AI in Lead Generation: 7 Ways to Skyrocket Conversions

Unless you’re as quick as Flash (superhero of speed), you know that AI can find, nurture, and convert leads faster than you.

But AI isn’t just about speed – today, it plays an important role in every step of lead generation, from finding to retaining leads.

The best part is that you don’t need superpowers to use these technologies; just the right knowledge of how to use AI will do it.

Like AI, this blog saves you time – packed with only essential insights and no fluff!

How AI Has Transformed Lead Generation

Manual lead generation is history! AI is revolutionizing how marketers attract and retain leads. 

In this section, I’ll show you important places where AI is already ruling and making new roads for lead generation. 

1. Reaching Out to the Leads

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Guessing and reaching random buyers from the prospects list (bought or collected manually).
• How AI Changed It: Identifies high-interest buyers, prioritizes outreach, and improves conversion rates with Intent detecting AI. 

2. Getting More Information About the Leads

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Visiting their profiles one by one to get the information.
• How AI Changed It: With AI data enrichment, marketers can enrich their leads on a scale in one go. 

3. Finding Leads

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Collecting leads from different sources and filtering manually.
• How AI Changed It: Marketers can find lookalike leads with AI technologies. There are also ICP/buyer persona-generating AI technologies, using which marketers can quickly find highly targeted and hot leads. 

4. Increasing Your Business Visibility

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Using time-consuming SEO or investing many bucks in paid Ads to have some visibility.
• How AI Changed It: Marketers can now make their business visible on many other quickly growing platforms using AI voice search optimization. 

5. Outreach Using Social Media

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Joining groups or connecting with users one by one. 
• How AI Changed It: With AI visual recognition, marketers can easily find and connect with their ICPs by scanning their images and videos online and finding traits or personas they were looking for on social media. 

6. Converting Website Visitors

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Installing tracking and reaching visitors by emailing them with basic information.
• How AI Changed It: With AI website personalization features, converting website visitors to customers has become easier. 

7. ABM (Account Based Marketing)

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Assigning a dedicated manager for your high-value clients.
• How AI Changed It: In AMB 2.0, sales teams use AI technologies like high-intent user detection and targeted buyer persona generation to find important and ready-to-convert clients.

8. Tracking and Analysis

• Traditional Lead Generation Method: Getting data at the end of the week or the end of the day and then storing and analyzing it. 
• How AI Changed It: With AI-based real-time data access, managers and decision-makers can now make live and quick decisions to save their efforts and reduce the impact of any damages. 

How to Use AI For Lead Generation

In this section, I’ll show you how many AI lead-generation technologies there are and how you can use them in your daily lead-generation process effectively. 

1. Use AI for Cold Outreach

Cold outreach can be done in 2 ways: cold emailing and cold calling. 

The fact is cold emailing has many AI advancements in lead generation; hence, I’ll start with that. 

A successful cold email campaign needs the following:

✔️ Perfect deliverability setup with lower bounces

✔️ Personalized and spam-free content

✔️ Timely response management

You can do all that using an AI-assisted cold emailing tool. One such tool is Saleshandy. It offers AI features like,

1. AI variant automatically generates multiple unique variations of your first email, automatically adding all the necessary personalization features like merge tags, variable tags, and spintax. 

With this, you don’t have to write every email(variant) from scratch when testing different variants.

2. AI bounce detection analyzes the type of email bounces and auto-pauses the email accounts to protect the sender’s reputation.

3. AI reply categorization: Saleshandy uses AI to analyze all your prospect replies and categorize them as Interested, not interested, booked, closed, etc. so that you don’t waste your time and efforts on the wrong leads.

If you think cold calling is best for your business, I have some AI technologies that might help you, too. 

Overall, calling is time-consuming and needs manpower for execution, but there are some parts where AI can help. 

Dialpad.ai is an AI-powered cold calling tool with AI technologies you can use.

Things like AI note-taking from the conversations, AI cloud-based support, and a training center where you can train teams and delegate work smoothly. 

One more technology is AI playbooks that help sales and customer support teams by providing them with in-call coaching.   

2. Use AI for List-Building

List building is one of the most time-consuming tasks in when it comes to sales outbound list generation. And also the task where most inaccuracies happen. 

So, if you are thinking about generating more leads using AI quickly or finding fresh leads using AI, this section is for you.

There are many technologies in AI lead generation that you can use in 2025. 

One tool with great AI list-building features is Apollo.io. 

Apollo.io uses AI features like research prompts, intent filters, AI scores, and conversation insights to identify and generate high-quality leads efficiently. 

But you should know that these features come at a cost and aren’t included in the base plan, which may feel limiting. 

Did you know?
Saleshandy’s lead finder has one of the biggest B2B databases of 700M+ professional profiles. Try the tool and get 100 lead finder credits in their email starter plan.  

3. Use AI for Market Research and Analysis

If you are not even ready for this section, I can tell you in advance. AI has completely overtaken the regular research methods of analyzing and finding customer intent. 

Intent-detecting AI lets you gather intent data from multiple sources, merge it, and analyze it for better in-depth research.

Talking about analytics, using AI technologies, you can track cross-channel responses, identify winning customer journeys, what works, build customized and tailored dashboards/reports, and more. 

One AI tool where you can find these research and analysis features is Factors.ai. 

However, this tool can be used mainly for research and analysis purposes, for outreach and email deliverability, there are better options like Saleshandy available. 

4. Use AI for Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is used to identify high-intent users. 

Usually, it is done through their interaction on the website by sales and marketing teams, but these days, with AI, it is done from many touch points to give better scores. 

Using AI lead generation tools, you can do smarter, better, and quicker lead scoring.  

AI can easily prioritize data using the entire buyer journey, create and customize lead scores, and help marketing and sales teams collaborate better. 

I can suggest one tool that does lead scoring the best: Hubspot Marketing.

5. Use AI for Lead Enrichment and Data Verification

AI Lead Enrichment

Using AI data enrichment, you can use features like filling incomplete prospects data, building automation processes to keep enriching lead data, and creating sales lead lists using the enriched leads. 

AI Data Verification

Regarding AI data verification, features like verification of leads using multiple sources, scanning real-time web data to ensure verification, and more. 

I’ll suggest one tool where you can do both things: Seamless.ai. It offers many more AI features that help you improve the quality of your leads. 

6. Use AI for Content

This is where AI has been most innovative and successful. 

The biggest problem sales and marketing representatives face is writing personalized, relevant, and valuable content to pitch. It used to take them about 40 minutes to 1 hour to write one email. 

With AI, now they can do it in seconds. AI technologies create personalized content and AI variants in seconds using details about the prospects. 

It’s not only about writing content, but you can also edit, format, generate ideas, and check the intent of your content using AI. 

One such tool that has impressive AI content creation features is Copy.ai. 

Using that tool, you can generate SEO-optimized content, create ad copy, and many more features for sales and marketing teams. 

7. Use AI Chatbots for Client Engagement and Retention

Last but definitely one of the most important technologies that reduces the time and efforts of sales or customer support teams by more than half. 

There are some tools like Zobot by Zoho that offer services to build your own AI chatbot. 

The best part is this chat is multilingual, which means one can converse in 30 languages. 

Businesses that already have their rule-based AI chatbot installed can also add this AI chatbot technology to it. Yes, you don’t have to switch. 

Benefits of Using AI For Lead Generation

Of course, you know the basics of how it saves time and makes your research time less. But I will break down the benefits on much deeper levels and how it benefits your business. 

1. Cost and ROI Benefits

So, what are your usual lead generation costs?

For the cost of one sales rep ($40K–$60K), you can get a yearly subscription to 5–7 AI tools for just 2.5% of that budget.

It’s not only about having a lean team but also having better quality. 

Let’s say you used to have 1000 leads and convert only five from them. That’s only a 0.5% success rate. 

Now, connecting with high intent and reaching out to highly interested prospects can go up to converting 20%, 30%, or even more depending on your offers and strategies of conversion. 

2. Time and Effort Benefits

So, how long do you usually take to run one lead generation campaign? Something like,

• List building = months
• Marketing research and analysis = weeks
• Enriching leads = days
• Writing content = hours

But with AI, you can do all these things in seconds. Yes, instant solutions save not only hours but also days of effort.

3. Better Customer Experience

If your customers still wait a full business day for simple answers, your AI-powered competitors are already winning them over with instant support. 

A seamless customer experience supports customer retention– and AI chatbots ensure you don’t lose potential clients who visit your site with questions, AKA high intent leads. 

4. Scalability

AI makes scaling your business faster and easier. It streamlines lead research, market expansion, and growth – helping you reach new opportunities effortlessly. 

How AI is Changing Lead Generation

Let’s quickly break down how you can literally use AI in every step of your lead generation. I’ll prove it to you. 

1. Researching with AI  – Use AI tools to analyze market trends, competitor strategies, and customer behavior.
2. Finding High-Intent Leads –  AI identifies and verifies leads with strong buying intent, improving lead quality.
3. Enhancing Data Enrichment –  AI tools like Clearbit and ZoomInfo add valuable insights to lead profiles.
4. Predicting Buyer Behavior – AI forecasts customer needs, improving targeting strategies.
5. Optimizing Lead Scoring –  AI ranks leads based on engagement, helping prioritize high-value prospects.
6. Personalizing Communication – AI generates emails and messages based on user behavior and preferences.
7. Automating Outreach  –  AI-driven email, chatbot, and ad automation engage prospects at the right time.
8. Improving Conversion Tracking – AI analyzes campaign performance and refines strategies for better ROI.

FAQs

Can you automate lead generation?

Of course, tools like Saleshandy allow you to automate your lead generation process with advanced automation and AI features like AI content variants, AI bounce detection, automated follow-ups, automated sender rotation setup, and many more. 

Can ChatGPT lead generation?

Yes, you can do lead generation using Chatgpt. To do that, you need to ask ChatGPT for very detailed prompts and keep refining it till you get your desired results. 

How do you generate leads using AI for free?

Most AI offers a free version that you can use for lead generation purposes. The only limitation is the number of free prompts you can use daily.