According to the last year’s McKinsey Global Survey, 65% of organisations regularly use gen AI, almost double the percentage from just ten months previously. Unsurprising then, given its rapid uptake, that discussion abounds about AI’s place in sales and marketing, and lead generation specifically.
What can AI do for lead generation?
Leads either exist or they don’t; AI can’t manufacture new contacts, so don’t believe anyone who says it can. But what it can do, is to analyse and then rank leads, so businesses can prioritise those prospects that are most likely to buy.
This might be using AI-driven solutions to search realms of publicly available information to discover priority accounts based on trigger events, things such as a new client win, product launches or M&A activities.
It’s these trigger events that are recognised as precursors to a purchase – things that happen to a company that are likely to trigger a change in the business and therefore a lead. While traditional lead generation models use intent data, identifying people because of the content they’ve downloaded, the right AI solution can go one step further and highlight pre-intent data, helping to predict when intent is likely to be shown, so businesses can act on it earlier.
AI to better segment lists
Identifying the trigger events is just the first part of the process. By analysing this initial data, it’s possible to pinpoint which trigger or triggers means a prospect is most likely to convert. Future campaigns can be segmented and automatically prioritised according to the findings, giving businesses a head start every time.
Using AI in this way allows campaigns to be optimised much faster and more efficiently than if they were managed by humans. And, due to the very nature of machine learning, the more you do with the right AI solution, the more it understands the prospects and the accounts a business cares about – and the better the results.
AI to personalise email follow-up
We all recognise the importance of personalisation in marketing but gathering even the most basic of insights can be a time-consuming task. The more detailed or the larger the scale, the more complicated it becomes. Here’s where AI can help again, combining the information gathered on a prospect’s job role and the trigger event detected to create communications that speak directly to customers’ needs.
That’s not to say that this replaces the human touch that’s needed to really connect with a customer. To be most effective, AI should be used to support, not replace humans. Even the insights provided by AI are only valuable if they are understood and used properly. As we all know, forging genuine relationships with prospects and customers requires communication that feel authentic, empathetic and genuine, and crafting these involves a level of emotional intelligence and a depth of understanding that’s impossible for a machine to replicate.
When it comes to lead generation, the combination of AI’s supercharged analytical abilities with marketers’ creativity has the potential to create something spectacular. With the right AI-powered technology in place, it’s possible to work smarter and faster, prioritising accounts and optimising campaigns, ultimately enabling human lead generation teams to deliver higher quality leads that are more likely to convert.
