Leveraging AI for Client Business Growth

There’s been an excessive amount of talk about AI lately. Depending on the business or the industry that you are in, you’ve either started experimenting or you’re waiting until the ROI on AI investments becomes clear. Either way, my hope is that this article helps demystify the potential impact of AI on your business growth, the marketing and sales activities in particular, and helps you prioritize future efforts accordingly.

Generally speaking, the high-level benefits of AI include the following:

• AI can process massive amounts of data instantaneously; with a little human direction, it can produce insights faster and deeper than a human alone, leading to better, real-time decision making
• AI can enable workforce efficiencies, producing workflow automation that is faster, cheaper and error-free to accelerate marketing activity in a strategic and precise/consistent/reliable way

At Chief Outsiders, we recognize that AI will contribute to business growth in a multitude of ways, impacting every aspect of a Go-To-Market and business growth strategy.? Although the degree of impact will differ by industry and type of business, adoption will be led by visionary companies that navigate the pros/cons of tools as they become available and empower their teams to employ tools to enable better decision-making, improved quality, time savings and increased competitiveness.

Chief Outsiders leverages the Growth Gears? approach to accelerate business growth for companies. Applying AI within the Growth Gears? framework shifts our process into hyperdrive. The following examples illustrate how companies we’ve worked with have started incorporating AI for the immediate benefit of sales and marketing operations, and product/service positioning, across the Growth Gears?.

MARKETING INSIGHTS

Better Customer Insights. Customer insights lead to more cost-effective marketing strategies and cost-efficient execution. AI tools can help us generate better customer insights by analyzing vast amounts of feedback, identifying patterns, and providing actionable information. AI tools can help marketers spot trends and create segmentations that lead to more effective marketing campaigns.?

A few AI use cases include:

• Analyzing persona behavior data to build predictive models
• Uncovering customer sentiment quickly from reviews, customer service and social posts?
• Analyzing feedback on new products and services prior to launch

AIContentFy explains some of these examples in more depth. Chief Outsiders engagements in the past year have delivered significant value to clients who have quickly adopted tools like these.

Raise the bar on competitive differentiation. Using AI tools to generate competitive analysis reports and product or service comparisons is only the beginning. AI tools can analyze copious amounts of data at lightning speed, and produce a curated list of prioritized opportunities (market gaps) that are perfect to pursue with your product or service. And of course, AI-driven offering features can be a competitive differentiator on their own.

A few AI use cases include:

• Quickly analyzing market data to surface gaps and opportunities
• Ongoing benchmarking of competitive offerings and market satisfaction, to ensure own products and services maintain their competitive edge
• Staying ahead of the competition by incorporating AI into a product or service to better address customer needs.

Understanding where AI can help meet customer needs better and faster is often the biggest mystery to companies. Chief Outsiders have helped to demystify the AI landscape for clients by taking customer insights and applying our knowledge of existing AI tools. In this way, our advisors can support your team to develop roadmaps that lead to growth for your business, industry or category ahead of competitors.

One of our clients has used AI rendering tools to create a differentiated service offering, enabling what-if iterations and commitment to customizations in less time, making the team more productive in the process.

Stronger Company Insights. Monitoring internal metrics is easier with AI tools. Whether you're tracking financial metrics or operational effectiveness, AI tools can help you keep tabs on the internal and external metrics that matter, ensuring continued business success.?

A few AI-driven use cases include:

• Win/loss analysis modeling to refine and improve lead qualification
• Identification of potential financial risks, offering data-driven insights for more informed financial planning and risk mitigation.
• Company culture assessments based on employee sentiment analysis

The AI-driven process provides a highly trained and capable partner that rivals the smartest, most experienced employee, producing a consistently stronger work product with extensive analysis that previously would have taken weeks to deliver.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Discovering Market Opportunities. AI models can analyze historical and current data and perform gap analyses. Machine learning algorithms can be used for demand forecasting, allowing businesses to optimize inventory and production.

A few AI use cases include:

• Suggested market opportunities based on trend analysis to forecast consumption and supply and identify unmet demand
• Faster competitive analyses and identification of ideal prospects?
• Forecasting sales and extrapolating trends for more reliable “what if” analyses, applying many more internal and external variables than a typical spreadsheet model

Competitive gaps and trend monitoring can pave the way for optimized positioning, pricing and market segmentation and new channels of distribution. For tools that help monitor external and internal trends, Influencer Marketing Hub provides an overview of AI tools and their application.

Responding to market demand. Machine learning algorithms can be used for demand forecasting, allowing businesses to optimize inventory and production. They can also respond to changes in competitive offerings, enabling companies to identify gaps, define opportunistic promotions or avoid over production.

A few AI use cases include:

• Recommended offerings based on customer feedback and modeling
• Real-time consumption and supply forecasts, and identification of unmet demand
• Proactive recommendation of actions that increase customer value

AI technologies empower businesses to respond to market demand by providing simulated forecasts, monitoring competitive actions, recommending consumer promotions, and providing the data that will facilitate agile decision-making. In this way, businesses can be more nimble in dynamic market environments and better meet the expectations of customers.

Optimally price offers and services to accelerate purchase and market penetration. AI tools can analyze copious amounts of data quickly to help illuminate gaps and trends that lead to market opportunities. Insights can lead to a company providing more value for customers, accelerating conversion and optimizing pricing.

A few AI use cases include:

• Predictive AI for analyzing willingness to buy and adjusting offers accordingly
• Dynamic pricing to ensure acquisition maximization by serving up the right offers to match anticipated demand
• Recommended offerings based on customer feedback and preference modeling

AI also can help a company maintain profitability by analyzing the supply chain to predict potential disruptions, cost changes, or other trends, and consider appropriate pricing changes as needed.

MARKETING EXECUTION

More effective sales teams. Several AI tools help sales teams scour public and internal data to automate the creation of competitive battlecards and tailored customer-facing collateral so they win more deals in less time. Marketers can benefit from these insights as well to elevate positioning and messaging strategy.

AI-enabled tools can

• Provide real-time monitoring of competitive activities and product/service launches
• Dynamically produce prospect-specific followup materials to include in post-meeting followup
• Actively listen to rep conversations and serve up appropriate reference materials.

If you are looking for sales enablement support, shop carefully. Test the tools that make bold claims to ensure the inputs and outputs meet your expectations and will save your team time and not burden them with another new technology to learn and adopt without significant benefits (or sales results). Opt for a pilot with clear metrics before committing to a long-term contract.

Optimal Resource Allocation. AI is already being used to screen and hire top talent, automate HR workflows and unearth insights into the existing talent pool. While some believe AI can be leveraged to optimally allocate resources based on careful scenario planning, a more immediate application is deployment of human talent where it provides the most value, while automating repetitive tasks that can be absorbed by technology. AI tools also can provide tailored or more immediate feedback to develop human talent more effectively.??

Ways that AI can support existing employees for the benefit of the company:

• Tailored onboarding, personalized learning paths and real-time feedback (human or automated coaching) based on current skillsets and job performance, resulting in faster more effective onboarding, greater productivity and better retention
• Workflow automations to augment live talent, resulting in greater productivity or customer satisfaction. For example, human-like conversational AI-based virtual agents can handle more mundane requests, and live talent can intervene to ensure quality customer service and relationships.
• Leaning into AI-driven recruiting tools to identify candidates across internal sources and match them to open job specs.

When it comes to AI, consider augmenting existing processes before committing to full automation or implementation, to help ensure the algorithms will produce expected and desirable results. Organizational trust in these tools develops over time, and employees who are included in the transition process are more likely to embrace rather than resist AI-driven changes.

Exceptional Marketing Execution. While not all workflows can be successfully automated at this time, those that can are performed more quickly and reliably. And in today’s immediate gratification-driven culture, intelligent automation offers more self-service and quicker issue resolution.

A few applications of AI include:

• Faster creation of lower-cost and better quality videos, images, presentations, ebooks, email sequences, etc, with generative tools
• Increased customer engagement in novel and efficient ways, enhancing the customer experience
• Dynamic, personalized experiences (for customer advertising, email sequences, collateral), increasing company relevance and value

This area is rapidly becoming table stakes. Many companies have readily adopted and easily integrated generative AI tools and dynamic personalization at scale into current processes. Early movers will have mastered this application of AI shortly and will start moving onto some of the harder applications of AI in the near future. Chief Outsiders regularly interviews industry leaders on their views about AI and reports on the latest adoption trends.?

Smarter KPIs. AI can be used to create and auto-populate dashboards, reports, and charts from multiple sources. With natural language processing capabilities, data is becoming more accessible in real-time to more users within the organization.

More important, AI can help:

• Identify the KPIs most aligned with company performance
• Prioritize the most important KPIs to measure across the organization
• Ensemble and share KPIs to help assess and balance strategic priorities across the organization?

AI tools can make KPI’s smarter by analyzing and identifying the metrics that truly correlate to performance and helping leaders better understand how the performance drivers might shift and change over time.

Evaluating new AI tools. New tools will continuously be released and mature. To stay ahead of the market and competition, create a cross-functional AI task force that can persistently be on the lookout for and potentially pilot new tools as they come onto the market.?

Many claims are exaggerated. When evaluating a possible new tool, make sure you understand

1. What problem does the AI-driven tool claim to solve?? What inputs and outputs are expected?? What types of prompts are required? Are there examples of what is learned by the tool over time?
2. Is the tool operating over public data sets (from the web) or private data sets (company data) and are outputs maintained confidentially within the company’s security network unintentionally available to the public?
3. Augmentation: Is human intervention allowed or required to achieve the stated objectives??
4. Integrations: As inputs are updated, do they feed the tool/model in real time?

New AI tools emerge daily, and the capabilities of AI tools constantly evolve. Chief Outsiders executives are constantly assessing and recommending tools and staying up to date on the expected results and outcomes. We are happy to chat with business leaders about effective tools in each of these areas. If you are curious about discussing the pros and cons of tools you are considering, message me and we'll have a conversation!

CONCLUSION

Chief Outsiders clients are experiencing early success incorporating AI into their business growth efforts.?While AI won’t give you all the answers, it will help your company and staff meet the future with a competitive edge. If you haven’t started exploring the possibilities of AI for your company, it’s not too late. Start with a cross-functional task force to explore potential use cases for your organization, and prioritize the efforts that meet immediate business goals to gain the success stories required for longer-term investment.

If you have already started incorporating AI into your company’s operations, and want to understand where you fall on the maturity scale of companies who are actively adopting AI -- or if you are looking for a current recommendation list of tools to evaluate for your organization -- reach out for a complimentary assessment and consultation.

Final note: While AI was used to augment the research for this article, it was compiled, written, fact-checked and edited by a human.