How to Use AI for Lead Generation: Find Partnerships That Convert at a Steady Pace
Explore how you can use AI tools for lead generation and finding partnerships
Did you know that almost half of marketers surveyed by Gartner in 2023 reported that AI helped them land a deal they might have otherwise missed? By 2025, Gartner predicts that 60% of B2B companies will shift to data-driven (read: AI-powered) lead generation.
Here’s a look at how you can use AI to unlock new opportunities and generate leads that turn into partnerships.
Why use AI for lead generation?
You might still hear old-school sales reps insist that no AI will ever match a pro’s intuition and experience. While there’s an undeniable truth to this statement, it’s equally true that AI doesn’t need to.
In manual lead generation, humans handle all aspects of data collection, analysis, and follow-ups. Unless they cut corners and rely on generic templates, human reps need weeks to tackle a large lead list.
That’s because people can only work on one personalized email at a time, which usually takes 20-30 minutes. And after a long day of writing emails, people get tired, face writer’s block, and become more likely to make mistakes.
In contrast, AI-powered lead generation can run through the whole database without sacrificing quality or encountering writer’s block.
That said, AI B2B tools won’t beat a seasoned sales pro. But they do have data. Huge swaths of data they can process and extract patterns from to land deals at a greater pace than newer reps.
To start generating leads for you, an AI instrument needs:
- Demographic and firmographic data of your existing customers, such as industry, size, location, and revenue
- Behavioral data about how the leads interacted with your website, emails, and social media
- Transactional data about your customers’ purchase history and interaction with sales teams
- Engagement data from marketing campaigns like email opens, positive response rates, and webinar attendance
All this data must be integrated into a single database, cleaned of duplicates, errors, and missing values, and converted into a format that AI can work with.
Best ways to use AI in lead generation
So how can AI help your team with lead generation? What exactly can AI lead gen do for you?
Here are a few ways.
Analyze user behavior
You can use AI to analyze the behavior of your website visitors. For example, if you offer a B2B software demo, AI can tell you:
- What demo features your visitors are most engaged with
- Which parts of the demo are the best- and worst-converting
- Which demo users are most likely to convert
- What specific paths through the demo are followed by those leads who later convert
Your team can use these insights to focus on the prospects most likely to convert, tailoring your offer for better engagement.
Search for partnerships, not dry contacts
Everyone wants contacts who convert into partnerships. AI can source such contacts by analyzing their digital footprints like content, collaborations, and audience engagement. Just make it clear who you’re looking for, and lead generation AI tools will point you in the direction of good partners for your business.
AI instruments use hundreds of data points to discover leads and compare them with those already converted. Some data points might not seem obvious, yet they turn out to be strong predictors of conversion.
Automate communication with leads
Answering all customer inquiries and comments in real time and keeping response times under 10 minutes can strain your sales team. With a tool like AiSDR, this possibility becomes reality.
But not all AI SDRs provide automated responses and objection handling.
The AI-powered tools that do have evolved to the point where 68% of customers prefer them over talking to a human SDR. They can give helpful responses about your product, guiding prospects to book a call or appointment.
Personalize communication
Email templates were a great time-saver back in the day, but lead generation AI advancements are threatening to make them obsolete. AI can instantly go deep into personalization and customize the message for each prospect with data pulled from tools like HubSpot and LinkedIn.
AiSDR also provides a library of email frameworks that you can use to configure your AI lead generator and set its approach to tailored outreach.
Use customized tools to collect customer data
AI-powered tools can help you collect more fine-grained customer data.
For example, they can implement:
- Predictive behavior analysis based on historical data – Learn which of your customers are likely to churn or upgrade. The AI tool will compare their profile to those who have already churned or upgraded by using hundreds of data points to estimate how likely a customer is to do the same.
- Sentiment analysis on social media – Gauge the sentiment toward your brand. Learn what people bring up when talking about your product and in what contexts.
- Real-time data processing – Always keep your finger on the pulse. AI tools keep adding newly received data to their sets in real time, improving the accuracy of forecasts and targeting.
- Anomaly detection – Get notified of any unusual or suspicious activity right away. AI tools can spot the signs that your customer’s account has been hacked or abused and immediately report them to your team.
- Voice recognition – Learn from your customer service calls, instantly deciphering them. Transcribing voice to text used to be a daunting task for humans, but AI handles it effortlessly, allowing you to make most of all those recorded calls.
Your sales team can use this info to target the most promising leads and predict conversions with high accuracy.
How AI is changing lead generation
Five years ago, B2B lead generation was about manually sifting through LinkedIn for promising contacts and reaching out to each one. Now, you can use AI to tackle this (even LinkedIn outreach) while you focus on higher-value projects.
Enhanced, accurate outreach
AI tools monitor emerging trends in real time and update outreach criteria accordingly. For example, if C-level executives were traditionally your primary buyers but now the decision-making has shifted to department heads, the AI lead generator will adjust by targeting and prioritizing department heads in your audience.
Correct lead identification
AI algorithms can score thousands of leads instantly, using hundreds of data points. With manual scoring, this process would take much longer. Plus, AI never gets tired of repeating the same sequence of actions over and over. That’s why it makes fewer errors and helps identify leads more accurately.
Easy launches of marketing campaigns at scale
Your sales team can quickly set up outreach campaigns with AI lead generation tools. These tools automatically identify and suggest the most effective targeting criteria based on past campaign performance and current trends. What’s more, they can use your buyer persona or ICP to target the best potential matches.
Continuous process optimization and improvement
No human can keep monitoring and adjusting the processes around the clock, but AI can. Learning from each interaction and feedback loop, it will immediately incorporate these findings in the next interactions. For example, if leads are converting at a higher rate from a particular message, your AI helper will craft more messages like this.
Lead support and personalized communication
AI lead generation tools can personalize communication to the extent that it feels like a conversation with a real human—a human who remembers all your past interactions and all the details you shared before. AI has no trouble remembering that for each lead in your database, unlike a human sales rep who would quickly get overwhelmed.
With all the benefits of AI-based lead generation, adopting it seems a way to go. But how to do that? How do you make sure your sales team makes the most of the AI tools you put in their hands? With our quick guide, you can start using AI for lead generation without much sweat.
How to get started with AI lead generation
Follow these steps to land promising partnerships with AI.
1. Define company and prospecting goals
The first question to ask is: What kind of leads do you need? Who are they in terms of industry, job title, and location? How can your product benefit them?
Here are two examples of good lead descriptions to start with:
- HR managers for small and mid-sized businesses in Europe looking for a reliable and cost-effective resume screening tool
- Tech startup founders in California looking for investor screening software that can help them approach the right people and secure funding
Next, think about what action you want your leads to take.
Do you want them to respond to your email? Subscribe to event reminders? Book a call? AI lead generator tools like AiSDR will adjust its messaging to help you reach your target outcome.
And before you actually start lead generation, you’ll want to understand your current lead gen performance. This means calculating cost per leads, cost per appointments, and similar metrics.
2. Use existing data to generate more leads
Who doesn’t love leveraging audience lookalikes to get campaigns running quicker?
Instead of groping around in the dark for audience parameters that work for you, you just use your existing customer data to guide your search for similar leads.
This is something else that AiSDR can handle. AiSDR pulls data from a variety of sources to build a good lookalike audience for you using:
- Your buyer persona
- Your ideal customer profile
- Your current customers’ websites
- Intent signals (hiring intent, web search queries, recent news and announcements, tech stacks)
- Lead databases
3. Choose the types of data integration
AI lead generation tools should be capable of connecting to your CRM and syncing data back and forth. Some of the data it might pull includes:
- Lead’s name
- Job title
- Company
- Industry
- Past interactions with your company
- Stage of the marketing funnel
4. Customize the persona of a potential lead
To generate leads effectively, you need a sales persona and a buyer persona. A buyer persona represents your potential customer. A sales persona represents a member of your sales team who targets this customer and includes the tactics and types of messages that work best with a matching buyer persona.
Creating multiple personas can be a challenge, but fortunately, AiSDR can slash this workload by half. If you have a detailed buyer persona, AiSDR will create a sales persona to accompany it.
For example, your buyer persona might look like this:
“Alex, 35, a tech startup founder in California, looking for an investor screening software that can help them approach the right people and get funding.”
The matching sales persona will include the most effective communication channels to reach Alex, his typical objections and responses to counter these, specific sales tactics, and sample emails.
5. Train your team to work with AI
Your sales team will probably struggle if left to master AI lead generation tools on their own. That’s why we at AiSDR provide AI usage training to all our customers. We also have white-glove customer support available 24/7.
6. Launch AI
Before launching AI, you’ll need to set certain parameters for the best results. For example, with AiSDR, you can configure a time zone to ensure emails reach users when they’re at work, not at home.
7. Monitor and adjust AI results
Using AI to generate leads, you’ll want to keep a finger on how it’s performing. With AiSDR, you can do just that. Our tool collects and updates fine-grained performance data in real time, presenting a complete picture of your lead generation.
You can change campaign settings at any time for even better outcomes.
8. Scale and optimize lead generation
You might be targeting different groups of leads for different products. AiSDR allows you to easily copy personas and campaigns and modify them as you see fit.
Based on search filter settings like new job openings or recent company events, AiSDR continuously scans for new leads, making sure no promising partnership slips through the cracks.
