Over a third of marketers already use AI chatbots. What’s more, 58% plan to increase their investment in AI and automation tools to boost lead generation. And it’s easy to see why.
Lead generation is a full-time job. You have to constantly monitor prospect activity, pull in swathes of data, analyze customer behavior – the list goes on. It’s an incredibly time-consuming task.
But in mere moments, AI can accomplish things that would take a human days or even weeks. And it can do so to a high standard.
Here, we’ll explore the benefits of AI-powered lead generation and the top AI lead generation tools for your teams. Keep reading, and all will be revealed!
What is AI Lead Generation?
First of all, let’s clarify what we mean by AI-powered lead generation. This simply refers to lead generation tools powered by artificial intelligence technology that aim to bring more ‘leads’ (i.e. potential customers) into your marketing and sales funnels with AI technology.
There is no single ‘AI lead generation’ tool or strategy. Instead, the term encompasses a variety of platforms, tools, techniques, and marketing strategies ranging from intelligent lead qualification and rapid audience-finding.
Benefits of AI Lead Generation
Lead generation powered by AI technology can boost your lead generation efforts in these ways:
- Better resource allocation. It allows you to optimize your lead generation resources for the best possible results. This also makes scaling your resources more realistic as it becomes easier to manage them;
- Streamlined workflows. It reduces manual tasks to help streamline workflows like your purchase process;
- Enhanced profiling and segmentation. It helps to profile and segment leads accurately. After analyzing data to identify patterns and insights, it creates accurate customer profiles and separates leads based on key data such as demographics, activity and behavior, or purchase history;
- Automated lead scoring and qualification. It can score leads quickly and efficiently based on predefined criteria. AI filters leads to determine which ones are most likely to convert, separating out high-quality leads from those unlikely to go anywhere.
AI Lead Generation Process
Now that you know more about AI lead generation and its benefits, it’s time to delve deeper into what the process looks like in practice across the whole sales funnel.
Maximize Current Resources for Increased Lead Generation
With the help of AI lead generation tools, you can maximize and optimize your current resources for better lead generation. For example, using lead generation automation to remove repetitive tasks from human staff frees up team members to focus their unique talents where they are most needed.
Similarly, AI and machine learning lead gen tools can effectively ‘join up’ your current lead generation, marketing, and sales strategies. By quickly and easily transferring data between platforms, artificial intelligence enables these platforms to perform at optimum.
Develop Potential Customers Profiles
AI can take even the scantiest data about potential leads and furnish that data with additional insights to create fully-fleshed profiles. Both your marketing and sales team can then use these profiles to understand your leads better, and to select the most effective conversion strategy for each lead.
Efficiently Evaluate Lead Scoring
Lead scoring — the process of working out the quality of each lead to determine which are most worth pursuing and which are less likely to convert — can be a long and complicated aspect of the lead generation process. AI for lead generation makes it a lot faster, easier, and more accurate.
Streamline Purchasing
AI-powered chatbots can speed up and streamline lead generation efforts by:
- ‘Triaging’ leads to quickly put them on the best purchase pathway for their needs.
- Troubleshooting lead problems without the need to contact a customer service advisor.
- Automatically intervening for things like cart abandonment.
- Collecting and utilizing valuable customer data.
- Manning virtual telephone numbers to make sure that potential customers aren’t competing for human call center agents.
- Intuitively guiding both prospects and sales professionals through the lead generation process.
Deliver Seamless Personalized Service
Personalization is a must for modern sales. Customers can and will ignore any service that isn’t directly relevant to their own needs.
In fact, 84% of customers want to be treated like a person rather than a number – and they’re willing to share their data to get that personal experience.
What’s more, 63% of consumers will flat out stop buying from a company that doesn’t deliver personalization.
Lead generation AI tools can quickly gather, analyze, and utilize customer data to offer intensively personalized experiences to every lead.
This is also very useful for sales and marketing teams, which can use AI data to inform their customer services.
From automatically offering personalized welcomes to engaging leads about the solutions most likely to meet their needs, AI lead generation tools take personalization to the next level.
Collect high-quality leads and nurture them through engaging newsletters — all on one dashboard.
Leverage Automated Marketing Campaigns for Lead Attraction
Responsive marketing is key to attracting quality leads. For example, if a lead abandons their cart or shows considerable interest in a particular product, a well-timed email or notification can nudge them into returning and converting.
AI tools can pick up on important buying signals and send out automated marketing messages or drip campaigns to capitalize on buyer interest and increase conversion rates.
Refine Lead Segmentation Accuracy
Segmentation is a fantastic strategy for turning leads into customers. By dividing your leads into similar ‘segments’ you can send out sales and marketing messages that are intensively targeted towards each segment.
AI tools can be a big help with segmentation. A good AI will use customer and sales data to create highly refined and accurate segments.
Improve High Quality Leads Worth with Predictive Analytics
AI excels at predictive analytics, which in turn makes it great at both generating more leads
and improving the quality of those leads. By analyzing vast amounts of past and present lead data, AI can quickly identify and alert you to leads that are likely to convert and have a high CLV (Customer Lifetime Value). This boosts the ROI of the entire lead generation process.
Analyze Old Customer Data to Identify Patterns
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, as the saying goes. If you’ve been around for a while, it’s likely that you have a lot of past behavioral information at your fingertips in the form of old customer data.
It’s laborious and tedious for human staff to comprehensively analyze your old customer data, but AI can do it in seconds. By quickly and efficiently analyzing old customer data, AI lead generation tools can spot important patterns in customer behavior, which you can use to refine your lead generation strategies.
Improve sales pipeline effectiveness
As well as generally streamlining and optimizing your lead generation process, AI is able to continuously monitor your sales pipeline. Good AI tools will quickly learn how your sales pipeline works and spot ways to improve it for more lead generation, maximum conversions, and a better customer experience.
5 Best AI Lead Generation Tools
Hopefully, by this point, we’ve piqued your interest in AI lead gen tools, and you’ll be wondering which tools might be good for your own purposes. To give you a head start in your research, here are five of the best AI lead generation tools on the market.
Salesloft — Great AI Lead Generation Software
- Contact personalization;
- Email analytics;
- CRM integration.
Salesloft (formerly Drift) has one of the best conversational AIs in the business. Salesloft can spot potential leads and quickly engage them in conversation. Through swift and personalized engagement, Salesloft’s AI can generate interest and bring pre-qualified leads into your pipeline.
Drift will also automatically schedule meetings with highly interested customers, which saves your sales teams a lot of work. All of this is fantastic for your lead generation efforts.
Key Features
- Automating meeting scheduling;
- Highly effective conversational AI;
- Uses a range of formats, including chatbots, live chat, and video.
Pricing
Contact Salesloft for pricing.
Intercom — One of the Best AI Lead Generation Tools
- Ticket and case management;
- Advanced reporting and automation;
- AI agent.
Intercom has a number of tools and features that help with lead generation and sales. Its Business Sales Messaging tool can quickly identify and qualify leads with the highest buying intent. This kind of lead capture data is fantastic for targeted outbound marketing.
But that’s not the only way that Intercom helps with lead generation. Having identified highly qualified leads, Intercom’s conversational AI ‘Fin AI’ can quickly direct the prospect to the person, department, or webpage best suited to their needs.
Key Features
- Plenty of integrations with the most popular sales and messaging tools;
- Swift, accurate, and reliable lead scoring;
- Highly scalable;
- Capable of answering complex customer questions.
Pricing
Intercom offers a short free trial. Following this, paid plans start at $29/user/month.
Clearbit — Best AI Tool for Analyzing Customer Data
- Data intelligence and enrichment;
- Lead scoring;
- Dynamic forms.
Clearbit is an AI analytics tool that can generate leads by pulling in data from every important touchpoint on the internet and turning it into precise, highly useful datasets.
Sales teams that use Clearbit for lead generation will find themselves armed with clean, enriched, and reliable lead generation data that will yield the insights needed to quickly bring in high-quality prospects.
Clearbit can also automatically enrich your own proprietary data. For example, if you have a customer’s phone number, Clearbit may also be able to provide their email address, social profiles, and so on.
Key Features
- Excellent data gathering and structuring;
- Data enrichment service;
- Website visitor tracking.
Pricing
Contact Clearbit for pricing.
Conversica — Excellent AI tool for Qualified Leads
- Lead facilitation generative AI;
- Revenue digital assistance;
- Performance tracking and coaching.
Conversica pulls in data from many sources to identify promising leads. It then automatically hyper-segments those leads according to useful data points. By the time that lead data gets to your sales agents, it’s already rich in insight and highly qualified.
Having gathered, sorted, and segmented lead data, Conversica can reach out to the most highly qualified leads with a personalized approach designed to draw leads further into your sales funnel.
If you’re looking for a good B2B lead generation tool, Conversica could be the right platform for you.
Key Features
- Intelligent chatbot capable of answering complex questions;
- Automatic hyper-segmentation of lead profiles;
- Automatic meeting-scheduling.
Pricing
Contact Conversica for pricing details.
Leadfeeder — Superb AI Tool to Generate Leads
- Live visitor tracking;
- Automatic lead scoring;
- Email marketing integrations.
Leadfeeder excels at optimizing the first stage of your pipeline by leveraging intent data to help you generate more leads.
The platform quickly identifies people and companies that show signs of interest in your company and tracks their behavior through the internet. Alerting you to these leads means you can focus on those who are highly likely to turn into a sale.
By tracing leads back to company websites or studying their online behavior, it can gain valuable insights about who your target audience is and what they need. It’s fantastic both for B2B lead generation and B2C lead generation.
Leadfeeder also sends detailed profiles to your sales teams. This includes a comprehensive assessment of each lead’s quality, solutions they’re interested in, and the best sales approach to pull them in. The result is intensively targeted lead generation that speeds up your sales journey and brings in more, higher-quality leads.
Key Features
- Wide range of integrations, allowing you to collate and utilize data from across your sales and marketing platforms;
- Filtering system that enables you to sort leads according to a range of qualifying factors;
- Strong sales intelligence;
- Lead management tools that can also be used in your marketing strategies;
- Support system ready to help with any aspect of your lead generation strategies.
Pricing
Leadfeeder has a 14-day free trial. Following this, paid plans start from $99/month.
Use AI to Bring in and Convert the Best Leads in 2024
Artificial intelligence is transforming the world in hundreds of ways, and sales is no exception. AI lead generation software can not only yield valuable insights into your target audience, but it can also make your sales process a lot faster, more efficient, and more satisfying for customers and sales staff alike.
Speed, efficiency, personalization, and great customer experience are the touchstones of modern sales AI. Add tools we’ve covered to your sales software in order to consistently bring in and convert high-quality leads, and achieve steady business growth.
AI Lead Generation FAQs
How does AI enhance lead generation?
AI enhances lead generation in several ways:
- It can quickly identify buyer intent and feed these promising leads into sales funnels;
- Conversational AI can engage with interested leads, speeding up conversion and improving customer experiences;
- AI can quickly pull together a wealth of data identifying lead preferences, behaviors, and so on. This is highly useful when crafting personalized sales journeys;
- AI-powered lead generation tools are very precise when targeting promising leads;
- AI tools can streamline sales processes and workflows, cutting costs and increasing efficiencies.
How can AI qualify leads effectively?
AI qualifies leads through a number of tools and techniques, including engaging customers with chatbots, using lead-scoring algorithms, and cross-referencing lead data with predictive analytics.
