How Generative AI is Transforming Go-to-Market

Depending on who you ask, generative AI will either enhance every aspect of life, or usher in the kind of techno-dystopian nightmare that was once the sole province of science fiction movies. But what will generative AI really do, especially for go-to-market professionals?

For Ben Salzman, SVP of ZI Labs and GTM Strategy at ZoomInfo, one of generative AI's initial effects has been simply encouraging sales and marketing leaders to experiment and question conventional wisdom.

“Generative AI is going to allow companies to run so much faster,” Salzman says. “Producing good content will be faster, designing strategic workflows will be faster, identifying audiences and executing data queries will be faster – it’s accelerating the pace of innovation.”

Generative AI and Sales: The New Frontier of Customer Trust

Many of today’s most forward-thinking companies, including ZoomInfo, are incorporating generative AI technologies into their products and services.?

Use cases range from the general, such as generative AI-powered search results from Google and Microsoft's Bing, to the specialized, such as the recently announced ZoomInfo Copilot, an AI-powered solution that analyzes market data and suggests high-value sales actions.

This means the only real question is not whether a company is using generative AI, but how they’re using it – and how effective those integrations and features will ultimately be for end users.

Salzman believes AI automation will eventually become so commonplace that its use will become normalized and customer trust will shift in response.

“In a few years, I would assume, when you get an email from a company that's well-articulated and researched, that AI will have been involved,” Salzman says.

The greatest challenge for sales leaders exploring generative AI tools is balancing the very real demand to reduce administrative burdens and automate routine tasks, with the equally urgent need to forge genuine, meaningful relationships with prospective customers.?

To reconcile these challenges, sales leaders must take a proactive role in educating both their teams and their prospects about the areas in which generative AI is preferable to human labor, as well as its potential and limitations.

“Generative AI is already redefining the engagement layer to produce marketing materials, content, and customer touchpoints,” Salzman says. “Over time, it will migrate farther down the stack, where even a layperson user could write a relatively sophisticated SQL query into a data warehouse – but we’re not quite there yet.”

Robust data regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) demand significantly higher disclosures regarding the extent to which data is shared and used by generative AI systems than in other markets, including North America and the Asia-Pacific region. This, in turn, will necessitate a broad, holistic approach to data management that spans the entirety of a company’s org structure to ensure compliance regulations are followed and customer data integrity is respected.

Generative AI: The Competitive Edge for Sales Teams

Salzman argues that, while establishing and maintaining customer trust regarding generative AI is crucial, broader adoption of such technologies will ultimately enable sales professionals to focus on what they excel at: Solving customer problems and forging meaningful relationships.

“Take having generative AI suggest alternatives on your email copy as an example,” Salzman says. “It's not writing it for you, or asking you to build some complex workflow around generating it – you simply ask it to rewrite something with a different tone, or a different call to action. It's more concise, and you can use it to coach you. In general, generative AI can probably write better than most salespeople. It’s a necessary evil for salespeople to have to craft content, not a point of leverage.”

Research from Salesforce suggests that, on average, sales professionals spend less than one-third of their workweek actually engaging with prospects and selling. Yet demands have never been higher, and market conditions remain unpredictable.

Imagine how much more effective sales teams could be if the necessary but time-consuming administrative work – precisely the kinds of tasks at which generative AI can excel – were handled for them.?

Think of how much stronger relationships with prospects and existing customers could be if salespeople were able to fully devote themselves to solving customers’ problems, without the additional cognitive burden of vital administrative tasks.?

Picture deploying customized plays and workflows with just a few clicks that help sales professionals connect with not just the right prospect at the right time, but also provide them with critical intent data and context about the problems those prospects are trying to solve before their competitors.

These are the possibilities offered by generative AI.?

The opportunities described above aren’t just possible. The capabilities of generative AI systems are already fundamentally reshaping how people sell, to whom, and when, and the coming years promise even bolder advances. Although there are both legal and ethical risks inherent to generative AI, the opportunities for sales teams are immense.

“What’s most exciting to me is the possibility of using generative AI almost as an ‘autocomplete’ for go-to-market motions,” Salzman says. “You could begin by engaging with a generative AI about what you're trying to do, whether that's a simple data query, an advanced search, a workflow setup, or even creating an end-to-end campaign.?

“My sense is that, over time, generative AI will be much more important to brand affinity experiences and a sense of community, even if it's digital.”