Conversational AI for Cold Calling: Best Practices and Tools for Enterprise

Cold calling is a repetitive process that requires a deep understanding of customers' pain points and concrete ways to solve them with your product or service. While cold calling may seem tedious, it is still a tactical way for many businesses to generate leads and close clients. Luckily, technologies like conversational AI are becoming a game changer for organizations in their call-calling procedures by automating multiple steps, scaling efforts, and reducing operational costs and repetitive tasks to a minimum. 

Here, we will highlight some of the best practices and tools for enterprise cold calling using conversational AI solutions. 

How Does AI Cold Calling Work?

AI cold calling refers to calling users and potential customers by leveraging artificial intelligence software to streamline time-consuming tasks. Traditional cold calling generally happens when an SDR or BDR team reaches out to multiple potential customers and communicates how a product or service can help them solve a problem. Sometimes, however, the information these employees receive is faulty and lacks context and personalization, leading to unsuccessful interactions. This issue led multiple companies to adopt AI within their outbound efforts to leverage data analysis, algorithmic resonance, and a better understanding of potential users to increase efficiency and reduce operational overheads. 

As a result, customer engagement and conversion rates improve significantly, given that engagements are more effective and conversations are more meaningful. Human agents can skip the arduous process of actually cold-calling and focus on improving the quality of their conversations. 

Old Cold Calling Methods are Fading Away

To anyone living in America, it is unsurprising that traditional cold-calling methods are becoming increasingly less effective. People are less likely to strike up a conversation with a stranger due to a lack of trust, the abundance of spam calls, and the lack of personalization when interacting with businesses over the phone. While that is not always true, and certain companies still use traditional methods that work and do a great job personalizing interactions, the general structure of cold calling is shifting to focus on quality just as much as quantity.

Before AI technologies that supported cold calling teams, the sales process depended primarily on finding the right balance between volume and personalization. With conversational AI technologies, cold calling changes because SDR and BDR teams no longer have to sacrifice quality for quantity.

Ultimately, by incorporating conversational AI solutions, BDR and SDR teams can have more meaningful conversations and waste less time on calls with uninterested prospects. 

How Can Conversational AI Improve Cold Calling and Sales? 

Incorporating conversational AI technologies helps sales teams improve their cold-calling efforts in multiple ways that reduce the repetitive nature of outbound strategies. Cold calling is a complex process. It requires a ton of research to find the right potential prospects who might be interested in your product or service, reaching out to these individuals on multiple occasions to ensure you can have a conversation, and persistence to get the message across and close a sale. 

Conversational AI helps sales by allowing them to have better, personalized interactions with potential customers at scale. From the research process to data collection and reaching out to prospects, sales become more efficient by focusing on having better conversations with suitable leads. 

Automation of Repetitive Tasks

By incorporating IVAs, the most advanced type of conversational AI, into their business, sales teams can augment their routines by outsourcing repetitive tasks and inquiries. Instead of doing time-consuming and repetitive daily processes, human agents can focus on finding more creative ways to reach out to better-qualified customers. 

Increased Reach and Scalability

A common problem in cold calling is that you need to increase your reach and scale your efforts to be more effective. However, to do that, human agents often deprioritize detail and personalization to meet their goals. With conversational AI, you can both increase reach and scale while also leveraging personalization, given its advanced capabilities of machine learning and data management. As a result, sales teams are able to meet targets while also maintaining a high level of customer engagement and effectiveness. 

Better Engagement Through Personalized Interactions

Engaging with prospective customers is a process that becomes more effective with personalization. The more time you can spend understanding every prospect, the more likely you are to build rapport and ultimately demonstrate the value of your product or service. With conversational advanced IVAs, sales teams can augment their skills by leveraging artificial intelligence data analysis to understand better prospects, previous interactions, as well as any other relevant details that may help them meet their target. 

Communication Stays Consistent

Another benefit of incorporating conversational AI into your sales operations is to guarantee consistent automated and efficient communication processes. When you work in sales, given the task volume, it is common to forget to follow up with a particular customer at a specific time. With conversational AI (IVAs), sales teams can improve their script quality, maintain standardized messaging, and stay on top of all follow-ups without additional effort. 

Better Lead Handling and Qualification

Lead management and scoring is a complex process requiring time and effort. With conversational AI technologies, handling leads becomes automated, and qualification becomes more efficient by automating data analysis based on actual interactions between prospects and sales reps. Instead of spending hours going through massive data sets to improve qualification, with IVAs, sales teams can improve their time management skills by using intelligent technology to help them analyze and qualify leads. 

Conversational AI Can Collect Data in Real-Time

A very difficult to master is the ability to be conscious of your behavior and its impact on any particular prospect. With conversational AI, sales reps can access automated and detailed reports to help them identify potential areas of improvement when handling calls based on their performance and behavioral patterns identified by the IVA. Sales reps can improve their performance by adding a real-time technology partner that collects real-time information and provides feedback. It is almost like having a personalized sales coach that helps you leverage your strengths while keeping communication standards and objectives. 

Effective Management of Different Time Zones and Languages

With conversational AI technologies that automate interactions with multiple customers, organizations can increase their reach on a global scale and solve issues like time zones and language barriers. While there may be limitations on particular processes, automating many interactions can massively reduce operational costs. 

Best Practices for Using AI in Cold Calling

Using IVAs for cold calling and improving sales operations requires having a clear understanding of use cases and limitations. To empower your sales team with conversational AI, we have selected some of the best practices you should consider.

Analyze Your Needs and Choose the Right Tool

There are many options available when it comes to conversational AI solutions. Before moving forward with any particular provider, it is essential to have a due diligence process to ensure that the right tool is being selected. To do so, ensure that the sales teams’ needs are identified and match them with the right tool to serve them. 

Proper Integration Across the Board

Not all conversational AI solutions have the same level of integration. Some act as standalone products that require a lot of developer hours to connect with your systems; others, however, are built with integration capabilities at the core to ensure alignment. Depending on your sales team's tech infrastructure, you must find the right conversational AI solution that communicates with their systems (CRMs, ERPs, etc.)

Recurring Staff Training Sessions

Adopting conversational AI to genuinely augment your sales team requires practice and time. To ensure that your team is fully taking advantage of conversational AI for their processes, it is a good practice to have recurring training sessions. If you want to build a more engaging session, you can also include actual examples and success cases teams come up with using IVAs.

Segment Your Audience For Personalized Experience  

While conversational AI has advanced capabilities for understanding behavior, it is essential to feed machine learning processes the correct type of information and segments. The quality of the information will determine the quality of the IVA's support. This clear and organized segmentation will also impact personalization and lead to engagement and closing rates improvements. 

Continuous Improvement Based on Data and Feedback

Given the nature of conversational AI using machine learning to improve its functionality, it is essential to create permanent feedback loops between sales reps and the IVA to improve information quality. The more frequently these fine-tuning processes occur, the more impact and quality sales teams will be able to receive by using IVAs. 

Understand AI limitations and Use Them to Your Advantage 

Artificial intelligence is an incredible technology changing how we interact with almost every aspect of our lives. However, even so, it is a machine with limitations that we must face and acknowledge to make the most out of it instead of expecting unrealistic improvements or features. It is vital for sales teams to always be at the forefront of their efforts, paying attention to details and verifying that IVA technologies are effectively empowering their team. Only by being proactive in our relationship with AI can we fully leverage and augment our capacities. 

Use Mosaicx Conversational AI to Empower Your Sales Team

At Mosaicx, we have created an enterprise-level conversational AI solution that empowers sales teams to meet their goals. Whether you need cold-calling support, data intelligence upgrades, or a product that meets standards and compliance requirements, our team will gladly help you. 

Visit our website and book a demo to learn more.