Starting out, rarely do we think about identifying an ideal customer profile and establishing a sales process. We tend to hope for organic growth and some resemblance of the “if you build it, they will come” approach.
Turns out, organic growth can be very unreliable, especially in the beginning, when your product or service hasn’t built a strong enough reputation yet.
What works is reaching out to potential buyers directly — with a well-defined sales pitch outlining your offering and how it addresses all the major pain points of your audience — and literally asking them to buy it.
As you know, such outreach is usually combined with various sales prospecting techniques used by your BDRs (business development reps).
BDRs can use lots of ways to reach out to your ideal customers: cold-calling and sales calls are definitely one, but also email, LinkedIn and other social messaging platforms, website chat, and more.
Ultimately, sales reps are trying to create a constant stream of opportunities that account executives can then use to show demos and close deals. This division of labor is crucial, as it frees up everyone’s time to focus on decisions they need to make in their particular stage of the conversion funnel.
That said, business prospecting presents a near unlimited number of opportunities, most of which unfortunately don’t lead to qualified prospects. In addition, seeking insights through research and doing all the associated paperwork takes a large chunk of time that can’t then be spent prospecting.
To better qualify opportunities and automate inefficient data entry work, BDRs can leverage the power of sales prospecting tools powered by AI, which can help find people to reach out to based on specific criteria, automatically update your CRM with your conversations, or even identify anonymous website visitors and assign them a quality score.
Find Customers for Your Product without Cold-Calling
Rarely would anyone engage in cold-call selling today without at least researching some information about the contact first. In fact, such research often makes up a big portion of your sales team’s time. Not only do they have to find out whom to contact, they also need to know their email or phone, and write an effective message or script.
The good news is there are sales tools that will make the whole process much easier. Qualifier.ai, for example, can become your AI-powered B2B sales assistant. It automatically searches for companies that fit your ICP criteria, finds the perfect prospects to reach out to along with their email addresses, and even emails them for you and follows up later using pre-defined templates.
Since Qualifier.ai works autonomously, it’s able to provide complete end-to-end experience and seamlessly multiply the outreach efforts of every BDR, saving them hours every day.
For more customized connections, you can use a tool such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which matches you with contacts based on your network and opens more possibilities for warm introductions.
Automatically Update Deals in Your CRM Sales Funnel
What do BDRs do besides looking for new companies to reach out to? Right, they are probably populating sales events in their CRM, especially if that CRM is Salesforce. Even though having an up-to-date CRM is essential to any team, no one likes spending hours every week doing data entry.
Dooly automatically synchronizes your notes to the appropriate categories in Salesforce, saving you up to five hours every week. Besides, it makes all your content accessible in one place and features its own playbook, suggesting you the best ways to handle objections while you’re on a call.
Turn Content Marketing Consumers into Buyers to Make a Sale
Not all prospecting interactions start with outbound calls. Advertising, SEO, and other marketing campaigns tend to bring lots of inbound traffic. Traditionally, you’d try to capture their information, such as name and email, by setting up newsletters and demos.
Today, however, relevant context is everything. The best time to engage a website visitor is while they are still on the website, through chat. You can answer questions, describe product features, and, most importantly for you, qualify the prospect. But what if the number of these inquiries is going through the roof and overwhelming your BDRs? Then you need to find a way to successfully pre-qualify them before you actually get the chance to qualify them personally.
Lift AI is a buyer-intent solution that uses its proprietary machine-learning model to identify anonymous website visitors and determine how likely each of them is to convert. Since anonymous visitors can constitute up to 98% of your traffic, Lift AI presents a unique opportunity to uncover visitors who are most likely to buy (on average 9% of your traffic).
Technically, Lift AI works by assigning buyer intent scores to every single visitor as soon as they land on your website, connecting the highest-scoring visitors directly with your BDRs and then greeting the rest with either a nurturing bot or a self-help chat interface.
Speaking of chat, Lift AI instantly integrates with any enterprise chat software you’re already using, from Drift to LivePerson.
Using Lift AI, you’re making sure that your BDRs spend all of their time talking to the right visitors, and thus skyrocketing their conversion rates and improving their productivity and satisfaction levels.
On average, companies find that Lift AI improves their conversions anywhere from two to 10 times within 90 days. Drift customers converted nine times more conversations using Lift AI. PointClickCare had a 400% increase. Formstack was able to grow its chat pipeline by 88%.
You can see how Lift AI can improve your own pipeline with a 30-day free trial and a custom revenue opportunity assessment for your website. Just paste a small Lift AI JavaScript snippet to your website and you’re ready to go!
As you can see, whether your business prospecting is mostly making outbound calls or handling inbound inquiries, the new generation of AI tools is there to assist you, making it easy to focus on what truly matters.
