5 Generative AI Use Cases to Accelerate Sales and Marketing Performance

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is infiltrating your sales and marketing department. Is this good or bad? 

The answer is both. And your fate depends on how you support generative AI’s rapid growth. That’s why now is the time to sit down with your marketing and sales leaders to understand the potential and pitfalls of generative AI for your organization.

The potential is in automating tedious marketing and sales processes, increasing worker productivity, and delighting and dazzling customers. However, these apps can also put your company at risk because of the potential for copyright infringement, inaccurate and outdated information, dataset bias, and security vulnerabilities.  

You may know about the over 100 million downloads and tens of thousands of browser extensions using OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4. But what do you know about Jasper.ai, Fireflies, Crystal Knows, Regie AI, Flick, Seamless.ai, or Gong? These are just a few tools your sellers and marketers can use daily. All are available for download, and most have free versions.

To understand the shifting sands of how mid-market and enterprise CXOs are making purchase decisions to modernize technology, consider Acceleration Economy’s “Selling to the New Executive Buying Committee,” a Course designed to assist vendors, partners, and buyers in this process.

5 Ways to Unleash Generative AI’s Marketing and Sales Impact 

To drive productive conversations with your marketing and sales leaders, it’s important to understand how generative AI is being used. Here are five of the emerging generative AI use cases to help leaders prepare for collaborating with sales and marketing leaders.  

1. Automating and personalizing cross-channel sales and marketing strategies in prospect and customer outreach, communications, and interactions: AI can help address changing customer needs and expectations around how they buy and interact with your company. Generative AI’s advanced algorithms can use customer and market data patterns to segment and target relevant audiences across their preferred channels. With these capabilities, businesses can efficiently analyze and identify high-quality prospects and tailor outreach to engage the right buyers with the right message at the right time. 
2. Writing and editing sales and marketing copy and content, including email, ad campaigns, sales presentations, and marketing collateral: The competition for your buyers’ attention is at an all-time high, so sales and marketing communications must be on point. At the same time, the costs of sales, sales productivity, and marketing return on investment (ROI) need constant improvement. Generative AI apps are available on browsers to create and refine short- and long-form content used in the hundreds of go-to-market (GTM) activities required to drive revenue and support your customers.  
3. Gathering and analyzing buyer and account intelligence to improve customer experiences and performance: AI’s data processing and analytical capabilities are invaluable tools for processing, analyzing, and operationalizing data from multiple sources. The difference between winning and losing customers is the ability to prioritize when to reach out, what to say, and what to offer. You can use generative AI to develop hyper-personalized content and offerings based on individual customer behavior, persona, and purchase history. 
4. Offloading and automating mundane sales and marketing activities, freeing up capacity to spend more time with customers and prospects: Sales productivity and marketing ROI are what executives and investors track closely. Sales and marketing pros think of generative AI tools as copilots, interns, or assistants to help them work smarter and more creatively. The more time your GTM pros are focused on customers and revenue and the less time they spend on mundane tasks, the more business value they can deliver. 
5. Capitalizing on the generative AI and AI capabilities built into the tools your team already uses in your sales and marketing stack: Generative AI capabilities are advancing very quickly. One of the best sources for innovation is exploring and working with your revenue teams to review your marketing and sales technology suppliers’ AI capabilities. This effort can yield an immediate impact as you don’t have to burn time and resources to onboard new vendors.

Generative AI in the Real World 

To bring the generative AI opportunity to life in sales and marketing, I’ll walk through a planning session I had recently with GTM leaders in the legal technology market. Here is an overview of a campaign creation effort with generative AI (with an assist from machine learning and natural language processing). This is the right time to underline that not everything is 100% automated. Human intervention and creativity are still needed from your sellers and marketers.  

Generative AI and machine learning in GTM work increase efficiency and productivity immediately. This daily effort also trains the generative AI models and tools to become more innovative, driving better business outcomes over time. 

Support Your Sellers and Marketers with Generative AI 

Now is the time to support your sales and marketing leaders in a world where generative AI brings new capabilities and productivity levels. As with all new technology, the sales and marketing generative AI journey starts with understanding what’s possible, defining a strategy, and collaborating on a game plan. Also, include an environment for your marketers and sellers to test and iterate with different tools and processes that will deliver better returns faster.

Final recommendation: To be an empathetic leader in this new era, drop a prompt or two into your favorite generative AI app and see for yourself what’s possible.  

---