Driving value with AI in Sales and Marketing: A CEO’s Perspective

As we continue to explore the transformational potential of Generative AI (GenAI), its impact on various aspects of business becomes increasingly clear. Having spent most of my professional career in consulting and IT services, I’ve seen firsthand how AI is reshaping industries, including our own.

In my people-based business (even if augmented by automation and AI) three key aspects drive success: to excel in people, sales and delivery. Today I wanted to share some thoughts on GenAI in Sales and Marketing—a space where AI has already begun driving significant improvements. These ideas reflect the practical experiences we’ve gained over the past two years, implementing and refining AI tools in our day-to-day processes.

I’m sharing these insights to encourage you to take action—because AI success starts with real-world application. However, to avoid falling into the trap of "proof of concept purgatory", it's crucial to keep a larger strategic picture in mind and work to highly adopt one business area after another business area – in my today’s example think Sales and Marketing new end to end with “GenAI everywhere if reasonably possible”.

What’s Working: Four practical GenAI Use Cases in Sales

Here are some of the AI-driven ideas we’ve successfully implemented that you may find useful for your own business:

1. Client intelligence leveraging all available sources. In large clients you will have many interactions across various people - each at client and from your own company. AI can synthesize interactions from across your organization to provide a holistic view of each client: understand the customer's journey, identify recurring themes across client's departments, understand relationships / interactions within your client, etc. Use GenAI to also add (anonymized) information of your other clients e.g. in the same industry, your own knowledge on processes and industry, and general publicly available industry information. By consolidating this intelligence, new account managers can onboard faster and sales teams can efficiently approach clients with more relevant, targeted information per contact.
2. Automated Meeting Summaries and CRM Integration With client consent, use GenAI-powered tools to record and summarize discussions from meetings. After usually minor human adjustments, these summaries are automatically stored in our CRM with information from e.g. Outlook on the meeting (client, participant, date, subject of meeting, …): AI helps to capture key meeting insights, define follow-up activities, and even is generating next steps like preparing event invitations or scheduling future meetings in Outlook. This seamless process reduces manual entry and ensures that no information is lost. Comment; we do on purpose want to manually send away the generated mails. If recording is not possible / wished, we use a similar approach by dictating meeting minutes into a GenAI tool by our staff after the meeting. The AI structures and summarizes the conversation, continuing with the same automation steps as above. This process is efficient enough that some team members even started to complete their meetings' internal and external follow-up while commuting (not recommended).
3. Support Tailored Proposal Generation In general, I still remain skeptical about automated offer writing, specifically if the offer is on slides and not text. Why: Usually in order to win specific value must be created in the specific situation of the client. But AI can still expedite much of the preparatory work. AI helps us create "individualized standard materials," such as tailored company descriptions, individualized case studies, tailored consultant profiles, ... and generate all content in a client specific look & feel (as part of “account-based marketing”). The key to success here is ensuring that your CRM and various document management systems (e.g. marketing system, knowledge mgmt., people profile information, sales folders with tender info, …) are integrated to pull the right information based on client interaction and tendering information.
4. Custom Client Landing Pages For large bids or tenders, we use AI to generate customized landing pages, where potential clients can explore our capabilities. These pages not only display personalized content – may be beyond what you are allowed to send in as tender response such relevant PoVs & research articles – they are also making all material easily accessible at one place. Furthermore, such a? landing page allows to gather valuable additional insights—like which sections clients are most interested in, what questions they ask, who accesses when, … —that we can use to further refine our proposals and communications.

The Road Ahead: Moving Beyond AI Experiments

Right, none of these ideas are new. The true differentiator lies in execution: How well are these AI-driven initiatives implemented and embedded into your daily operations? The questions to answer to yourself are:

1) How many of these (or similar) ideas are “fully implemented” in the sense that all possible information is used in day-to-day business by all your client interacting people?

2) Where might be the bottlenecks – lack of data, low IT & AI-literacy, missing integration between parts of the processes / systems, geographic / content coverage?

3) How to ensure that the quality you deliver to your clients increases with each offer rather than risking to dilute to unintended “same average outcome” for different clients?

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Overcoming these challenges will ensure that AI helps you deliver better, more tailored solutions to clients without sacrificing the human touch that sets your business apart.

Are you ready to fully leverage AI in sales and marketing? If not, now is the time to start transformation as ultimately the overall responsibility for staying ahead of the curve lies in your, the CEO's hands.