5 Best Practices to Improve Outbound Sales with CoPilot AI

Let's face it, selling stuff isn't easy. Your team could have an ideal fit prospect, do perfect discovery, host an amazing demo and still have their prospect back out right when they're about to seal the deal. While many sales teams rely on inbound leads generated from marketing, outbound vs inbound sales is a hot topic in the sales world, and the reality is, inbound is usually not enough for your team to reach their quota.

That's where outbound sales come in. Your outbound sales process is all about getting out there and making things happen, instead of just waiting for customers to come to you. But here's the thing - the old ways of doing outbound sales are getting a bit stale. That's where innovative outbound sales software options, such as CoPilot AI, come in to play.

In this article, we're going to look at five best practices to make your outbound sales better with CoPilot AI. We'll talk about using outbound sales tools finding better leads, learning more about what makes them tick, strategically engaging with them, and capturing the important information that helps you measure your team's performance. These tips aren't just about selling more - they're about empowering your reps to handle even the trickiest sales situations.

Best Practice #1: Finding the Right Leads

First off, using AI saves you a ton of time when it comes to lead generation by automatically scoring and sorting leads. AI will do the heavy lifting to identify the highest fit prospects based on your target audience, buyer personas, and value proposition, and will even score them based on their intent. This means your reps can focus on the people who are most likely to buy from you, without the need to build a full outbound sales team.

Using CoPilot AI to Find Better Leads

CoPilot AI is designed to find the best possible leads for your reps to connect with. Paired with Sales Navigator, it uses AI to look through millions of LinkedIn profiles and pick out the people who are most likely to be interested in what you're selling. It doesn't just find leads - it ranks them based on how likely they are to want to meet with you.

Lead Filtering with Sales Navigator

Since CoPilot AI works in collaboration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you are able to take your ICP and filter out the leads that best align with it. Lead filtering refines your lead generation strategy to help your team reach qualified decision makers within your target market.

Reply Prediction AI

Sales Navigator's lead filtering isn't quite enough to ensure that your team is focusing their energy on the right leads, that's where CoPilot AI's Reply Prediction AI comes in to help with lead qualification.

With Reply Prediction AI, your B2B sales reps can zero in on the leads most likely to respond to their outreach. By analyzing past interactions and engagement patterns, this smart tool ranks your search list, spotlighting the prospects who are ready to chat.

Best Practice #2: Scaling Your Outreach

So, you've found the lead you were looking for, and thanks to CoPilot AI, you know which ones are the highest-fit and highest-intent. Now you need to be able to communicate with them at scale to cast a wide net and see who you can reel in for a meeting.

Using CoPilot AI to Scale Your Outreach

CoPilot AI includes outbound sales automation to make the routine stuff easier, like sending out personalized messages and follow-ups, so your reps can focus on connecting with people and closing deals. With various campaign types and automated messaging, the goal is to help your reps work smarter, not harder, so that doing outbound sales strategy doesn't become a series of ineffective cold calls and emails.

Automated Prospecting Campaigns

With CoPilot AI’s automated prospecting campaigns, your sales team can easily scale their outreach efforts. Using your search list, your reps can send hundreds of personalized messages to the right prospects with minimal effort. This tool ensures that your team is reaching the most relevant leads, freeing up their time to focus on high-value activities like closing deals and building relationships.

Automated Nurture Campaigns

There may be some people in your reps' search lists that they're already connected to through LinkedIn. These leads may be a bit warmer, already know about your services, and are a bit more primed than the average prospect.

Keep in mind that your reps will want to engage in a different type of outbound automation and set up nurture campaigns for these leads. Nurture campaigns are targeted at those first-degree connections, and they help your rep to set up a different set of messages that will enable them to continue building the relationship with this group, rather than focusing on introductions.

Team Prospect Overlap Protection

If you have multiple reps on your team that are all going after the same ICP, you may be worried that they're reaching out to the same people. CoPilot AI includes overlap protection for your team to make sure that this doesn't happen.

With overlap protection, your team will be able to run their prospecting and nurture campaigns safely without bombarding prospects with multiple messages.

Best Practice #3: Engaging Effectively with Prospects

You've built your search list, you've set up and deployed your automated outreach campaigns and, if you're like the majority of our clients, you've likely received some replies! Now is the time to focus on engagement, figure out what motivates your prospects, and start focusing on booking that meeting.

Using CoPilot AI for Effective Engagement

CoPilot AI moves beyond just identifying the leads to helping your reps engage in the right ways with each and every prospect. We want your reps to be able to book high-value meetings that lead to revenue growth for your company, and that starts with effective communication.

Sentiment Analysis AI

Similar to Reply Prediction AI, Sentiment Analysis AI comes in to pick up on tidbits from your rep's conversations to indicate who is most likely to book a meeting. In a clear and precise way, your reps will be able to see who they should be focusing on to fill up their calendars.

Personalized Insights AI

With Sentiment Analysis AI, your reps can determine who they should be talking to, but they might be left wondering how to do it effectively. Personalized Insights AI will scan your prospects' LinkedIn profiles and show you their preferred communication style (Director, Relator, Socializer, or Thinker).

It also unlocks key tips for engaging with that prospect including do's and don'ts for effective communication, messaging templates that will resonate with them, and suggestions on how to handle their objections.

Best Practice #4: Managing Conversations at Scale

Once those replies start coming in, your team may feel overwhelmed with the amount of conversations they need to manage. With the ability to run multiple campaigns to the right prospects, it may seem a bit daunting to be able to juggle all of those conversations effectively.

Using CoPilot AI to Manage Conversations at Scale

Not only can you perform outreach at scale with CoPilot AI, but we have tools that help you manage the conversations that spark from that outreach. Your reps don't need to spend time grappling for the right words for each prospect because CoPilot AI makes it easy to manage hundreds of conversations in less than an hour per day.

Smart Reply AI

Once your reps have gotten a few bites and are moving into the engagement phase, CoPilot AI's Smart Reply AI is kind of like having a conversation coach for effective communication. It helps them craft messages that perfectly match the tone, context, and style of each prospect. Whether you need to write in different languages, play around with a variety of templated messages, or create your own, Smart Reply AI can do it all. This means your team can have more natural, engaging conversations with prospects at scale.

Best Practice #5: Tracking Progress and Maintaining Data

At this point, your reps likely have a full sales pipeline of engaged prospects, they're booking consistent meetings, and have hopefully closed a few deals. As the sales leader, you're likely looking for ways to be able to accurately track your progress, forecast accurately, and manage your reps performance all in one place.

Using CoPilot AI to Track Progress & Maintain Data

CoPilot AI provides real-time insights into each rep's performance, helping you stay on top of progress and identify areas for improvement. With detailed analytics, you can make more accurate sales forecasts, ensuring you're always prepared.

Teams Inbox

CoPilot AI includes a centralized Teams Inbox for sales leaders. By tapping into the Teams Inbox, you can monitor prospecting conversations for each of your reps. This enables you to identify areas for improvement, track how your reps are progressing towards their quota, or step in and maintain their relationships while they're out on vacation.

Meetings Booked AI

Meetings Booked AI will pick up on the intent of your prospects to book a meeting based on their conversation with your reps. From there, your reps will be prompted to confirm if a meeting has been booked. If they select "yes", you will be able to see all of their meetings booked in one central location within CoPilot AI, making it easy to measure conversion rates and see if your reps are actively out there hustling!

CRM Integration

Having data in CoPilot AI is great, moving it to your CRM is even better. With our native CRM integration with Hubspot and Salesforce, you can log new conversations and meetings booked in your CRM, update your contacts based on their stage in the journey, and gain even greater visibility into your team's deal progress.

Conclusion

Using sales enablement tools like CoPilot AI has been shown to seriously level up your outbound sales strategy. It helps you find better leads, automate outreach at scale, engage more effectively, and better track your team's progress.

The world is moving quickly, and staying ahead means using the latest tech to its fullest. CoPilot AI turns old-school outbound tactics into a smart, data-driven strategy.

If you want to see how CoPilot AI can shake up your sales and push your business forward, why not book a free chat to talk about improving your outbound sales?