10 Best AI for Sales Prospecting to Get 8x More Results 

Prospecting can sometimes feel like you’re stuck on a hamster wheel. You put in tons of effort, but it’s tedious and unrewarding – manual data entry, endless follow-ups, and chasing poor-quality leads that rarely convert. 

Luckily, AI can step in and take the endless grind off your plate.

Here’s a closer look at the smartest AI prospecting tools that do the heavy lifting so you can focus on revenue growth and closing deals.

What is AI for sales prospecting?

The easiest way to visualize AI for prospecting is to imagine your SDR or other sales teammate in software form. 

High-quality AI prospecting tools and AI SDRs are able to: 

• Research, qualify, and score leads to find prospects likely to convert to a demo
• Create prospecting emails and sequences, if not run entire campaigns
• Send follow-ups across multiple channels according to set cadences 
• Nurture leads from MQL to SQL or until they’re ready to book a call

Good human SDRs are also capable of handling and excelling at all these tasks. But who said they have to do it on their own? 

Using AI for sales prospecting helps them tackle more work and pursue more leads with less effort. Instead of spending hours manually searching for leads, AI tools enable your SDRs to pinpoint and guide high-intent prospects through the first steps of their customer journey.

In a nutshell, sales prospecting AI powers the quantity of potential relationships while freeing your sales reps to focus on the quality of building relationships.

Here are some of the benefits of AI-powered sales prospecting. 

Fresher and more relevant data

A prospecting AI tool doesn’t just find leads. It makes sure your data is spot-on. Good AI sales tools will run regular checks to ensure your lead data is valid, up to date, and complete. Some will even go as far as enriching your existing lead data by pulling information from lead databases and entering it into your CRM.

Lightning-fast search at scale

Finding and researching prospects is a huge time-sucker. AI sales tools like AiSDR make it easy to search through millions of leads in minutes or dig deep into specific companies to find the right people to talk with. Some will even completely automate prospecting for you instead of requiring you to be in the pilot’s seat.

Bird’s-eye view of everything

Is your sales toolkit an amalgamation of several distinct tools, such as HubSpot for your CRM, LinkedIn for networking, and Mailchimp for emails?

Some AI SDRs and sales tools go beyond prospecting and lead data management automation. They offer an umbrella that provides coverage for end-to-end outreach, as well as access to essential sales tools and two-way data syncing.

This carries several benefits:

• The AI solution has all the information it needs for high-quality prospecting.
• You don’t need to double-check your entire toolkit to confirm data is synced across platforms.
• You have a bird’s-eye view of your sales from one tool, making work more convenient.

Higher efficiency

AI-powered solutions help you find hundreds of leads, add them to campaigns, and craft highly-personalized emails in the time it takes an SDR to personalize a message for one lead. When AI is deployed to handle the mundane while you handle the creative, this allows lead prospecting efficiency to improve by 15-20%. 

Sales quota fulfillment 

Did you know that 84% of sales reps didn’t meet their quota last year? Or that 67% don’t expect to meet it this year. 

Your odds of hitting your quota improve with AI. Over the past year, 83% of sales teams using AI experienced revenue growth compared to 66% of teams not using AI. Their secret? Hitting their sales targets.

Where sales prospecting AI can help

AI sales prospecting tools and virtual sales assistants are like a Swiss Army knife for your sales team. There’s a blade or tool for every task.

Lead generation

AI streamlines lead generation by sifting through massive amounts of data to identify potential prospects to add to your sales pipeline. Depending on how you set it up, it will search for different things:

• Prospect details: If you want to cast a wide net, the AI can search for specific characteristics like job titles, management level, or company growth. For example, if you’re targeting CFOs in tech startups with over 100 employees, AI can pinpoint prospects that fit that exact criteria.
• ICP matching: You can also instruct the AI to search for companies that fit your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) or leads that reflect your buyer persona. You can then narrow the results by focusing on industries, company size, and location. 
• Intent: With the right data, you can drill down even deeper by working with inbound leads and scanning prospects for buying intent and other signals. This might be repeat website visits, content downloads, or keywords they search for.

With these capabilities in its arsenal, AI for lead generation will secure a steady stream of high-quality leads without the need for manual research.

Lead qualification

If you train AI on how you qualify leads, AI will use factors like engagement history, firmographics, and even external signs and intent signals to assess which leads are worth pursuing. This approach to lead qualification brings down prospecting costs and improves conversion rates since your team focuses on prospects who are more likely to convert.

Account-based lead scoring

Similarly, you can make AI score your leads. AI tools will evaluate entire companies or accounts rather than just individual leads. AI assesses the overall fit of an account based on factors like company size, industry, and buying signals, helping you prioritize who to target.

Data enrichment

AI also excels at data enrichment. It will pull information from multiple databases and sources and fill in missing details like contact information or job titles. This ensures your CRM data stays updated and accurate without needing to do it manually. 

Personalization

AI helps you get the right message to the right person at the right time. It analyzes buyer behavior, preferences, and past interactions to provide insights for tailoring your outreach. A recent survey suggests that 81% of customers prefer companies that offer personalized experiences, and AI makes it possible to adjust messages to every lead without draining time, resources, or relying on copy-paste templates to drive high-volume messaging.

Possible risks of using AI tools for sales prospecting

Artificial intelligence for sales isn’t a cure-all for slow sales or stalled pipelines. Like any other tool or innovation, there are some risks to using it.

Poor customer trust

One of the biggest challenges of prospecting with AI is ensuring your prospects feel valued and not just another name on a list. 

If people suspect your company uses AI to collect information and trick them into buying your product, or if your personalization is overly specific to the point of sounding creepy, you risk burning those leads. Such situations have partially contributed to almost half of customers globally not trusting companies to use AI ethically.

You can mitigate this risk by being open, honest, and transparent. Over 70% of customers expect you to tell them if AI is used in services, products, experiences, and content.

Poor data quality

AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. If your data is outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete, the insights generated by AI could lead you astray. This could result in missed opportunities or wasted effort in targeting the wrong prospects. 

To avoid this risk and get the most out of AI tools, keep your data clean from the get-go and regularly update it.

Sales team dependence on automation

While AI can automate many tasks, there’s a risk your sales team can grow too dependent on it. Over-reliance on AI could lead to a decline in critical thinking or an inability of SDRs to notice opportunities. Sales reps might also lose or prove unable to develop essential sales skills like email writing and demand generation. 

Integration challenges

AI is a wiz at bringing all your data together under one roof, but it still needs to be able to read your data formats. If an AI tool doesn’t sync well with your CRM, email marketing platforms, or other software, this can lead to data silos and workflow disruptions. These take time and resources to deal with, which can slow down your sales process. 

Increased costs

AI tools can be expensive, both in terms of upfront costs and ongoing maintenance. Setting them up well and training your team to use new technology effectively can also consume significant costs. While the long-term benefits can outweigh the costs, you’ll need to carefully consider whether the investment aligns with your sales goals and budget.

How to get the most out of using AI for prospecting

Here are some best practices for maximizing the benefits of AI in your sales process.

Match AI to your needs

Not all AI tools are created equal, and some are better suited for specific tasks or scales of operation. 

For example, if your team handles a high volume of leads daily, you’ll want an AI tool that excels at lead qualification and messaging. On the other hand, if your focus is on in-depth research for fewer high-value clients, a tool that specializes in deep data analysis will get you further. 

At the least, you’ll need to check if your AI can:

• Send enough emails in a day/week/month to cover your needs
• Find enough leads to reach the necessary sales target
• Work with inbound and outbound leads
• Integrate with your systems
• Offer personalization, research, and follow-up features to perform your tasks
• Customize and scale to avoid overpaying for unnecessary features

By ticking all these boxes, you’ll know you’re getting a tool that does what you need without wasting resources.

Train your team to work with AI

Introducing AI into your sales process isn’t just about plugging in a new tool. Your team needs to understand how to use it effectively. 

A recent AWS-commissioned survey of 6,500 employees across Europe shows that just 14% of workers consider themselves highly knowledgeable about AI, while 50% rate their understanding as either “basic” or “nascent.” In non-tech companies, the lack of knowledge can be even greater.

There are two options to address this knowledge gap: 1) Train your sales team on how to use AI for sales prospecting tasks like lead generation, qualification, and data enrichment, or 2) Find a sales AI vendor like AiSDR that offers 24/7 customer support for setting up and running AI sales.

Test, analyze, and adjust AI performance

AI tools will happily plug away in the background, but that doesn’t mean you can set it and forget it. At first, you’ll want to check in every day to monitor results.

You can start by setting up A/B tests that compare AI-sourced leads with manually research prospects. Over time, analyze performance and adjust your AI’s settings if needed. Fine-tuning the tool like this ensures it continuously improves and stays aligned with your sales objectives.

And as you build trust in the solution, you can check in less regularly.

Set up integrations

Integrations with your sales tech allow AI to access and update customer data in real time. After confirming your AI will connect with your tech stack, make sure to configure the AI so that the flow of data is seamless and reliable.

10 best AI prospecting tools in 2024

Here’s a rundown of the top ten AI prospecting tools of 2024, as well as the features and use cases for getting the most out of them.

AiSDR

AiSDR is your virtual sales development rep designed to help you find and engage the right leads without lifting a finger. With access to a massive database of over 700 million leads, AiSDR works to match prospects to your ICP using qualification criteria and intent data. Once it spots interest, it flags hot leads for you.

Here’s what else AiSDR does to supercharge your prospecting:

• Digs into a huge pool of leads with an ultra-low bounce rate (<5%) thanks to triple-checked addresses and multilingual email outreach, including German, Chinese, and Arabic.
• Seamlessly syncs with HubSpot, enrolling leads into the right campaigns at the right time, whether they’re free trial users, demo requests, or inbound prospects. 
• Tracks what your leads are up to (like downloading a free ebook) and helps you know exactly when to reach out and what to say to boost conversions.
• Analyzes the latest 3 LinkedIn posts from a lead to craft personalized, eye-catching messages. It handles follow-ups, auto-replies, and even tricky referrals, all while mimicking your tone and brand voice, and answering every email within 10 minutes.
• Builds nurturing campaigns based on past conversations, common objections, and intent data, keeping the process relevant and personal.

Best for: Human-sounding email outreach at scale. AiSDR makes sure your email outreach is timely, relevant, and never too pushy. With continuous inbox rotation and mailbox warm-up, it maximizes your email deliverability so your messages hit leads’ inboxes every time.

AiSDR pricing: AiSDR costs $750 per month for 1,000 emails with unlimited leads and mailboxes. Discounts are available the more emails you purchase.

SalesAI from People.ai

SalesAI is an intelligent sales platform from People.ai designed to offer sales reps real-time insights into leads, accounts, and deal health. SalesAI’s focus is on analyzing and presenting your existing data; it doesn’t generate new leads, enrich data from external sources, generate emails, or send follow-ups.

SalesAI can help you by:

• Gathering insights from sales activity, buyer behavior, and CRM data to provide actionable tips for lead management
• Offering suggestions through on-screen tips or via a chat window, guiding your next steps
• Answering sales-related questions, from giving a summary of the current state of the lead to providing a full month’s review on prospecting
• Ensuring company data remains secure and isn’t exposed to public AI models or competitors
• Seamlessly integrating with Salesforce and other CRMs for easy workflow management

Best for: Understanding complex in-house data. People.ai helps you cut through the noise and identify the best actions for successful prospecting, whether it’s identifying stakeholders to address in a particular lead, prioritizing leads, or choosing the next step to convert a prospect.

SalesAI pricing: Available on request. 

Lusha

Lusha is a powerful B2B lead enrichment and prospecting tool that helps sales and marketing teams find accurate and verified contact information quickly and easily. 

Lusha offers the following features:

• A huge database of 135 million contacts and advanced filters to find leads based on your ICP
• Direct dials, email addresses, and social media profiles so you can connect with decision-makers fast
• Easy access to contact details directly from platforms like LinkedIn, Salesforce, or any company site. The extension instantly shows key contact info while you’re browsing
• “Likelihood to buy” identification based on signals like website visits, so you can approach leads with tailored offers
• Seamless sync with CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive, making it easy to manage and nurture leads without manual data entry

Best for: Finding accurate prospect contact details. Lusha helps you reach the right people at the right time without wasting hours on outdated or irrelevant data.

Lusha pricing: Lusha’s plans range from a free option to a $59 per user per month or custom price. 

Cognism

Cognism is an AI-powered sales intelligence platform designed to make prospecting more efficient. It helps you enrich CRM data, qualify and prioritize prospects, and reach the right lead, focusing on phone numbers to directly connect with decision-makers.

Here’s what sets it apart:

• Cognism automatically fills in missing details like phone numbers, key stakeholders, and firmographic info in your CRM records
• With the Chrome extension, you can see contact details directly on LinkedIn profiles, making it easier to gather essential lead information on the go
• Advanced sales intelligence allows you to find the most relevant leads based on your ICP by simply typing in search requests or using filters
• Using your ICP, Cognism defines and prioritizes leads that are most likely to convert and helps your team focus their efforts
• AI analyzes website visitors’ intent, giving your team insights into inbound leads’ interests
• Cognism easily integrates with CRM platforms and sales engagement tools, including Salesforce, HubSpot, SalesLoft, and Outreach

Best for: Identifying companies showing buying signals. Cognism’s main focus is to provide you with enough information to find the right decision-makers and connect with them quickly, preferably on the phone. Its comprehensive lead data helps you choose the right prospecting tactics, although it doesn’t provide specific tips or generate prospecting emails. 

Cognism pricing: Available upon request. 

Outplay

Outplay is an all-in-one sales engagement platform that helps sales teams streamline and personalize outreach across multiple channels. 

Here’s how it works:

• An AI writer generates personalized messages based on prospecting email templates and prospect data
• Outplay ensures timely follow-ups with automated sequences for inbound and outbound leads, notifications for opened emails or clicked links, and triggers that move prospects to the next steps
• It seamlessly integrates with tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook, and Calendly
• Advanced analytics and reporting help identify the best outreach sequences, coach reps, and forecast revenue
• The Outplay Chrome extension provides quick research and prospecting directly from LinkedIn, allowing reps to find verified emails and direct dials and build prospect lists fast
• Real-time activity tracking offers visibility into rep activity and prospect engagement, including call recordings, transcripts, and sentiment analysis for coaching
• Conversational intelligence helps analyze and summarize previous conversations with prospects, including phone calls, to understand where it was left off or to take notes
• A/B testing and lead scoring help to optimize outreach and prioritize leads based on engagement

Best for: Multi-channel outreach and easy connect with leads at any stage. With Outplay, SDRs can automate most time-consuming tasks like re-reading or re-listening to past communication, sending follow-ups, and researching prospects’ contacts. 

Outplay pricing: Pricing for Outplay is a bit complicated as you pay separately for sales engagement and conversational intelligence solutions. Sales engagement solution costs $79 per user per month, and conversational intelligence is $39 per user, but both options also offer free plans.

Warmer.ai

Warmer.ai has a single focus: help businesses personalize cold emails quickly and effectively. Here are its two main features:

• Warmer analyzes your prospects’ LinkedIn profiles and website data and creates unique, tailored cold emails 
• It integrates with popular CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, so you can easily provide AI with prospects’ data to start research and keep the prospect list updated.

Best for: Improving email open and response rates. Warmer.ai focuses exclusively on capturing prospect attention with personalized emails without the hassle of manual email customization.

Warmer pricing: Warmer.ai doesn’t give pricing information on its website, but you can request a free trial.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The granddaddy of lead generation and prospecting comes with advanced features to find specific leads and tailor messages with relevant insights. 

More specifically, LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

• Helps your SDR find leads that fit your ICP like a glove with robust search and filters
• Provides data to help you prioritize the leads that are more likely to convert 
• Uses generative AI to create account summaries to help personalize your outreach across multiple touchpoints
• Seamlessly connects with CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Dynamics 365 to sync lead information
• Alerts you when a lead changes jobs, making it easy to keep your CRM up to date

• Detects when a prospect shows interest in your company or services, giving you warm paths to follow up
• Sends direct, private messages to your prospects and customers, bypassing inbox noise

Best for: Social selling. LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you generate leads, stay up to date with their activity, and find relevant information for prospecting to increase conversions.

LSN pricing: Navigator’s Core and Advanced plans are $65 and $144, respectively. Pricing for the Advanced Plus plan is available on request. 

Smartlead

Smartlead is an AI-powered sales tool designed to automate and optimize your email outreach. 

It can perform the following tasks:

• Automatically categorize leads based on the sentiment of their replies, helping you quickly identify intent. You can create sub-sequences for different scenarios like positive replies, out-of-office responses, or negative feedback
• Help you track the performance of A/B tests and email sequences so you can focus on the ones that bring the best open, reply, and click-through rates 
• Offer unlimited automated email warm-ups and follow-ups
• Create personalized emails with its AI email writer
• Integrate with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zapier, Make, and basically any CRM or sales tool

Best for: Building lead pipeline with emails. Smartlead is the most effective in the early stages of prospecting, helping to reach leads and build connections, but it also has useful features to communicate with leads and help convert them into customers. 

Smartlead pricing: Smartlead’s Basic plan is a good budget option at $39/mo. Pro is $94/mo, and Custom starts at $194/mo.

Humantic AI

Humantic AI is an advanced AI tool that helps sales professionals predict a prospect’s personality using proven personality assessment frameworks. 

Humantic AI can

• Provide detailed personality insights of prospects, helping you understand their communication style, preferences, and decision-making process 
• Analyze leads in bulk, allowing you to scale personalized outreach without sacrificing relevance
• Integrate with tools like Salesforce and Outreach, enriching buyer data with such details as position, job level, designation, etc.
• Combine generative AI with DISC insights to create personalized emails

Best for: Personality-based data insights and nurturing. Humantic AI uses a personality-based prediction algorithm to generate insights and create highly personalized emails to increase the chances of conversion.

Humantic AI pricing: Humantic offers different packages for organizations and individuals. You’ll pay between $16/mo as an individual starter up to $760 per month or a custom price for higher-end organization packages. 

ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is a B2B contact database that helps you gather deep insights into your target markets. Powered by AI, ZoomInfo lets you find and reach high-quality leads from its huge pool of professionals and companies.

ZoomInfo offers the following features:

• Access to over 70 million phone numbers and 174 million verified email addresses, and a filtering and scoring system to find leads that fit your ICP
• Website visit tracking to identify companies showing interest in your product
• Lead enrichment
• Analysis of sales conversations to understand what leads to wins or losses
• AI for sales prospecting outreach based on predefined triggers or signals, such as website traffic, to reach a lead at the perfect time
• Integration with major CRMs and email tools

Best for: Building targeted prospect lists. ZoomInfo is a perfect tool for lead generation and first contact with prospects. It also helps sales teams get lead data to make prospecting as relevant and personalized as possible. 

ZoomInfo pricing: Available on request.

AiSDR users gain unlimited access to leads in ZoomInfo via AiSDR’s prospecting tools.

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