How to Write AI Cold Emails for B2B in 2024
The integration of AI messaging in Response AI has revolutionized the landscape of B2B sales, especially in the cult-outreach space. This guide delves deep into the transformative role of AI in enhancing sales strategies, specifically focusing on using AI for B2B Sales & lead gen. We will explore how AI not only simplifies but also amplifies every step of the B2B sales process, particularly for Cold Email.
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The Evolution of AI in B2B Sales
Good to see you, reader!
We'll start off by saying, the emergence of AI in B2B sales is a game-changer & if you're going into 2024 without an AI Playbook, you're going to get lapped.
McKinsey & Company’s research highlights AI's potential in startup/agency growth, sales & productivity. AI-driven audience targeting and segmentation allow for the creation of highly personalized outreach strategies, offering sales teams insights into customer behavior, persona, and purchase history. With Response AI for example, you're able to AI-scrape thousands of data-points on your prospects in seconds to generate AI icebreakers & cold sales emails.
Ideally, by 2024, your B2B sales playbook should take advantage of AI so you can save time & cut through the noise. Copy-paste emails just aren't going to cut it anymore.
Some of our favorite data-points to mention in your outbound sales playbook in B2B:
- Recent funding news
- Recent events the company are running
- Recent product updates
- HQ Location changes
With Response, you can use AI to run your B2B AI Outbound Playbook without investing the time into researching prospects manually & writing emails.
Remember that what 99% of salespeople will do in Cold Email is 'personalize' but with something COMPLETELY irrelevant to the prospect & the sale itself:
"Hey Phil! I noticed you live in Chicago! Go Chicago Bulls! We specialize in SEO services for Roofing Companies..."
Look. It's a quaint & charming way of reaching out to someone, but this is B2B Outbound Sales. Plus, you leveraged AI but in the laziest way. Anyone can find out in a heartbeat that the prospect lives in Chicago. But who can find out that Phil's company recently closed a Series B Funding Round for $12M?
Response AI can do this for you with the AI Cold Email Engine.
AI Cold Email Sales: A Paradigm Shift
Incorporating AI in lead generation has shifted traditional sales roles, especially SDRs, BDRs & founder-led sales motions. AI tools can identify & enrich leads, assisting in list building & scoring the quality of those leads, & as we discussed earlier, you can use AI to automate personalized email copywriting.
Obviously, the time-save aspect is crucial especially as we enter a 'scale' economy in Cold Outreach: the more prospects you reach out to, the more meetings you get. The more meetings you get, the more sales you make. Simple.
So if you need any reason to implement AI in your outbound prospecting, it should be speed-to-sale. You're going to get beaten by teams that have a faster speed-to-sale (because they're leveraging AI.)
Sales reps from Response AI (before we built the Cold Email AI engine) were spending 10 minutes crafting 'the perfect email' for B2B prospecting. Over the span of 1,000 leads, 10 minutes adds up.
Now, we spend less than 10 seconds personalizing a cold email.
Building an AI-Driven Sales Team
A modern AI-enabled B2B sales team should include:
- AI Lead Generation Specialist: Focuses on utilizing AI for identifying and researching leads, and automating lead nurturing processes. This can be done by any members of the team with Response AI - which literally finds, scrapes & writes AI cold emails for your prospects at scale, on auto-pilot.
- Sales Development Representatives (SDRs): Handle human-centric tasks like direct outreach and content creation for platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram & TikTok (& yes, your B2B prospects really are on TikTok. You just need one good video to go semi-viral, & you'll experience a flood of leads.)
- Creative Copywriter: Works on crafting core email sequences and other marketing materials, which can be further personalized by AI. As stated above, there are dozens of tools that help you with this, like Response & Clay. Ideally you want an outbound sequence of steps + follow-ups written entirely by AI, which focuses on
The craziest thing about using AI to write cold emails: it literally crafts & sends better emails than your top sales rep could research, in a fraction of the time. Here are some cold emails, written entirely by Response AI's cold email engine:
"I noticed your recent news on securing a $9M Series A funding from top B2B SaaS investors! Impressive accomplishment. Looking forward to seeing the growth and impact this investment will bring to your platform." - written for Polar Analytics
"I noticed your recent blog post on the GRID Data Platform and found it informative. It's great to see a company focused on providing game developers with complete tech infrastructure and game data strategies.
Keep up the excellent work!" - written for GRID eSports
"Just read the news that EdgeTier recently raised €6M in a Series A round led by Smedvig Capital. Impressive achievement to accelerate your vision for the future of Customer Engagement!" - written for Edge Tier
Now you'll see that this is a lot better than telling Phil that you support the Chicago Bulls.
The Art of Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Using AI
Defining a precise ICP is obviously critical, or else you're just firing bullets in hopes of hitting some kind of target.
In 2024, you're going to waste a lot of time defining ICPs if you don't leverage AI.
Right now, it can be as simple as asking ChatGPT to define a customer profile for you, based on a few key prompts like:
- Your product/service & what it does
- The timeframe for delivering your service
- Who your service is for
- Your favorite kinds of customers
- Companies you've already worked with.
Then, you just have to ask ChatGPT to build an ICP based on this information. It'll spit out a near-perfect avatar for your next outbound AI Cold Email campaign.
Here's how I'd do this...
Ask ChatGPT:
"Define my ideal customer profile based upon these features of my product & companies I have worked with:
My product is a B2B AI-enrichment platform that helps salespeople, agency owners & startup founders craft unbeatable cold emails with AI. We've worked with Ogilvy, King Kong Agency & more.
Our favorite customers are people with big teams. Take your time on crafting the perfect ICP for me.
Concluding thoughts
Embracing AI in B2B sales offers a plethora of benefits, from enhanced lead generation to more effective customer engagement and closing deals, & Response AI can help guide you through this process. If you're not using B2B AI tools in 2024, you're going to be left behind.
We now have a clear way of identifying our ICP, crafting high-leverage AI cold emails with the Cold Email Engine, & a way of measuring success of our sales teams based on AI-driven insights. Now let's get to work!
The Evolution of AI in B2B Sales
Good to see you, reader!
We'll start off by saying, the emergence of AI in B2B sales is a game-changer & if you're going into 2024 without an AI Playbook, you're going to get lapped.
McKinsey & Company’s research highlights AI's potential in startup/agency growth, sales & productivity. AI-driven audience targeting and segmentation allow for the creation of highly personalized outreach strategies, offering sales teams insights into customer behavior, persona, and purchase history. With Response AI for example, you're able to AI-scrape thousands of data-points on your prospects in seconds to generate AI icebreakers & cold sales emails.
Ideally, by 2024, your B2B sales playbook should take advantage of AI so you can save time & cut through the noise. Copy-paste emails just aren't going to cut it anymore.
Some of our favorite data-points to mention in your outbound sales playbook in B2B:
- Recent funding news
- Recent events the company are running
- Recent product updates
- HQ Location changes
With Response, you can use AI to run your B2B AI Outbound Playbook without investing the time into researching prospects manually & writing emails.
Remember that what 99% of salespeople will do in Cold Email is 'personalize' but with something COMPLETELY irrelevant to the prospect & the sale itself:
"Hey Phil! I noticed you live in Chicago! Go Chicago Bulls! We specialize in SEO services for Roofing Companies..."
Look. It's a quaint & charming way of reaching out to someone, but this is B2B Outbound Sales. Plus, you leveraged AI but in the laziest way. Anyone can find out in a heartbeat that the prospect lives in Chicago. But who can find out that Phil's company recently closed a Series B Funding Round for $12M?
Response AI can do this for you with the AI Cold Email Engine.
AI Cold Email Sales: A Paradigm Shift
Incorporating AI in lead generation has shifted traditional sales roles, especially SDRs, BDRs & founder-led sales motions. AI tools can identify & enrich leads, assisting in list building & scoring the quality of those leads, & as we discussed earlier, you can use AI to automate personalized email copywriting.
Obviously, the time-save aspect is crucial especially as we enter a 'scale' economy in Cold Outreach: the more prospects you reach out to, the more meetings you get. The more meetings you get, the more sales you make. Simple.
So if you need any reason to implement AI in your outbound prospecting, it should be speed-to-sale. You're going to get beaten by teams that have a faster speed-to-sale (because they're leveraging AI.)
Sales reps from Response AI (before we built the Cold Email AI engine) were spending 10 minutes crafting 'the perfect email' for B2B prospecting. Over the span of 1,000 leads, 10 minutes adds up.
Now, we spend less than 10 seconds personalizing a cold email.
Building an AI-Driven Sales Team
A modern AI-enabled B2B sales team should include:
- AI Lead Generation Specialist: Focuses on utilizing AI for identifying and researching leads, and automating lead nurturing processes. This can be done by any members of the team with Response AI - which literally finds, scrapes & writes AI cold emails for your prospects at scale, on auto-pilot.
- Sales Development Representatives (SDRs): Handle human-centric tasks like direct outreach and content creation for platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram & TikTok (& yes, your B2B prospects really are on TikTok. You just need one good video to go semi-viral, & you'll experience a flood of leads.)
- Creative Copywriter: Works on crafting core email sequences and other marketing materials, which can be further personalized by AI. As stated above, there are dozens of tools that help you with this, like Response & Clay. Ideally you want an outbound sequence of steps + follow-ups written entirely by AI, which focuses on
The craziest thing about using AI to write cold emails: it literally crafts & sends better emails than your top sales rep could research, in a fraction of the time. Here are some cold emails, written entirely by Response AI's cold email engine:
"I noticed your recent news on securing a $9M Series A funding from top B2B SaaS investors! Impressive accomplishment. Looking forward to seeing the growth and impact this investment will bring to your platform." - written for Polar Analytics
"I noticed your recent blog post on the GRID Data Platform and found it informative. It's great to see a company focused on providing game developers with complete tech infrastructure and game data strategies.
Keep up the excellent work!" - written for GRID eSports
"Just read the news that EdgeTier recently raised €6M in a Series A round led by Smedvig Capital. Impressive achievement to accelerate your vision for the future of Customer Engagement!" - written for Edge Tier
Now you'll see that this is a lot better than telling Phil that you support the Chicago Bulls.
The Art of Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Using AI
Defining a precise ICP is obviously critical, or else you're just firing bullets in hopes of hitting some kind of target.
In 2024, you're going to waste a lot of time defining ICPs if you don't leverage AI.
Right now, it can be as simple as asking ChatGPT to define a customer profile for you, based on a few key prompts like:
- Your product/service & what it does
- The timeframe for delivering your service
- Who your service is for
- Your favorite kinds of customers
- Companies you've already worked with.
Then, you just have to ask ChatGPT to build an ICP based on this information. It'll spit out a near-perfect avatar for your next outbound AI Cold Email campaign.
Here's how I'd do this...
Ask ChatGPT:
"Define my ideal customer profile based upon these features of my product & companies I have worked with:
My product is a B2B AI-enrichment platform that helps salespeople, agency owners & startup founders craft unbeatable cold emails with AI. We've worked with Ogilvy, King Kong Agency & more.
Our favorite customers are people with big teams. Take your time on crafting the perfect ICP for me.
Concluding thoughts
Embracing AI in B2B sales offers a plethora of benefits, from enhanced lead generation to more effective customer engagement and closing deals, & Response AI can help guide you through this process. If you're not using B2B AI tools in 2024, you're going to be left behind.
We now have a clear way of identifying our ICP, crafting high-leverage AI cold emails with the Cold Email Engine, & a way of measuring success of our sales teams based on AI-driven insights. Now let's get to work!