AI Sales Calls: How AI Makes Outbound Sales More Effective 

‍It’s three minutes to the start of your cold calling spree.

You look through your call lists and let out a deep sigh.

You’ve spent an awful amount of time combing through their LinkedIn profiles, picking up clues that probably prove they’ll love your product. 

You’ve rehearsed your proposed generic script and have gone through the numbers and emails again hoping everything is on point. There’s so much more work left for you to do and the clock is ticking.

You’re exhausted. 

Sound familiar?

If you haven’t used AI for sales calls, you’re missing out.

With AI, sales calls can be tailored to target your most promising leads, scheduled for optimal call times, and scaled for large lead outreaches without expanding headcount. 

During the call process, AI makes the brand voice and messaging coherent, records call points, and ensures consistent messaging, and quality across all calls.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this article:

• How AI helps in overall outbound sales
• Specific ways you can use AI to enhance your sales calls 
• Top AI tools and features to look for

tl;dr: With AI, sales teams can improve customer experiences, scale their outbound sales, and boost their productivity.

How Can AI Help Sales Teams?

Sales calls are generally effective because they help you reach a large number of individuals and receive responses on the spot. That way, you won’t be ghosted like in cold emailing or spend time and energy pursuing leads that do not care. 

A typical sales team functions as the life wire of a business’s prospecting, customer engagement, lead nurturing and conversion. 

A LinkedIn poll by EU-Startups showed that about 41 percent of sales managers were open to AI sales calls while 16 percent were still unsure. But there’s a whopping 43 percent who say an outright no. 

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We can argue that the naysayers probably do not know how much difference it could make to their workflow and time management and they’ve not considered the disadvantages of manual sales calls.

In a discussion with Rob, the head of Go-To-Market at Copy.AI, he calls the traditional sales process the “hummer” of sales teams - expensive and inefficient. 

Let’s look at a few disadvantages of manual calls: 

• So much time is wasted in calling and texting wrong prospects
• Generic manual call scripts do not convert as much
• Employee burnout due to large call lists 
• Missing data and call records
• Decreased attention during calls because of distractions like note taking

With AI, there’s a solution to all these disadvantages.

Little wonder the HubSpot state of AI 2023 report showed that, “…three most popular use cases for AI/automation in sales are automating manual tasks (35%), offering data-driven insights (34%), and helping write sales content or prospect outreach messages (31%).”

AI can help you: 

• Categorise and score leads
• Schedule cold calls at appropriate times for each lead
• Write personalised cold calling scripts and stellar elevator pitches. 
• Automate and schedule follow up calls 
• Record call points and minutes. 

But how does the call process work? 

It’s simple; AI can be effective at every level of the sales call process.

5 Ways AI Enhances Your Sales Calls

Now that you’re convinced, we’ll get into the specific ways AI enhances your sales calls. 

1. Efficiency Gains 

With lots of business tasks to do, it’s a no-brainer to find out ways to simplify processes and invest in more efficient options.

AI is your best bet.

Here are a few tasks AI helps you save time on: 

1. Data entry: You can transcribe call conversation and extract relevant information such as contact details, meeting notes, action items, and more.
2. Call routing:AI analyses the context of every call and automatically routes it to the most appropriate person or department.
3. Scheduling: Scheduling outbound calls manually can be time and energy consuming and for enterprise brands who have a long list of leads to reach out to, it’s almost impossible. 
4. Content tasks: Copy.AI’s chat feature can enhance your words and present you with a top-notch elevator pitch.
5. Personalization: AI can ensure a personalised experience for potential customers. Copy.ai achieves this using a variety of tools. Copy.ai’s Sales LinkedIn InMail tool and the research account tool takes care of this need. 

These software can analyse lots of internet databases, combing through relevant information to recognize patterns such as prospect’s interests, online behaviour, demographics and purchasing history. You can tailor your offer using the data you derived. 

So, sales managers and teams can refocus on creative tasks, brainstorming strategies and retaining existing clients.

Additionally, the return on investment (ROI) on AI tools for sales calls is huge considering how much more you can do in little time. 

Overall, AI aims to make sales calls faster, smarter, and more effective.

2. Enhanced Insights

There’s only so much that manual teams can find out about how well their strategies are performing and how to improve their outbound calls. 

With AI, there are valuable insights to work with. Here are a few key metrics AI gives you access to:

• Prospects pain points and needs: 75 percent of Sales managers said that they primarily aim to find out prospect’s pain points through their sales calls. This is only possible through AI. 

Source

The keyword and conversation analysis garnered from these AI calls can be used to generate content to address the needs of prospects. 

• Lead sentiment for nurturing: AI assesses a lead’s sentiment, positive, negative or neutral, qualifying leads based on their responses. This enables you to figure out the best way to nurture promising leads. When you integrate AI with your CRM, you can target leads who are sales ready and get better returns from your calls. For instance, copy.ai’s sales OS prioritises leads based on lead scoring.

• Campaign metrics: AI gives you call campaign results and metrics that would guide you in your next campaign. You can figure out what you can improve on and strategies to drop, you can also find out the conversion rates of various cold calling scripts and create a template based on best performing scripts. 

• Pricing strategies: You can use AI to optimise your pricing based on customer’s purchasing history and economic advantage. It looks at their past deals, customer’s shopping preferences and general business pricing to divide customers into segments and pitch them at the most cost effective pricing for their segment. AI tools will suggest the optimal price for the customer based on the pre-information. 

• Optimal timing for cold calling efforts: The AI algorithm helps you recognize the best time to call your leads. You can get notified when these customers are searching for products related to yours or using keywords with the intent of purchasing. Finding these prospects at the tail end of their buyer journey will shorten the conversion time. 

These AI-derived insights enable sales forecasting and help coach reps to appeal to customers in the most personalised way possible. 

3. Consistent Brand Quality

Branding goes beyond logos, visual identity and design. Branding includes brand messaging, brand voice and tone. It is important to maintain a coherent brand identity across all media touch points, including communicating with prospects through sales calls. 

AI does a great job in this regard. It standardizes the messaging, tone, and call voice to match with what the brand projects everywhere else. 

For example, with Copy.ai’s brand voice analytics, the brand quality is preserved no matter how many calls or prospects are reached. 

Here’s how to input your brand voice on Copy.ai

Step 1: Copy a sample of content that correctly shows your brand voice and paste it in the box provided. 

Step 2: Once you’ve copied an excerpt of your content that correctly shows your brand voice, click on the ‘Analyze Brand Voice’ button.

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After a few minutes, Copy.ai analyses the content and shows you what your typical brand voice is.

Step 3: Turn on the toggle that says to save as default voice across your teamspace.

Step 4: Using the brand voice you’ve saved, you can ask Copy.AI’s chat feature to rewrite your cold calling script using the default brand voice. Imagine a prompt like:

Step 5: Include more details to make the scripts tailored and tweak it to what you want. 

Let’s face it, generic scripts don’t work. Tailoring AI cold calling scripts improves the quality of calls significantly. Coupled with AI insights, you can stay on-brand and still deliver a personalized, high quality pitch. 

4. Scalability

Enterprise businesses who have a high volume of leads can only achieve outbound calls through AI. 

AI increases the number of daily calls and outreach, maintaining quality all through. 

First, AI can help you arrange and input lead data no matter how large. The inventory can be automatically updated when there are new website visitors, lead magnet users, sign ups for the waitlists and even clients. 

You can reach your prospecting goals with AI’s scaling features. Also, when AI takes care of the bulk of the work, the team members can focus on the call and be present to come up with new strategies to handle bulk work. 

Also, AI can integrate with various apps and platforms you need for handling a large number of prospects. You can import your CSV file and integrate with Salesforce. In the end, you can enhance your CRM efforts

5. Workflow automation

AI is essential to boost sales teams productivity by automating their work process from the big tasks to even the nitty gritty. 

In most companies, sales teams follow a strict procedure and perform repetitive tasks. 

This means that AI workflows would be easy and very beneficial to automate these repetitive tasks.

With Copy. ai, you can build your own workflow from scratch. With the modifiable sections, you can tailor the workspace to include team peculiarities. 

Here’s how: 

Step 1: Click on the ‘Build’ dashboard 

Step 2: Edit and fill in the texts following the prompts you’re given.

Step 3: You can tweak the steps since they’re modifiable. 

Step 4: Test your workflow once you’re done. 

Step 5: Publish your workflow after the testing. 

With AI, cold calling efforts yield higher ROI. Sales professionals can simplify and optimise their sales process. Customers enjoy tailored sales strategies. In the end, everyone is happy. 

For more information, check out this post on how to levearge AI for GTM plays.

Now that you’ve seen all the ways AI enhances cold calls, we’ll go ahead to discuss some of the best AI-powered options. 

Top 4 AI Platforms to Help with Sales Calls

1. Copy.ai

Copy.AI’s sales OS is the all-in-one dashboard for sales efficiency. 

The tool captures every call detail that matters. These detailed and accurate records are updated with the integrated CRM to improve workflow. 

Below are some features to explore: 

• Find cross-sell leads at company 
• Cold inbound email outreach 
• Extract MEDDIC from sales transcript 
• Create blog post from sales call 
• Extract product feedback from sales call 
• Prospect leads at company 
• Personalised cold outbound emails 
• Prioritise leads/lead scoring 

Copy. AI also improves your efficiency and productivity. The most fascinating Copy.AI feature is the automated workflow.

With a single workflow, you can:

• Create sales enablement docs and send them immediately after. 
• Segment and prioritise the lead. 
• Identify pain points, objections and discover potential solutions. 
• Send insights to different departments or reps to work with. 
• Update a prospect’s information in Salesforce.

There are prebuilt workflow templates you can choose from and modify. Copy.AI Sales OS automates lead enrichment and qualification, integrates with collaboration tools and improves CRM hygiene. The OS works 24/7 in the background, executing workflows and allowing your team to focus solely on closing deals. 

2. Aircall

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With Aircall, you can create toll-free and international numbers to use. It also allows you to host conference calls with your team members who need to listen in on the call. 

Aircall integrates with Salesforce and HubSpot, enables scaling and simplifies call reviews.

Aircall has lots of other beneficial features like:

• Call recording, 
• Transcription
• Call whispering 
• Integrations with other platforms. 
• Power dialer and Click-to-dial
• Tags to categorise calls for easy reporting
• Ai generated call summaries.

3. Air AI 

Air AI is a conversational software that focuses on the in-call aspect of sales calls using the voice bot. The software can hold long sales calls with human level empathy, memory, understanding and communication skills. 

With Air AI, you can have 10-40 minute long phone calls that sound like a real human. It can can take actions across over 5000 plus applications. 

Here are the features you can explore: 

1. AI/ Machine learning 
2. Communication management 
3. Customer experience management 
4. Data mapping 
5. Speech and intent recognition
6. ChatGPT and live chat
7. Behaviour tracking 
8. Virtual personal assistant 

4. Gong

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Gong is a revenue-intelligence platform that uses sales conversation and customer interaction insights to predict and grow business revenue. 

Gong gives you real-time insights into how your sales strategies are performing. The conversation intelligence feature is one of the most prominent features for AI sales calls using Gong. 

It helps to:

• Capture all customer interaction
• Perform deep AI powered analysis.
• Share relevant insights with reps
• Record and transcribe calls 
• Track team activity and 

Final Thoughts

From all we’ve discussed, AI is a productivity-booster at every stage of the sales process. With the help of AI, sales teams can simplify pre-call data entry, in-call note taking and post-call follow-ups. 

If you’re excited about trying out these AI features, check out Copy.AI’s tutorials and upcoming events to watch demos and see practical applications.