business development roles with successful, innovative companies. These roles equipped me with excellent resources for managing my “book of business” in my assigned industry and territory.
Conversely, I also worked with some companies whose business development strategies and tools were so weak that you won’t find them on my LinkedIn profile or resume. It’s best not to name or shame those businesses. But if I had had access to the AI sales, marketing, and workflow optimization tools we’ll explore in this article? Well, those sales experiences would have produced far better results for all involved.
Table of Contents
The Benefits of AI for Business Development
A sales mentor once told me that a key to succeeding in sales is to find ways to maximize the time you spend meeting with prospects, building relationships, and moving opportunities forward. They also said that it’s critical to find ways to delegate or streamline tasks that are mandatory yet of little or no value in helping me meet and exceed my quota.
For digitally-savvy salespeople, today’s AI tools are like virtual administrative assistants that can help with those tasks — for example, they can write emails, sales scripts, and social media posts. They can prioritize leads and even suggest topics for discussion.
So, how can adopting today’s AI tools boost your business development strategy and your team’s results? By streamlining administrative activities, improving forecast accuracy, and providing data-driven insights about what might lie ahead for your business, that’s how!
Measurable AI benefits for the biz dev profession include:
- Automating and minimizing administrative tasks like data entry, scheduling meetings, scheduling follow-ups, and capturing the details of phone calls and email conversations.
- Creating, managing, and updating revenue forecasts. Better visibility into deal closing timelines, and related value, scope and volume metrics enables better resource planning and target setting.
- Prioritizing leads based on historical interactions and engagement data.
- Using predictive analytics, which can make trend-based estimates on the likelihood and timing of leads converting to sales, and when a customer will be receptive to calls or meetings.
- Providing high-quality information for sales management regarding sales representative coaching requirements. If deals take much longer to close based on forecasts, reps might be sandbagging deals or need management guidance.
- Leveraging an AI-powered chat to interact with customers or prospects after business hours based on scripted messaging and rules.
How to Use AI for Business Development
I’ve sold quite a range of products and services throughout my sales career. It feels like I’ve sold everything from advertising to zebra printers during my time as a telesales rep.
To meet my quota in these roles, I had to make frequent judgment calls on what businesses fit the ideal customer profile for the products and services I was selling. As a business development representative for an enterprise software company, I had a geographic territory and business size parameters to work with.
Here are examples of important business development responsibilities, and how you can use AI tools in each area.
Improving Lead Scoring
Manually prioritizing what leads to contact first can be daunting. I often struggled whether I should contact leads from the biggest companies first regardless of the role of the contact. Or, maybe I should target executive level leads first, because they are more likely play a bigger role in decision making. I would feel much better to leave the decision to an AI bot, based on historical patterns.
How AI can help:
- Prioritize the leads and prospects in my territory prospects based on a company’s industry, size, annual revenue, and the prospect’s role.
- Spend more time connecting with influential business stakeholders and earn credibility so they would meet with me about my company’s products and services.
My favorite AI tool for this: HubSpot’s Predictive Lead Scoring.
Gathering Actionable Information
When I started working at an enterprise software company years ago, a senior business development colleague often discussed how important it was to identify white space opportunities in my territory. Doing so meant learning about the companies in my “book of business,” how they were managing their company data, and business challenges that motivated them to invest in what I was offering.
How AI can help:
- Find businesses that meet defined criteria like number of employees, industry, location and technology stack.
- Find out what kinds of technology a company uses now and who their competitors are.
- Uncover news stories about circumstances that can help me build credibility with a stakeholder, or to build a business case for investing in my solution.
Pro tip: Using the information I gathered, I could congratulate a lead on a promotion, or maybe they’ve acquired another company and need help integrating their systems across the larger organization.
My favorite AI tool for this: ChatSpot.
Enhancing Outbound Email Campaigns
Even after working on the sales team for a company for a few years, writing personalized, impactful emails that meet company messaging standards and are error-free is time-consuming at the best of times and bordering on monotonous. When I was prospecting to fill my calendar with meetings or inform my audience about the next event or promotion, using a well-written template was like outreach rocket fuel.
How AI can help:
- Email templates
- Generative AI prompt-based writing suggestions
- Social content generator
My favorite AI tool for this: Generative AI Content Assistants.
Testing and Tracking Email Campaigns
Most of my outbound emails were sent on a one-by-one basis as opposed to en masse. In many ways I liked this better because (much like with A/B testing) I could adjust the email copy and approach based on the replies I received (or lack thereof).
Read receipts have always been a pet peeve of mine, and I never accept them. Yet sending an email out without knowing if a prospect opens it and clicks on the links I sent can be demoralizing.
How AI can help:
- A subtle way of detecting when a prospect or customer opens and acts on your email is a much more elegant way to do business.
- Seeing when they open the email, and what they react to is a great motivator, and helps you know what to follow-up with them about.
My favorite tool for this: Free email tracking software from HubSpot.
Capturing Meetings via AI-Enabled Transcription
Retaining comprehensive records of histories and sharing discussion details with colleagues across sales, product management, and marketing teams is a great way to help the organization better understand customer needs and how to overcome objections that arise during the sales process.
How AI can help:
- Using online meeting and call recording software with AI-enabled transcription tools is a great resource for sales coaching and gathering support for key opportunities.
My favorite AI tool for this: I used call tracking software as an inside sales representative, and it was a great way of making calls with the CRM-informed context of previous interactions with leads and contacts. The ability to capture call audio and transcriptions was a great way to bring colleagues from roles like pre-sales, professional services, and training up to speed on customer needs.
Providing Accurate Information to Prospects with AI Summarizations
I lost count of the number of times a prospect used the common sales objection “Just send me some information.”
I would always take the time to qualify specifically what kind of information would be relevant to their needs. And like a pro, I did my best to build rapport and keep the conversation going. Yet, qualifying the kind of information that would interest them tended to produce better results than sending a bunch of generic links and attachments.
How AI can help:
- An AI-enhanced sales platform can help a business development executive (BDE) to distill blogs, sell sheets and articles down into digestible insights and highlight benefits and value drivers.
Pro tip: I often repurposed the content as social media posts, prospect emails and presentation talking points. When I document conversations in CRM, I use HubSpot AI to capture the most salient points of email threads to keep conversations moving forward. If you’ve read a few of the blog posts I’ve written, you may recognize that brevity is not my strong suit. Distilling detailed notes, email threads, and other curated content into a more concise format is invaluable to me as a resource.
My favorite AI tool for this: AI Summarization.
Enhancing Sales Forecasting Intelligence
For a good portion of my sales career, I was a public sector account manager. It was often challenging to forecast when a deal would close relative to government fiscal years and slow procurement processes. Happily, there are now tools out there that use predictive artificial intelligence to project future sales based on closed won deals in the current period.
How AI can help:
- Provided you have reliable, accurate forecasting data requires machine learning to create a data-driven forecast for your team. Of course, forecast projections are estimates only based on trends, and (as with many aspects of sales) are not a guarantee of future results.
- My own forecasting feels more like guesstimating when a deal will close. Delegating this process to AI takes the pressure off my shoulders, and leverages historical data for more accurate predictions.
My favorite forecasting tool is: HubSpot’s AI forecasting.
Enhancing Communication with AI Chatbots
As an inside sales rep early in my career, I interacted with prospects from all over the world, often after my local business hours. There are many scenarios where delegating online conversations to a chatbot is more efficient than having sales agents interact with prospects live on your website or social media channels.
How AI can help:
- Handling customer and prospect inquiries after hours, during meetings, or when reps are busy.
- Scheduling appointments and routing leads to reps based on their territory, named accounts, and product or service specialization.
- Chatbots always adhere to their programming rules and workflows. When a conversation veers outside of their comfort level, they can escalate to a live agent.
My favorite AI tool for this: HubSpot Customer Chatbot.
Building Conversation Intelligence
Live voice or video sales conversations – much like live theater or television – can be unpredictable. Phone calls don’t offer body language cues to convey a customer’s state of mind, especially if their tone seems calm and measured.
Sometimes, customers use words from conversations with your competitors that a sales rep may not recognize. In other cases, prospects are using keywords about pain points or that signal they are ready to buy that a sales rep doesn’t pick up on.
How AI can help:
- Sales managers and trainers can use the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of HubSpot Sales to analyze customer conversations and enrich coaching sessions.
My favorite AI tool for this: Conversational Intelligence.
Generating Social Media Content
Survey data from Hubspot’s 2024 Social Media Trends Report found that 64% of marketers are concerned that creating social media content with generative AI can harm their brand’s reputation. Yet 87% of respondents said using AI is crucial to social media success in 2024, and 71% said they use AI tools (including generative AI tools) for social media posts. The same number of respondents say it outperforms human content.
How AI can help:
- Giving your sales team permission to use Generative AI tools to create custom social media posts is an effective way to empower them to spend less time thinking about what to post on social media and more time with customers.
My favorite AI tool for this: HubSpot Social Caption Generator.
Automating Workflows and Integrations
Can you envision a workflow rule where a SaaS deal is closed in a company’s CRM, and it triggers a task in the customer success onboarding software to follow up with the customer for onboarding support? Or if a trial request CTA link is clicked in an email, it schedules a series of nurturing emails and sales follow-up?
How AI can help:
- Sales process automation frees up salespeople from administrative tasks so they can increase customer facetime. These kinds of integrated workflows can not only streamline internal processes but guarantee every lead and customer are nurtured appropriately.
My favorite AI tool for this: HubSpot’s Sales Automation tools.
Testing It Out
Now that we’ve explored AI can level up your business development strategy, let’s make these tips with a realistic scenario.
Imagine you are the VP of Sales at a software as a service (SaaS) provider called SleekRidez that caters to exotic car dealerships. You manage a remote worldwide sales team, and you want to harness the expertise of your best representatives to help new salespeople ramp up faster and achieve better results.
Where AI Would Help This Business
Account Targeting and Analyzing Audience Data
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the importance of understanding your audience, identifying buying signals, and targeting the right accounts and opportunities.
With a tool like 6Sense Revenue AI for Marketing, SleekRidez could enrich the data they have about exotic car dealers, and discover insights to boost online form submissions.
Conversation Intelligence
A tool like HubSpot’s Conversation Intelligence can help exotic car dealerships better understand their customers’ needs and preferences. By analyzing sales conversations, the tool can identify common themes and pain points, allowing dealerships to tailor their sales pitches more effectively.
Create Personalized Emails
Email templates like HubSpot’s can help exotic car dealerships create personalized emails that are more likely to be opened and read by potential customers. The templates can be customized with the dealership’s branding and messaging, and they can include images and videos to make them more engaging.
Online Meeting Recording and Transcripts
Online meeting recording and transcripts tools can help exotic car dealerships capture and review sales conversations. This can be helpful for training new salespeople, and it can also be used to identify areas for improvement.
AI Website Chatbots
Drift’s Conversational AI chatbots can help exotic car dealerships answer questions and schedule appointments with potential customers 24/7.
Their algorithm analyzes customer conversations and suggests key topics buyers are asking about, which can gather critical information when human sales reps engage prospects in their territory. This can help dealerships generate more leads and close more sales.
Drift can recognize visitors online from target accounts, enabling sales reps to impress high-value customers. Drift’s conversational bots can also qualify leads, collect contact information, and book meetings.
Take Your Business Development Strategy to New Heights
My experiences as a business development executive weren’t nearly as automated or digitally enabled as the business growth strategy above. I was surprised that when I came up with the idea for the fictitious company and their business model, I could see clearly how the AI tools I’ve listed here can provide real value.
The business development landscape is always changing, and currently, AI is set to impact how we perform our daily tasks and responsibilities. With various AI tools helping to bear some of the administrative weight — and sometimes even unlocking new insights to act on — you can spend less time at your desk and more time implementing your strategy in the real world.