How to use AI in B2B Sales – Complete Guide (2024)

The future of B2B sales is here, and it’s powered by AI! Artificial Intelligence has been revolutionizing sales like no other technology in recent decades. In this guide, we’ll cover how AI can help make B2B sales better and easier. We’ll look at five main ways AI can help: doing boring tasks automatically, finding the best potential clients, discovering new companies to sell to, making messages more personal, and helping with sales calls. We’ll show you real examples of how AI works and give you tips on how to use it in your own sales team. Whether you’re new to AI or already using it, you’ll learn how it can help you sell more and make your clients happier.

Benefits of Using AI in B2B Sales

Did you know that 64.8% of a sales rep’s time is spent on non-revenue-generating activities? That’s right, almost two-thirds of their day is taken up by tasks that don’t directly contribute to making sales. But what’s causing this massive time drain? Two major reasons are administrative tasks and poor data quality

On average, sales reps spend 14.8% of their week (nearly a full day) on administrative tasks such as data entry, scheduling, and reporting. Additionally, they spend about 27.3% of their time (more than a quarter of the week) dealing with the consequences of poor data quality, like correcting errors or searching for accurate information.

This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can make a big difference. By automating time-consuming, repetitive tasks, AI can help streamline the sales process and allow salespeople to focus on high-value activities instead. Imagine having an intelligent assistant that handles lead qualification, data entry, and even personalized email outreach.

In fact, you don’t have to imagine it anymore. Companies that already use AI for scoring leads (figuring out which customers are most likely to buy) have seen a 15-20% boost in turning those leads into actual sales. It’s clear that with AI taking care of boring manual tasks and messy data, sales teams can spend more quality time engaging with customers, understanding their needs, and creating tailored solutions. The end result is increased efficiency, better sales performance, and happier clients.

5 Ways to Use AI in B2B Sales

Before we make it seem like AI can completely take over your sales department, it’s important to know that there are still things humans will do better. Some people think AI should be used for everything, while others don’t want to use it at all. The truth is somewhere in the middle, and you need to figure out where AI can help in B2B sales and where it’s not the right tool. At the end of the day, your main goal should be to get real, measurable improvements from using AI.

1. Automating Sales Processes with AI

Starting with the most obvious – automating sales processes. We already know that SDRs lose nearly 1 full day each week on administrative tasks (14.8% to be exact), so automating these can improve efficiency simply by freeing up their schedule for something more productive.

The good news is that most B2B companies, if not all, don’t need to build their own AI tools for that. Most popular sales platforms, like Salesloft and Outreach, are adding AI capabilities that you can start using right away. These new features can help with tasks like sorting emails, scheduling meetings, and even drafting personalized messages to potential customers.

High-volume outreach tools like Instantly and Smartlead have a really neat AI feature that analyses the contents of the replies you get, and automatically categorizes them. Pair that with email sequences that are triggered with reply categories and you can automate 90% of your email outreach.

Another cool thing AI can do is listen to sales calls and pick out the important parts. This helps sales reps remember key points and lets managers give better advice (we’ll cover that later in more detail).

Recommendations

If you are implementing AI features in your sales operations for the first time, the important thing to do is to test the operations before you completely replace manual processes. Most of the features are advertised as set-and-go, but you need to make sure that the accuracy is on par with manual operations.

2. AI-Driven Lead Scoring and Qualification

AI-driven prospecting is one of the most exciting things in B2B sales since the advent of the internet which gave us an insane amount of data on our prospects. But before we explain in detail how it works here’s a little backstory on why it’s so important.

Imagine you’re a sales rep with a long list of potential customers. To figure out which ones are most likely to buy, you need to manually research each lead to see how well they match your ideal customer profile. That can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. It’s hard work! And it’s getting even harder because win rates (the number of deals you close) are going down each year. The only way to keep up is by hiring more SDRs. But hiring more people means spending more money so, you end up with a problem: you need more leads, but getting them costs more money.

Additionally, B2B data decays at a rate of 70.3% per year. People change their jobs, companies switch the technologies they’re using, pivot on their offering, rebrand, hire people, fire people, and so on. All the important information you need to qualify leads is changing rapidly, which means that if you’re not constantly updating the data you have you’re stuck with poor data quality that can reduce sales productivity by as much as 50%.

Just two years ago, it was hard to imagine an AI solution for efficient prospecting. But now, thanks to two new types of tools, it’s become a reality.

The first are Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. ChatGPT can do two important things:

1. It can search the internet and find specific information you ask for.

2. It can analyze lots of data, clean it up, and organize it neatly.

But you might wonder, “How can we use this for prospecting high volumes of leads?” That’s where tools like Clay and Persana AI come in.

Clay and Persana are like smart spreadsheets that can connect to many data sources and other tools, including ChatGPT. In them, you can tell ChatGPT things like, “Go to the prospect’s website and tell me what this company does.” Then, you can ask follow-up questions like, “Based on that description, who does this company likely sell to?” or “Do they offer services or software?”

You can even set up a scoring system. For example, if you’re looking for B2B companies, you might tell the AI to give 10 points to B2B companies, 5 points to companies that do both B2B and B2C, and 1 point to B2C companies.

Here are 2 examples of how we’ve used Clay and ChatGPT to prospect companies.

1. We’ve reviewed the company’s website and found what they do, how they help their customers, what problems they solve, and what are some of the best features of their product.

2. Based on the company description we found trigger points that would indicate a customer is a good fit for them (we sell sales and marketing services so it’s important for us to show that we know what’s bothering THEIR potential customers).

In total, it took less than 15 seconds (of waiting) for AI to extract all this information we could then use in our own sales outreach. The best part? You only need to set up these instructions once. After testing and improving your process, you can add thousands of companies to Clay or Persana, and the AI will do all the work – much faster than any SDR could.

Recommendations

When implementing AI Prospecting Workflows, it’s important to work with someone who knows how to set them up properly. AI tools like ChatGPT can sometimes make mistakes or “hallucinate” information, so you need someone who knows how to ask the AI the right questions to get accurate data.

It’s also good to have someone who can make these workflows fit your specific sales process, instead of using generic templates. This way, the AI tools help improve what you’re already doing, not change everything.

When done right, AI Prospecting Workflows can connect to your email and LinkedIn, write personalized messages and work with your CRM. A good system can do up to 90% of the manual work while being 97-99% accurate. For cases where AI can’t find accurate information, it’s best to have a workflow that delegates these prospects to human SDRs for manual qualification.

If you want to learn how AI Prospecting Workflows can help your business, feel free to reach out to us – we offer this service and can show you how to make it work for your specific needs.

3. Find Lookalike Companies

Finding lookalike companies is a smart way to expand your list of potential customers. The best part? All you need to do is provide the URL of your ideal customer.

Here’s how it works: You give the AI tool the website address of a company that’s a perfect fit for your product or service. The AI then analyzes this company and searches through its vast database to find other businesses that share similar characteristics. Some of the most popular solutions on the market are:

1. Ocean.io has a smart search feature that can find companies similar to your best customer just from their URL.

2. Clay allows you to input a company’s LinkedIn URL, and its AI will find similar companies based on that information.

These tools save you tons of time. Instead of manually searching for new leads, you can let the AI do the hard work. They don’t just look at basic information like industry or company size but also find hidden commonalities such as similar tech stacks and growth patterns. You just provide one URL, and the AI gives you a list of potential customers that match your ideal profile. This leaves you with more time to focus on reaching out to these new prospects and closing deals.

Recommendations

When using tools like Ocean.io and Clay to find lookalike companies, start with your best-performing customers as models. Don’t just rely on one tool – try a few different ones to compare results. Remember, AI suggestions are a great starting point, but always review the list of lookalike companies (or qualify them with AI Prospecting Workflows) to ensure they truly fit your ideal customer profile.

4. Personalizing Customer Interactions Using AI

77% of B2B buyers won’t buy without personalized content. That’s a surprisingly high number. The first few touches with your prospects will always be either email, phone call, or LinkedIn message. Typically, SDR would research prospects manually and then use whatever information they found to send a unique message. Doing this on scale is a bit of a challenge. Most, if not all, outreach platforms can insert prospects’ name, title, company name, and similar information, but in 2024 there are millions of messages sent every day, and this doesn’t feel personalized anymore.

Here are instead 2 ways AI can help personalize your outreach:

1. Email and LinkedIn messages: AI can analyze information about a company or person and suggest ways to make your message more relevant to them. For example, it might find recent news about the company that you could mention.

2. Video personalization: Some new tools like Vinna.ai, RepliQ, and Sendler.ai can change video backgrounds. You can make a video once, and make it look like you’re scrolling through prospects’ websites while you talk, which feels more personal.

It’s important to not give AI too much autonomy. Don’t let it write entire emails or even full sentences sometimes. This can sound fake or like a robot wrote it. Instead, it’s better to let AI find specific pieces of information and then use these in sentences you’ve already written. This way, your messages feel personal but still sound natural.

Remember how we used Clay and ChatGPT to find important information about companies? We can use this same info to make parts of our messages more personal. For example, instead of telling AI to write one sentence that tells who the company sells to and what the common trigger points their ICP is facing, you might write the sentence yourself and let AI fill in the blanks:

“I saw that you likely sell to [JOB ROLES], and they often face challenges like [TRIGGER POINTS]. Our service could help by…”

Recommendations

When using AI to make things personal, start small and try different ways of doing it. Always check what the AI writes before you scale the specific approach. The best way to do this is to pick 10 prospects you know everything about and test messaging with AI fillers. Once you’re satisfied automate the process using Clay or Persana.

5. AI in B2B Sales Calls

AI Sales Agents

AI Sales Agents have been making waves in the sales world. You’ve probably heard about the viral video of an AI agent smoothly handling a call with a prospect interested in buying a Tesla. If not, here’s a video for you.

To be realistic – this call is likely staged. But it sounded pretty good, right? It gave a glimpse of what might be waiting for us in the future.

Companies like Nooks are already offering AI sales callers as a service, showing that this technology is moving from concept to reality. However, it’s important to understand the current limitations. While AI can handle inbound calls pretty well, especially when the prospect has already shown interest, it’s not yet ready for outbound cold calls. Inbound calls are more straightforward and “navigational,” but outbound calls require soft skills, adaptability, and the ability to build rapport quickly – areas where human sales reps still have the edge.

Call Recording & Analysis

Another use case of AI in B2B Sales Calls is Call Recording & Analysis. Sales reps spend up to 55% of their time on internal calls and meetings. AI can make this time more productive by automatically recording, transcribing, and analyzing these conversations. It can pick up on key points, action items, and even emotional cues that might be missed in real time. OtterPilot is a great choice for that as you can chat with AI and ask questions about the call after it was recorded.

AI-Powered Coaching and Feedback

Real-time AI-Powered Coaching and Feedback is another exciting application. During calls, AI tools like Cogito can provide instant suggestions to sales reps, helping them improve their pitch on the spot. AI can analyze call patterns over time, identifying areas where each rep can improve. This personalized, data-driven approach to training can significantly boost a sales team’s performance and help new hires get up to speed more quickly.

Recommendations

While AI in B2B sales calls shows promise, it’s best to start with AI-powered analysis and coaching tools to enhance your human sales team’s performance. Keep an eye on AI sales agent technology, but for now, focus on using AI to support and improve your existing sales processes rather than replace human interactions.

Key Considerations for Implementing AI in B2B Sales

Now that we’ve looked at five ways to use AI in B2B sales, let’s briefly cover what to keep in mind when you start using AI. We gave some tips for each way to use AI earlier, but here are some big things to consider:

1. Find the right AI tools for your sales team, as not all AI tools are the same, and what works for one company might not work for you.
2. Make sure your customers trust AI by making sure your data is good, mixing AI with human touch, and always checking how well the AI is working.
3. Check if the AI integrates with the tools you’re already using to avoid disruptions in your workflow.
4. If you’re outsourcing an AI setup, work with someone who has experience with it. The key aspect of AI is to bring you cost savings and performance increase, not an increase in costs.

Conclusion

We’ve seen that there’s definitely a place for AI in B2B sales, from finding new customers to closing deals. AI can do boring jobs quickly, give helpful information, and make each customer feel special. This can help your sales team work better and sell more. But it’s important to pick the right AI tools for what you need and use them the right way. Remember, AI is not here to take over your sales team’s jobs. It’s here to help them do their best work.

As you start using AI in B2B sales, focus on making real improvements and always try to make things better. If you use AI the right way, it can help you reach your sales goals and do better than other companies.

Looking to the future, AI in B2B sales is going to get even more exciting. As AI gets smarter, more and more manual tasks will be replaced with it, and we’ll see new tools that can guess what companies want before they even know it. These tools will make hard decisions easier and show us even more about how well we’re selling. Companies that start using AI now and learn to use it well will be ready to lead the way in B2B sales. So, don’t just try to keep up with AI – use it to get ahead and be a leader in your field.

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