The AI Explosion Applies to Your Business

If you haven't heard about how AI is going to transform the way you do business, you have probably been offline for a while. AI is the latest trend, fascinating businesses around the world as though it's a new invention that can automate low-hanging tasks without human intervention. While it's not new, and human intervention is very much required to make it valuable, the possibilities and potential are pretty amazing when coupled with the right business strategies, data stacks and organizational design.

In order to safely harness AI you need to take some steps to prepare your organization. In this series of posts we will outline some concrete business strategies that will enable your organization for AI, along with their digital tactics and their governance overlays.

Business Strategy: Using AI to Automate Sales

Caveat: You shouldn't completely automate sales

Your team does sales better than any automation can, and it's unlikely that any near-term AI can compensate for their knowledge and relationships. That said, there are several ways that AI and digital support can help your team level up their performance.

Tactic: Refine Your CRM Data

Did I hear you say, "What CRM Data?" If you aren't using a CRM organizationally, now is the time to start. Your operation cannot effect a complete workflow with digital operations without institutional information centralized in a single repository. There are good CRMs and CRMs that are difficult to manage. If you have a CRM in place, you don't need to change it unless you want to. If you don't have a CRM, you should implement one.

The AI Play: Export Your CRM Data And Review It

You can and should review your data manually - with your eyeballs - but you should also take advantage of data correlation technology to update your data. Using tools available at low cost like Contacts+, Derrick, and others, you can clean and enhance your data and ready it for re-import. Enhancing your data in offline format is easiest and allows you to use better tools than most online CRMs allow at similar cost.

The AI Play: Consolidate Your Data

Once you've cleaned your CRM data, combine it with data from your social media profiles and networks. Who's liked you on LinkedIn? Shouldn't they be in your CRM? Bring it all together, clean, combine, and enhance it.

The AI Play: Tag Your Data

This is where your first stab at a business process design comes into play. Who inside your organization is going to be responsible for each contact or company? Make sure that individual is assigned to the contact or company. You may be able to use AI to assign affinities to your targets, rate your prospects and understand who on your team is best suited to your contacts, but you first have to understand how you want your business relationships to work. Make a table in a spreadsheet and lay out the rules.

You don't have to make one-to-one assignments - departments or groups can be assigned instead, but make sure each contact is tagged properly so nobody is orphaned in the system. Make sure each contact includes a "last touch" date and a "next touch" date before you re-import, indicating your expectation for the interval of next contact.

Re-Import Your Data to the CRM

If you're going back to your existing CRM, make sure your merge is in Upsert format, so you're updating and inserting, rather than creating duplicates. If you're using a new platform, you're starting from a clean slate and can import at will. Double-check your import with a small load first to make sure your fields are lining up properly.

Governance Considerations

Implementing a CRM from scratch means protecting PII and other regulated data. Make sure you have policies and processes in place alongside technical controls to ensure privacy controls, opt-outs and other requirements, depending on the data types you are storing and where you are storing your data. If you are in a regulated industry or your contacts fall into a group that are regulated, it is worth consulting someone to ensure you cover your bases, even if you choose to self-implement.

Tactic: CRM Integrations

Notifications and Alerts

Once your data is in the system, it should include key dates for the next contact. Now you need to set up the alerts to the contact owner so they are reminded to reach out in time for the key dates. Different systems offer different alerts, but all systems have to be configured for the alerts to go out. ProTip: if you'd like escalations to happen in case a salesperson isn't executing on their assignments, this type of alert will need to be configured as well.

Scheduling and Calendars

Not all CRMs offer calendars that are widely loved. If your team is used to working in GSuite or Outlook, they should be able to continue to do so. You will need to set up your calendar system (GSuite, Office 365) as allowed to connect to your CRM system, and your CRM to connect with your calendar system. Depending on your CRM, there may be a plug-in to install, or synchronization may happen behind the scenes. Bi-directional synchronization is the key word. That way your team can add events to either system and have both systems update.

Apps

The CRM world is full of some awful apps. There are some very good ones in the newer CRMs, as well, but your team may decide they'd rather not use another app and want to use what they know: Google Contacts or Outlook Contacts. That should be fine, if you've set up synchronization properly. You can protect your data using a mobile device management program (see below under Governance Considerations). If you want your team to use an app, look into how you can customize the view so it shows them what they need to see and remove fields that aren't relevant. Particularly on a small screen, time is money.

?The AI Play: Social Media

Your CRM solution needs to be able to act as a team player. One of the things it should be able to do for you is evaluate signaling. This means that when your contacts are in the market for something you need, your CRM should know about it, and tell you about it. Social media is one of those areas your CRM can monitor and report back on much better than a human. Connecting your CRM to social media allows the CRM to correlate a massive amount of information quickly and return assessments to a human for further evaluation and action.

The AI Play: Daily Operations

Daily CRM operations fall into a few categories: data cleansing and upkeep; task assignments and fulfillment; and lead capture and response. All of these can have AI involvement. There are CRMs that have in-built data cleansing and upkeep components, such that once you import your cleaned contact base, you will never have to perform that routine again. The system will keep it clean for you on an ongoing basis. As for task assignment - see below in workflowing. This can be a fully automated process, provided you design your business process in a logical way. For your lead capture and response, it is possible for the CRM to gather new signals and respond to them in an automated fashion. This is where your own relationship strategy has to be considered. It might be that you harness AI to capture leads and then your human team responds to them, or you might be comfortable with automated response. Either way, you can functionally handle daily sales operations inside the right CRM.

Governance Considerations

Mobile Device Management means the ability to control your firm's information, even if it's roaming the earth on a mobile device. It's critical if you're managing regulated information but it's important no matter what your data stack looks like. You should be able to wipe a phone or laptop remotely, scan for malicious applications, locate a device, lock a device and a few other critical moves at minimum. Basic MDM is a requirement for most companies these days, and it makes life a lot easier.

Tactic: Workflowing Your Connectivity Strategy

The AI Play: Assignments and Reassignments

Staffing changes happen, and sometimes AI can illustrate through data analysis that staffing changes need to happen. When a CRM is enabled to receive emails inbound (either via synchronized mailboxes or otherwise) then management can report on sentiment analysis and that is a powerful tool in measuring alignment and results. AI can be enabled to use sentiment analysis and conversion analysis to assign contacts, rebalance workload and otherwise better align clients. The days of "geographies" can be over for most industries, when sales can be aligned to actual results.

The AI Play: Automated Communications

Responding to or reaching out to customers via a CRM is one of those things that can be automated, and if done properly, nobody will ever know. On the other hand, if it's not done with great thought and care, it's so obvious and off-putting, that it's really not worth the brand damage. It's critical to get the tone right, and to make sure that the communication is valuable.

Governance Considerations

For many sales people, their conversion ratios and their emails that indicate sentiment analysis should be considered private communications. Setting up a CRM so it can safely analyze data without releasing any HR or otherwise protected data can be tricky but it is just a matter of restricting permissions so that management can see the data, and the AI engine can see the data, but other end users of the system cannot.

Tactic: Analysis and Reporting

The AI Play:

Knowing who's been added to your system and who's been contacted is critical, but it's also table stakes. If your CRM can't send you a top-level view of who's doing what in sales, then things aren't working properly. Your CRM should also be able to send each sales person a report that shows what they've done and what they haven't done.

Where AI comes in (and this is embedded in the more advanced CRMs) and shows its value is in telling the sales person and the business manager which tasks will yield the most value in terms of likely conversion. AI's capabilities, as you've seen above, are in its ability to bring data together from a variety of places and analyze it quickly. This signal analysis is hugely valuable in helping sales to prioritize, and ultimately in helping you to run, forecast and pivot your business strategically.

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