Unlocking Generative AI for Marketing and Sales

Digitization is at its sophisticated best. Last month was incredibly big for Generative AI. First, Microsoft launched Viva Sales, a generative AI-powered application to make the life of sales and marketing people much easier followed by Salesforce, which launched Einstein GPT. Generative AI has become the enabler for marketing and salespeople, empowering them to create creative content tailored for the target audience while adhering to the tone of the brand and working within the guidelines.

Viva Sales enable salespeople and sales managers to create concise and tailored customer emails, get reminders and recommendations and extract insights about prospective customers.

Using generative AI, Einstein GPT produces tailored content across all Salesforce clouds, increasing staff productivity and improving customer experiences. Salesforce users will receive generative AI capabilities right out of the box thanks to the integration of Einstein GPT and OpenAI.

Let’s go back to Generative AI, the brilliant technology that’s making all of these wondrous things happen.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a sub-sect of artificial intelligence that enables robots to produce material on their own. It operates by automating the creation of content through the use of algorithms and deep learning techniques. The ability to generate any kind of digital information, including text, graphics, and even music, makes generative AI a very potent tool.

It accomplishes this by identifying patterns in already collected data and exploiting those patterns to create novel and distinctive outputs. GenAI is a significant tool for many industries, including gaming, entertainment, and product design since it can create highly realistic and complicated content that resembles human inventiveness.

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Generative AI in Sales

The sales industry is unpredictable, challenging, dynamic, volatile, and constantly evolving and let’s face it; keeping up with it can get a tad bit difficult. Today, it is well-positioned to swiftly emerge as a market leader with the help of Generative AI, the kind of AI used by OpenAI (the firm behind ChatGPT) and its rivals.

Artificial intelligence is used in sales to streamline and improve the sales process but sadly, only 37% of brands are turning to AI to amplify their sales game. This clearly doesn’t imply automating the entire sales process. Instead, just a handful of cutting-edge tools to help your sales professionals save a bunch of time and focus more on selling.

Why do Brands Need AI in Sales?

Let’s talk numbers here. A report suggested that sales professionals roughly spend 33% of their time selling products aggressively. With so much potential at stake, they are pulled back and caught up in a web of to-do tasks, drafting follow-up emails and setting up meetings.

For instance, generating proposals, email templates, and other sales materials takes a lot of time for salespeople. These materials can be swiftly and effectively created by generative AI, giving salespeople significant time to concentrate on other facets of their jobs, like developing relationships with clients.

Here, artificial intelligence is the ideal solution to turn things around where sales representatives can work with more prospective clients and amp up the sales operation. The good part is, businesses and leaders are already realizing and working along this winning mantra. Forrester predicted that AI-powered platforms have an enormous scope and their market is likely to grow to $37 billion by 2025.

Here are a few ways how AI can enhance the workings of the sales team.

• With the use of AI tools, the sales team can quickly adapt to evolving buyers’ journeys.
• AI programs gather and analyze countless data points to draw conclusions. With this knowledge, you may target your various personalities more effectively.
• The team can enjoy immediate access to data thanks to AI. You can also rely on real-time data that guarantee its veracity and correctness.
• Sales outreach initiatives today use a variety of channels. Wherever you discover your prospects, AI can assist your team in keeping track of them.

Sales enablement is the process of giving sales teams the tools, materials, and training they need to sell more successfully and forge deeper bonds with clients.

Selling involves a lot of interactions and transactions, which generate a lot of data, including text from email chains, audio from phone calls, and video from in-person interactions.

Creating Content

Different forms of content such as case studies, email templates, and product brochures are just a few examples of sales enablement materials that may be produced with generative AI. Not just ensuring that all materials are concise, uniform and current, this can also help the sales teams save time and effort.

Personalization

In order to develop individualized sales materials that are catered to certain clients’ requirements and interests, generative AI may examine customer data. By doing so, you might boost your chances of making a sale and fortify client relationships.

Generating Leads

To find potential leads and design niche marketing campaigns, employ generative AI. For example, it can discover new customers by analyzing data from a company’s website and then produce tailored emails and social media posts to engage them.

Sales Analytics

Generative AI can analyze sales data to reveal what is working and what isn’t working. This data can be used by sales teams to streamline their procedures and perform better.

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Training Material

After understanding the unique requirements and skill levels of sales teams, generative AI can help to develop training materials that are specifically tailored for them.

Virtual assistants

Generative AI can help sales teams to create chatbots and virtual assistants that can be available 24*7 to answer client queries, offer product recommendations and also help with sales transactions.

Generative AI in Marketing

Generative AI is colossal and has the potential to refurbish how marketing professionals work. It could create personalized ad copy, generate blog posts (and images), summarize long-form posts, develop content briefs, comb through unstructured data, and so much more. With the use of the perfect tools, marketers can more quickly and efficiently produce content that is more effective than ever before.

The breather is, it is not here to replace humans. To get the desired effects, humans still need to contribute strategic insight, empathy, editing, and a deeper comprehension of the target audience. And last but the most important thing is that we are responsible for the accurate prompt to make this work.

In a survey conducted by IBM, 35% of participants identified generative AI as one of the most well-liked upcoming technologies that, in the next years, could significantly alter corporate processes, including marketing.

By producing content from scratch, Generative AI promises to advance automation for marketers. The discussion over AI and ML (machine learning) applications has intensified recently with the appearance of ChatGPT and DALL-E 2.

Content from the Scratch

To automate content production, text-generative AI employs huge language models and natural language processing techniques. These methods examine the patterns and styles of attractive content using vast data sets of previous content examples. AI-generated text can be utilised for a variety of content development tasks, such as:

• Scriptwriting
• Product descriptions.
• Create blog posts or emails.

Generate questions for SME

As a content marketer, you would require to speak with SMEs. Particularly now that Google has changed the search rating criteria from E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to E-E-A-T, adding an extra “E” for the experience. This essentially gives expert-authored or expert-involved content more weight.

Summarize Posts

Create a collection of the most important bullet points from an article or guide that can be used as a table of contents, a summary, a quick social media post, or even a short description to share with internal stakeholders.

Generating Social Media Posts

You can input a prompt as, “Write a catchy Instagram caption about XYZ product” and voila, watch the magic unfold. You will be served with a tailor-made eye-catchy post that is sure to hit the bull’s eye.

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Generating SEO keywords

For businesses to find SEO-friendly, pertinent, high-ranking keywords and phrases for strengthening their digital marketing presence, generative AI examines vast volumes of data and can spot consumer behaviour trends. Marketers can make the most of Generative AI in the following ways:

• Generate SEO topics.
• Conduct SEO keyword searches.
• Find appropriate content headlines.
• Create a structure for content.

Image/Video Generation

Using deep learning algorithms and generative adversarial networks, generative AI can automate the creation of images (GANs). There are various ways to use image generation using these tools in marketing, including:

• Producing incredibly accurate product photos for use in online shops, social media platforms, and other marketing materials.
• Develop logos.
• Creating compelling, aesthetically pleasing advertising.

Generative AI video techniques can be used to produce professional marketing and product demonstration videos that can boost sales.

Customer Journey

Artificial intelligence can be used to automate the customer service model because it has been shown that conversational AI models can grasp consumer inquiries quickly and reply to them more swiftly than people. Currently, generative AI automates customer service activities by:

• Messaging applications and chatbots that provide round-the-clock customer care channels.
• Automated emails that respond quickly to frequent client questions and requests.
• Personalized recommendations and solutions are provided to customers by self-service portals with incorporated generative AI capabilities based on their inquiries and past behaviour.
• Multilingual support, which serves a wide swath of society.

Cookieless Marketing

As third-party cookies are gradually phased out on platforms like Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and even Apple, cookieless marketing is the way of the future. Some marketers may believe that these new restrictions will have a negative impact on the effectiveness of their targeted advertisements.

A Transparent Approach 

In the era of aggressive digital marketing, brands are looking for transparency. According to a new Consumer Navigator survey shared by Dentsu, 70 % of respondents agreed to the fact that firms should disclose when AI has been used to create products, services, experiences, or content.

Seventy-seven per cent of respondents felt that brands need to keep an eye on technology to make sure it doesn’t reinforce preexisting biases and disparities.

61% of consumers backed companies testing generative AI. Less than half (42%) concurred that they like brands employing AI over those not using it, suggesting some underlying reluctance.

Consumers are curious about generative AI but have some severe reservations, according to a survey by Dentsu.

Customers could lose trust in a brand rapidly and run the danger of a public relations crisis if they learn it uses AI techniques to create marketing messaging or social media content. Also, there are existing programmes that can tell whether a text was written using ChatGPT.

While AI may be adept at data analysis, it falls short of your marketing team’s understanding of your clients. While Generative AI’s Pandora’s box may be packed with sentiment monitoring, keywords, and tracking, it’s frequently the case that sarcasm, wordplay, or another expressive language can alter how accurately AI detects tone.

Final Thoughts

Generative AI is a potent technology with the potential to transform the way we conduct business in the sales sector. Generative AI can assist sales professionals in closing more deals and forging stronger bonds with customers by automating monotonous processes, personalising sales materials, and producing distinctive and engaging content.

At the end of the day, Generative AI should not be utilised to replace sales staff; rather, it should be used to supplement their efforts. To begin, specify your goals and identify the components of your marketing approach that can benefit from AI.

Determine the appropriate use cases for generative AI to increase the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives. Use high-quality data inputs because AI relies on it to produce insightful analysis and precise predictions. Lastly, as you learn and gain expertise with AI in the marketing sector, start with modest, manageable marketing campaigns and iterate.

The opportunities are limitless, and when correctly tapped, they can improve our abilities as marketers. And as I’ve already stated, generative AI will be most useful to us as an assistant rather than a replacement.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com].