When done well, personalization in B2B sales conversations is worth the effort: depending on your industry, personalization can lift your revenue by up to 25%.
And no technology is better at creating personalized sales at scale than AI. Here’s why:
- Enhanced Productivity: AI saves time by combining your insights with AI leads to a 66% increase in productivity.
- Increased Revenue Potential: 83% of sales teams using AI report revenue growth.
- Better Conversion Rates: Sellers using AI can drive a 30% increase in conversion rates.
But like any tool, AI-powered personalization only works when it’s used properly. Consider the lousy AI usage you’ve probably seen in your own inbox or social feeds: robotic, impersonal messaging or attempts at personalized sales that don’t resonate due to lack of research.
This might look familiar:
- “I’m impressed with the work you’re doing at [insert company]!”
- “In the fast-paced world of [your industry] …”
Generic flattery and nothing-burger phrases are obvious examples of what not to do. Here’s how to identify the data that ramps up personalization in sales — and how to leverage AI — to make your sales outreach stand out and close more deals.
Sales Personalization in Action: Definitions, Examples
Let’s take a moment to talk about what sales personalization is, and what good personalized sales looks like.
Sales personalization is the practice of crafting outreach and messaging that speaks directly to your prospect’s unique business goals, challenges, and context, rather than using one-size-fits-all messaging.
It all comes down to knowing who your potential customer is, what they’re up to, and what they need. And having the right GTM intelligence means you can steer clear of generic “personalization” and immediately cut to the heart of the matter.
Instead of the city your prospect lives in, their alma mater, or other arbitrary factors, personalized messaging in sales is about tailoring your outreach to resonate with their specific needs, challenges, or interests.
Think more along the lines of:
- “I saw [company] recently announced plans to …”
- “I noticed you’ve been actively hiring and expanding your team …”
- “Since you use [technology 1] and [technology 2] to score and route leads …”
Connecting the dots from there to how your solution can help is straightforward. Keep things specific and relevant to their work — no need to get overly familiar.
Now that we’ve established what good personalization looks like, let’s explore some common data points that will help you get there.
Data to Fuel Personalized Sales Conversations
Before we get into how to bring it all together into a powerfully personalized message, let’s first level-set on what information makes for more effective personalization in sales. Here are our favorite insights and signals.
Organizational Context
Knowing how a contact fits within a company’s buying group informs how you’ll engage them. And it grants a better understanding of how they might use your product or service.
You can discover this by examining company org charts — or do one better by enlisting an AI tool to help. For instance, ZoomInfo Copilot identifies entire buying groups, pinpointing the right contacts based on roles, departments, and management levels. This way, you can personalize your conversation based on where your contact falls within that buying group.
Company News Signals
Company-level insights reveal what’s most important to your prospect’s organization. Look for information that goes beyond traditional firmographics or confirmation of your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Signals generated by a target company’s recent news, including hiring, financing, and product releases, keeps you up to date on their most important priorities. Weave this information into your sales conversations to present a well-informed impression that will keep prospects engaged.
Research things like:
Earnings Calls:
Publicly traded companies have regular, mandatory earnings reports. These disclosures and briefings are a gold mine of valuable signals that can inform personalized sales, including:
- Loans or liens
- M&A
- Stock sales
- Spending
- Planned investments
Awards and Recognition
Know when a company or product gets formal recognition — including placement on “Best” and “Top” lists — to provide fodder for relevant conversation. Look out for awards and placements that dovetail nicely with your core offering.
Podcast Mentions:
When a contact or key member of the buying group makes a guest appearance in a media interview or podcast episode, they’re likely to talk about business — which means potentially disclosing ideas or initiatives that weren’t on your radar. Use these discussions to create a current picture of what your target customer cares about and is planning for.
Projects:
News on recent projects — whether planned, currently in-flight, or just completed — gives you extra insights you can use for personalized sales outreach to a target account.
Intent Signals
Buyer intent is one of the most powerful signals you can use for personalization — with it, you can speak to your customer’s most pressing current needs. Intent data reveals what prospect accounts have recently researched, including:
- Product reviews
- Infographics and blogs
- Product comparisons
- Case studies
Intent spikes around a certain topic cluster are useful for personalization. But use those insights carefully — you’ll want to weave them naturally into conversation to avoid sounding creepy.
“It’s never a good idea to directly mention that you are aware of what your prospect is searching for, but rather to make them feel like there’s some kind of serendipity with your call. As if they were looking for information about a specific need, and your solution just fell into their lap,” says Will Battle, a ZoomInfo SDR.
Using AI to Personalize Sales Outreach
You have to bring all these data points together to know who your customer is and what they want — the crux of perfectly personalized sales outreach.
This is where AI comes back into the picture. The more accurate and informative the prompts you feed to generative AI are, the better your results will be. Doing the research up front means you’ll spend less time fighting the bot for the perfect messaging and more time actually talking with your customers.
Nail down an effective prompt template that you can plug data into, and you’ve now got an operation for personalizing your sales messaging at scale.
Sounds great, right? But there’s still one problem left to solve: salespeople are shorter on time than ever before. Recent Salesforce research states that sales pros spend 70% of their time on non-selling activities — and almost 10% of their total time is spent on research.
The key is to get all those essential data points for your personalization, fast. Sound impossible?
We’ve got another AI solution to suggest.
Level Up Your AI: ZoomInfo Copilot
Instead of hunting data from multiple sources and tossing it into generative AI to get your personalized message, use AI that brings those data points directly to you — and then helps you tailor your messaging based on all that information.
Solutions like ZoomInfo Copilot were purpose-built for these use cases. Copilot removes the extra legwork from doing research and bringing it together into customized messages.
With Copilot, intent data, buying group information, and other signals like company news all get pushed directly to the top of a dashboard where best-fit accounts live.
From there you can use Copilot’s generative AI chat to combine those data points and generate messaging for your next conversations.
For instance: Say you’re a rep who’s about to have another chat with a prospect you’ve already spoken to. You can use Copilot Chat to pinpoint what new signals associated with their account have cropped up since your last interaction. This ensures you’ll be up-to-date on what’s top of mind for them.
Finding, tracking, and using all of the buying signals relevant to your customer used to be a complex, time-consuming process involving multiple software dashboards. Not to mention the heroic effort to transform those signals into personalized messages.
Now, with AI-powered technology, you can combine hundreds of signals instantaneously to highlight the most important information you need to engage with your customers effectively. AI takes the gruntwork out of personalization so you have more time to focus on what you do best — building connections and making deals.
GTM Intelligence: The Key to Sales Personalization at Scale
With a rise in AI agents and advanced machine learning roiling the future of sales, it’s clear that personalization is the key to separating your GTM team from the competition.
And with ZoomInfo’s GTM intelligence platform, taking your personalization to the next level has never been easier.
By combining real-time buying signals, our constantly growing B2B data foundation, cutting-edge AI capabilities, and a constellation of partners and integrations, ZoomInfo empowers your team to deliver personalization effortlessly and at scale.
Ready to see it in action? Learn more about how ZoomInfo Copilot can transform your sales personalization strategies today.