Challenges of Adding AI to Lead Follow-Ups
AI can make your follow-up processes so much easier, but there are a few challenges to be aware of and prepare for to get the most out of everything the technology has to offer:
Tips for Finding the Right AI Lead Follow-Up Tool
Great! You’ve decided to start using AI to automate manual processes and support your reps with fresh, accurate information. Now, it’s time to choose the tool to take over.
Here are a few tips to help you select the best solution for managing AI sales follow-up:
- Ensure the tool supports integrations—The AI tool you choose should be able to connect to other platforms SDRs often use, such as CRMs or data providers. Integrating your AI tool with these platforms allows you to create a unified system with a streamlined data flow
- Prioritize multifunctionality—Follow-ups are only one part of a sales process. To centralize work, look for a sales tool that can go beyond automating follow-ups and help you conduct lead research, enrich existing databases, and simplify cold outreach
- Consider ease of use—Opt for a user-friendly tool that doesn’t require extensive training to start seeing results as soon as possible. Comprehensive resources are always a bonus to ensure your SDRs can see the features in action
To save you time, we have just the solution for you—Clay. The AI-powered sales tool can handle lead follow-up and more to ensure high-performing campaigns. You don’t have leads yet? Don’t sweat it! Clay can help you find leads, turn them into prospects, and land in their inbox with a message that speaks to their heart. 💌
Clay’s Outreach & Follow-Up Capabilities
Clay is an AI sales platform with plenty of features to support every step of your sales pipelines and campaigns.
When it comes to email outreach and follow-ups, Clay has an ace up its sleeve—an AI email writer.
With this feature, you can automate writing emails, whether for cold outreach or follow-ups. Clay will help you collect and then pull lead data to write emails—this means you don’t have to copy and paste information into prompts or jump back and forth between apps.
Besides helping you write the body of your emails, AI email writer can also create resonating subject lines to ensure your outreach and follow-up messages don’t go unnoticed. 👁️
Once your messages are ready, quickly send them to your email sequencer or CRM tool or save them as a CSV file.
Want to see how a Clay expert does this in practice? Check out this video guide:
Clay’s built-in data enrichment and scraping features let you add value to every lead follow-up, whether via email, SMS, or call. You can cite research and case studies, mention relevant recent news, or reference your recipient’s time spent in their current position—options are endless.
Make Clay’s AI Your Valuable Team Member
Besides giving your sales reps the right support to nurture and engage with your leads, Clay helps you collect and enrich lead data to build extensive records.
One of the best-known options is Claygent—a unique AI research agent and multifunctional personal assistant that can help you collect valuable info for following up with leads via any channel. The Claygent can:
- Answer questions about your leads
- Summarize the info it finds on the internet
- Find case studies
- Clean data
- Generate outbound sales campaign ideas
Clay also integrates with OpenAI to let you complete specific actions without leaving the platform, like generating text for your follow-up messages using ChatGPT.
Enrich Your Leads and Scrape the Web Using Clay
We’ve mentioned that follow-ups need to be personalized to spark interest. To make your follow-ups stand out, you need quality, up-to-date, and accurate data on your leads, and this is exactly what Clay’s data scraping and enrichment features can provide.
In addition to Claygent, which can help you collect specific data on a lead, Clay’s Chrome extension is another powerful scraping feature. Use it to scrape entire pages from company websites, social media, or any page on the internet by relying on premade or customized recipes. ⛏️
As for enrichment, Clay fully integrates with 50+ data providers to let you pull information from dozens of databases directly into your Clay table without leaving the platform. The best part is that you don’t have to create additional accounts or pay for subscriptions—you can access all providers within your Clay account.
Depending on your needs, you can access specific providers individually, which is especially convenient if you already know where you want to look.
If you’re looking for better data coverage and want to automate enrichment, rely on Clay’s waterfall enrichment to access multiple providers one by one until you get the info you need.
Here’s how it works:
- Select the data you want to find (like email addresses or phone numbers)
- Choose the providers you want Clay to search through
- Wait until Clay finds a valid match and stops the search
Choose the Perfect Plan for Your Team
With Clay’s free forever plan, your team can try out and use its core features without spending a cent. If you’d like to get access to more advanced options, choose one of the four paid plans:
All plans support unlimited users. ♾️
Sales pros love Clay due to its affordability and feature versatility. Here’s what one user says about it:
Sign Up for Clay—Your All-in-One Sales Toolbox
Don’t wait another day to streamline your email communication and sales campaigns. Here’s how to create your Clay account:
- Go to the signup page
- Enter your name, email address, and password
- Start exploring the platform
Clay has created an extensive resource library named Clay University, which is a great starting point if you want to learn more about the platform’s offer. If you’d like to see how others use Clay and maybe get some ideas for your campaigns, join Clay’s Slack community.
To find valuable tips on making your campaigns more efficient by integrating Clay into your workflows, take a look at Claybooks.
💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about using AI in different sales processes? Check out our guides below:
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