How to Use AI For Business Development and Startup Growth

Introduction

The AI revolution is already here, and businesses that aren’t adopting this technology risk falling behind their competitors that do. 

According to a survey by McKinsey & Company, 65% of respondents are already incorporating AI tools in their businesses, nearly double the percentage of those using AI from the firm’s previous study from a year ago.

Because AI can boost productivity and efficiency while saving money, startups that learn how to incorporate AI could see their businesses scale and increase revenue faster than the competition. But how can startups use AI for business development?

As it turns out, there is no shortage of ways for startups to incorporate AI into their business development strategies, whether they need help with marketing, sales, customer service, and more.

How to use AI for startup business development 

When it comes to startup business development, there are many factors to focus on, from customer outreach to competitor analysis. No matter what a startup needs help with, there seems to be an AI tool for just that. 

Content creation, data analysis, account management, sales, and more can all be made more efficient through AI. Here are several ways AI tools can help with startup business development.

Analyze data

One of the biggest strengths of AI is data analysis because it can understand everything from numerical data in spreadsheets to human language in online content and provide quick summaries and insights into all of the information in seconds.

Startups can use AI tools to clean, organize, and analyze spreadsheets, but artificial intelligence isn’t limited to processing numbers. Natural language processors, or NLPs, can also understand human language, making it easier for startups to analyze data from social media posts, customer reviews, and more. 

Startups can use AI in multiple different ways for data analysis, whether they want to analyze sales history, understand market trends, flag recurring customer complaints, or identify competitor strategies.

Identifying prospects, partners, and new markets

When startups are ready to scale, they need to be able to determine exactly how they will do so. Maybe the startup will want to identify new partnerships with other companies, or perhaps they are looking to expand into new markets. AI tools can help with the prospecting and outreach steps for expanding.

For instance, the AI tool Apollo—and others like it—makes it easier and faster than ever to identify the people you want to reach. From there, Apollo can help personalize messages to potential partners or prospects, keep notes on and summarize meetings, and manage deals.

Additionally, startups can use AI tools to analyze company data to create audience segments, which can lead to more tailored marketing efforts. AI can automatically track market trends in real-time to highlight areas that could have potential for growing the startup. For example, AI may reveal that you have a large audience for your online content in a different city, state, or country than you’re currently operating, which could reveal an opportunity to expand sales into that region.

Manage accounts at scale

The first individual customer is exciting for a startup, and that excitement only grows with the first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers. However, the more customers your business attracts, the more difficult it can be to deliver that same attention and personalization to 1,000 customers as it was to the first 10. 

Unless, of course, you have AI tools to track customer engagements and manage customer and lead data. Using an AI-powered CRM allows you to see all customer interactions, sales history, and more in one convenient location, and AI can flag when customers may be due for follow-up calls. AI can also track what customers or leads are browsing on the company website and send personalized recommendations and promotions to improve the chances of conversion. Plus, startups can have AI summarize any customer trends, such as 5-star reviews on a specific product or service, and use that data in their sales process to prospective clients.

Conduct market and customer research

Startups must split their time between improving the customer experience for existing clients, reaching out to leads, and marketing to their target audiences. With few team members and limited time, startups will want to use AI to speed up the market and customer research process.

Because AI can organize, enhance, and analyze data quickly, it saves startups time. Rather than poring over spreadsheets to identify any valuable insights, the startup team can focus their time on outreach over data analysis.

Automate sales tasks

One thing that AI is particularly good at is automation. For startup sales teams, AI-powered automation can help with many manual, repetitive tasks like analyzing data or personalizing customer outreach content.

McKinsey & Company found that AI adoption by sales and marketing teams in general has increased more than any other business function. That could be because AI can save sales reps, in particular, an average of two hours per day, time that can be better spent on lead conversion efforts.

AI tools are excellent for startup data analysis because they can quickly “understand” and present insights for large amounts of data at once. AI can flag potential leads and even rank lead quality, so sales reps can focus on reaching out to high-quality leads rather than scanning spreadsheets for hours.

With CRMs that incorporate AI tools, the CRM can analyze past data on customers, company sales, and even the market to make sales forecasts and predict customer behaviors. AI can help sales reps by producing personalized emails and recommendations to convert high-quality leads or make additional sales to existing clients.

For example, Eltjo Hofstee, Director of Sales and Customer Success for EasyDMARC, saved the company’s sales team up to three hours per day on sales tasks by incorporating Bardeen AI with his HubSpot CRM. The AI reduced the amount of time spent verifying customer and lead information and even saved some of the leads they were previously losing due to email addresses without company domains.

Run ongoing competitive analyses

Startups are especially vulnerable to competition from existing companies and other emerging startups, so it’s important to stay up-to-date on what competitors are doing in order to stand out. 

AI tools are helpful in competitor analysis and mapping market trends, both of which can be helpful as a startup carves out a niche. AI can pull data from news, press releases, and video content and then summarize what it learned about competitors. It can also quickly pull publicly available information about competitors’ offerings, prices, product or service features, and more. This process saves startups the time they would have to spend manually pulling all of this information and then analyzing it all.

Content creation and marketing 

Startups often find themselves with limited resources, making it more challenging to create content and marketing materials that engage the target audience.

However, generative AI tools can help with everything from brainstorming to outlining blogs to writing social media captions and more. AI is also helpful at drawing from customer data to create personalized marketing materials, like enticing promotional emails for a client’s favorite product. 

AI can even transform one piece of content into multiple different forms of content, saving startups time in distributing content for different media.

“The way that I liked, very tactically speaking, was in marketing organizations, still using maybe your solo marketer to come up with the core idea. But then use AI to reframe that and repackage that into a dozen different formats and channels. That kind of scale is what AI can give you. If it allows your one team member, or maybe you're doubling as CEO and marketer, it allows you to sort of own the idea and own the strategy, and use AI to amplify it,” Meghan Keaney Anderson, head of global product marketing and communications for Watershed, told HubSpot for Startups.

AI business development tools 

Clearly, AI tools offer a wide range of services to help startups with their business development, but where does a founder start with this technology? Here are a few helpful AI tools to get you started with startup business development.

Lang.ai

Lang.ai is a customer service automation tool that goes beyond the simple chatbot. This tool tracks customer interactions to train and improve the chatbot continuously and offers in-depth customer insights based on help requests. For instance, it will flag and notify your team if several users begin requesting help over one particular issue, like payment platform failure, by flagging repeated phrases found in recent customer service requests.

HubSpot Marketing and CRM AI Tools

HubSpot’s marketing and CRM products are now supercharged with new AI tools to help with everything from drafting sales emails to creating content to responding to website visitors, the Breeze Copilot tools automate your workflows, saving time and improving productivity. Automation allows startups to do more work, even with fewer team members. The AI tools can scale as your business grows, too, so you can continue operating smoothly and efficiently while also improving the AI with your company’s growing database.

Breeze can also help with competitor analysis by identifying your top competitors and then presenting prompts to explore the data further, allowing users to find their strengths and weaknesses when compared with the competition.

Zoho

Data analysis is important for any business that wants to succeed. Zoho is an AI-powered data analysis tool that can gather insights from your CRM data and display them in easy-to-digest visuals that are also ready to share with team members. Zoho can also rely on historical data to develop predictions and forecasts, which startups can use to inform business decisions.

Apollo.io

For prospecting and preparing a go-to-market (GTM) strategy, startup leaders can use Apollo.io, which offers access to over 275M contacts and 73M companies. Users can score and rank leads, send personalized emails, manage meetings with potential clients and partners, track deals and deal tasks, and more. It also offers data enrichment to help flag contacts for things like missing emails or job changes, so you are always reaching out to prospects based on the highest quality, most up-to-date information.

Clay

Startups can use tools like Clay for data enrichment. By using AI to improve the value of your data with supplemental outside information, startups can identify new audiences or markets to expand to. For example, Clay is a data enrichment tool that improves data and then uses that high-quality data for outreach. Users can prospect using Clay’s built-in tools or input leads from their CRMs, and Clay offers more than 75 data enrichment tools all in one location to make the process even simpler.

Balancing AI and human input 

AI is a great resource for startup business development, but it can’t operate solo. Startups need to rely on both human knowledge and expertise with the automation and productivity perks of AI to produce successful results. 

While AI can help with creative projects, like transforming one interview into multiple forms of content or brainstorming blog post ideas, it’s best for more data-centric tasks. Still, by leaning on AI, the human team members can spend more time on creativity, personalization, and collaboration.

As Anderson explained, “This is not a replacement for your marketers. I think that it's meant to be a tool in their hands. And the reason why I say it's not a replacement is, if you just leave everything to AI, you will find pretty quickly that it's great at patterns, it's great at proliferation. It's not great at original ideas, and it's not great at understanding your strategy or your customers just yet. And it makes mistakes.”

Startups that learn how to balance the use of AI for startup business development with human inputs will find the most success in scaling. Those that don’t tap into AI could fall behind, while those that rely too much on AI will lose the personal touch that clients want.

Scale a startup with the help of AI

While incorporating AI tools is a balancing act that startups must master to scale successfully, these resources offer a diverse range of services for startups to explore and experiment with. The only way to nail that balance between artificial and human intelligence is to start playing and strategizing, and these methods, tools, and examples can help startups get started in their journey to AI-powered business development.