Marketing AI Institute | Blog

An AI Tool That Helps You Qualify and Nurture Every Lead

Written by Paul Roetzer | Apr 20, 2021 3:24:00 AM

Your marketing and sales teams spend a lot of time doing repetitive, tedious tasks in order to generate leads, nurture prospects, and book meetings. In the process, they often fail to adequately contact, nurture, and qualify all the leads coming in.

AI is here to help.

Exceed uses AI to understand conversations with leads and engage with each one, driving more pipeline by ensuring each lead is qualified and nurtured. The platform's conversational marketing assistant then automatically books meetings on your reps' calendars when a lead is qualified enough.

The tool acts as a multiplier for marketing and sales reps, enabling them to have conversations with leads at scale.

We spoke with Will Pearlman, Head of Marketing at Exceed.ai, to learn more.

In a single sentence or statement, describe your company.

Exceed.ai is a conversational AI marketing platform that helps you engage every lead and set more qualified meetings using authentic two-way email and chat conversations.

How does your company use artificial intelligence in its products?

Exceed.ai uses natural language understanding to understand how your leads, prospects, and customers are responding to your call to actions, questions, and replies.

We use machine learning and AI to optimize, humanize, and personalize each conversation to ensure more leads are pushed through the pipeline and qualified meetings are scheduled on your reps calendar.

What are the primary marketing use cases for your AI-powered solutions?

Exceed.ai is used for inbound lead follow-up, conversational nurturing (instead of one-way communications), lead qualification (MQL), lead scoring, appointment setting, up-selling free or existing customers, pre/post-event engagement, activation of cold/dormant or recently engaged leads, renewal automation, and converting website visitors to qualified leads.

What makes your AI-powered solution smarter than traditional approaches and products?

The Exceed.ai platform helps automate the tedious and time-consuming process of lead outreach and qualification by using AI to intelligently engage potential prospects and increase pipeline volume and quality. Our intelligent virtual assistant works 24/7 to reach out to every lead and have a personal conversation with them.

When a lead is qualified and ready to talk to a human, the AI assistant can schedule a meeting directly on your rep's calendar while updating your CRM and marketing automation platform with the latest information from the conversation. The AI assistant can even update your CRM with the latest status so you know if someone is on vacation, has a change in job title, leaves the company, is not the right contact, or asks to be contacted later—and it always remember to follow up at that later date. Companies like SugarCRM, Demandbase, monday.com, Hearst, and Comeet are all exceeding their goals and maximizing their revenue potential with Exceed.ai.

Who are your ideal customers in terms of company sizes and industries?

The companies that find the most value from Exceed are those with a wide top of the funnel and are having difficulty reaching out to all their prospects. Typically, companies use lead scoring to select which leads get engaged by a human or they hire more reps, but both of these solutions end up costing the company money and have diminishing returns since many leads end up overscored when they really aren't sales-ready, or underscored and end up never getting a follow-up. Companies with these types of pipelines will find the most value from Exceed.ai as it can engage all leads and identify the conversation-ready prospects.

Are there any minimum requirements for marketers to get value out of your AI-powered technology? (e.g. data, list size, etc.)

You need to have at least 150 inbound leads per month from your website, chat, trade shows, webinars, etc., or at least 500 leads in your database.

What do you see as the limitations of AI as it exists today?

While our AI can do quite a lot, it is not a replacement for human reps. Exceed allows humans for focus on what they do best and exponentially increases the volume of leads each rep can handle, but Exceed cannot understand every email. Sometimes when a lead replies Exceed will need to ask a human to approve a response or intervene when it is unsure of the best action to take.

What do you see as the future potential of AI in marketing ?

The future potential of AI in marketing is to create an augmented workforce—humans working alongside AI so that humans no longer need to do the repetitive and time-consuming tasks that, frankly, frustrate most marketers and sales reps, and can affect company morale. Additionally, Exceed can literally contact every lead and never gives up on them creating greater efficiency for all your marketing programs in a way that is infinitely scalable.

Any other thoughts on AI in marketing, or advice for marketers who are just starting with AI?

Conversational AI is the future of lead engagement. It is the next evolution of marketing and combining it with a well-structured database can become an incredibly powerful solution for any business that has a considered purchase. Exceed allows you to have a personal conversation with every lead and scale that to identify all the potential revenue opportunities for your business.