Discover the blended AI workflow for sales: how an AI sales agent handles inbound leads from interception to qualification, ensuring a perfect handoff to your human sales team for closing deals. Learn to optimize your sales funnel and empower your team.
If you're just joining us, welcome! This is the next installment in our series, which recaps a recent webinar on inbound sales optimization. Our discussion features two industry experts: Frank Sondors, the founder of Salesforge, a company that uses AI to build sales pipelines, and Dom Chiarenza, the Head of Sales here at SalesApe. SalesApe offers an AI-powered solution that acts as a virtual sales agent, handling inbound leads to qualify them, answer questions, and seamlessly hand off qualified prospects to a human sales team.
So far, we've discussed the critical importance of speed to lead, the ideal response times for different industries, and the common human-centric bottlenecks that prevent businesses from achieving optimal efficiency. If you want to go back and read the previous articles in this series you can find them all here:
Now, we're going to pull back the curtain on how to solve these problems by showing you the blended workflow in action.
The blended workflow is a step-by-step process that transforms an inbound lead into a high-intent, qualified prospect without a human ever having to touch a cold lead. This is where you leverage the power of an AI sales agent to handle the initial, repetitive work, allowing your team to focus on what matters most: closing deals.
The first thing that happens is the AI agent intercepts the inbound lead instantly, 24/7. It doesn’t matter if it's lunchtime, a holiday, or your prospect is speaking Klingon. The lead is engaged right away, which is how you achieve those sub-60-second response times we've been talking about. This instant engagement is crucial for maintaining the interest of a buyer who expects immediate gratification.
Once the conversation begins, the AI’s job is to enrich and score the lead. It can pull in publicly available data and combine it with the information the prospect provides during the conversation. Based on your predefined criteria, it gives the lead a score. This is a critical step because it ensures your team is not wasting time on leads that aren’t a good fit. If a lead doesn't meet the criteria, the AI can gently guide them to other resources, like more website content or a lower-intent purchase, before you ever bring in an expensive human salesperson.
The AI isn’t just a simple bot with a few pre-programmed answers. It's a tailored agent that is trained on successful conversations. It will ask a series of questions—often a back-and-forth of five to six exchanges—to move the conversation forward. The goal here isn't to just gather data; it's to be intelligent about qualifying the lead and driving them toward a specific goal, whether that's booking a meeting or a purchase, all without your prospect being able to tell it’s an AI agent they’re talking to.
Once a lead is qualified, the AI creates the perfect handoff. All the notes from the conversation are seamlessly synced into your CRM, so when your human closer gets the meeting, they know exactly what was discussed. They're not just doing cold research; they're walking in with valuable nuggets of information that help them build a solid foundation with the prospect. This automation eliminates the repetitive administrative work and allows your team to focus on the high-value activity of building relationships.
The beauty of this system is that the AI will keep following up with the lead until a goal is achieved. This ensures that no lead goes untouched and that every prospect is given the best chance to convert. It's not about replacing humans; it's about empowering them to be more effective and efficient, and we're seeing this as a fundamental shift in how sales funnels are built.
In an ideal world, step five is never needed. Step four has worked perfectly and your prospect is either about to talk to your human superstars or they’ve been given the info they needed from your AI.
Unfortunately, humans aren’t always predictable. Whilst AI is trained on lots of data, including your own, there might still be instances where human intervention is needed sooner than anticipated. In these instances, your trained AI knows when to hand over early and how to stop any situation from escalating. Whether you’ve got an existing customer who has used a generic way to initiate contact or you’re dealing with a prospect that’s just having a bad day, your AI is still being supervised and a human handover can happen at any time.
At the end of the day, your AI has all the same training as your human SDRs but it can’t ever forget any training or have a bad day itself.
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