A few weeks ago, a professional services firm targeting manufacturing industry clients in Europe and India discussed their lead generation needs with me. Naturally, in order to achieve their targets, they needed high quality sales leads consistently. Until then, most of their contracts had come through referrals from core team’s personal network.
Having worked extensively in all B2B lead gen channels, I knew that getting responses from overseas could be a challenge, and results could take time. However, that was also the time that I started studying AI for sales and marketing objectives, and mapping the landscape of tools.
So we used AI prompts, and identified excellent AI-powered tools. These helped us create a multi-channel marketing program, for inbound website leads, as well as outbound leads generated over email and LinkedIn. AI gave us depth of research for SEO keywords, high-quality contact data, and an ability to reach out seamlessly over multi-channels. The best part is that tasks are automated, so campaigns that would have taken weeks to setup and monitor are now created in minutes.
We were amazed at the results, we saw high quality leads coming in right from the 2nd month, and are now focused on increasing that number each month. In fact, the client closed a decent value contract in the second month itself, recovering their investment in the marketing project.
Let’s see why AI is so effective for B2B lead generation.
- B2B buyers don’t make impulse purchases the first time they see a product or service – whether online or at a trade show. They observe and engage with a specific brand over many different touchpoints before even giving the time for a presentation. Using a multi-channel approach, we could start engaging with our target audience effortlessly over email and LinkedIn, while not spamming them. As we created 5 to 6 touchpoints, we found this increased the response rate, much more than if we were using only a single marketing channel.
- Until now, we never had a way to reach out to a prospect at the time when they are most likely to need our services. But now, we can set up buying or intent signals, so the technology tells us when a person is searching for something, or has taken on a new role, or their company has got funded – events that may trigger their search for your product.
- We need data to find prospective buyers – names, designations, organizations, emails, and phone numbers. In the past, we purchased high-quality data from the best vendors, but it would still become increasingly redundant as people changed jobs. Today, AI platforms provide data collated from many different sources and updated regularly. A person’s job change is reflected in a few hours or within a day. As a result, email bounce rate is often below 3%.
- Before AI, generating website leads required diligent Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is painstaking work. Today, AI prompts and tools helps us do far deeper keyword research and automatically execute technical SEO tasks. It suggests how to create hundreds of backlinks, making it substantially easier for a human to achieve results.
I genuinely believe that AI can be a superpower for Sales and Marketing and would love to know how readers are approaching it.
Suhasini Kirloskar is Founder, B2B Growth Essentials from MarketAxis Consulting. www.b2bgrowthessentials.com