AI cold calling: Features, benefits & top tools

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, more and more AI-powered solutions are coming to market. Increasingly, sales teams are using AI to accelerate their workflows and prospect more effectively. For the purposes of this piece, we’ll explore how reps are using artificial intelligence to improve cold calling outcomes.

What is AI cold calling?

AI cold calling refers to the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the process of making unsolicited phone calls to prospects and clients. Using this approach, AI algorithms make calls to individuals or businesses without prior contact or permission with the goal of initiating sales conversations, gathering information, or scheduling appointments.

At LeadIQ, we believe that most sales prospects don’t want to talk to an AI. They want to feel valued and have a personalized engagement — which is doubly true if you’re selling to executives or leaders in their fields.

While you can use AI to actually call customers on your behalf, we advise against it. To make the most out of AI cold calling technology, we recommend looking at it as another tool in your tech stack — one that you can use to optimize and improve your existing cold calling processes.

Features and functions of AI cold calling technology

Even if you don’t use AI to make cold calls on your behalf, the technology can still transform your prospecting workflows. You can use AI cold calling tools for:

• Prospect identification and research. By analyzing vast amounts of data rapidly, AI cold calling tools can identify potential prospects based on criteria such as demographics, past interactions, and online behavior. After potential prospects have been identified, you can use AI to research their pain points and challenges. As an example, you can leverage LeadIQ’s AI capabilities to quickly learn about your prospects before calling them, making it that much easier to personalize the call.

• Automating sales coaching. AI for cold calling can provide real-time feedback to sales representatives during calls, offering suggestions for improving communication techniques, overcoming objections, and highlighting successful strategies. Additionally, the technology can analyze call recordings and performance metrics to identify areas of improvement and automatically deliver targeted coaching materials or training modules to sales teams.

• Automating lead qualification. Utilizing machine learning, AI cold calling can automatically qualify leads based on predefined criteria, such as budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT). The technology can analyze conversation patterns, tone of voice, and responses to questions to determine the likelihood of a lead converting into a sale, enabling sales teams to prioritize their cold calling efforts more effectively.

• Surfacing cold call data insights. AI can analyze data collected from cold calling campaigns — like call duration, conversion rates, and reasons for rejection — to uncover patterns and trends that can help inform future strategies. It can identify which approaches are most successful with specific audience segments, optimize script language and structure, and provide actionable insights to improve overall campaign performance.

Benefits of AI for cold calling

From increasing rep productivity and increasing consistency to improving sales playbook adoption and decreasing manual tasks via automation, AI cold calling delivers a ton of benefits to sales teams.

Increase productivity using AI cold calling

AI cold calling can significantly boost productivity by automating repetitive tasks — like researching prospects and updating CRMs. With AI handling these routine activities, sales reps can focus more time and energy on engaging with prospects, building relationships, and closing deals. With an AI-enhanced prospecting hub, sales teams can reach more potential customers faster, ultimately increasing overall sales effectiveness. 

Increase consistency across the sales team

AI cold calling ensures consistency in messaging and approach across the entire sales team. By using predefined scripts and automated coaching functionality, AI helps standardize communication strategies and ensures that all reps convey the company’s value proposition and key selling points consistently. This consistency builds trust and credibility with prospects, minimizing the risk of miscommunication or deviation from the sales strategy, which leads to more predictable sales outcomes.

Increase sales playbook adoption

AI cold calling accelerates the adoption of sales playbooks by providing real-time guidance and support to sales representatives during calls. With AI-powered tools offering in-the-moment suggestions, reminders, and prompts based on best practices and playbook guidelines, sales teams are more likely to adhere to established processes and strategies. This leads to a higher adoption rate of sales playbooks, which also improves alignment with organizational goals.

Decrease manual tasks using AI cold calling

By automating manual tasks such as data entry, follow-up scheduling, and prospect research, AI cold calling reduces the administrative burden on sales reps. This frees up valuable time that can be redirected toward revenue-generating activities like prospecting, nurturing leads, and closing deals. With AI handling these time-consuming tasks efficiently and accurately, sales teams can operate more effectively while minimizing errors and focusing more on activities that directly contribute to sales growth. 

Top AI cold calling software & technology (for teams of all sizes)

Over the last year, there’s been no shortage of AI cold calling technology that’s made it to market. Unfortunately, you can’t just deploy any AI cold calling solution and expect fantastic outcomes. For the best results, you need to understand your prospects and existing sales processes as thoroughly as you can before implementing the technology. If, for example, your team doesn’t know how to properly use AI tools or a prospect feels that it is creepy or invasive, AI cold calling software can actually end up doing more harm than good.

Once you’ve figured out you plan to use AI for cold calling tools to help your team sell more, it’s time to research your options and pick a solution that enables reps to win more business. To make that process easier, we’ve compiled a list of some of the top-performing AI cold calling tools on the market today. 

Best AI cold calling software [June 2024]

Aircall AI

Aircall is a cloud-based phone system for businesses offering call management features and CRM integrations. The company’s AI Add-on delivers several benefits to sales teams, including AI-generated call summaries, automatic key topic recognition and CRM logging, sentiment analysis, and more.

Pricing: Starts at $9/user/month on top of $30/user/month for regular license

Gong

Gong is a revenue intelligence platform that uses AI to analyze sales conversations and provide insights to improve sales performance. With Gong AI, sales teams get access to models that are trained on high-quality sales data. Gong’s AI tools automatically extract insights from customer interactions, including pain points and next steps. It also enables reps to track trends and concepts — not just keywords.

Pricing: Starts at $5,000 plus $1,600/user/year (source)

LeadIQ Scribe

LeadIQ Scribe is a generative AI-powered writing and research tool that enables reps to personalize outreach in seconds. Using Scribe, reps can automatically surface insights based on a prospect’s LinkedIn activity, education, current events, and more. While this can help personalize written messages, it can also help inform cold calling approaches. And the best part? Scribe learns over time; the more you use it, the more helpful it becomes.

Pricing: Starts at $0/user/month

Zoom’s AI Companion

Zoom’s AI Companion is an assistant that helps reps work more productively inside Zoom. In addition to helping draft emails and chat messages, AI Companion can rapidly summarize meetings and chat threads, enabling you to get up to speed with what’s happening quickly. After calls wrap up, the AI provides post-call summaries so reps can stay in the moment and focus on the conversation instead of being distracted by taking notes.

Pricing: Starts at $13.32/user/month

Trellus

Trellus is an AI-powered auto-dialing solution that enables reps to make more cold calls every day. The platform instantly connects reps with prospects whenever they pick up, and it also provides AI-generated research that helps reps personalize each engagement. Reps can also leverage Trellus’ real-time suggestions when they’re on the phone to enjoy more productive conversations.

Pricing: Starts at $0/user/month

Kixie

Kixie is a sales intelligence platform that recently added AI-driven conversation insights to its product. Using AI, Kixie users benefit from automatic call summaries synced to their CRM, an AI sales coach that provides personalized insights for every rep, and automatic keyword tracking and reporting. Altogether, these features help sales teams work more efficiently. 

Pricing: Pricing information not publicly available; AI features are new

Best practices for implementing AI cold calling

In an effort to hit their numbers faster, sales teams are often eager to adopt new tools and technologies without a comprehensive strategy about how they’re going to put them to use. While it’s always tempting to test the shiny new object as quickly as possible, failing to have a plan can lead to unintended consequences.

For example, many sales teams forget to consider how AI tools might impact a prospect’s perception of an engagement. Do you think most folks are excited to talk to an AI? Without considering how AI cold calling tools might impact the customer experience, reps risk alienating prospects or creating barriers to meaningful engagement — making it that much harder to hit their numbers.

As such, it’s important for sales teams to focus on both internal benefits and the needs and expectations of their prospects whenever they’re adopting new tools. By doing so, they can increase the chances the tools they end up implementing improve sales processes — ultimately leading to better business outcomes.

As you begin exploring AI cold calling technologies, keep these best practices in mind to ensure the tools help you deliver better experiences for prospects and customers.

1. Understand your needs & goals

Before implementing AI for cold calling, it’s critical to understand your sales team’s needs and goals. Take time to assess current pain points in your sales processes and identify specific objectives you aim to achieve with AI. Whether it’s increasing productivity, improving lead qualification, or enhancing customer engagement, understanding your goals ensures that that AI solution you ultimately select aligns with your objectives. 

By understanding your goals up front, you can effectively evaluate AI options and ultimately select the tool that meets your needs most thoroughly.

2. Learn how you can use AI for cold calling planning

To make the most out of your investment in AI cold calling, spend time understanding the various ways you can use the technology to improve your cold calling processes. Unless you’re keen on the idea of having an artificial intelligence directly engage with your prospects, you may want to use the technology to improve lead qualification, accelerate your research, and surface cold call data insights. 

The more familiar you are with the myriad ways you can use AI cold calling tools in your day-to-day workflows, the easier it will be to create more targeted, efficient, and successful cold calling campaigns.

3. Know how to evaluate AI cold calling technologies to choose the right tool for you

Whenever you’re considering new technologies, you need to know how to evaluate different solutions so you end up with a tool that meets your needs. Start by defining clear criteria based on your objectives. For example, you might want a tool that’s easy to use and integrates with the other tools in your prospecting hub to reduce context switching. 

As you begin searching for AI cold calling tools, thoroughly research your options, request demos of appealing solutions, and spin up free trials to test the tools in action. After those trials wrap up, gather feedback from your reps to make an informed decision. 

4. Don’t do too much too fast

Ready to roll out AI cold calling tools? Make sure you don’t rush into doing too much too fast. For the best results, start by identifying a specific area or process where AI can add value and focus on implementing it effectively. Avoid overwhelming your team with multiple changes at the same time, which can lead to confusion, frustration, and resistance. 

Instead, focus on incremental improvements and allow time for adjustment and optimization. For example, you might want to begin your journey with AI by using it to learn more about your prospects in less time.

Analyze effectiveness of AI cold calling techniques and technologies

When you start playing around with AI for cold calling, monitor things like conversion rates, lead quality, and sales cycle timelines to gauge the effectiveness of the technology. By tracking these metrics, you can determine the ROI of your AI investments and identify areas for optimization. While you’re at it, solicit feedback from sales teams and prospects to learn valuable insights into the impact of AI on engagement levels and customer satisfaction. Use that data to figure out what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your approach accordingly.

Use LeadIQ to enhance your AI cold calling technologies & techniques!

If you’re looking to incorporate AI into your cold calling processes, LeadIQ can help.

Our purpose-built prospecting hub includes AI-enhanced features that help sales reps cover more ground faster. Using LeadIQ, you can accelerate prospect research and quickly get the insights you need to personalize cold calls — making it that much easier to have relevant, engaging conversations with potential customers at the right times.

To learn more about how LeadIQ’s can transform your organization’s approach to cold calling, enabling you to utilize AI cold calling technologies and techniques, take our platform for a test drive today.