Cold Outreach AI: How to use AI to make more sales

How much time do you spend manually writing outreach messages, personalizing your sequences, and finding new prospects?

Now imagine cutting that time in half, without sacrificing results.

That comes with embracing the magic of AI in your cold outreach approach.

With AI, you can analyze data to identify the best prospects, tailor your messaging to their needs, and automate the outreach process without losing the personal touch that's critical for engagement.

In this article, we’ll give you a complete guide to using AI in cold outreach to grow your business!

Whether you're new to cold outreach or looking to upgrade your existing efforts, this guide provides clear instructions on how to harness AI's power to improve your outreach results.

What is AI in cold outreach

Outreach AI: Definition

Outreach AI is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to improve outreach tasks and make outreach campaigns more effective.

It automates and optimizes processes like campaign creation, and email personalization, and helps businesses generate more responses and grow faster.

For example, let's say you have a business and want to reach out to potential customers via email. AI tools can help you can automatically create hyper-personalized multichannel sequences based on your value proposition, and your recipient’s info.

This saves you hours of manual work, avoids the blank-page anxiety, and increases your reply rates.

What is AI personalization

AI personalization helps you build ultra-targeted and hyper-personalized outreach sequences at scale.

It analyzes your prospects' data and automatically creates custom campaigns with personalized icebreakers that resonate with individual prospects.

This level of customization and personalization increases the chances of capturing prospects' attention, generating higher reply rates, and ultimately driving better outcomes for your outreach efforts.

The importance of AI in cold outreach

What's the impact of AI on prospecting

AI technologies will revolutionize the way prospecting is done, helping businesses to generate effective campaigns at scale 10x more faster.

According to Gartner, Inc., by 2025, 75% of B2B sales organizations are expected to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) guided selling solutions to enhance their traditional sales playbooks.

This prediction signifies the growing recognition of AI's potential to revolutionize the sales process and its significant impact on B2B sales strategies.

What are the benefits of using AI in outreach

Automating outreach tasks using AI can save you significant time and resources. By generating highly personalized multichannel sequences with AI, you can free up resources to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

This efficiency translates into cost savings and enables you to achieve more with limited resources. In short, you can book meetings on 100% autopilot, without effort.

How does AI improve outreach effectiveness

AI can be leveraged to optimize your outreach and boost your reply rates in several ways. You can use AI-powered outreach tools, such as lemlist, to generate highly personalized multichannel campaigns without the need to be an outreach expert or have any prospecting experience.

By tailoring messages to individual recipients, AI increases the relevance and resonance of outreach efforts, leading to higher engagement and response rates.

In short, with AI, you can save up to 1 hour per campaign creation and focus on other tasks that matter to your business.

How to revolutionize your lead gen with AI: Use cases

95% of salespeople would meet their sales goals faster if they could reduce time spent on non-revenue-generating activities like admin, note taking, and updating CRMs.

This is where the power of AI comes into play.

Here are some of the most frequent and powerful use cases of AI in sales.

Define your target audience with AI

You can use AI to understand who is your target audience, what challenges they face, and how your offering meets their needs. By honing in on your ICP and buyer personas, you'll create messages that resonate and forge genuine connections.

You can use ChatGPT to create your buyer personas with this prompt:

You're a senior consultant with 20+ years of experience.
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You're a master at creating the most unique and unusual growth strategies. You've helped the fastest-growing companies in the world skyrocket their growth and customer acquisition.
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Your tone of voice should be actionable, no-fluff, approachable, casual, and storyteller.

Generate 5 detailed buyer personas for an individual who would be interested in [DESCRIPTION OF YOUR PRODUCT OR SERVICE].

The buyer personas should include the following information:
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1. Name: (insert the name of the persona)
‍
2. Position: (insert position or role of the persona)
‍
3. Professional background: (describe the professional background, experience, or expertise of the persona)
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4. Goals and objectives: (specify the goals and objectives that the persona wants to achieve in their professional life)
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5. How they heard about [YOUR COMPANY NAME]: (indicate the channels or sources through which the persona became aware of your company)
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6. Path to purchase: (describe the typical journey or steps the persona takes when considering and making a purchase related to your product or service)
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7. Potential barriers: (identify the factors or concerns that might hold the persona back from buying your product or service)

Remember to provide sufficient detail and context to ensure the generated personas are accurate and useful. Please present the buyer personas in the form of a table.

For example, we ran this prompt for lemlist and got 5 detailed buyer personas. Here’s an example of one of them:

To dive deeper into defining your target audience with AI, use this guide on defining ICPs and buyer personas with AI.

Define your ICP with AI

You can speed up the process of defining your business’ ideal customer profile with lemlist's free ICP generator.

All you need is your value proposition and your product or service description.

The ICP generator will create for you 3 buyer personas that you can download, analyze, and use to personalize your cold outreach. Use them to customize email copy, increase reply rates, get more LinkedIn connections, and boost your business revenue.

Use AI to find your target audience

Reaching out to your leads on the channel where they are most active, such as LinkedIn, increases your chances of getting replies and accelerates your growth.

But, manually searching for LinkedIn prospects

→ takes too much time
→ is an endless back-and-forth
→ doesn't always provide your leads' emails

With the help of AI, you can get access to databases that contain millions of LinkedIn profiles with easy search and advanced filtering.

For example, you can use Taplio to connect with individuals based on your specific criteria or preferences.

In this article, get your step-by-step guide on how to do it to save hours of LinkedIn lead gen!

Boost everyday outreach tasks with AI email assistants

Imagine having someone dedicated to sorting your emails, writing them, and even reminding you when to send them..

Thanks to the power of AI, it's possible to save hours of manual work with AI email assistants!

For example, you can‍

→ Boost teams’ collaboration with Missive
→ Organize inbox with SaneBox
→ Predict responsiveness with Boomerang for Gmail

and much more!

Wondering which AI email assistant is the best for your business? What tool can help you boost efficiency and let you focus on more revenue-driven tasks?

In this article, get a breakdown of the 7 best AI email assistants on the market that will help you simplify your sales process.

Create personalized multi-channel outreach sequences

You can leverage AI trained by the best-converting campaigns to create personalized outreach sequences.

For example, lemlist's AI allows you to create fully custom multi-channel campaigns in seconds.

Simply fill in your

• target audience
• value proposition
• trigger
• language
• tone of voice

... and watch the AI magic happen

In this article, you can get step-by-step guide to creating an outreach sequence that generates replies up to 2 times faster than your current approach.

Use AI to craft the engaging outreach messages

If you’re not using AI to speed up your writing processes, you’re already behind.

You can use for free our cold email generator below

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Tips: You can also use simple prompts to power your sales pitches, calls, and LinkedIn messages so that you can back to the human side of sales.

For example, you can use AI prompts to improve your CTA, such as:

‍Write 3 calls to action for the following outreach email. Ensure each CTA directs the recipient to take a specific action or next step. Use a friendly but assertive tone. Keep the writing concise and clear. Each CTA should be up to 5 words.

Outreach email: [Paste]

Or, you want to beat the competition over cold call:

‍You are an experienced sales representative for [ClickUp]. You are looking to win over a project manager who previously used [Trello] for all their [project management] needs but hated that they couldn't integrate with Google Drive, or customize their workspaces. Write a list of 5 talking points that would be helpful to convince the customer to move to [ClickUp].

Or, simply network your way to sales via LinkedIn:

‍Write a short, 50-100 word message to [Graham, the content marketing manager] at [Benevity], congratulating them on their new position. Based on their profile summary, ask how your [Content Marketing Agency] can help in the new company, and list the top 3 ways [Content Marketing Agencies] can help in-house [content marketing managers] look great to their boss.

‍PROSPECT: [Paste linkedin URL.]

AI prompts like this should give you a massive leg-up when it comes to building yourself the best, automated base to start outreach with. And then, you do what you do best: close those deals.

To access a full list of top 12 chat AI prompts that will help you avoid writers block and get replies, check out this article!

Leverage the power of AI with top sales AI tools

Here are some of the best tools AI sales tools we’ve found, to help you get started:

1. Setsail.co

SetSail is a Sales Data Layer that centralizes and interprets sales data across go-to-market teams and tools.

What’s in it for you:

• use machine learning to detect buying signals and productivity patterns
• access insights in your CRM, data lake, or via SetSail’s dashboard
• improve sales rep performance via performance metrics and improvement suggestions
• get an instant view of all your sales activity

Free trial ✅

Paid plans:

• Custom pricing

2.  Tavus

Tavus is an AI-powered video personalization platform.

What’s in it for you:

• batch create thousands of personalized videos for your leads via variable data in a CSV file
• directly embed CTA buttons in your videos
• get automated GIF previews of videos to embed in campaigns

No free trial ❌

Paid plans:

• Custom pricing
• Starts around $400 / month

3. Clay

Clay is an automated sales prospecting platform that creates personalized messages via data from multiple sources.

What's in it for you:

• enrich your customer data from 50+ data sources (tech stack, OpenAI GPT-3, Google, etc.)
• identify qualified leads through data about the latest events, such as fundraising
• add contacts to personalized campaigns in Customer.io, your outreach tool, or CRM

Free trial ✅

Paid plans:

• Basic ($349/month)
• Explorer ($599/month)
• Pro ($800/month)
• Enterprise (custom pricing)

4.  lemlist

lemlist’s AI sequence generator will help you create ultra-targeted multichannel sequences in seconds.

What's in it for you:

• avoid writer’s block with custom copies
• save > 1h per campaign with predefined steps
• get 3x more replies with unique sequences

Free trial ✅

Paid plans:

• Email Starter $39/month
• Email Pro $69/month
• Multichannel Expert $99/month
• Outreach Scale $159/month

To get the rundown on 4 more tools that can help you automate your outreach at scale, take a look at this list of the 8 best AI sales tools.

The best resources to learn about AI

Hungry for more?

AI is a constantly changing field, so if you want to take full advantage of it, you’ll need to stay up to date with the latest tools and updates.

To help you with that, we did a roundup of the best AI resources to stay on the cutting edge.

Here are our top recommendations:

AI newsletters

#1 The Rundown is a daily newsletter that keeps you up to date with the latest news in AI.

#2 The Intelligence Age will ensure you don't fall behind AI trends and give unique angle to the newest trends.

AI YouTube Channels

#1 Matt Wolfe will keep you updated about the latest AI news, hottest trends, and tested tools.

#2 AI Andy posts daily AI content that keep you on top of AI trends while making you laugh.

AI social media channels

#1 Kosherplug is a TikTok channel that shares viral news, life hacks, and tips around AI.

#2 Wgmimedia is an Instagram account that shares sensational clips, updates, and viral moments related to AI.

For a full resource list of newsletters, social media, and videos to help you get the most out of AI in cold outreach, check out these resources to learn about AI.

The key takeaways

Here’s a quick recap of everything you can do to harness the power of AI in your cold outreach:

1. Use AI to craft personalized messages for your prospects, addressing their specific needs and interests to create a stronger connection and boost response rates.
2. Automate your follow-ups to stay on prospects’ minds, increasing the chances of getting a reply.
3. Thoroughly research AI outreach tools to find the perfect match for your needs, considering features, compatibility, and value for investment.

Embrace AI as your digital assistant, helping you connect with prospects on a more personal level, and optimize your sales performance!