GenAI for sales, marketing and transformation, and the rise and fall of the Chief Design Officer

A weekly round-up—3 discoveries, 1 reflection and a quote worth remembering in the innovation & design space—for leaders invested in digital transformation.

By Maish Nichani

#1: 3 things for successful GenAI transformation

Dr Raj Ramesh, whose explainer videos on digital transformation are a treat, is now experimenting with 60-second YouTube shorts. The first is three things to consider when adopting GenAI into the business. ??

#2: What salespeople get wrong about using GenAI

We’re getting calls to run our AI Opportunities Sprint for sales and marketing teams. After some Q&A with clients, it becomes clear that GenAI can impact a lot in this space—and it’s not all about crafting emails and social media messages. As this HBR article points out, GenAI can help in many ways, such as conducting in-depth research, personalising messaging, creating case studies and finding creative selling methods.

“Having thoughtful, critical discussions with generative AI can yield a remarkably detailed understanding of the business issues, their likely causes (often with specific points of evidence from that customer organization), and it can help sales teams appropriately position their solutions into this business context — all without extensive manager involvement… In this regard, generative AI has the potential to crack one of sales leaders’ longest-standing frustrations: sellers lacking business acumen and deep customer business understanding.”

PebbleRoad, for instance, has created a custom GPT DomainDynamo that can help you get up to speed about a new domain very quickly. If you're a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, simply add our GPT and tell it what you'd like to learn about. It'll prompt you based on frameworks such as Business Model Canvas, Porter’s Five Forces, PESTLE and SWOT. Have a go and let us know what you think of it!

#3: The big design freak-out: A generation of design leaders grapple with their future

Robert Fabricant, Co-Founder & Partner at Dalberg Design, has written a two-part series for the Fast Company trying to dissect the fall of the design leader. The second part comes out later, but in this first part, he tries to discover what happened to the promises of glory and the causes of the dramatic fall. Fabricant lists many causes resembling an M&A gone wrong: CEO not understanding design’s role, structural issues, misaligned expectations, and the lack of design-led transformation.

I think that unless design drives a company’s growth, we are not going to see respect from any of the C-level. I see this expectation every time I meet a C-level executive. The meeting might be about CX, but the executive hears market growth numbers. Design must learn to speak the language of business.

Internal reflections

We’re running our first overseas AI Opportunities Sprint next week. We’ll be in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to help a large organisation's sales and marketing teams find opportunities to use GenAI to augment their work. This time, we are experimenting with the prioritisation part of our framework.

The last few times we ran the workshop, we noticed that people wanted to keep all the ideas, which was nice but not practical when trying to green-light a few projects. So, this time around, we are trying ways to help pick out a few winners during the workshop. Let’s see how it goes.

Quote worth remembering

“If you wait for certainty, you will spend your whole life standing still. And if you grow discouraged and give up when things get rough, you’ll miss out on your best possible destiny. So the secret is to be excited about what is in your power to control, be accepting of what’s not in your power to control, and then move with certainty into an uncertain future.”

— Kevin Hart on why it’s important to keep trying.