AI-backed products are taking the world by storm. Whether it’s AI art or an autonomous vehicle, these products feature cutting-edge technology and are a breath of fresh air on the market.
AI products may be revolutionary, but teams who want to sell them still have to go through the same traditional processes to find leads and turn them into customers. If anything, sales teams need to work harder to present AI-backed products as they’re still relatively new, and customers may be skeptical about their efficiency.
To help you create and manage efficient sales campaigns, we’ll walk you through AI selling to cover the main challenges sales teams face and explain how to overcome them using AI. We’ll also recommend an AI solution to help you sell your AI products, boost conversions, and automate work.
The Basics & Challenges of Selling AI Products
AI products use different AI techniques to help users save time, automate their work, improve their quality of life, or simplify processes.
In many cases, AI products are more robust versions of products that already exist but don’t use such advanced technology. In theory, this should make selling AI products easier, but this often isn’t the case. In addition to “standard” challenges like finding the right leads and coming up with the right outreach strategy, teams tasked with selling AI-based products face additional pitfalls, such as:
One thing that can help sales teams overcome these challenges and sell AI products is AI itself. 💪
Using AI To Sell AI
Regardless of the type of AI-based product you’re selling, AI can help you optimize every sales stage without a drop of sweat. Here are a few ways to use AI to sell AI:
- Market research
- Lead generation and scoring
- Data enrichment
- Sales forecasting
- Outreach personalization
- Building a knowledge base
Market Research
Selling AI products is much more than calling or emailing a random account and pitching your offer. You need to do extensive research—if you don’t know your target audience and competition, you won’t be able to highlight your AI product’s unique value and properly address potential pain points and objections. ❌
While essential, thorough research is incredibly time-consuming. To uncover market trends, evaluate your competition, and understand your target audience, you’d need to invest considerable effort into activities such as:
- Browsing company websites
- Reading case studies
- Listening to podcasts
- Reading market statistics and industry trend reports
By introducing AI to your market research process, you can automate all these activities. Here are a few examples of what AI tools can do for you in terms of market research:
- Data analysis and summarization—AI tools can go through your records, case studies, reports, and other sources to extract the info you’re interested in, like emerging industry trends, historical data, or case studies from your competitors
- Creating surveys—AI tools can help you generate effective questions for surveys that you’ll use to collect info from your target audience and gain first-hand insight into your market
- Answering questions—Gen AI tools like ChatGPT can answer specific questions related to market research to help you obtain the necessary info as soon as possible and set your campaigns in motion
💡 Bonus read: Interested in learning more about using ChatGPT in sales? Read our guides on ChatGPT email prompts and ChatGPT for sales and business development.
Lead Generation and Scoring
Through lead generation and scoring, you identify potential customers and focus on those who are most likely to purchase your AI products. Still, these processes require a lot of work, including:
- Defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) to use as a basis for prioritizing accounts
- Understanding your leads’ needs, behaviors, current tech stack, openness to trying out innovative products, and challenges
- Creating and refining models and prompts for ranking your leads
With AI technology, you can generate and score your leads more efficiently. Thanks to its ability to analyze large amounts of information, AI can create an ICP based on your input and ensure it aligns with your goals to the letter. It can also scour the internet to fetch data on your leads and help you build a database.
Based on the ICP, existing data, and your instructions, AI can assign points to each lead to ensure your SDRs don’t waste time and effort on low-potential accounts, optimizing resources. ✨
Data Enrichment
Existing lead databases are an excellent starting point for developing sales campaigns for your AI products. Still, some information in them could be inaccurate, outdated, or missing, and this could jeopardize your campaign’s success from the get-go.
AI can help you freshen up your existing records through data enrichment. Using an AI tool, you can access one or more data providers and pull information to fill in the gaps or replace outdated or inaccurate lead data. Many advanced tools offer options to put enrichment on autopilot and access multiple databases for better data coverage and quality. 👌
Sales Forecasting
Accurate forecasting allows you to make informed decisions about the future, ensure proper resource allocation, and prepare for potential problems you could face when selling AI products.
Traditionally, sales forecasting involved sales professionals reviewing past performance data and market conditions to make predictions. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach per se, there are a few significant drawbacks to consider:
- Limited access to data that can impact prospects
- Inability to make complex predictions
- Lack of scalability
With AI forecasting, you get access to machine learning and large language models that can uncover patterns and identify correlations that a human would hardly notice. For example, advanced AI tools can analyze customer sentiment based on specific keywords used in reviews and then connect these to an increase or decrease in overall sales.
Outreach Personalization
Whether you’re in B2C or B2B sales, personalizing your outreach efforts is equally important. All customers seek unique experiences and offers that align with their needs and help them resolve challenges. You can try your luck with a generic message, but your prospects are likely to ignore it, along with dozens of other similar messages. ❌
To cater to your leads, you need to show them you understand their perspectives and struggles. From there, you’ll be able to naturally point out why your AI product is a necessity and what benefits they’d get from it. Of course, this is easier said than done—you can’t possibly write personalized messages to every lead on your list, especially if that list is long.
What you can do is have AI personalize messages for you. AI tools and chatbots can create unique content based on your input. You feed an AI tool with info on your leads, and it writes a hyper-personalized message for each account on the list—it’s as simple as that.
Besides creating actual messages for initial outreach and lead follow-ups, many AI tools offer options for checking and correcting your content’s grammar, tone, and style to help you cover all grounds.
Building a Knowledge Base
As you saw, some of the biggest challenges of selling AI are people’s lack of understanding of what the product can do and the complexity of the product itself. To overcome these issues, sales teams need to:
- Know every single detail about their product
- Learn how to explain the product’s value and potential to people who may not be familiar with it
- Understand how to deal with objections while highlighting their product’s strengths
AI can help you with all of this by allowing you to effortlessly build a knowledge base that encompasses resources like:
- Employee handbooks on your company’s policies and guidelines
- Product overviews and roadmaps
- Instructions for presenting the product’s values to leads
- Directions on handling different objections
- Training materials for new team members
You can enter prompts in a chatbot like ChatGPT to instruct it to create a comprehensive knowledge base that will guarantee uniformity across your team and help them prepare for every scenario. 💪
Potential Drawbacks of Using AI to Sell AI Products
Using AI to sell AI products comes with a few potential pitfalls to consider:
How To Choose the Right Sales Tool for Selling AI Products
There are plenty of AI sales tools on the market, so you may experience choice overload. To choose the one that will help you sell AI products and avoid common challenges, focus on these criteria:
- 🧲 Data collection and enrichment options—Find a tool with robust data scraping and enrichment options that will allow you to gather comprehensive info on your leads that you’ll need to customize sales strategies and outreach
- ⚙️ Multifunctionality—A quality sales tool should have a rich feature set covering the entire sales process, not just a particular activity like content creation or lead generation
- 🤓 User-friendliness—Getting used to a new tool can take some time, but you shouldn’t have to spend months learning the basics or invest money in specialized training
- 🔁 Integrations—The right tool should allow you to expand its functionalities by integrating with valuable sales-related platforms like data providers or CRM systems
- 💰 Affordability—Choose a platform you can try out for free to determine if it’s a good fit before committing. You should also focus on tools with several pricing plans to prevent paying for features you won’t use
One tool that offers all of the above and more is Clay. This sales automation platform helps you unlock AI’s superpowers, manage your pipeline more efficiently, and sell more AI products. ✅
Sell More AI Products Than Ever With Clay’s AI Features
As a powerful AI-backed solution, Clay offers various options you can leverage to sell AI products more effectively.
One of them is Claygent, an AI-based personal assistant. Based on your prompts, Claygent can:
- Research leads
- Retrieve specific company and people data points, from email addresses to podcast appearances
- Summarize information
- Generate industry-specific campaign ideas
This makes Claygent a valuable addition to your research process. With it, you can scrape specific lead information from any corner of the internet, retrieve case studies, and zero in on your competition. You can also use the feature to enrich existing info with additional data points to grow your database. 📈
Another AI-powered functionality that can help you conduct lead and market research is Clay’s integration with OpenAI, which lets you perform actions such as:
- Using AI to ask ChatGPT questions based on Clay inputs and context clues and get precise responses
- Using AI to ask ChatGPT image-related questions and gather extra data points
- Completing prompts using OpenAI/GPT (a simple-to-use but less advanced AI model than ChatGPT) and generating unique responses
Once you gather lead data, streamline the outreach process with Clay’s AI message writer based on OpenAI. The feature uses the data in your Clay table to build hyper-personalized, resonating messages for your leads. You choose which data points to include in your emails, so you’ll get excellent results on your first try with no need for additional refinement.
Once you create your emails, send them to your CRM system or email sequencer, or download them as a CSV file.
Pull Data from Dozens of Sources
Claygent isn’t the only feature that can help you collect data on your leads. One of Clay’s stand-out functionalities is its ability to fully integrate with over 50 data providers, allowing you to pull all kinds of information directly to your Clay table. The best part is, you access all these integrations within Clay without having to create new accounts or pay extra subscriptions.
Clay also offers waterfall enrichment, a unique option that lets you tap into multiple databases one by one until you find a valid match. Thanks to it, you can fully automate your enrichment processes.
Find the Perfect Plan With Clay’s Flexible Pricing
You don’t have to pay anything to enjoy Clay—the platform comes with a free forever plan that allows you to try out some of its core features. To upgrade, you can subscribe to one of the four paid options:
All Clay plans are credit-based. Depending on the plan you opt for, you’ll get a specific number of credits you can use to purchase actions and data points. You control how much you’ll spend and on what, so you don’t waste a cent. 💰
Every Clay’s plan can accommodate unlimited users, which is ideal for anyone worried about growing their team and having to get a more expensive subscription.
Users worldwide love Clay’s unique feature set, and here’s one review that summarizes what the platform’s about:
Set up Your Account With Clay Today
If you’re ready to make selling AI products easy, create your account by following the steps below:
- Go to the signup page 📄
- Enter the required information
- Start exploring the platform
If you’d like to make sure the platform is the right option for you or you want to learn more about it, check out Clay University—detailed feature walkthroughs will help you get to know the tool inside and out. To build your workflows from scratch, check out Claybooks, our community’s information powerhouse.
To learn how others use Clay and adopt some of the ideas, join the Slack community.
💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about the different applications of AI in sales? Check out these guides:
AI-backed products are taking the world by storm. Whether it’s AI art or an autonomous vehicle, these products feature cutting-edge technology and are a breath of fresh air on the market.
AI products may be revolutionary, but teams who want to sell them still have to go through the same traditional processes to find leads and turn them into customers. If anything, sales teams need to work harder to present AI-backed products as they’re still relatively new, and customers may be skeptical about their efficiency.
To help you create and manage efficient sales campaigns, we’ll walk you through AI selling to cover the main challenges sales teams face and explain how to overcome them using AI. We’ll also recommend an AI solution to help you sell your AI products, boost conversions, and automate work.
The Basics & Challenges of Selling AI Products
AI products use different AI techniques to help users save time, automate their work, improve their quality of life, or simplify processes.
In many cases, AI products are more robust versions of products that already exist but don’t use such advanced technology. In theory, this should make selling AI products easier, but this often isn’t the case. In addition to “standard” challenges like finding the right leads and coming up with the right outreach strategy, teams tasked with selling AI-based products face additional pitfalls, such as:
One thing that can help sales teams overcome these challenges and sell AI products is AI itself. 💪
Using AI To Sell AI
Regardless of the type of AI-based product you’re selling, AI can help you optimize every sales stage without a drop of sweat. Here are a few ways to use AI to sell AI:
- Market research
- Lead generation and scoring
- Data enrichment
- Sales forecasting
- Outreach personalization
- Building a knowledge base
Market Research
Selling AI products is much more than calling or emailing a random account and pitching your offer. You need to do extensive research—if you don’t know your target audience and competition, you won’t be able to highlight your AI product’s unique value and properly address potential pain points and objections. ❌
While essential, thorough research is incredibly time-consuming. To uncover market trends, evaluate your competition, and understand your target audience, you’d need to invest considerable effort into activities such as:
- Browsing company websites
- Reading case studies
- Listening to podcasts
- Reading market statistics and industry trend reports
By introducing AI to your market research process, you can automate all these activities. Here are a few examples of what AI tools can do for you in terms of market research:
- Data analysis and summarization—AI tools can go through your records, case studies, reports, and other sources to extract the info you’re interested in, like emerging industry trends, historical data, or case studies from your competitors
- Creating surveys—AI tools can help you generate effective questions for surveys that you’ll use to collect info from your target audience and gain first-hand insight into your market
- Answering questions—Gen AI tools like ChatGPT can answer specific questions related to market research to help you obtain the necessary info as soon as possible and set your campaigns in motion
💡 Bonus read: Interested in learning more about using ChatGPT in sales? Read our guides on ChatGPT email prompts and ChatGPT for sales and business development.
Lead Generation and Scoring
Through lead generation and scoring, you identify potential customers and focus on those who are most likely to purchase your AI products. Still, these processes require a lot of work, including:
- Defining your ideal customer profile (ICP) to use as a basis for prioritizing accounts
- Understanding your leads’ needs, behaviors, current tech stack, openness to trying out innovative products, and challenges
- Creating and refining models and prompts for ranking your leads
With AI technology, you can generate and score your leads more efficiently. Thanks to its ability to analyze large amounts of information, AI can create an ICP based on your input and ensure it aligns with your goals to the letter. It can also scour the internet to fetch data on your leads and help you build a database.
Based on the ICP, existing data, and your instructions, AI can assign points to each lead to ensure your SDRs don’t waste time and effort on low-potential accounts, optimizing resources. ✨
Data Enrichment
Existing lead databases are an excellent starting point for developing sales campaigns for your AI products. Still, some information in them could be inaccurate, outdated, or missing, and this could jeopardize your campaign’s success from the get-go.
AI can help you freshen up your existing records through data enrichment. Using an AI tool, you can access one or more data providers and pull information to fill in the gaps or replace outdated or inaccurate lead data. Many advanced tools offer options to put enrichment on autopilot and access multiple databases for better data coverage and quality. 👌
Sales Forecasting
Accurate forecasting allows you to make informed decisions about the future, ensure proper resource allocation, and prepare for potential problems you could face when selling AI products.
Traditionally, sales forecasting involved sales professionals reviewing past performance data and market conditions to make predictions. While there’s nothing wrong with this approach per se, there are a few significant drawbacks to consider:
- Limited access to data that can impact prospects
- Inability to make complex predictions
- Lack of scalability
With AI forecasting, you get access to machine learning and large language models that can uncover patterns and identify correlations that a human would hardly notice. For example, advanced AI tools can analyze customer sentiment based on specific keywords used in reviews and then connect these to an increase or decrease in overall sales.
Outreach Personalization
Whether you’re in B2C or B2B sales, personalizing your outreach efforts is equally important. All customers seek unique experiences and offers that align with their needs and help them resolve challenges. You can try your luck with a generic message, but your prospects are likely to ignore it, along with dozens of other similar messages. ❌
To cater to your leads, you need to show them you understand their perspectives and struggles. From there, you’ll be able to naturally point out why your AI product is a necessity and what benefits they’d get from it. Of course, this is easier said than done—you can’t possibly write personalized messages to every lead on your list, especially if that list is long.
What you can do is have AI personalize messages for you. AI tools and chatbots can create unique content based on your input. You feed an AI tool with info on your leads, and it writes a hyper-personalized message for each account on the list—it’s as simple as that.
Besides creating actual messages for initial outreach and lead follow-ups, many AI tools offer options for checking and correcting your content’s grammar, tone, and style to help you cover all grounds.
Building a Knowledge Base
As you saw, some of the biggest challenges of selling AI are people’s lack of understanding of what the product can do and the complexity of the product itself. To overcome these issues, sales teams need to:
- Know every single detail about their product
- Learn how to explain the product’s value and potential to people who may not be familiar with it
- Understand how to deal with objections while highlighting their product’s strengths
AI can help you with all of this by allowing you to effortlessly build a knowledge base that encompasses resources like:
- Employee handbooks on your company’s policies and guidelines
- Product overviews and roadmaps
- Instructions for presenting the product’s values to leads
- Directions on handling different objections
- Training materials for new team members
You can enter prompts in a chatbot like ChatGPT to instruct it to create a comprehensive knowledge base that will guarantee uniformity across your team and help them prepare for every scenario. 💪
Potential Drawbacks of Using AI to Sell AI Products
Using AI to sell AI products comes with a few potential pitfalls to consider:
How To Choose the Right Sales Tool for Selling AI Products
There are plenty of AI sales tools on the market, so you may experience choice overload. To choose the one that will help you sell AI products and avoid common challenges, focus on these criteria:
- 🧲 Data collection and enrichment options—Find a tool with robust data scraping and enrichment options that will allow you to gather comprehensive info on your leads that you’ll need to customize sales strategies and outreach
- ⚙️ Multifunctionality—A quality sales tool should have a rich feature set covering the entire sales process, not just a particular activity like content creation or lead generation
- 🤓 User-friendliness—Getting used to a new tool can take some time, but you shouldn’t have to spend months learning the basics or invest money in specialized training
- 🔁 Integrations—The right tool should allow you to expand its functionalities by integrating with valuable sales-related platforms like data providers or CRM systems
- 💰 Affordability—Choose a platform you can try out for free to determine if it’s a good fit before committing. You should also focus on tools with several pricing plans to prevent paying for features you won’t use
One tool that offers all of the above and more is Clay. This sales automation platform helps you unlock AI’s superpowers, manage your pipeline more efficiently, and sell more AI products. ✅
Sell More AI Products Than Ever With Clay’s AI Features
As a powerful AI-backed solution, Clay offers various options you can leverage to sell AI products more effectively.
One of them is Claygent, an AI-based personal assistant. Based on your prompts, Claygent can:
- Research leads
- Retrieve specific company and people data points, from email addresses to podcast appearances
- Summarize information
- Generate industry-specific campaign ideas
This makes Claygent a valuable addition to your research process. With it, you can scrape specific lead information from any corner of the internet, retrieve case studies, and zero in on your competition. You can also use the feature to enrich existing info with additional data points to grow your database. 📈
Another AI-powered functionality that can help you conduct lead and market research is Clay’s integration with OpenAI, which lets you perform actions such as:
- Using AI to ask ChatGPT questions based on Clay inputs and context clues and get precise responses
- Using AI to ask ChatGPT image-related questions and gather extra data points
- Completing prompts using OpenAI/GPT (a simple-to-use but less advanced AI model than ChatGPT) and generating unique responses
Once you gather lead data, streamline the outreach process with Clay’s AI message writer based on OpenAI. The feature uses the data in your Clay table to build hyper-personalized, resonating messages for your leads. You choose which data points to include in your emails, so you’ll get excellent results on your first try with no need for additional refinement.
Once you create your emails, send them to your CRM system or email sequencer, or download them as a CSV file.
Pull Data from Dozens of Sources
Claygent isn’t the only feature that can help you collect data on your leads. One of Clay’s stand-out functionalities is its ability to fully integrate with over 50 data providers, allowing you to pull all kinds of information directly to your Clay table. The best part is, you access all these integrations within Clay without having to create new accounts or pay extra subscriptions.
Clay also offers waterfall enrichment, a unique option that lets you tap into multiple databases one by one until you find a valid match. Thanks to it, you can fully automate your enrichment processes.
Find the Perfect Plan With Clay’s Flexible Pricing
You don’t have to pay anything to enjoy Clay—the platform comes with a free forever plan that allows you to try out some of its core features. To upgrade, you can subscribe to one of the four paid options:
All Clay plans are credit-based. Depending on the plan you opt for, you’ll get a specific number of credits you can use to purchase actions and data points. You control how much you’ll spend and on what, so you don’t waste a cent. 💰
Every Clay’s plan can accommodate unlimited users, which is ideal for anyone worried about growing their team and having to get a more expensive subscription.
Users worldwide love Clay’s unique feature set, and here’s one review that summarizes what the platform’s about:
Set up Your Account With Clay Today
If you’re ready to make selling AI products easy, create your account by following the steps below:
- Go to the signup page 📄
- Enter the required information
- Start exploring the platform
If you’d like to make sure the platform is the right option for you or you want to learn more about it, check out Clay University—detailed feature walkthroughs will help you get to know the tool inside and out. To build your workflows from scratch, check out Claybooks, our community’s information powerhouse.
To learn how others use Clay and adopt some of the ideas, join the Slack community.
💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about the different applications of AI in sales? Check out these guides:
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