Any sales pro will tell you that you handicap yourself when you don’t personalize your outreach and messaging. You literally cut yourself off at the knees.
For instance, Cloudtalk writes, “Lack of personalization is a significant challenge, leading to lower engagement rates. At a time when data is king, a one-size-fits-all approach is less likely to resonate, making it crucial for businesses to leverage customer data to tailor their messages.”
You know that personalization matters. A decent amount of personalization (but not too much!) can get your foot in the door with a prospect. You’ve probably experienced this yourself.
Personalization shows that you a) did your homework on your prospect, b) know their industry, c) care enough to go the extra mile, and d) actually know what you’re doing. And if you want to gain the trust of the C-suite, you have to position yourself as one who knows what they’re doing. Period.
Personalization also reduces friction and is less intrusive. The “warmer” your cold calls, the better. For instance, if you have personalized information about the prospect’s company — like industry size, recent company news, and even their recent social media activity — then something called “reciprocity” takes place.
Sales Tip: What’s reciprocity? It’s a psychological phenomenon that takes place in your prospect’s mind — they see that YOU put in the effort, so they seek to return that effort by responding positively (or at least responding!). Personalization drops their guard, builds rapport, and generally positions you as a trustworthy advisor. This isn’t always the case, but generally speaking this is how B2B sales works.
OK – that’s a lot to take in, I know. But thankfully, the act of personalizing your cold calling and cold email campaigns is pretty easy. With today’s AI-powered tools, you can streamline most of the personalization so that it’s automated. And that’s exactly what we’re going to cover today.
So let’s see how AI can help supercharge your cold calling efforts and make you the king (or queen!) of personalization. Let’s go.
RELATED: How I Use AI to CRUSH in B2B Sales
Personalization Approaches Using AI
Prospect research and intel
AI tools can help you collect critical intel about your prospects (recent news, awards and accolades, and even nitty-gritty LinkedIn info on a more personal level). You can take this info and tailor your outbound messaging to speak directly to who they are. No more of this “To whom it may concern” nonsense. When you dial a prospect, you’ll have something to say that gets their attention and sets those hooks.
Predictive analytics
What time is the best time to cold call? I’ve found that the golden hour is exactly one hour before the traditional business day begins, 8-9am. Or one hour after the business day ends, 5-6pm. But today’s AI offers us predictive analytics, allowing us to determine the best time to dial (backed by data!). Sure, you’ll want to use your own experience to guide you, but why not also use the technology at your fingertips? After all, the sweet-spot is not one-size fits all; it depends on industry, title, and other factors. Time zone matters, too. The better AI sales analytics tools can help you really hone it in so you’re more likely to call during your prospect’s free time, no matter where in the world they’re located.
RELATED: How to Build a 7-Figure Company with Cold Calling
Scripts and positioning
Of course, you can also use ChatGPT and other generative AI to create cold calling scripts from the ground up. But… it’s important that you only use the generated scripts as a rough draft. You must gut-check it against your own experience (as a real-life, flesh and blood person) and put your human touch on it. This is an important point to consider. You can’t blindly trust any AI tool. If you do, you risk sounding like a robot to your prospects or audience, and you risk making business decisions on potentially inaccurate data.
Personalized Opening Lines
If you send a lot of cold emails, you should be using AI to help craft personalized opening lines that reference specific information about the prospect. Yes, there are even tools that can do this at scale. Upload 20,000 contacts in a spreadsheet and let the AI add in the personalized first lines for each and every contact, saving you or your team literally thousands of hours of manual research and data entry. Now, don’t expect perfect personalization out of the box — but these tools are becoming more advanced with each passing month.
AI-Driven Follow-Ups
You can also use AI to suggest personalized follow-up actions. If your prospect is highly interested, you’ll be prompted to get on the phone asap. If it’s only a tire-kicker, you’ll be recommended to hold off / not waste your time making further calls. This isn’t just about where the prospect is in the funnel (top, bottom, or middle of funnel) — it’s more about their behavior and buying triggers. Today’s top AI sales tools are able to analyze and predict these things without breaking a sweat.
Final Words
As you can see, AI presents salespeople with massive leverage. And from what I’m seeing, the adoption rate in the sales world is less than 10%. This means getting ahead of 90% of the competition has never been easier. Just dabble and put the basics in motion and you’re already ahead of the pack. Or… learn to master these tools and stay on the cutting-edge of AI tech and you will be richly rewarded. There has never been an opportunity such like this in the history of the internet age.
RELATED: Will AI Replace B2B Salespeople?
Just remember, AI does not give a flawless output. (The better your inputs, the better its outputs — but that’s a post for another day.) As it stands, you will have to massage the content and copy, and contextualize the data, before deploying it. In other words, you have to keep the human-in-the-loop.
Even still, AI does give sales teams a massive head start by eliminating countless hours of mundane research and data entry. And in fact, some of the data that AI can aggregate could never be collected and synthesized by humans in a timeframe that would make it economically feasible. Talk about a value add.
Finally, whatever you do, don’t overdo the personalization. If you’ve received one of those cold emails that includes everything about your company and even your background, you know that it’s a turnoff. There’s absolutely no reason to ever dump all of that personal information on someone. And it comes off as creepy, with borderline-stalker vibes. So name, company, title, and a few data points is all you need. You don’t need to show your prospect you know that he or she is a Cowboys fan. That’s just too much, too soon.
So with that, get out there and leverage AI to help personalize your cold calling and cold emailing. You’ve got this.
Until next time…
Johnny-Lee Reinoso