Image Source: Exceed.ai.

Are your manual lead nurturing and qualification tasks preventing you from spending more time closing sales?

If you answered “Yes,” then it’s time you switch from manual lead generation processes to an Artificial Intelligence or AI-based solution.

Exceed.ai is one such platform.

It uses AI and automation functionalities to help your marketing and sales teams convert more leads into sales opportunities. 

This review covers the ins-and-outs of Exceed.ai and its features and how it can supercharge your lead management efforts.

What is Exceed.ai?

Exceed.ai is a platform with an AI assistant that works with your marketing and sales teams to convert more leads into qualified meetings via personalized, contextual, and automated follow-ups and responses.  

The platform helps you scale the top and middle of your funnel, create more pipelines, and nurture and qualify leads through the AI assistant’s 24/7 two-way website and email conversations. 

When your leads are qualified and ready to talk to a human rep, the assistant automatically books a meeting directly on the rep’s calendar. 

Several use-case examples of Exceed.ai include:

• Qualifying Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). The platform’s AI verifies lead intent and qualifies them by asking qualification questions before handing them over to your sales reps. 

• Follow up inbound leads. The AI assistant immediately responds to and follows up with incoming leads triggered when leads perform certain actions such as requesting a demo, going through the free trial, or downloading content. 

• Convert website visitors into leads through chatbot. Exceed.ai’s AI assistant qualifies and schedules meetings with leads who are ready to talk to your sales reps. 

• Reactivate dormant or cold leads. The platform’s AI reaches out to your prospects who previously expressed interest in your products and services.  

Exceed.ai does the heavy lifting by handling the manual, repetitive tasks in your lead nurturing and qualification process. This allows your reps to focus on strategic conversations, conversion-ready leads, and closing deals. 

It’s one of the best ways to use AI to grow your online sales. 

Main features

Let’s go over Exceed.ai’s key features and how they work. 

Virtual assistant

The Exceed.ai virtual assistant communicates with your prospects and works with your sales reps to engage, nurture, and qualify each lead through chat or email and book qualified meetings. 

After signing up or logging in to the platform, go to the Settings tab on the lower left-hand side of the interface and click Virtual Assistants. 

Image source: Exceed.ai.

You can select an existing virtual assistant’s name or add a new one by entering a name and last name in the fields provided at the bottom of the interface. 

Add your email signature, including the name, role, and address, and upload the image for your logo. 

Image source: Exceed.ai.

You can also connect your virtual assistant to a Sequence (which we will cover later) and sync it to cloud-based email services such as Office 365 or Google email accounts. 

Image source: Exceed.ai.

Set your email delivery preferences and include an opt-out link to comply with anti-spam regulations. 

Sequences

Exceed.ai’s sequences feature is like a playbook or campaign consisting of email and chat templates. 

The platform lets you customize the template, create new ones, and make multiple variants for split testing for audiences to determine the emails and chats that get the best responses. 

You can use the platform’s guided templates to build your sequences. For instance, you can create an email sequence starting with an Engage campaign, followed by Handover, Meeting Scheduler Responses, Ended, and Out of Office and Contact Me Later. 

Set up email sequences within your Engage campaign, such as the example below.  

Image source: Exceed.ai.

Customize the email content by clicking each step in the sequence and set an email sending schedule such as four days after Engaged. 

Image source: Exceed.ai.

Exceed.ai’s sequence feature automates your email campaigns, streamlining your lead nurturing and qualification efforts and saving your marketing and sales teams tons of time and energy.  

You can also view reports of your chat and messaging performances within the sequence, your contacts, and conversation histories between leads and your virtual assistant.  

Image source: Exceed.ai.

Exceed.ai lets you create automated answers to common queries in the sequence and set criteria for lead qualification.   

Additionally, you can create automated workflows from your sequences by setting rules to automatically move your contacts from one sequence to the next based on their status and after a specific period. 

Image source: Exceed.ai.

Teams and roles

Exceed.ai lets you invite team members and collaborate on your project. If you’re the owner, you can assign members to manage contacts within the platform or specific contacts the system recognizes as qualified. 

The roles, responsibilities, and access project managers can assign include Assigned to, Manager, Viewer, and Integration Manager. Access and actions are limited to specific roles.  

The platform lets team members add their account information, enable their chat availability, and set their meeting scheduling preferences. 

Connecting team members’ calendars allows Exceed to.ai to automatically book meetings with qualified contacts based on the prospects’ preferred schedule and your reps’ availability. 

Image source: Exceed.ai.

Team members can also set specific days and times, the length of the meeting duration, buffer time between meetings, and notifications. 

Image source: Exceed.ai.

Also, team members can configure assignment preferences and set specific prospect attributes and values. 

Exceed.ai automatically assigns leads to accounts based on the set criteria (considering the other reps associated with the project and their preferences). 

With these features, you can assign roles, input the required information, and configure necessary settings and the platform handles the rest, routing leads to available and appropriate team members automatically.  

Other Exceed.ai features include:

• Dashboard. This gives you an overview of your team members and their assignments, a visual representation of lead engagement and actions in your funnel, your Return on Investment (ROI), and performance analysis (which gets refreshed every four hours). 

• Contacts. This contains the list of your contacts (leads) with their details such as their company, the sequence where you engage them, current status, last activity, etc. You can also import a CSV file to your contacts. 

• Tasks. This shows the pending tasks for specific contacts/leads.  

Exceed.ai is a huge time-saver, handling the many menial tasks in your lead nurturing and qualification process so your teams can redirect more of their energy and resources to revenue-generating efforts. 

Final thoughts

The journey from your leads to sales opportunities can be manual, slow, and prone to errors but Exceed.ai’s powerful AI capabilities eliminate and reduce these challenges for your team. 

It handles the back and forth emails between leads and your sales reps and responds to prospect queries, touchpoints, and follow-ups using AI and automation, doing the heavy lifting for you and your team. 

Exceed.ai is designed for flexibility, allowing you to apply it to many use cases, have full control over your communication copies, and customize email sequences to optimize your lead management efforts.