Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t a new concept; however, its evolution continues to take the world by storm—especially when it comes to the sales and marketing industry. While AI used to refer to futuristic robots and the Terminator, it has a whole new meaning in 2023. AI empowers sales and marketing teams to maximize their productivity and quality of their lead generation efforts, resulting in more closed revenue.
Keep reading to learn what AI is in the sales and marketing industry, the benefits it brings to businesses, and the top AI sales and marketing tools currently on the market.
What Is Artificial Intelligence for Sales and Marketing?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is computerized technology programmed to execute cognitive tasks as well as—or perhaps better than—human beings. It is one way to automate everything that can be automated, which can free up your staff to tackle higher-priority tasks that AI can’t manage. Investing in AI can reap dividends by increasing your company’s ability to process tons of data, which can then be analyzed to obtain in-depth information on client behavior and purchasing habits. This allows you and your team to put an end to the hundreds of manually assembled spreadsheets, putting more time into building relationships with potential buyers.
You don’t want to eliminate the human element since humans are still better at interpreting body language or tone of voice. But AI can not only help your business gain insights about buying history, website traffic, email engagement, and more, it can can find useful patterns in buying behavior and patterns that humans might not readily identify.
Benefits of Using AI to Facilitate Sales and Marketing Objectives
AI for sales and marketing brings significant benefits to growing businesses, such as that is presents the following:
Greater Opportunity to Forecast Sales
An AI platform can tap into historical data to make informed sales forecasts. You’ll be able to get informed predictions about things like new customers interested in new products, deals or prospects with the highest likelihood to close, and which opportunities to focus on next. Your sales and marketing team leaders will also be able to predict team performance as long as the right data is entered.
Better Market Recommendations
After considering your sales and marketing team’s objectives and tapping into data already in the system, the AI system can offer recommended sales actions. For example, your sales and marketing team can receive input on which customers to focus on with upsells and which clients are closest to making sales decisions.
Automated Sales and Marketing Functions
The right AI platform can automate many processes and procedures to free your sales and marketing team members from tedious, time-consuming tasks. This allows them to focus on more mission-critical responsibilities.
For example, let’s say that after an introductory call between an SDR and a prospect, the prospect is automatically enrolled into an email nurturing campaign. This saves the SDR time from sending a customized email so they can spend more time connecting with more buyers.
Top AI Tools to Use for Sales and Marketing
It’s also essential to consider the various areas in which sales and marketing teams can use AI for sales development.
For Lead Automation—
When lead management software is used to its full potential, your business can identify and eliminate bottlenecks in sales, improve the overall customer experience, create an environment for ongoing sales development, and help your sales and marketing team prioritize leads.
It’s critical to know that lead management is a must-have tool if the goal is to scale your company. And what company doesn’t anticipate growth? Otherwise, things can become unwieldy. Relevant software will help your company structure would-be customers’ data in the sales cycle. So, your business won’t see essential steps slip between the cracks. You’ll also be able to see what is working well and what isn’t.
You can go with a dedicated lead management platform, or you can use a customer relationship management (CRM) platform. With a CRM solution, you can capture leads and guide prospects through your business’ conversion funnel. You can continue to build on the relationships formed after these prospects become customers. Lead management and CRM solutions are similar, but they’re not the same. The primary difference between lead management and CRM software relates to scope.
Instead of pondering whether to get one or the other, it makes sense to consider how a lead management system and a CRM platform can be beneficial. A lead management tool will help you transform prospects into clients. After that, you can use a CRM tool to continue providing a high customer service level.
Salesforce
There’s a reason why Salesforce often tops lists of the top CRMs: it’s a platform that will scale right alongside your company. That means you won’t have to fret about your company ever outgrowing the platform. If you have a really small company, Salesforce might be overkill. But it is an excellent option for fast-growth businesses.
Hubspot
HubSpot has lead management down pat. Like other top CRM options on the market, HubSpot covers the six significant stages in the lead management process. These include finding and understanding leads, collecting data about leads, scoring leads, nurturing leads, distributing leads to the sales team, and tracking and measuring leads.
Zoho
Zoho is another great option if you want a top lead management system for your business. Your sales and marketing department will benefit from streamlined processes that create quality leads from different sources. It’s the sort of CRM that will help your business bridge the gap between sales and marketing.
For Email Marketing Automation—
Email automation can generate and disseminate interesting and helpful content that appeals to your prospects, driving more people to your website, boosting social engagement, and leading to better sales conversions. It isn’t about mindlessly sending prospects way more emails, but boosting your objectives and making your messages enticing enough to turn leads into customers.
Planning and executing a sound email marketing automation campaign begins with knowing what your business wants to achieve. You need specific goals rather than general objectives. You should also know what outcome you’re expecting and, of course, who your target demographic is in the first place. Remember that not all prospects will have the same motivations to buy what your company sells. So, your email marketing campaigns will be more effective if you group your prospects into different funnels so that the right content can be sent to the right prospects.
Once you do all the above, focus on creating a message that speaks to your target demographic. You will need to tweak the message for different types of prospects so that you speak to their specific pain points. Create a strong call to action and build a solid landing page that helps turn prospects into customers. When you use a top email marketing automation program, it’s relatively easy to set up an email marketing campaign, adjust things on the fly, and re-launch campaigns at appropriate intervals in the future. Your sales and marketing team will save time and money by being able to optimize email marketing campaigns and re-launch campaigns down the road.
CampaignMonitor
CampaignMonitor can easily connect your business with prospects and customers using easy-to-use software. The power behind the application is that it helps businesses to send highly personalized emails. This can create a dependable channel to expand engagement with subscribers and earn loyal readership and conversions.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a well-known marketing automation platform and email marketing service. You’ll see how easy creating, sending, and analyzing email and ad campaigns can be. Additionally, MailChimp has a ton of native connections with websites, making it a great asset for growing small to medium-sized businesses.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a solid choice for your company if you want a comprehensive marketing automation platform. You can use it to create campaigns, automate follow-up campaigns, and edit campaigns already in full swing.
For Content Creation—
Businesses increasingly understand the need to boost organic website traffic and client engagement with original content, and AI can help. It doesn’t mean eliminating your content creation team. The human element is still essential, but it can be supported with strategic use of technology. Your content generation team will be able to do more with less. So, even if you have a great team of content producers, you can still generate content more efficiently with the right AI writing tool.
Regardless of what sort of content you produce or what messages you need to create, AI writing tech can help you do it better. It’s essential to be realistic, however. Distinctly human qualities like creativity and empathy can’t be replicated by AI technology. That’s one reason it’s wrong to assume that AI writing tools can replace human writers.
The top AI writing tools use what’s known as natural language processing (NLP). NLP predicts text based on the information you feed into it. When you enter a query, the tool will comb over millions of resources for pertinent data. It will then process the information into human language, and incorporate proper punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, and other things.
So, how can you get started with an AI writing tool? You’re better off taking baby steps. For instance, you might want to use it for your social media messaging. If you key in the right information, an AI writer tool can produce something you can use. Chances are that you’ll need to give it a once-over and make some edits. But the technology can get the ball rolling and provide a valuable resource for human content writers.
Another way an AI writing solution can help is by easily generating tons of topic ideas and highly relevant keywords. While it can be taxing for humans to have to chase down that sort of information, it’s something a top-tier AI writing solution can do quickly and easily.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is one of the leading players in the AI writing tool market. You can use the tool for a wide variety of things, such as writing job descriptions, responding to queries from job applicants, and developing content for onboarding newly hired workers.
Regie.Ai
Leveraging Regie.Ai, you can easily create sales and marketing content. It can also track reading levels and word counts to generate the type of content your readers are interested in. You can use this AI writing solution to generate story ideas and produce good web copy. You’ll always have the option of editing what was generated so that it meets your needs.
Jasper
Jasper is a great AI writing tool that will generate useful content for your company. Even if you have a good content writing team, Jasper can save the writing team a lot of time by coming up with fresh content.
Key Takeaways
Your business can take things to another level once you understand how AI can enhance sales and marketing initiatives. The secret’s now out. Many businesses are turning to it to boost the number of leads that come in and increase overall sales performance.
It’s also essential that your business be aware of top items for sales and marketing purposes. Whether your direction is lead automation, email marketing automation, or content creation, it’s essential to understand the tools available to help your business achieve its objectives.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, we use a combination of the best tools in the market along with high-performing sales and marketing experts to help small to medium-sized B2B businesses create valuable and personalized content and effectively move leads through each stage of the sales funnel. When you’re ready to maximize your approach to lead generation, contact the experts at Abstrakt!
