Marketing in the B2B sector often focuses heavily on lead generation. But here’s a challenge that most sellers face on the daily: You’ve gotta keep your pipeline full of prospects … but in the process, you risk pulling attention away from other critical metrics, like conversion rates.
Without the right tools, those tasks can become a quagmire of manual activities that often make it impossible to track every lead and prioritize the ones most likely to convert.
May we recommend a secret weapon? An AI-powered email assistant can help your sales team with a variety of functions designed to save time and improve engagement.
Here’s how an AI email assistant can automatically send personalized emails at scale to help your team be more productive and make more money.
Use an AI-Powered Email Assistant to Quickly Respond to B2B Leads
These days, B2B buyers are accustomed to getting what they want when they want it. And when sales teams take too long to respond to buyer engagement (such as a Contact Us inbounds), those buyers bolt in favor of other solutions.
When it comes to response times, the stakes are higher than you probably think. By the time B2B buyers are ready to engage a company’s sales team, they’ve already completed about 70% of their buying research. And they’re likely weighing their options between you and a few competitors.
This means rapid response could be the only thing standing between you and a successful sale. Consider this recent research regarding speed-to-lead response times:
- Nearly 8 in 10 of customers buy from the company that responds to their inquiry first
- You’re 7x more likely to qualify a lead when you reach out within an hour as opposed to just one hour later
- Only 7% of companies respond to leads within five minutes, while 55% respond in five or more days
- If you make contact within five minutes, you are 100x more likely to connect with a prospect than if one hour has elapsed
- You’re 21x more likely to convert a lead into an opportunity when responding in five minutes or less
TL;DR: If your competitors respond faster than you, you could lose over two-thirds of your leads to them.
AI-powered email software greatly reduces the time it takes to respond to buyer engagement. At the same time, it enables you to stay focused on prospects that are already advancing deeper into your pipeline.
When a potential customer makes contact, your AI assistant can trigger an immediate response in the form of a personalized email that relies on captured data. You can also set up priority-based alerts to make further contact with the prospects who’re most likely to purchase.
AI-Powered Email Assistants Can Prequalify Leads for You
Prequalification is a necessary process. But it’s often time-consuming and forces salespeople to disrupt their productive workflows.
Lack of time is the biggest reason your sales team can’t effectively contact every lead. While a sales rep is answering questions and collecting data from a lead early in the pipeline, a customer who’s ready to convert moves on to the company with the quickest response.
AI-powered email assistants can take manual tasks out of your hands with an automatic reply to potential customers. Your AI email assistant will:
- Reply to potential customers with a series of predetermined questions
- Use the customer’s answers to provide additional resources or book a meeting so you can have a conversation
- Engage and qualify your leads at scale to identify genuine buyers and route them to sales
AI Can Help You Write Your Own Emails Faster
Three out of four B2B marketers agree that personalization enhances engagement rates, but we all know that it’s tricky to personalize content at scale. Response templates are available for practically every situation, but they usually sound generic … and buyers can smell a too-broad “canned” response a mile away. These emails usually don’t hit the mark.
AI assistants can tap into data you’ve already collected about the customer in your CRM or other databases, enabling the software to near-instantly craft emails that speak to the person and their unique concerns, not just the opportunity you’re trying to offer.
AI-powered tools can also use algorithms to:
- Understand and emulate your writing style
- Automatically correct unprofessional grammar
- Improve style with word selection
These tools can work with your writing style to speed up repetitive text like greetings and allow you to concentrate on informative, communicative writing.
AI-Powered B2B Email Can Be Proactive About Sourcing Deals
Working B2B sales leads requires a nurturing process with ample communication. Most sales organizations struggle to work all their leads effectively. Even with a robust CRM, it’s easy to let leads fall through the cracks.
A contact in your CRM who only gets one or two touches and fails to respond may never be worked again until they are moved into a “dead” or “inactive” status. This type of delayed contact could be too late to convert hesitant leads.
The smartest B2B email tools:
- Tap into your CRM and seek contacts that haven’t received much communication
- Initiate nurture campaigns to reactivate those opportunities
- Use machine learning to identify which prospects are most likely to convert based on the customer’s behavior
A similar process enables the AI to engage contacts that failed to respond to earlier correspondence. This additional engagement can provide additional resources or lead to an appointment for more detailed communications with a sales rep.
The most comprehensive AI tools work with your communication style to assist your daily processes and streamline manual tasks. When you automate communication processes that take place early in the sales funnel, you can effectively — and practically effortlessly — address your prospects’ pain points and concentrate on buyers ready to convert.
How 6sense Can Help
6sense applies the power of AI across the entire buyer journey to eliminate the guesswork (and wasted time) that plagues B2B revenue teams and derails deals. This includes an AI-powered email solution like the kind we’ve described in this post.
With artificial intelligence that provides real-time visibility into your entire funnel, you can create a personalized experience that targets buyer pain points at every stage of the B2B buyer journey.
Learn how you can finally align sales and marketing efforts to improve your sales rates with 6sense.
