New! Smith.ai Launches On-Demand Outreach Campaigns and Bundled Features

We’ve expanded our Outreach Campaigns! Now available: Per-contact pricing, on-demand campaigns, bundled features for major savings, and more.

Recognized by Clutch as a top sales outsourcing provider in 2023, Smith.ai first made Outreach Campaigns available in December 2021 to help businesses reach, engage, and convert more leads. 

Nothing has changed with how our North America-based, sales-trained agents make outbound calls. They still conduct sales outreach for growing businesses 24/7/265, fully focused on attaining specific client objectives with the help of our AI-driven technology.

Here’s what’s new and exciting:

‍Per-Contact Pricing: We used to charge per-call — but after a year of making sales outreach calls, we now know it’s optimal to make five calls to significantly improve the odds of reaching leads by phone. With per-contact pricing, we’re including a five-call cadence in every campaign for less than the cost of what businesses would have spent on the per-call model.

‍Two Campaign Options: We’ve added a one-time campaign option so business owners and operators can choose how to enhance their sales teams.

• On-Demand Campaigns are geared toward businesses that have a fixed lead list on-hand with no commitment or recurring investment beyond that single campaign. Consider on-demand campaigns “projects” that have a clear start and finish. Pricing starts from $15/contact (with a 200-contact minimum), and drops as the lead list size increases. This option is best suited for limited-time offers, trade show and event follow-ups, quick boosts to reach sales targets, and upsells to current or former customers. 
• Ongoing Campaigns are subscription-based and best suited to businesses seeking continuous lead engagement and nurturing. Pricing starts at $12/contact (with a 200-contact & three-month minimum). Pricing drops for these plans, too, as lead list size increases. This option is best for rapid web-form lead capture and engagement, sustained prospecting and nurturing, and SDR-style cold-calling. Leads can be provided via list upload or API — the latter available only with ongoing campaigns.

Bundled Features: Previously available at an additional cost, these core features are now included with all new campaigns to improve the efficiency and efficacy of agents’ outreach efforts. What would have cost you in total an additional $3/call (or now $15/contact) is now included at no extra cost:

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• CRM Integration: We’ll update your software automatically, either through one of our native integrations or via Zapier. We’ll even help you set up and test the data connection. Once integrated, activities are logged when Smith.ai makes a campaign call. Depending on the CRM, other activities may also be logged, such as when agents complete an objective like setting an appointment or taking a payment. 

• Email and Text Message Follow-up: We’ll send customized emails and texts directly to the contacts on your outreach list  — right after each call — to improve engagement, response rates, and follow-through. 
• Third-Party Intake Forms: Avoid wasting time with unqualified leads. Our goal is to connect with and convert leads who are eager, ready, and fitting to work with your business. We’ll screen leads you may have obtained from lead-generation tools, web forms, or conferences using your custom qualification questions to only put them in touch or on your calendar if they’re a match.
• Appointment Setting: We’ll schedule appointments directly with contacts we reach and engage, to help you avoid back-and-forth phone tag and carry momentum forward to help you close more sales. 
• Outbound Business Caller ID: With caller ID enabled, our outreach campaign calls appear on recipients’ phones as coming from your business phone number — because we know a familiar phone number gets a significantly higher response rate from leads and customers. 

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Why choose Smith.ai for your sales outreach? 

With outreach campaigns, we make it easy for businesses to seamlessly add 24/7 sales engagement to their already-stretched teams. Beyond simply adding sales capacity, here are five primary reasons we’re your ideal sales outreach partner:

1. We eliminate the headache and cost of recruiting, training, and managing part- and full-time staff members. With North America-based agents, account managers, and support staff, businesses get the experience of an in-house team at a fraction of the cost.
   
   
2. We eliminate the risks associated with low-cost providers operating overseas — namely, the negative impacts on customer experience and brand reputation. We aren’t just calling for your business, we sound of your business, and that matters to leads you’re seeking to connect with, and then convert.
   
   
3. We work fast and accurately, thanks to hundreds of talented sales-trained agents and our proprietary AI-driven software that help agents make calls at the right time, use the right messaging, and focus on the right objectives — as defined by you, with as much collaboration from us as you prefer.
   
   
4. We’re experts in efficient engagement after handling millions of conversations since 2015. We’ve managed frontline communications for businesses with programmatic playbooks for years for our virtual receptionist and live chat clients. We know the top three questions to ask leads for every industry, the best SMS follow-up messages to drive deeper connections, and much more. With outreach campaigns, we know that most outreach campaigns are time- and ROI-sensitive. Often money and energy have already been spent. We’re not the first and only investment in business growth. So, we apply our expertise to your singular campaign goal and hit the ground running on Day 1.
   
   
5. We work transparently, giving you real-time access to every single communication we handle on your behalf. An online dashboard with every call, email, and text detailed; daily summaries; and an array of CRM and other business system integrations mean you’re always in the loop. Other sales outsourcing providers make you wait days, weeks, or longer to get access to performance data (which often results in delayed insight and action).

Clients who have benefited from our outreach campaigns come from a wide range of industries, including legal, home services, HVAC, finance, digital marketing, and veterinary services. 

Campaigns are an excellent fit for any business looking to reach more leads but doesn't have the bandwidth, staff, management, budget, know-how, or systems to do so in-house.

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“We had to hire a new employee internally to handle the increased volume of new leads and retained clients – thanks to Smith.ai’s Outreach Campaigns,” said Kaelyn Diamond, partner at Ziegler Diamond Law Firm. “Last month, we had a campaign that generated 324 leads that were submitted to Smith.ai for outbound follow-up. 42 of them successfully converted for our firm. It goes to show how well Smith.ai's Outreach Campaigns work for businesses.” 

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Why we developed outreach campaigns

We launched outreach campaigns in response to the need for businesses to scale revenue without committing to permanent increases in overhead costs or risking your reputation with subpar providers.

Business owners told us they struggled to pay upfront to hire sales staff and managers when they only needed extra sales support during certain times of the year — during their busy season, after a trade show, or following a large marketing campaign. They also told us they lacked the capacity to manage sales teams. That’s difficult with little to no experience in running revenue-driving teams, without the right sales software in place, and without knowing appropriate targets to set.

Others told us staff performance varied too greatly from person to person, staff turnover imposed impossible hiring and training burdens on the business, and sales management lacked the analytical and strategic development skills necessary to improve current outreach efforts.

Business owners and sales teams needed something more flexible, more affordable with less upfront commitment, more embedded with expertise, and just plain faster off the starting blocks. So we built it.

How our Outreach Campaigns work

Smith.ai focuses on reaching, engaging, and converting your leads through outbound calling to create more sales opportunities and progress them through your funnel. 

Each campaign is totally customized — from the objective and messaging to the size of the list and the cadence of the calls. It puts business owners and key stakeholders in the driver’s seat without them needing to actually execute the work — so they can focus instead on closing deals.

We expect our clients to come prepared with research done ahead of time on their ideal prospect profile — knowing what qualities make them an ideal customer and having relevant, honestly sourced lead lists ready to go. 

Your lead list can come from your CRM, a trade show attendee list, an email subscriber list, or other sources, like a sales intelligence and enrichment tool like ZoomInfo or Apollo.io. These contacts can be sent to us manually in the form of a .csv file or automatically via API integration or Zapier. 

We’ll make outbound calls using contact information from the lead list, your caller ID, and messaging based on your input and ours, making sure conversations are crafted to meet the objectives set during the setup and onboarding period.

What’s involved in setting up an outreach campaign?

Smith.ai provides the technology, talent, and testing to ensure your campaigns are set up for success, right out of the gate. We don’t mess around with month-long onboardings, pitch-y meetings guided by generic slide decks, or single points of contact who can become single points of failure. It takes a team (a few, in fact), and we’re about speed and focus.

Here’s what you can expect from our team:

Before your campaign begins, you’ll work with our solutions architect to map how Smith.ai will connect with your current systems. Whether sending completed campaign calls into your CRM or passing new leads to Smith.ai, we’re hands on, so you don’t need to worry about hiring a sales tech consultant. We’ve got the technical chops, and we’ll make the workflows as streamlined as possible. 

We’ll also develop expert outreach messaging and carefully timed cadences based on your target objectives (in partnership with you, as much as you like). Plus, we’ll build FAQs and rebuttals to common objections into our AI-driven tools so our agents are equipped for every turn a conversation may throw their way. 

Throughout the entire process, you’ll have a dedicated onboarding specialist and account manager who will keep you up-to-date on progress before and after launch. 

And, of course, post-launch, you’ll be able to monitor all campaigns with a real-time dashboard so you can view past and upcoming calls and messages, real-time campaign funnel performance, the full list of your campaigns and their performance at a glance, and much more. 

Research shows that 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up call, yet 80% of new sales deals require five follow-up calls after the initial connection. That’s why our business development representatives make five calls per contact. In your dashboard, you’ll always know exactly how many attempts we’ve made to each contact, and how many more attempts are outstanding. Just as our AI software smartly guides our agents to focus conversations on achieving your campaign objective — whether that's booking a meeting, promoting a special offer, collecting a payment, or completing an event registration — so too does our software guide your understanding of how well a campaign is performing. 

To distill all that down, here’s what we’re committing to deliver on every outreach campaign:

• A team that is fast, flexible, and laser-focused on maximizing your campaign outcomes, with as little legwork required from you, as possible
• Kick-off and campaign review meetings, plus regular check-ins (we’ll set the frequency together)
• Script development for phone, email, and SMS outreach 
• Creation and refinement of your campaign “playbook,” FAQs, and rebuttals in our AI-driven software
• Consulting on campaign cadence, launch timing, and total duration
• Analytics dashboard setup and training
• Lead list review, plus establishing the connection of lead-flow systems with our solutions architect
• CRM/Zapier integration setup to log completed conversations in your main system
• End-to-end quality assurance testing at launch and ongoing, including agent feedback reviews after live calls

As we’ve said, we’re a partner not a vendor — and we can’t wait to show you the difference the Smith.ai experience can make on your sales growth.

If you have questions about outreach campaigns generally or the new features we’ve shared here, please reach us via email at support@smith.ai, chat with us live right here, or call us at (650) 727-6484.

Launch an outreach campaign with us! 

Ready to get started? So are we. 

If you're a Smith.ai client interested in Outreach Campaigns, simply reach out to your account manager, email support@smith.ai, or call (650) 727-6484. 

If you're not yet a Smith.ai client, schedule a free consultation to discuss what our Outreach Campaigns can do for your business. You can also reach us at hello@smith.ai or (650) 727-6484.

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Statistics: 

69% of buyers have accepted cold calls from new providers (Source: Rain Group)

82% of buyers accept meetings when salespeople reach out to them (Source: Rain Group)

Organizations that don’t cold call experienced 42% less growth than those who used the tactic (Source: Crunchbase)

80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the initial connection (Source: Hubspot)

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