How to Use AI For Cold Calling - Step By Step Guide

July 9, 2024

Introduction

When I first heard about AI callers, I was intrigued but unsure about how to set them up. The idea of having an AI handle cold calls sounded amazing, but I didn’t know where to start. After diving in and experimenting, I discovered how powerful and efficient AI callers can be for my business. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through what AI callers are and show you step-by-step how to set them up, so you can add AI phone callers to your business and have them handle cold calls for you.

What Are AI Phone Callers?

AI phone callers or AI sales agents are essentially smart robots that can make and take phone calls for you. They use advanced technology to understand and respond to human speech, which makes them sound almost like a real person. For example, I set up an AI phone caller to handle my initial outreach to potential clients. It introduces itself, asks if the person is interested in my services, and if they are, it schedules an appointment for me automatically. This not only saves me a ton of time but also ensures that I’m only spending my time talking to people who are actually interested.

One of the things that surprised me the most was how natural these AI callers sound. When I first started using them, I was worried that my clients would feel like they were talking to a robot and get put off. But the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. Most people don’t even realize they’re not talking to a human! The AI can answer common questions, provide information, and even handle follow-ups, making it a powerful tool for any business.

Overall, AI phone callers have been a game-changer for me. They take care of the repetitive and time-consuming task of making calls, allowing me to focus on more important aspects of my business. If you’re considering using AI phone callers, I highly recommend giving them a try. They’ve made a huge difference for me, and I’m sure they can do the same for you. Let’s cover some of the AI callers out there and how to set them up properly.

What to Do Before Diving Into Cold Calling With AI

Before diving into cold calling with AI, there are a few important steps I learned to ensure success. When I first started, I made some mistakes, but with a bit of preparation, things got much smoother. Here’s what I recommend based on my experience:

Understand Your Target Audience

First, it's crucial to know who you’re reaching out to. When I started, I spent time researching my potential clients. I looked into their needs, preferences, and pain points. This helped me tailor the AI scripts to address their specific concerns, making the calls more effective.

Create a Solid Script

Next, crafting a good script is essential. I wrote clear and concise scripts for my AI caller, making sure it sounded natural and friendly. It’s important to include key points about your product or service and have responses ready for common questions or objections. This preparation made the AI interactions feel more genuine and engaging.

Test and Refine

Before going live, I tested the AI calls. This step was crucial. I made a few test calls to friends and colleagues to get their feedback. They pointed out areas that sounded robotic or unclear. I refined the script based on their feedback, which significantly improved the call quality.

Ensure Compliance

Lastly, make sure you’re compliant with calling regulations. Different regions have different rules about cold calling, and it’s important to respect those. I spent some time understanding these regulations to avoid any legal issues.

Following these steps made my experience with AI cold calling much smoother and more successful. If you’re thinking about using AI for your cold calls, I highly recommend preparing thoroughly. It makes a big difference!

Best AI Phone Callers

I want to share my experience with three of the best AI phone callers I’ve used. These tools have been game-changers for my business, making it easier to manage calls and stay on top of leads. Let me break down their features and pricing for you.

1. Vapi AI

Vapi AI Landing Page

Vapi AI is great at creating interactive voice responses, handling speech recognition, and text-to-speech conversions effortlessly. It can manage voice commands, making it versatile for various tasks. What I love most is its seamless integration with existing systems and customizable voice models to fit your brand. You can integrate Vapi with other CRMs to track leads as well which makes it a really good ai phone caller.

Pricing

  • Pay-As-You-Go: 5¢/min for calls.
  • Additional Costs: Includes charges for transcription, model, voice, and telephony services.
  • Phone Number: $2 a month for extra phone numbers that you purchase.
  • Free $10 Credits For New Users: If you sign up through our link here.

2. Salesfinity

Salesfinity Landing Page

Salesfinity specializes in AI-driven sales calls, handling lead generation, follow-ups, and appointment scheduling. The AI’s natural voice interaction makes it almost indistinguishable from a human, which is fantastic for keeping clients engaged. In depth analytics provide insights into call performance and customer engagement. One really key feature here that I liked is the AI parallel dialer which calls multiple people at once and talks to them at the same time which is an insane feature for any business owner.

Pricing

  • Basic Plan: $149 per month for power dialling only with US and Canada numbers.
  • Standard Plan: $349 per month for power dialer, ai parallel dialling and 5x US and Canada numbers included.
  • Enterprise Plan: No limitations on any feature, access to all features, contact sales for a specific price for your team.

3. AI Caller

AI Caller Landing Page

AI Caller offers powerful AI-driven call automation, managing cold calls, customer service interactions, and follow-ups. The tool’s voice authenticity is impressive, making conversations sound very natural. It also offers comprehensive reporting and analytics, helping you refine your strategies based on call data. This AI phone caller also has access to over 6000+ apps that can be integrated within their software which is a great addition.

Pricing

  • Build Plan: $49 per month for 300 calling credits, with additional credits at $0.16 each.
  • Grow Plan: $499 per month for 4,000 calling credits, with additional credits at $0.14 each.
  • Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing with unlimited calling credits, and additional credits at $0.12 each.

4. Synthflow

Synthflow AI Landing Page

SynthFlow AI uses advanced NLP to understand and respond to human speech in a way that feels natural. When I first used it, I was amazed at how lifelike and engaging the conversations were. This feature helps keep potential clients interested and makes the interactions feel less robotic. Synthflow can also automatically schedule follow-up calls with your prospects and integrate with a lot of different CRMs which makes it a really easy to use AI phone caller. It’s also not that difficult to set up which is a bonus on top.

Pricing

SynthFlow AI offers several pricing plans to fit different business needs:

  • Basic Plan: $29 per month, 50 minutes included with $0.04 costs per voicemail.
  • Pro Plan: $450 per month, 2500 minutes included with $0.04 costs per voicemail and additional costs of $0.08 per minute.
  • Growth Plan: $900 per month, 6000 minutes included with $0.04 costs per voicemail and additional costs of $0.08 per minute.
  • Agency Plan: $1400 per month, everything included from growth plan + white labeling features, rebilling, unlimited workspaces, assistants, batch campaigns and more!

My Experience

Using AI callers has literally changed the way I do business. Replacing some of my sales reps with AI was a tough choice but I saw the opportunity of using AI within my business and I saw the results in real time. I can say confidently that AI phone callers are going to be more and more popular in the future especially with the new features, better voices and overall faster workflows. I would highly recommend anyone, especially business owners to try this out and see if this can be a game changer for them like it was for me. 

AI Phone Caller Setup for Cold Calling

In order to set up ai phone callers for our business we need to first choose the software that we will use for this. Since I mentioned four different softwares in this article, we will choose one that is called Synthflow AI. This software is easy to use and anyone can get started with it, especially with our step by step guide that I will show you in a second. You will need a couple of other things to get started such as a phone number and some other important things but we will cover those in this step by step guide. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Signing Up For Synthflow AI

Synthflow AI Dashboard

First step is to sign up to Synthflow AI platform. You can sign up and get a free trial with our link here. Once you sign up you will land on the Synthflow dashboard where you will see this simple UI. Don’t worry about navigating just yet, lets go to the next step to start setting up our AI phone caller.

Step 2: Setting Up Twilio Integration

Twilio Integration inside Synthflow AI

First step after signing up is to go to integrations and set up a Twilio account. If you don’t have a Twilio account yet, check out this article here to learn how to set it up. Once that is done you can go here and add an “Account SID” and “Auth Token” which are very important codes that Twilio provides you with to be able to connect Twilio to any other third party apps in this case Syntfhlow AI.

Twilio Integration in Synthflow AI

Step 3:  Building Out First AI Voice Caller

Setting up AI Assistant inside Synthflow AI

Go back to your dashboard, click on the upper right button that says “create” and click on “assistant” this will bring you to the page to select which type of assistant you would like, just click on “Inbound Receptionist” as this is the type of assistant that we will build. 

Step 4: Configuring Our AI Phone Caller

Synthflow AI Phone Caller Configuration

Now that we clicked on the inbound receptionist, we have to set up a company website, name, knowledge base, phone number, actions, and crm that we will use and finally test the assistant. You can see the steps on the right side of the screen. You can skip all these steps for now because we can configure all of that later.

Inbound Assistant Dashboard

From here you will land on the Inbound assistant dashboard where you will be able to edit all of those important steps that we skipped previously. Since I cannot cover everything in this tutorial I will show you the most important things you need to configure. By far the most important thing here is to configure the prompt, you can click on the prompt to do that.

Inbound Assistant Prompt Configuration

Make sure to write your prompts as detailed as you can. This will allow the AI system and the bot to understand what their goal and task should be. This is extremely important. You can always test the bot yourself so don’t overcomplicate this step as your testing phase will tell you more about what you need to change.

From here you will need to do a bit more advanced things. Deployment is the next step which is done through Zapier integration. For this I did attach a video with a timestamp that will help you navigate through the last step of this ai phone caller configuration. This is the last and the most important step of this guide so that’s why I wanted to visually represent you how to do this in the best way possible without any errors.

Final Thoughts

Using AI for cold calling has truly transformed my business. When I first started, I wasn't sure if it would work, but the results have been amazing. By following the steps I shared—understanding your target audience, creating a solid script, testing and refining, and ensuring compliance—you can set up an effective AI cold calling system. This approach has saved me time, improved my efficiency, and helped me connect with more clients. I hope you find these tips helpful and that they make a big difference in your business too. If you’re looking to learn more about AI phone callers and AI agents be sure to check out our blog for more articles like this one.