Two Tips to Set You Up for B2B Sales Success in 2023
Applying the fundamentals of strategic outbound will set you on the path to success in the coming year.
How AI impacts B2B sales is a hot topic in the sales community. There continues to be some apprehension among sales professionals, but here’s the reality: AI isn’t going to replace salespeople. As we described in our last blog, AI will make them more efficient, more strategic, and therefore, more effective. When used correctly, AI helps teams cut through the noise, focus on the right prospects, and close more deals. Simply put, it helps B2B sales pros work smarter and sell faster.
Over the past year, MarketLauncher has embraced AI to set new standards in outbound engagement. We have tested several use cases for cutting-edge AI technology and seen an exponential increase in our ability to connect with C-suite executives. In this blog, we’re sharing with you some of our favorite AI-powered tools and how we are using them to have a measurable impact on outbound sales success.
Buyer behavior has gone through a shift over the past few years where getting a sales prospect’s attention requires communication to be highly personalized and relevant. To meet this expectation, the ML team started incorporating deep research into our process. ChatGPT speeds up the time it takes to gather this intel and then helps our sales team craft highly personalized messages. Script guidelines, talking points, and introductory emails can all be generated quickly by asking ChatGPT to tailor messaging that combines what we’ve learned about the prospect with the client’s unique value proposition. This cuts through the noise and gets an executive buyer’s attention in an authentic way that begins to build trust early in the sales process.
We recently created a Custom GPT where we uploaded all our case studies and playbooks to create a knowledge base. Our instructions were to review all the materials so that when we prompt for a personalized email to a prospect, it will include relevant case studies that highlight our credibility and expertise, tailored to the prospect’s industry and pain points. This makes it easy to map the message back to specific success stories to highlight our experience. It has always been our process to keep messaging highly relevant to our target audience, but having a Custom GPT has already saved hours of time looking through documents and trying to distill our experience down to a few compelling soundbites.
“It has always been our process to keep messaging highly relevant to our target audience, but having a Custom GPT has already saved hours of time looking through documents and trying to distill our experience down to a few compelling soundbites.”
We also leverage AI to get faster insights from our conversations during sales prospecting. This has been a game changer for our clients by allowing us to very quickly take verbatim responses from the conversations our team is having with prospects and provide prescriptive insights about how the market is reacting to the offering and how it's being positioned. While market insights have always been part of our services, AI is enabling us to share these insights faster and take action to impact the results earlier in a campaign – which ultimately leads to better outcomes.
I’d also strongly recommend checking out Agent.ai. We've been playing around with a Company Research Agent and a Personalized Executive Outreach Agent that, when used in concert, lets you craft highly personalized messages that lend authenticity to a “show me you know me” approach that tends to resonate more with senior executives. The Personalized Executive Outreach Agent reviews an executive’s online presence and hones in on the topics that an individual has been posting about on social media, talking about in interviews, and writing about in blogs.
Sales calls are packed with valuable insights. Having a note-taker helps sales reps focus on the conversation instead of taking notes. We’ve tested all the note-takers, and our favorite by far is Fathom. In addition to recordings, transcripts and summaries, Fathom also extracts key takeaways and insights. This means better follow-up and stronger relationship building. We upgraded to the Team edition, which allows us to share the recordings with team members and segment them into folders. We found the “Ask Fathom” feature to be particularly powerful when used to extract insights from meetings with a client or prospect. It will even analyze information from multiple calls that have been segmented into a folder by client or topic.
Like most technology powered by AI, it is a huge time saver. When putting together a proposal recently, I asked Fathom to “Find me all references to discussions about the client’s target market.” Fathom not only finds all those references but also summarizes them and offers insights and suggestions.
We discovered Beautiful.ai when a former client joined their executive team. We saw a demo and were completely hooked. As the CEO of a prospecting firm, I do a lot of presentations, so I am not exaggerating when I say that this tool has changed my life. Beautiful.ai creates sleek, data-driven presentations in minutes, making it easier to craft compelling stories that resonate with prospects. For us, the results have been terrific. We can create higher-quality presentations that are produced faster and have more impact. A prospect actually said to me the other day, “Your deck was so impressive, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Our COO, Mary White, loves that it has exponentially cut down the administrative time it takes our managers to create client reports. We’ve traded that time for deeper analysis and insights, and we can see the impact based on the quality assessment scores we are getting from our clients.
I could go on and on, but just check it out for yourself. It uses AI in some really clever ways that allow anyone with a story to tell to put it into a beautiful package.
Learn more about Beautiful.ai.
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Each week, we’re discovering more and more AI tools entering the market and we make it a priority to evaluate them with a mindset of, “Will this impact outbound sales or enhance our sales processes?” AI is evolving faster than any shift we’ve seen before, and keeping pace requires intentionality. That’s why we actively participate in discussions on AI advancements, attend show-and-tell sessions, and take part in AI training. We want to ensure we’re bringing the most effective solutions to each of our client campaigns.
To support this ongoing learning, we’ve even created an internal AI Microsoft Teams channel to collaborate, share discoveries, and test new tools together—because AI is very much a “learn by doing” experience. As you can see, we’ve fully embraced the role of AI and will continue to seek out emerging technologies that give our sales team an edge.
One platform that’s been getting our attention is CLAY. Every sales pro knows that a great outbound campaign begins with a well-targeted list. CLAY seems to have a solution that intelligently sources and refines contact data to make outreach more precise and effective. We’ll investigate and share more on what we've learned about the benefits of Clay for B2B sales (and other new tools we identify) in future posts.
As AI continues to evolve, we remain committed to adopting the best tools while ensuring that our team’s expertise and personal touch remain at the heart of every engagement. AI alone isn’t enough. The real magic happens when AI meets human intuition, relationship-building, and strategic thinking. That’s what turns outreach into real conversations—and conversations into closed deals.
Have you tried any of these AI-powered tools in your outbound sales strategy? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Lara
