The impact of Artificial Intelligence on Sales and Marketing

The concept of Artificial Intelligence has been around since the 1950's with pioneering work by the likes of Alan Turing, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, so it is reasonable to ask why the sudden immediacy? The answer lies in the alignment of dramatically increasing processing power and bandwidth, cloud computing and big data, all combining to provide a platform for Machine Learning and Deep Learning applications to finally realise their potential and deliver tangible value. For this reason there were by late 2016 over 1,500 AI startups raising $5 billion of funding in the U.S alone.

Autonomous cars, Amazon's Alexa, Deepmind's AlphaGo, intelligent robots and warnings of the threat to society from Superintelligence, all grab the headlines. However, there is a quieter AI based revolution occurring which fundamentally impacts the way every company will interact with their most important asset - their customers. What AI brings to the table is its capacity to analyse large volumes of unstructured data, to sift that data to identify patterns and insights and then make predictions and recommendations. All this at a scale that even large human teams cannot hope to match. The resulting useful information regarding a company's markets, competitors, customers and prospects is a game changer. According to Forrester, this capability means that sales and marketing already account for 50% of AI spending by companies today, so what are the areas AI is making an impact?

Customer Insights

There has never been so much information available to companies. This data exists not just within the company's own systems but across a plethora of digital channels including websites, online search activity, email, social media, job postings, forums, the financial press and many others. The brilliance of AI is its ability to trawl this sea of data in order to gain insights into customers and buyer behaviours.

The goal here is to identify your ideal customers and predict what it is that they want before they ask for it. AI powered tools help identify a companies most likely customers, track their current online activity, identify what solutions and content they are most interested in, gauge when they are likely to buy, and recommend when and how they are best approached to provide a maximum probability for closure. Forrester calls this the Insights Revolution, stating that companies that arm themselves with such tools and successfully utilise the new depths of customer information will increase profit growth by an average 14%.

Content Management

The importance of Account Based Marketing and using hyper personalised content is well published, however this is becoming amplified in an internet enabled world where Buyers are taking control and where companies struggle to reach them in a saturated digital marketplace. Content marketing has therefore emerged as a critical form of digital marketing and, when powered by AI, this can be achieved at greater levels of impact and scale.

AI based tools are now making an impact in three areas (i) content creation tools that harness the power of Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to create better content than humans can manage, (ii) tools that monitor the Buyers digital journey and therefore deliver hyper personalised content tailored to each Buyer at each stage of the sales cycle, (iii) with Buyers claiming 78% of salespeople do not have the right materials (research by Sceismic), tools that automate and manage content delivery to the sales team and to the customer bring new levels of value.

With the increasing difficulty in reaching customers through outbound campaigns, due to legislation, firewall effectiveness and digital saturation, it becomes more imperative for companies to attract Buyers through high quality digital content.

Sales Acceleration

Somewhat incredibly, revenue generating activities can account for as little as 37% of a salespersons working week (survey by Insidesales.com). It therefore stands to reason that any tool that can reduce time spent in internal review meetings, researching target customers, generating content and sales pitches, and planning and organising customer engagement and meetings will be highly impactful in terms of cutting costs and increasing revenues. It is clear that CRM and Salesforce Automation platforms have not had the desired impact, however as new AI based applications become available, this combined ecosystem can bring real value to the sales function.

In addition to the Insights and Content Management areas already discussed, AI powered Sales Acceleration tools now start to go beyond traditional dashboards to help drive sales effectiveness. Such tools can, for example, monitor every aspect of sales team performance, they can help automate time consuming and repetitive administration tasks, and they can help structure and better organise customer contacts and communications throughout the sales cycle. Other tools now deliver real value in the area of sales team coaching and new hire induction, while Chatbots and AI powered Virtual Assistants play an increasing role in activities such as scheduling customer meetings with over 97% accuracy.

Overall, whilst we are at the start of a new journey powered by Artificial Intelligence, there can be no doubting the significant impact these technologies are going to have within sales and marketing. Gartner predict that 89% of businesses will compete mainly on customer experience and that AI platforms will cannibalise revenues of at least 30% of market leading companies. Time to get onboard.