Gen AI for Presales—Applications, Best Practices & Challenges

Generative AI can produce various types of content based on your input. Thanks to this ability, the technology has become invaluable in the sales realm—it can support practically every sales-related process, helping sales pros organize their time better.

But sales is much more than negotiating and closing deals. Before this, sales teams need to do extensive market and customer research, conduct data analysis, and “prepare” for closing deals—and these activities are called presales. 🤝

We have firsthand experience with using AI in sales workflows—with it, we’ve fully automated a four-step campaign for outbound sales sequences and improved positive response rates. To help you achieve similar success in the presales stage, we’ll:

• Explain the role of gen AI for presales
• Go over the exact processes the technology can support
• Share the best practices for maximizing gen AI and potential challenges you may face

Common Uses of Gen AI for Presales

Gen AI for presales involves using generative AI in various activities that happen before making the actual sale to streamline tasks.

In some companies, the sales team handles both sales and presales, while in others, there are separate presales and sales teams that work in sync to close more deals.

While not all companies have the same presales processes (or have them at all), we’ll cover some of the most common use cases of gen AI in presales:

1. Market research
2. Buyer persona creation
3. Lead generation and qualification
4. Customer discovery
5. Proposal preparation
6. Call and email script writing

Market Research

Learning more about the market is one of the key steps to support sales—if you aren’t familiar with market conditions and trends, you won’t be able to highlight your offer’s value and land conversions. 🔍

Gen AI can help you research the market by:

1. Analyzing and summarizing vast amounts of data—Generative AI can sift through data at lightning speed and summarize insights to help your team understand how to position your products and services
2. Identifying changes in market trends—Through data analysis, gen AI can spot and report on emerging trends to help you prepare and gain the upper hand over the competition
3. Predicting how your product will perform in the current market—By analyzing historical data, gen AI can produce predictions about the performance of your products and services and help your sales team strategize according to current market conditions
4. Providing more info on your competition—Gen AI can analyze your competition’s offers and efforts to help you understand your company’s position and refine strategies to improve performance

Buyer Persona Creation

Making profiles of ideal customers is an important presales activity that helps personalize marketing and outreach, which ultimately leads to more conversions.

Still, creating a buyer persona requires extensive research to learn details about your ideal customers’ characteristics, behaviors, preferences, needs, and pain points. The process can be time-consuming, and gen AI can help you speed it up through natural language processing, AI modeling, and predictive analytics. It can:

• Conduct ideal customer research for you
• Analyze existing customers (if you have them)
• Spot trends and create buyer persona subgroups for more precise targeting
• Create surveys to gather more info from your target customers
• Generate detailed descriptions for each persona

Lead Generation and Qualification

Constantly pursuing accounts that aren’t particularly interested in your offer drains the sales team’s time and resources. For this reason, lead generation and qualification are a huge part of presales—thanks to these activities, SDRs can focus their efforts solely on accounts that are likely to convert. 💯

Gen AI can simplify lead generation and qualification with its ability to process a large amount of data, predict patterns, and create content. The technology can:

1. Help you collect lead info from various online sources and identify patterns
2. Enrich existing lead data with extra data points from different databases
3. Determine how likely a lead is to convert based on their engagement and estimated value
4. Prepare material to attract leads and present your offer

Customer Discovery

In many companies, the presales team is the one making the initial contact with qualified leads. But, in this phase, there are no direct sales pitches—the team reaches out to leads to learn more about their unique needs and challenges. Based on the findings, you can make changes to your product or service to ensure it perfectly aligns with what your leads are looking for.

Whether you’re conducting customer discovery via email or cold call, gen AI can help with the process by ensuring you ask the right questions and obtain relevant information. Using chatbots like ChatGPT, the presales team can effortlessly generate the questions to ask while subtly highlighting the offer’s value. 💪

💡 Bonus read: Want to know more about using ChatGPT in sales? See our guides on using ChatGPT for sales and business development as well as email responses.

Product Proposal Preparation

As presales teams are usually the ones conducting customer and market research, they have an excellent understanding of what customers want. This is why they often handle product proposal preparation whenever there’s a new product launch or update. 📒

These documents emphasize a product’s potential and show how it meets market needs. Still, a common challenge when preparing proposals is a lack of time—you’re racing against your competition to bring something new to the market and win over customers.

Gen AI can help create personalized proposals in record time. Here are a few ways to leverage gen AI for proposal preparation:

Sales Script Writing

Presales teams usually leave outreach and negotiation to sales teams, but that doesn’t mean they don’t participate in these significant processes. In many companies, presales teams are in charge of writing sales scripts—talking points SDRs use as a reference when reaching out to leads to enhance the chances of positive reactions. 🗒️

Sales scripts aren’t word-for-word checklists that SDRs strictly follow to achieve results—they represent guidelines that keep them on the right course. As customers continue to seek personalized experiences, sales scripts need to reflect this, and it becomes impossible for presales teams to create unique scripts for each lead.

But with gen AI tools, presales teams can take email and cold call script writing to new levels, save time, and deliver unique experiences to all leads. These tools can:

• Adjust the tone and language of the script as needed in relation to a particular lead
• Easily link your product’s benefits to a lead’s challenge
• Create a collection of templates covering different scenarios to ensure the sales team is prepared for any situation that may arise during outreach and negotiations
• Gather unique data points on specific leads and use them in scripts. For example, an advanced gen AI tool can find out if a lead has appeared in podcasts and add it to the script if they have
• Create role-play situations for the sales team to practice scripts

Best Practices for Implementing Gen AI Into Your Presales Processes

Gen AI can transform your presales workflows and help increase conversions and customer satisfaction only if you implement them properly. Here are a few best practices to maximize the technology’s potential:

Challenges of Using Gen AI for Presales

Using gen AI for presales isn’t always a smooth ride—there are a few bumps on the road you could come across, such as:

• Questionable data quality—Gen AI may offer incorrect or outdated info that could hinder your presales efforts and move you away from your goals
• The need for excessive customization—Aligning standalone gen AI tools to your team’s needs, goals, and preferences can be overwhelming and time-consuming
• Integration difficulties—Some people in your team may be hesitant to use gen AI in their processes, and not having the entire team on board could lead to issues down the road. Plus, some gen AI tools may be difficult to integrate into your current tech stack

Which Presale Gen AI Tool Should You Use?

You can use gen AI tools like ChatGPT to streamline different tasks for both presales and sales. However, such standalone solutions can’t access your existing lead databases to offer the higher degree of personalization necessary to win over customers.

A far better option is to use a specialized sales tool that offers gen AI features through integrations. This way, you can streamline and connect entire presales and sales workflows, from research to outreach, and reduce context switching.

As picking the right AI sales tool can be overwhelming due to so many options, we’ve summarized the main factors to consider when choosing yours:

• AI options—The tool should offer AI features to simplify and improve different presales and sales processes, such as market and customer research, lead generation, and outreach
• Ease of use—The platform should have an intuitive interface you can easily get used to even if you haven’t used similar tools in the past. While mastering everything the platform offers may take some time, it shouldn’t take you months to learn the ropes
• Multifunctionality—The tool you choose should help you streamline multiple processes to reduce jumping between apps. Ideally, it should unify presales and sales and allow teams to work in sync
• Integrations—The platform should integrate with common platforms presales and sales teams use in their work, such as CRMs, data providers, or web scraping tools

One tool that matches all these criteria is Clay. This sales automation platform is an ideal solution for many presales and sales teams looking to simplify work and save time. ♥️

Clay—A Valuable AI-Powered Presales and Sales Assistant

Clay is an innovative sales automation solution with several valuable AI-powered options to help presales and sales teams be more efficient, including:

1. Claygent
2. OpenAI integration
3. AI message writer

Claygent

Claygent is Clay’s AI-based assistant that removes the need for manual research and helps teams effortlessly obtain the desired data. It works like ChatGPT—you enter prompts, and the assistant does its magic.

For example, Claygent can:

• Research companies and people
• Summarize information
• Generate outbound campaign ideas
• Answer questions

Thanks to these functionalities, you can streamline processes such as market research or lead generation and qualification. ✅

OpenAI Integration

Clay integrates with over 200+ tools, allowing you to expand its functionalities and keep work under the same roof. One of these integrations is OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

With the integration, you can complete specific actions, such as:

AI Message Writer

Clay offers a valuable option for simplifying outreach—AI message writer. This OpenAI-based feature helps you draft personalized emails within seconds. ✍️

The difference between using a standalone gen AI tool and Clay’s AI message writer for message writing is that the latter uses lead data you have in Clay to personalize messages. This way, you can be confident your outreach is based on quality, accurate, and up-to-date information that will resonate with your leads.

Besides outreach, you can use Clay’s AI message writer to respond to emails, follow up with leads, and even write sales scripts for SDRs.

Once you prepare your emails, you can upload them to your CRM or email sequencer or import them as a CSV.

Clay’s Enrichment Features—Obtain Comprehensive Lead Data

In addition to fantastic AI options, Clay packs a punch with features focusing on data enrichment to help you get quality info on your leads in no time. Both presales and sales teams benefit from these options, as comprehensive data is the foundation of every high-performing sales campaign.

The platform’s stand-out capability is that it integrates with over 50 data providers, letting you pull all kinds of data points from dozens of sources without leaving Clay. This means you can easily automate lead research and identify high-potential accounts. You can then use this info for customer discovery and sales script writing or pass it on to the sales team for outreach.

There are two ways to tap into these data providers:

1. Accessing each provider individually
2. Using waterfall enrichment

If you choose the second option, you can sequentially search across multiple providers to find the desired info. Clay gives you complete control over the process, so you select the data point you’re interested in and the providers the platform should access. The search stops whenever Clay finds a valid match to ensure you don’t waste your Clay credits (the platform’s currency). ✅

Clay’s Pricing—Flexibility at Its Finest

To help you get a feel for the platform without obligation, Clay offers a free forever plan with 100 credits. If you’d like more credits and access to a broader range of features, choose one of the four paid plans:

Novices and seasoned sales pros agree that Clay is well worth the investment. Here’s what one user says about the platform:

Get Started With Clay

If you’re ready to elevate your presales and sales processes and effortlessly create and manage high-performing campaigns, all you need to do is create your Clay account:

1. Go to the signup page
2. Enter your name, email address, and password
3. Enjoy Clay

Visit Clay University to learn more about the platform’s functionalities through comprehensive feature walkthroughs. To get inspired by how others use Clay, check out Claybooks. Join Clay’s Slack community and be the first one to learn about updates. 💌

💡 Keep reading: Want to know more about the many ways you can use AI in sales? Check out the following guides:

• AI selling
• AI BDR
• AI follow-up email
• Conversational AI lead scoring
• ChatGPT email prompts