AI is going to change the art of prospecting and pipeline generation in amazing ways. This field is moving insanely fast, but I wanted to point out a few cool things I noticed this week.
A few areas I expect will improve significantly with AI:
Prioritizing accounts and prospects within them!
One thing that continues to be abundantly clear to me as I advise companies on their outbound strategy is that SDRs spend an incredible amount of time prospecting the wrong people. This is a huge problem in prospecting and it doesn’t seem like any sales tech solution provider has really nailed a solution to it.
Realistically stack ranking accounts and prospects within those accounts seems like something that AI can solve. Like, it doesn’t even need to be that good to reduce hours of wasted time per day per rep. This may actually be one of the most important unlocks for SDR efficiency.
Personalization at scale
Most of the attention on LinkedIn seems to be focused on how AI can change email writing. And the hype is real. There are already tools out there that fit right into your saas tools that make the research/personalization phase of an outbound email 10x faster. One of the companies I advise, Regie.ai, does this extremely well. AI can speed up the process of sequence creation and copywriting significantly.
The ways you will be able to personalize will improve as well. Another company I advise, Studeo made a tool for their own outbound prospecting that literally makes a personalized mockup of the product they sell, digital storytelling, using the prospect’s own photos and information. And they attach it to the outbound email as a GIF. Automatically!
There will be an explosion of different ways we will be able to personalize experiences for prospects AI gets better and better.
Doing repeatable tasks for you
You will be able to ask AI to do stuff for you. The other day one of my friends, Kyle Corbitt, made a browser extension that can literally execute tasks in your browser by telling it what you want to get done. It’s a two-day old prototype, but really impressive.
One example he gave was setting a meeting. You can see from the demo how easy it would be to get invites sent to prospects instantly during a cold call so you can ask them to confirm while they are on the phone with you. (Getting the prospect to click “confirm” while on the cold call is an effective tactic for increasing hold rates, but it often isn’t executed because it’s hard to do in the middle of a cold call).
But of course the implications of having a tool like this available are much more significant than that simple use case. Tools like this will decrease the number of clicks and time spent on repetitive tasks significantly.
I welcome this. The SDR job requires way too much clicking right now!
How do I prepare for changes?
Stay current, and use new technologies as much as you can. Regie and other AI tools for salespeople are free to try. Definitely get a ChatGPT account if you haven’t yet and play around with different use cases. This field is moving fast but we are still early!
Like any advance in sales tech, the earliest adopters of productivity increasing software get the strongest advantage.
Be an early adopter!
p.s: Did you know you can add me to your team as an advisor for your outbound strategy?