AI for B2B Lead Generation: The Ultimate Guide

Leads are the lifeblood of your B2B sales team.

But sometimes, it might feel like your leads are moving through clogged arteries...

Cold outreach is just too inefficient. 

As a result, many B2B brands are transitioning to AI-driven lead generation. The State of Sales Report found that 80% of the sales leaders they surveyed have implemented AI tools in the past 12 months. 

In this guide, you’ll learn all about AI for B2B lead generation, including three powerful applications, key metrics to track, and potential challenges to guard against. 

What is AI-powered B2B lead generation?

AI-powered B2B lead generation means using AI sales tools in your lead generation process to boost efficiency and conversions. 

For example:

You might use an AI-powered database to quickly create a B2B lead list of CFOs with mobile-verified numbers who work at small financial advisory firms that use Quickbooks accounting software. 

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is much faster than searching for potential leads on Google or LinkedIn, and the results are also far more accurate.

Here’s how AI can help you in each part of the B2B lead generation process:

• Prospecting: Use a sales intelligence tool to quickly build lead lists that fit your ideal customer profile. 
• Qualification: Lead scoring tools analyse potential customers’ demographics and online behaviour, predicting if they’re a good fit and sales-ready.
• Outreach: Use AI copywriting tools to write personalised sales emails more quickly. Many email platforms also offer predictive AI that identifies the best time to send your sales and marketing messages. 
• Analysis: Revenue intelligence tools like Gong use AI to find patterns in customer interactions and offer ways to improve cold calls and emails.  

The above list is just a snapshot of outbound-focused applications for Artificial Intelligence.

Marketing professionals can also use AI to streamline content creation, conduct market research, set up chatbots, and automate other tasks that power inbound lead generation. 

Every team involved in finding and attracting promising leads can benefit from AI.

Why should businesses use AI to generate B2B leads?

In The State of Sales Report, 87% of sales leaders who have adopted AI said it has positively impacted their sellers’ daily work experience.

Why?

In terms of B2B lead generation, let’s cover three key reasons.

First, AI-powered tools are a productivity hack. 

They automate the repetitive tasks associated with lead generation, such as finding qualified leads and their email addresses or writing a follow-up email. 

These recurring activities consume a lot of time. 67% of surveyed sales leaders said their reps spend 11 or more hours per week on research and follow-up. 

You could easily cut that number in half with features like AI-powered lead search and automated follow-ups. 

Your reps can spend that extra 6 hours per week on work that requires human oversight, like reading a lead’s recent article on a social media platform and writing a thoughtful response to it. 

Second, AI provides you with intel that helps you make better decisions. 

By analysing vast amounts of data at record speed, AI can spot patterns in customer conversations and make accurate predictions that might otherwise have escaped your sales team. 

For example, an AI-powered conversational analysis tool might inform you that phone calls in which you speak less than 60% are 75% more likely to fail than calls in which you speak more than 60%. 

Third, AI allows you to reach more leads with personalised outreach. 

It does this in a few ways:

• Helps you uncover more information about your leads in less time, which you can use to hyper-personalise outreach.
• Auto-personalises cold emails, chatbot messages, and social media posts.
• Analyses historical sales data and a lead’s online behaviour, helping you to predict a lead’s buying intent.

In summary, AI helps your team run a more productive, informed, and personalised sales process. This opens up opportunities to generate more high-quality leads with fewer resources.

How can you use AI to generate B2B leads?

Below are three of the most impactful applications of AI in B2B lead generation: lead list building, personalisation, and automated outreach. 

1. Quickly build highly targeted lists of leads

Prospecting has always been a time-sink for B2B businesses. 

Often, even when done efficiently, the process leads to superficially targeted lists that contain inaccurate contact data and result in poor outreach performance.  

Fortunately, sales intelligence tools with AI functionality make precision list-building fast and simple for all sales and marketing teams. 

With Cognism’s AI Search, for example, you can discover hundreds of high-quality leads simply by typing (or speaking!) your ideal lead’s attributes into the AI search bar. 

For each contact that appears in the search, you’ll gain accurate data on their email addresses, mobile numbers, direct dials, job titles, locations, and more.

Cognism’s AI Search also offers the following benefits: 

• Build lists as granular as “CEOs in New York working at SaaS brands with fewer than 50 employees and no CRM” using criteria for technographics, firmographics, and demographics.
• Look up specific contacts or companies to speed up the lead research phase of lead generation.
• Use multilingual voice commands to search for leads in your native tongue without typing anything!

Prospecting used to mean visiting business websites and checking the Team page for vital contact details. Then, it meant using filters in a B2B contact database to narrow down the leads that fit your profile.

Now, with AI, it’s as simple as looking something up on Google!

See how Cognism’s AI Search works - take an interactive tour of the platform 👇

2. Improve personalisation in customer engagement 

ChatGPT gets a lot of credit for its content writing.

B2B sales reps can use it to draft anything from a lead-specific cold email to a reusable, segment-focused cold calling script.

You could prompt it to write an email campaign for a particular type of decision-maker. 

For example:

Write a 4-part cold email series to a VP of Property Management in New York City at a Residential Management Company.

The goal is to get them interested in our inspection software that speeds up inspections. 

Focus on how they can handle resident move-ins and move-outs in half the time. Use a conversational, friendly tone. Please reference any industry trends that will make our product seem crucial.

Here’s the first email it gave us:

Even if the content isn’t up to your standards, you at least receive a solid base of text that you can polish. And, if you’re not a writer by trade, the process will have taken far less time.

However, ChatGPT is not just a handy writing assistant. 

Sales teams forget that it also makes a fast, accountable customer analyst. 

By quickly interpreting large, clean datasets about your customers and their interactions with your brand, ChatGPT can reveal insights about your target audience that might’ve escaped your reporting tools or intuition.

These data-driven insights help you better understand your potential leads, empowering you to create more personalised outreach strategies.

For example, after providing ChatGPT with your dataset, query it with the following prompts:

• What traits do my 20 highest-paying clients have in common?
• Give me five current trends in [your industry] that would interest my average customer. 
• Provide a cold email that would relate to my ideal lead. 

⚠️ Want more ChatGPT sales hacks? Check out our guide: How to Use ChatGPT for Sales.

3. Automate lead outreach and follow-up

Sales engagement platforms like Outreach offer AI features for automating outreach and follow-up, allowing sales reps to reach more leads in less time. 

For example, Outreach uses AI to auto-draft personalised emails based on a sales rep’s prior conversation with a potential customer. So all the rep has to do is review the email and click send!

Tools like Cognism provide contact data and sales triggers for intercepting leads at the best times in their buying journey. This helps sales professionals find and convert the most winnable opportunities. Who in sales wouldn’t want that? 

Marketers also benefit from AI-powered lead generation tools.

They can use email automation tools to automatically send relevant content to leads based on AI predictions about their buying intent and interests.

An AI email tool like MailChimp can even make suggestions on how to improve email marketing campaigns: 

Don’t forget:

Effective outreach requires deep knowledge of the lead. Using a tool like Cognism’s AI Search, you can quickly pull up contact and company details. It speeds up your outreach efforts, allowing you to make that call or send that email more quickly.

What are the key metrics to track in AI-powered lead generation?

When implementing AI in B2B lead generation, it’s important to monitor its impact. This will help you assess its performance and optimise your process.

For example:

If lead conversion rates have increased dramatically since you adopted AI-powered software solutions, then you know your investment is paying off.

Conversely, if lead engagement rates have dropped since your reps started drafting emails with AI, it’s a sign that your approach needs refining.

Below are some key AI lead generation metrics to monitor:

• Lead Volume: Total number of leads generated through AI-powered methods.
• Lead Quality: Percentage of leads that meet your ideal customer profile or are classified as qualified.
• Conversion Rate: Ratio of leads that convert into paying customers or move to the next stage in the sales funnel.
• Cost per Lead (CPL): Total cost of acquiring each lead through AI-powered methods. 
• Lead Response Time: Average time taken to respond to or follow up with a lead.
• Engagement Rate: Interaction levels with AI-generated outreach, such as email open rates, click-through rates, and social media engagement.
• Lead Attribution: The number of leads generated by each AI-powered channel or strategy (e.g., chatbots, predictive analytics).

As with any big change to your lead generation process, there will be bottlenecks. Finding and fixing these issues is far easier when you track AI lead generation metrics like the ones above.

What are the challenges of AI-powered lead generation?

Wait a minute, isn’t AI supposed to eliminate challenges, not create them? 🤔

If only that were true!

Unfortunately, as with any new technology, there are some potential hurdles you may have to overcome to successfully adopt AI into your sales processes. 

Below, you’ll find three key challenges and their solutions.

Data quality and availability

AI lead generation tools require clean, accurate, complete datasets to run correctly. Data quality is paramount!

For example, ChatGPT can’t write a personalised email if you lack the lead’s job title, technology use, company size, and other key details. 

The Solution:

Use a tool like Cognism Enrich to fill in and update your B2B contact and company records with fresh, compliant data. 

Lack of in-house expertise 

Some B2B sales teams may lack the technical skills necessary to take full advantage of AI for lead generation. 

For example, without an in-house administrator, you might struggle to set up AI workflows, especially with more complex tools. 

As a result, you may have to hire new talent, purchase training through the AI vendor, or conduct your own training. These options can be costly and time-consuming. 

The Solution:

If you’re worried about learning new software, invest in easy-to-use AI platforms.

Cognism’s AI Search, for example, is remarkably simple to use. Just type in your ideal lead’s characteristics and receive a list of leads and their contact information.

Privacy and compliance concerns 

Using AI tools to find B2B contact data opens up the risk of non-compliance with data privacy regulations, like the GDPR. Failure to meet standards can result in costly fines. 

The Solution:

Make sure your sales intelligence software is compliant with relevant regulations. Cognism guarantees compliance in the following ways:

• Our contact data is 100% GDPR-compliant.
• Our database is fully notified.
• We hold only business emails in our database.
• We scrub mobile numbers against global Do-Not-Call (DNC) registries.

What is the future of AI in B2B lead generation?

The future of AI in B2B lead generation is one of enhanced precision and efficiency.

As the technology improves, AI tools will be able to provide deeper insights about your leads and take over more of the lead generation process. For example, AI chatbots will handle lead qualification and nurturing and may even advance to the point of presenting product demos.

AI could also help reps perform more effectively. 

In theory, it could provide sales reps with real-time recommendations during cold calls, suggesting the most relevant product features or case studies based on the lead’s responses.

Overall, progress in AI sales tools should result in healthier pipelines and increased profits for B2B companies.

How can you stay ahead of AI trends in B2B? 

You can start by regularly checking Cognism’s blog! We write extensively about the latest trends in B2B sales and marketing.

Or listen to our podcast, where we interview sales and marketing experts about their experiences working in B2B.

Lastly, don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn!