Sales prospecting guide for selling AI

Introduction

Selling any type of service the outbound way involves some challenges. AI services, however, can be more challenging to sell for several reasons:
‍
- Sales cycles tend to be long.
- Technology can be too complex to understand for buyers.
- Sellers need technical acumen to formulate custom solutions.
- Services are expensive. Thus, it is required to find companies with a consequent budget.

Another issue is to tie in AI services to the profit of a company. When selling AI services… it can be tempting to start showing off features. It’s understandable: you’ve spent time developing solutions and managed to come up with impressive technology… your prospect should be impressed too, right?

Here’s the kicker, your prospects don’t care much about the breakthrough technology you’ve developed, nor do they care about your impressive internal technical capabilities. They’re mostly focused on what is in it for them.

How will your solution help them…
- Save time
- Save money
- Increase revenue
- Or a combination of the above?

That is the question you have to answer first. 
Because that will be the basis of your outbound strategy: your offer.

STEP 1: Define your outbound offer.

A common problem when selling AI services is the complexity attached to these. General AI services don’t perform well for outbound because most prospects don’t fully understand the capabilities of AI. 

It is also extremely difficult to write a compelling pitch when your value proposition is “We provide general AI services. We’ll do whatever you need us to do”. 

It is fine to keep all-around AI-as-a-service on your homepage for inbound leads, but YOU NEED to come up with specific use cases when going the outbound route. This means it is not enough to tell prospects you can implement AI to fix some of their issues. You need to identify these specific issues and only then present your solution.

There are several ways to identify use cases that will be the basis of your offer. Let’s dive in:

-> Methodology for identifying outbound use cases


1. Look at your past project implementations

Past projects give a lot of insights into what problems are worth going after and for which companies are willing to spend money. They also make a great case when used in a cold sales pitch… if you’ve implemented a solution that had a great positive impact on a company, you can go after similar companies, likely facing similar problems and simply describe how your solution positively impacted your past client. 

This gives relevancy to your cold pitch and social proof and helps figure out your targeting. Hence why past projects usually are the lowest-hanging fruit to leverage.

When picking past projects, go for:
- The ONES that were easiest to implement OR
- The ONES that sold at the biggest price OR
- The most recurring ones OR
- A mix of these criteria.

2. Based on this, identify your ideal customer profile or target

Targeting is the most strategic aspect of any sales prospecting campaign. The reason is simple: if you’re targeting people who’re not encountering the problem you’re looking to solve, your pitch will fall on deaf ears. Look at your past projects and try to identify the following within your past customers:
‍
- What is their typical company size?
- What is their industry? Verticals?
- What (data) stack was the company using?
- Who was the person in contact with you during the project? (title)
- Who was the person who decided to launch the project? (title)
- Who is the person “using” what you’ve implemented in their day-to-day? (Job title)


You can go further by also looking at:
- The level of funding of the company when you started the project.
- Specific activities of the company such as:
‍
-> Headcount growth
-> Department headcount growth
-> Roles they were hiring for
-> New markets they were expanding to

All these insights will allow us to refine our targeting when looking for potential clients on B2B databases such as Apollo or ZoomInfo.

Sometimes, we identify “patterns” within past customers that aren’t usable for research on traditional B2B databases.

In such cases, I like to use Ocean.io, which lets you search for companies using their “lookalike” feature. Simply put, they’ve developed a company matching algorithm that understands the specificities of your target - and they’re able to find companies very similar to it.

3. Example of AI Outbound use-case for Sales Outreach

You could go to market with a use case that looks like so: 
‍
-> AI Chemical formulation for enterprise companies in the pharma industry.

‍Following the previous steps - you could have identified - thanks to a past project that:
- Pharmaceutical companies have to come up with new drugs on a regular basis…
- Drugs are the breadmaker of their business…
- AI can facilitate the process of formulating chemical compounds to create new drugs.

Identifying this go-to-market use case makes the rest of your sales process easier because:
- You know WHO to target (= enterprise companies in the pharma vertical)
- Your pitch is ready-made as it revolves around the pain point you identified (= it is complex & time-consuming to come up with new formulations… you help cut time to market)
- It DIRECTLY addresses your target (= “Hey, I sell AI services, interested?” VS “Hey, how do you come up with new formulas on a recurring basis? We’ve developed an AI formulation solution that cuts time-to-market by 50%... might be interesting?”)

‍-> Let’s take another example: Say you’ve identified that many companies are using outdated/legacy data stacks. 

Your value proposition is thus:

-> “We help analytics teams migrate to a modern data stack”

Now, once again, this makes the rest of our sales prospecting campaign easier since:
- We know who to target (= companies using outdated data software)
- We know what to pitch (= relating our message to the recurring problems encountered when using legacy software)
- We are relevant to our target (= we’re not contacting every firm in the world. We’re ONLY targeting those who are using outdated software).

‍Once we’ve identified a few use cases… We want to test how they resonate in our market. For that, we first need to…

STEP 2: Generate a list of best-fit prospects.

As mentioned above, targeting IS THE MOST strategic part of an outbound campaign. Companies usually spend too much time crafting their pitch and their automation cadences and not enough time targeting the right companies & people.
‍
This is a mistake because: 
- The most compelling message put in front of the wrong person will NEVER convert.
- A bad message put in front of a company or person encountering an urgent problem WILL convert.

On top of this, when your targeting is granular enough, you can send a message at scale, and it will still feel personalized & relevant. The way you’ve built your audience list becomes part of your message.

For example: “Hey {firstName}, I saw you were using {Software}, which usually makes companies encounter {Problem 1} & {Problem 2}. Companies usually find it hard to migrate because {Pain point}. Is that something you’ve seen as well?”

The best way to build high-converting target lists is to rely on signals & triggers such as:
- Companies hiring for a specific role (e.g: Hiring for analytics engineers) signal that they’re looking to implement changes in the hire department area.
- Companies using specific software signal that they’re already investing resources in solving a specific problem.
- Companies being present on a niche platform (e.g: Clutch) signal that they’re looking for ways to take on new projects.
- Companies that were recently funded: it shows they have a budget to spend for longer-term initiatives
- Companies growing fast might need to implement more robust systems to support this fast growth.
- (...)

The trick is to leverage the knowledge we have about our target audience regarding our use case to find creative ways that will help us build high-intent lists.

Once we’ve come up with a combination of “technologies used”, “buying signals”, & other demographic details for our list of companies - we’ll have to target the relevant roles within the company. 

For AI services - this typically includes executives or senior people in technical departments (Data Science, Digital, Innovation, IT, R&D…) such as:
- Chief Data Officer
- Chief Digital Officer
- Chief Information Officer
- Director of Innovation
- Head of R&D
- (...)

Another way to think about who to target is to ask yourself the following questions:
- Who would get laid off if the identified problem didn’t get solved?
- Who would be promoted if they were to solve the identified problem?

Once you’ve identified target roles, you can search for their contact data using previously mentioned B2B databases such as Apollo or by combining LinkedIn Sales Navigator (the premium version of LinkedIn) with scraping & email finding tools such as Phantombuster & Findymail. 

STEP 3: Structure and write your pitching cadence

If you followed the first 2 steps, you should now have:
- A list of companies that are a great fit for your solution.
- Contact information of people within these companies you’ll be reaching out to.

This begs the following questions: 
- What am I going to tell them?
- Are there good and bad ways to reach out?
- What should I do if they don’t reply?
- How can I make sure they notice my message?

It’s no surprise that decision-makers receive a ton of outreach emails… which means it’s easy for yours to get lost in their flooded inbox.

Here are a few best practices to follow when writing your messages to make sure they’re read by your recipient and don’t land in the SPAM folder:

- Write them as short as possible.
- Avoid adding links, images &/or documents.
- Individually personalize them for your recipients.
- Play with formats & platforms (= send videos, reach out on social media)
- Contact several people within a company.
- Include several touchpoints.

To help this process - you can use tools such as Lavender that rates your cold emails in real time. 

You can use AI copywriting tools such as Copy.ai, Jasper & ChatGPT to generate message ideas.

You can use tools such as Warmer that will write personalized icebreakers for you.

And - if you really want to stand out - you can use AI-powered video software such as HippoVideo or BHuman that lets you send personalized videos at scale.

STEP 4: Set up the infrastructure to send 500+ emails a day while keeping open rates above 80%

You now have:
- A list of ideal companies to contact
- Contact information of people within these companies
- Written pitches you will send to your targets

You now need to set up an email infrastructure that will allow you to send emails at scale without landing in the SPAM folder. Half of the battle is to avoid triggering email platforms' spam filters by avoiding links, images & documents in your cold emails. Another is to avoid sending too many emails from the same inbox.

The best practice is to send under 50 emails a day per domain. It is also recommended to avoid using your main domain for outreach. If too many people label you as spam, the consequences can be serious and impact other areas of your business. For example, most of your emails could land in the spam folder, even important communications with existing customers.

I wrote a post here that describes the infrastructure I set up for my own prospecting and for clients.

In summary, you need to:
- Create several domains & email accounts.
- Forward these new domains to your main domain (in case someone tries to look you up).
- Configure your SPF, DKIM & DMARC records for each of these domains.
- Limit your sending volume to 50 emails per domain per day.

And finally, you will want to use email warming software to improve the reputation of these new domains. 

Deliverability is a dense subject in itself. If you want to learn more about it, I recommend that you read this great article by Mailreach on how to prevent your emails from going to SPAM.

If you use several email inboxes - you’ll save a lot of money by using a sending solution that doesn’t charge per email profile. You can use Smartlead, which lets you use an unlimited number of email profiles.

STEP 5: Set up your cadence in your Sales Engagement Platform & Automate your sending

- Use Smartlead, Apollo or LaGrowthMachine (for multichannel social outreach).
- Add several days between your touchpoints
- Make sure to include an unsubscribe link for compliance.

Before you go...

Hey - if you read this far… I’m guessing you’re really interested in cracking your outbound sales system.

I left out many details in this guide, especially on the last steps. I didn’t do that purposefully. I just ran out of time. 

That being said, if you want to discuss how to implement a prospecting system to sell your AI services... I invite you to book a time in my calendar right below 👇