Master lead generation with these 4 AI-driven techniques

Lead generation is vital for business growth, but it can be a difficult area to master and scale.

AI tools can help with every stage of generating leads, from planning outreach strategies to automating lead qualification and engagement. AI isn’t a replacement for the hard work that goes into finding good quality leads. But it can certainly help with the more repetitive elements, freeing you up to focus on human-centric tasks like strategizing, problem solving and decision making.

In this post, we’ll take a look at 4 ways to use AI for efficient, scalable lead generation.

Let’s get to it.

1. Crafting a tailored lead generation plan with ChatGPT

With 91% of marketers saying that lead generation is their most important goal, it’s clear that every marketing team needs a well-thought-out lead generation plan.

An effective lead generation plan aligns your resources with the right opportunities. With AI, you can create a detailed strategy for your business based on its unique needs and your target audience.

To create a solid lead generation plan with AI, you’ll want to:

1. Begin by telling ChatGPT core details about your business—and prompt it to remember and refer back to these. You’ll want to include the basics, like your brand name, but also information about your mission, market position, and audience.
2. Next, ask the AI to list the key components of a typical lead generation plan. If there are extra things you want to include, prompt ChatGPT to add these in, before generating your plan.
3. Once you’re happy with the outline for your plan, get ChatGPT to generate the whole thing.
4. Get ChatGPT to list key channels to prioritize, given your target audience. Then, ask for detailed lead generation plans for the top 3 channels. Prompt the AI to include specific steps for your team.

This should give you a clear, comprehensive, and actionable lead generation plan.

2. Qualifying inbound leads using OpenAI and Zapier

Is your team wasting time on unqualified leads? If you keep getting unsuitable leads or find that your conversion rates are low, then you’ve got a problem with your current lead qualification processes.

Many businesses find that manual lead qualification is slow and prone to human error. It’s no surprise that two-thirds of lost sales are because sales reps didn’t properly qualify potential customers before starting the sales process.

AI tools like OpenAI and Zapier can streamline the process, enabling you to focus only on leads that meet your criteria. Here’s how:

1. Use Google Forms or a similar tool to capture leads, collecting information like the prospect’s name, email address, company name, and their message to you.
2. Connect your form to Zapier, setting up a Zap that triggers each time a new form is submitted.
3. Configure this Zap to use OpenAI to qualify your leads (you’ll need to generate an OpenAI key before connecting Zapier to your ChatGPT account).
4. Start qualifying your leads by asking OpenAI to categorize leads with email addresses from free email providers like Gmail and Yahoo as “unqualified” and leads using other email domains as “qualified”.
5. Then, use OpenAI to examine the email address and company name of your currently qualified leads. Prompt it to disqualify leads from companies with under 100 employees and under $1M ARR. (You can adjust this to whatever criteria fit your product/service.)
6. Get OpenAI to assess the message on the form, qualifying leads that have expressed interest in a specific product—e.g. the Enterprise product offering. Prompt the AI to write a short message for the sales team, explaining why the lead is or isn’t qualified.

You could go even further with this process by sending qualified leads straight into your CRM.

3. Build an AI-powered lead generation chatbot

AI chatbots can transform your lead generation by providing instant, personalized interactions that capture and nurture potential customers 24/7.

We recommend using Chatbase to create your AI chatbot. It lets you build custom chatbots without writing a single line of code.

You’ll need to:

1. Train Chatbase on your website content, by getting it to crawl your site.
2. Create a chatbot and test it by asking questions about your website content.
3. Set up a lead capture form so you can keep track of information that comes in via your chatbot.
4. Instruct your chatbot on how to interact with your website users and how to follow up with them to collect the information you need.
5. Give your chatbot key constraints—like maintaining its focus on sales if the user tries to divert it onto other topics, and relying exclusively on its training data. (You don’t want your chatbot to go rogue.)
6. Test out your chatbot using a live link, to make sure everything’s working as expected.
7. Connect Chatbot and Zapier so you can save the names and email addresses of potential leads in a spreadsheet.

4. Generate leads from prospect personas using AI

Using Clay, a data enrichment tool, you can automatically generate leads based on your prospect personas, then send emails in bulk.

This can save you a huge amount of time trawling for prospects and manually sending messages.

Here’s what you need to do, step by step:

1. Create a new table in your Clay Workspace using the “Find People” option. Select a persona to use with this table.
2. Set Clay to search directly within its own database (rather than using an external list), then set query parameters that match your persona attributes. For instance, you can set the “Job title” parameter to match the job titles listed for that persona.
3. Once you’ve set up your query, use “Preview people” in Clay to see a sample of relevant leads.
4. Adjust your query as needed—e.g. to include a “Location” parameter. Once you’re happy with the results, create a table of the leads.
5. Next, create a template email to use for bulk outreach, with an appropriate subject line and body content. Insert variables (like the lead’s first name) into the email.
6. Save the email and run the process to generate emails, then create a “Smartlead” campaign to send your emails to your leads automatically.

If you found this post helpful, you might also like:

• Generating follow-up strategies for sales leads
• Make more sales with AI: 4 ways to get more leads to buy
• 5 powerful techniques to get you started with AI chatbots
• Build an AI sales assistant with Google Sheets and Slack (workshop)