Using AI in Outbound Sales: 101 Guide

If you want to be in control of your business’ growth, you must reach out to leads rather than wait for them to discover your business on their own. Still, outbound sales processes require repetitive research work, never-ending copywriting, and consistent lead communications. No matter how large your team is, this is months' worth of work that’ll never be completely free of errors.

Knowing how to wield AI is not a cheat code but a necessity in sales. With AI, you can create excellent outreach content and get better leads faster, understand their needs in-depth, and reach out to them at the right times. We know that because we’ve used AI to automate our 4-step outbound campaign and have seen a 5.1% positive response rate! 📈

Based on our experience, this article will show you how to use AI in outbound sales, the benefits and limitations of this approach, and how to choose the right platform for your sales experts.

What Characterizes AI-Driven Outbound Sales? 

Relying on your sales reps to do all the heavy lifting is a thing of the past. Today, reps use artificial intelligence to improve and automate nearly every step of cold outreach, from research to email sequencing. While specific features vary, you can expect AI platforms to assist you in tasks like:

• Researching broader market landscape, competitors, and trends
• Sourcing updated lead lists and organizing them
• Tracking lead behavior through the sales cycle
• Personalizing outreach content and helping with direct response copies
• Tracking the efficiency of your campaigns

That said, AI is by no means here to replace your experts. They still have the deciding role in all of your sales processes. But now, with technical knowledge and a capable tool at hand, they can nail down the perfect ideal customer profile (ICP), find all the juicy information to catch leads’ attention, and craft the perfect outreach message to turn them into prospects. With a strong foundation like this, your sales experts can do what they know best—nurture the leads and build meaningful relationships. 

Implementing AI in Outbound Sales Workflows: Step-by-Step

Gone are the days when AI was only used for easy content creation. With the right tool in the right hands, AI can do so much more for your outreach workflows. You can use it to:

1. Find leads that are likely to convert
2. Understand them to adjust your approach
3. Reach out with tailored content
4. Record lead’s behavior at touchpoints
5. Analyzing conversations and adjusting strategy
6. Track metrics and generate reports

1. Finding High-Priority Leads at Scale 

Having a bunch of cold leads you can’t qualify doesn’t do you any favors. You need a list of leads that you can easily turn into prospects and eventually to buying customers. You don’t have to sacrifice quantity for quality, though, as with AI, you can create large-scale processes that involve:

1. 👱 Building detailed ICPs—AI can build comprehensive ICPs using your past customer data and help your reps pinpoint common characteristics they might have missed. For example, you start gaining more startup customers, and as AI picks up the trend, it helps your reps prioritize targeting startup roles which are statistically more likely to convert
2. 🔍 Searching databases—AI can help you scour all corners of the web or go through your shortlisted directories to find leads that are close to your ICP. And as you’re no longer limited by your static databases or the number of interns you have for research, you get more leads much faster, increasing the number of potential customers you may have

So, when you use your sales experts’ experience and teach them how to use technology without over-relying on it, AI can help you qualify leads more likely to move down the sales funnel. 

2. Understanding Your Leads and Customizing Your Approach

To approach your leads in an informed way, you need details, including their interests, preferences, and challenges. Sophisticated AI platforms can fetch and organize information beyond email addresses and foundational data. These data-providing capabilities are a tool for your sales and marketing experts—and with such a tool at hand, they can dig up leads’:

• Career paths
• Social media behavior
• The type of events they attend
• Software solutions they use
• Company history, like mergers and key investors
• Intent data and buying signals

AI can organize these data points in easy-to-reference tables and update them in seconds. With this information, your reps can uncover insights into your leads’ pain points and decisions. Here’s an example of what it can do for both B2B and B2C leads:

You can prompt AI to score your leads based on their likeness to your ICP so your reps can prioritize reaching out to those most likely to convert.

3. Recording Lead Behavior at Touchpoints

When synced to your CRM, AI can track the browsing behavior of leads to uncover insights, like:

• 💯 Touchpoints driving the most interactions and conversions
• ⏰ Common engagement times and patterns of leads
• 👎 Bottlenecks in your sales cycles that are causing delays or disengaging leads

For instance, you could learn that leads who engage with you on social media ultimately end up buying your products and services, so you could reach out to them on priority and shorten the sales cycle. Or, you could identify that leads getting sales calls are dropping out of the cycle completely—this would steer you towards changing your scripts and call frequency.

You can also deploy AI to record all lead interactions with your company. This way, you give your sales reps a neat overview of leads’ interests and avoid asking questions that have already been answered. The insights AI provides are numerous—you can get:

1. Notes from sales calls
2. Email opening times
3. Content preferences, like emails that the lead clicked the most on
4. Email and social media interactions
5. Conversation history with chatbots

The best part is that you don’t need to dig into years' worth of notes or open dozens of browser tabs to find this information—AI can pull it out in a single click!

4. Reaching Out to Leads With Personalized Content

In outbound outreach, the goal isn’t to send as many messages as possible but to create high-quality content that drives high engagement rates. Once you have a strong prospect list, you can achieve this by tailoring your emails and calls to prospects’ needs and interests as much as possible.

Using ChatGPT to write emails, generate media, and prepare cold call scripts isn’t a new concept, but you need to go beyond generic content for your outreach to engage prospects. Sophisticated generative AI for pre-sales can create content contextually. Armed with advanced research capabilities, they go beyond copying names and email addresses from your databases. With some good prompting, AI can reference specific details, such as:

• A prospect’s social media post
• A company’s new HR policy
• A recent product review
• Inferred interests from the blog posts they visited on your website

AI can do this for thousands of prospects in an instant—scale, rate, and accuracy impossible for human employees to achieve on their own! You can also write follow-up emails and respond to email queries using AI just as swiftly. ✍️

5. Analyzing Conversations and Adjusting Strategy

Outbound initiatives don’t end with sending the first message or making a call—you have to analyze prospects' and leads’ responses to refine your follow-up strategy. 

In cold calls, AI can identify subtle indicators like the following:

This helps score leads based on real-time conversations instead of relying on memory or relistening to hours of recordings. AI can analyze the engagement cues to highlight what aspect of the product the lead was interested in and help your sales reps:

1.  ✔️ Adjust their approach during the call
2.  ✔️ Follow up with an email that keeps the lead engaged

In email campaigns, AI can provide insights on which emails a lead opened and spent time reading—this helps you nurture them with the right follow-up sequences. 

6. Tracking Metrics and Generating Reports 

By the time your BDRs compile monthly and yearly reports to assess the period’s conversions, it’s too late to fix errors and push that declining graph back up. Errors in reports are common and dangerous—they give you an obscure picture of your outbound sales process efficiency.

Tracking KPIs using AI can eliminate these problems almost entirely. You can discover metrics like open rates, response rates, and demo bookings to get a precise and up-to-the-minute view of your outbound efforts. It’ll help you to identify what tactics drive conversion as you correlate engagement KPIs with lead scores and pipeline progress. 🧠

With AI, you also get instant alerts when your KPIs change suddenly. For example, suppose it detects a sudden drop in response rates to your outbound emails within a week. In that case, it can immediately flag the issue and help you see that this week's campaign's message content or tone isn’t resonating with your target audience. 

This approach also allows your teams to tweak outreach messaging in real time and experiment with A/B testing to re-engage leads before a major decline in conversions occurs.

💡 Bonus read: Read our in-depth guides to learn how to make the most out of ChatGPT for sales and business development, understand AI BDRs, and use AI in selling

What Can’t AI Do in Outbound Sales?

While AI offers some amazing processing data and content creation advantages that manual workflows can never keep up with, it does not have a brain of its own. This poses a unique set of limitations that can risk your outreach efficiency:

1. AI can’t judge data quality—AI algorithms rely on the databases they are fed, and they can not judge their quality. So, if your data set is outdated or skewed, AI’s output will be biased. For instance, if your past targets were companies from one industry, but you have now shifted to focus on new markets, your AI may still be over-prioritizing that industry’s leads today
2. Risk of over-automation—If left to its own devices, AI can make outreach impersonal and robotic, alienating leads. For example, badly built platforms can send dozens of generic messages with thin, irrelevant content that can make leads mark you as spam
3. Limited understanding of context—As AI doesn’t have human empathy, intuition, and knowledge, it can struggle to interpret nuances, cultural differences, or complex industry-specific contexts. It can make mistakes, such as sending a lighthearted message to a formal law firm where a more professional tone is expected

How To Use AI in Outbound Sales: The Right Way

While capable, AI is still just a tool that gives your sales and marketing experts the right support to let their skills and creativity shine. That means that you should avoid platforms marketed as these perfect solutions designed to replace your sales reps. Instead, choose a tool that perfectly balances automation and your autonomy. 🤹

With AI, you can’t adopt a ‘set-and-forget’ approach. Stay in the loop, oversee content, and judge outreach quality to step in as soon as necessary. In order to do that, you need a platform that lets you take the wheel while equipping your experts with tools that go beyond simple automation. 

What AI-Driven Outbound Sales Automation Tools To Choose?

No matter your niche and business model, your AI-driven tool of choice should have the following qualities:

1. ✅ Features tailored to your pain points—Ask yourself what pre-sales phase is the most time-consuming and resource-intensive for you. If it’s research, you need a platform with reliable database integrations and web scraping capabilities. If you majorly rely on cold calling, you may need robust call-script building and conversational lead-scoring features
2. ✅ Modularity and scaling capabilities—Go for a platform that lets you expand your package feature-by-feature, so you’re only paying for what you need, especially if you’re a small business with nuanced needs. Similarly, if you have a large organization, expect seasonal growth spurts, or plan to expand in the future, look for platforms that scale easily and allow multiple (ideally, unlimited) users
3. ✅ Social proof—AI platforms can be a huge investment, so looking for testimonials before finalizing one is best. Plus, as AI takes over automation, choosing an inefficient platform can completely alienate your prospects by spamming them with messages or doing faulty personalization. If feasible, consider reaching out to past customers to judge the solutions’s usefulness and customer support

We have just the right suggestion for you: Clay—a sales automation AI powerhouse that lets your sales experts execute their strategies with depth and precision. 😍

For starters, use Clay’s OpenAI integration to create hyper-specific ICPs based on contextual information, like your company details and past successful conversions.

After that, it’s game on!

Supercharge Your Outbound Sales Workflows With Clay’s AI

To help you build a strong foundation, Clay came out with the industry-leading AI assistant that can automate manual processes like no other. Whether it's research, writing, or email sequencing, Claygent can do it all. The AI assistant can support you by handling:

• Research—Automate prospect research from scratch
• Data collection—Fetch and analyze specific lead information from anywhere on the internet
• Account prioritization—Filter and score leads based on any data point
• Message customization—Change content messaging and tone based on the company mission and profile
• Strategy—Build different campaigns segmented by industry, employee headcount, technology, etc.
• Outreach automation—Set up automatic email campaigns for deep-targeting or trigger-based targeting

You’re deploying a call campaign? No problem! Claygent’s research features are also handy for writing call scripts. You can approach this in the following steps: 

Enrich Your Leads and Leverage Clay’s CRM Enrichment

Once you have your basics, Clay will help you gather all relevant information about your leads using native enrichment features that let you gather data on autopilot. Clay integrates with over 200 tools, more than 75 of which are data providers. This means dozens of databases at your disposal without additional subscription fees.

For the most resourceful option, use Clay’s waterfall enrichment feature—an algorithm that sequentially goes through databases until it finds the information you need. For maximal control, choose the checking order to prioritize your favorite data providers. These features let you approach outbound sales with facts and figures guaranteed to make a strong impression that gets replies. 📨

With your Clay table populated, it’s time to enrich leads in your CRM with data points like: 

• Demographic data—Age, gender, or location
• Contact details—Email addresses, phone numbers, and social media handles
• Social media data—Posts and preferences
• Technographic data—Technologies and tools a lead uses
• Firmographic data—Company details, including size, industry, and revenue

Hyper-Personalize Your Outbound Email Campaigns With Clay

Clay’s AI writer can pull all these details from the Clay table to write tailored outreach emails with lead-specific details, like a target company’s recent hiring spree. Whether you give it a detailed prompt by yourself or use Clay’s prebuilt templates, you’ll find it spinning content that’s natural, personal, and high-quality. 🧶

You can even write the bulk of the email copy yourself and then use the OpenAI integration to edit text for grammatical corrections and generate images that go with the content. Once you’re done, push your data to your email sequencer and watch your campaign go live in minutes. 

Hundreds of sales experts and business owners have used Clay to improve their prospecting, research, and outreach copies. Here’s what one of them had to say about Clay:

Multiple Payment Plans for All Budgets

Getting started with Clay is completely free, and you can play with the features without limits. Once you fall in love with the functionalities, you can upgrade to a paid plan:

No matter which plan you choose, your account will support unlimited users. This means you can train your experts or expand your team without holdbacks—all with a single subscription. 🛍️

Let Clay’s AI Propel Your Outbound Sales 

You can set up a free Clay account in seconds: 

1. Head to the signup page 👈
2. Enter your name, email address, and passcode
3. Explore Clay’s features

Explore Clay’s amazing features with in-depth tutorials at Clay University. Engage with other marketing pros in the Slack community, and check out Claybooks get first-hand insights from those who have used Clay to supercharge their business.

💡 Keep reading: Want to uplevel your marketing and sales processes with AI? Check out these guides:

• Example of AI in sales
• AI in B2B sales 
• AI in sales and pipeline management
• AI in marketing and sales