Just like many intelligent tools, AI lead follow-up solutions are quickly gaining popularity among sales teams and business owners. Why? Because in sales, persistence is the key to success – now, more than ever.
Studies show that only around 2% of your sales leads will actually convert after an initial conversation with your team. If you want to turn the majority of your leads into loyal, paying customers, you need to connect with them constantly.
It takes numerous forms of outreach and communication to convince customers of your product’s benefits, highlight your differentiators, overcome objections, and build trust. The trouble is, many sales teams struggle to find the time (and energy) to send endless personalized business messages to every potential prospect.
That’s where AI steps in. It can automate the process of reconnecting with customers, generating outreach content, and essentially driving leads through your sales funnel. Here’s how you can leverage AI to take your sales strategy to the next level.
In this article:
The Evolving Presence of AI in Sales
Artificial intelligence has become commonplace in the sales landscape over the last few years. While some forward-thinking companies have been using AI for decades for things like data analysis, competitor analysis, and discovery, use cases have evolved in recent years.
Companies are beginning to turn to generative and conversational AI solutions to create sales and marketing content, personalize messages, qualify potential customers, and even handle objections at scale. As a result, tech-driven companies are guiding customers through sales pipelines faster, increasing conversion rates, and reducing the strain on their human team members.
AI lead follow-up solutions are just one example of the tools companies can use to optimize the ROI from their sales efforts. These solutions make it easy to send specific messages and content to customers throughout their purchasing journey, collect data, enhance personalization and more.
AI lead follow-up agents can take the pressure off and help you close more deals. Let's talk!
AI-Driven Automation: What are AI Lead Follow-Up Tools?
AI lead follow-up tools are essentially intelligent solutions that streamline the process of connecting with customers and guiding them through the sales funnel.
They can come in a range of forms, from platforms like Clerk Chat that allow companies to automatically send messages to SMS leads based on specific triggers, actions, or pre-set parameters, to omnichannel conversational AI chatbots that can interact with customers on a sales person’s behalf.
Lead follow-up tools can even extend to cover things like generative AI tools which help professionals to personalize text messages, and analytical tools that qualify leads and advise teams on which prospects they should be following up with, and when.
Ultimately, these tools help sales teams thrive, by automating repetitive tasks, enabling the creation of better drip campaigns and content strategies, and improving engagement processes.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the things companies can do with AI lead follow-up solutions.
Practical Applications for AI Lead Follow Up Tools
On a broad scale, AI tools for following up with leads are focused on helping teams improve their relationships with potential customers and nurture them through the sales funnel. Across every industry, these tools can assist with a wide range of tasks, such as:
1. Generating Email or Text Responses
Nurturing leads isn’t just about bombarding them with sales pitches or product descriptions. Prospects have questions that they need your team to answer before they’ll even consider a purchase. Generative AI technology is excellent for crafting unique responses to questions across channels at scale.
You can simply paste the conversational history from a conversation with a customer into a tool like ChatGPT, and it can immediately suggest a practical, concise, and intuitive response. Some innovative AI tools, like the AI-powered sales assistant built into Clerk Chat, can even use data from your CRM and other tools to create custom sales text message templates.
This technology helps sales professionals respond to queries faster and more efficiently, without forcing companies to compromise on delivering personalized experiences to leads.
AI lead follow-up agents can take the pressure off and help you close more deals. Let's talk!
2. Making Content Recommendations
The chances are, before your customer actually buys something from your company, they’ll want to learn more about what it can do, who it can benefit, and how it works. Sharing the right content with your prospects can help to guide them through the purchasing process and ensure they make intelligent decisions faster.
Unfortunately, if you create a lot of content, it’s not always easy to know which content you should be sharing with leads. AI solutions can evaluate data about your customer’s general purchasing journey, the types of content that get the most engagement on your website, and make suggestions.
A conversational AI tool for sales teams can instantly suggest the best content to share with a prospect based on what’s already working to boost conversions for your business. It can even use CRM data to recommend specific content based on previous customer purchases or interactions.
3. Automating Communications
Probably the most obvious way to use an AI lead follow-up tool is to consistently communicate with your target audience. For instance, Clerk Chat’s automated text messaging service comes with a built-in AI assistant that can follow up with every prospect on your behalf based on the rules you set.
You can ask the assistant to create and schedule texts to reach customers at specific times, such as a day after your customer has a conversation with a sales agent, or a day before a new product launch. You can also create automated workflows that allow you to text customers based on specific triggers.
You might also use AI to send abandoned cart text messages to a customer who leaves a product in their basket without buying anything. These tools save your staff members significant time and effort when it comes to building relationships with customers over time.
4. Improving Targeting Strategies
As mentioned above, AI lead follow-up tools aren’t just great for automating interactions with customers. They can help you determine which customers you should be reaching out to as well. AI lead scoring tools can look at various factors and determine which potential contacts are most likely to respond to your retail SMS campaigns or sales pitches.
Some AI tools can even help you to segment your customers into specific groups, based on their likelihood to convert, the kind of outreach they prefer, their location, and more. This means you can make better decisions about how to connect with prospects throughout the purchasing journey.
Lead Scoring
A process of assigning a value to potential leads based on their likehood to convert into customers.
5. Summarizing Conversations
Meetings and conversations with customers house a lot of valuable data. Before you turn to your AI lead responder software to follow up with a prospect, you can use intelligent tools to summarize various messaging threads and recordings, highlighting the most important topics and statements.
This is a fantastic way to get an immediate, behind-the-scenes insight into the kinds of things you should be mentioning if you want to personalize each SMS for sales outreach or adapt specific pitches according to a customer’s current pain points and goals.
Summarizing conversations can also give you an insight into the topics you should be covering in your small business SMS marketing campaigns, content creation strategy, and more.
6. Improving Messaging Strategies
Finally, even when you think your prospect is the “perfect fit” for your company’s products or services, great communication is the key to closing a deal. Built into your marketing tools or customer messaging software, AI tools can help guide you towards the right things to say.
Intelligent tools can suggest ways of customizing your messages based on the things you’ve learned about your customers in previous conversations, or sales strategies that have worked in the past. These tools can even help you adjust your messaging based on different customer needs.
For instance, if you want to use an SMS service for ecommerce to follow-up with a customer rather than email, an AI tool can condense the key points of your message into a smaller notification.
The Benefits of AI Lead Follow-Up Solutions
On a broad scale, whether you’re using a conversational AI lead responder or any other form of intelligence, the right technology can optimize your outreach strategy. AI powered tools:
- Enhance personalization: In every industry, customers don’t want to be treated like a number. They want to see evidence that you understand their specific needs and pain points. An AI tool can collect insights from other platforms, like a HubSpot SMS integration, to personalize messages for specific customers instantly.
- Always-on availability: When your customers respond to a cold outreach message or send a message to your customer service team, a quick response is crucial. With AI customer service texting software, you can ensure you’ll always be able to respond to messages instantly.
- Improved productivity: With AI tools automating tasks like creating follow-up text message templates and conducting lead research, employees have more time to focus on valuable tasks. AI makes your teams more productive and efficient.
- Greater scalability: Around 80% of closed sales need around five follow-ups on average. When you leverage AI follow-up tools, you can distribute some of the work to bots, which means you can scale your outreach efforts faster, without hiring additional staff.
- Better insights: With the information you gather from your AI-powered SMS tools and platforms, you can quickly learn more about which outreach, nurturing, and conversion strategies work best for your business, boosting your future ROI.
Top Tips for Using AI Tools for Lead Nurturing
Now you know the benefits of using AI tools for following up with customers and how you can embed them into your strategy, let’s finish this article with a few quick tips on how you can boost your chances of success.
1. Align your Data
All AI tools rely on data to deliver effective results. If you want your AI bots and auto-responder solutions to share accurate insights with customers, and create personalized messages, you need to give them access to the right information.
Make sure the AI tools you’re using can leverage data from other platforms, like your CRM software, your knowledge base, and other business databases using integrations. Remember to feed your tools additional information over time about the success rates of your sales and marketing campaigns and changing customer preferences, to keep their responses up-to-date.
2. Refine AI-Generated Content
AI lead follow-up tools are great at crafting personalized outreach messages, sales pitches, and content recommendations. However, they do occasionally make mistakes. Whether you’re using AI for customer experience, marketing or sales, always double-check the content your solution produces.
Make sure all the information and tips you share with your customers, as well as insights into your pricing structure and product features, are accurate. If necessary, adjust the tone of the message, or teach your generative AI bots how to replicate your company’s tone, so you can consistently communicate with customers using the same language and personality.
3. Follow Sales and Marketing Best Practices
Finally, make sure you’re still following best practices for sales, marketing, and customer service, even when you’re leveraging AI. Read up on the latest text marketing tips before you dive into AI-powered SMS campaigns, ensure you’re not overwhelming your customers with too many promotional messages, and pay attention to your campaign results so you can optimize over time.
Additionally, ensure you’re staying compliant with industry regulations. If you’re using an SMS platform integrated with Salesforce to personalize messages to customers, be careful that you’re not sharing too much sensitive information with your bots. Follow the guidelines outlined by regulations like the CAN-SPAM act to maintain your brand’s reputation and your relationship with customers.
Drive Conversions with AI Lead Follow-Up Tools
In every industry, salespeople are committed to a constant cycle of searching for, nurturing, and converting leads. As actually acquiring customers becomes more complex, professionals need to invest more time and effort than ever before into the process of nurturing prospects.
AI lead follow-up tools can help streamline the outreach experience for your professionals, ensuring they can craft personalized messages faster, connect with customers at the right times on the best channels, and learn from the results of your campaign.
With Clerk Chat, adding AI to your follow-up strategy is easy. Our intuitive business messaging platform gives you all of the intelligent tools you need to create campaigns, personalize messages, automate outreach, and dive into your campaign data.
Contact Clerk Chat today to get a free demo of our platform, and discover how you can take lead follow-up strategies to the next level.
