How Companies Can Use AI To Build Distributed And Augmented Smarketing Teams

Long gone are the days where marketing and sales teams worked in silos. With the rise of marketing technology over the past decade, the need for both teams to cooperate and work in tandem has become paramount for businesses to effectively identify customers, nurture leads, and close deals.

As AI seeps into every industry, the organizations with unique competitive advantages are the ones who are able to learn how to utilize the new technology to eliminate repetitive tasks and free up human capital to focus on more productive and valuable ones.

In this article, we will address three topics:

1. How marketing technology is transforming the relationship between marketing and sales teams
2. Misconceptions around AI and the ways in which it can benefit how you do business
3. How you can plan and build efficient distributed teams moving forward

Marketing and Sales Must Hold Hands

The responsibilities of a CMO has changed drastically over the past decade. Only a few years ago, they were overseeing branding, messaging, and visual design. Today, on top of previously mentioned responsibilities, they’re also expected to be in charge of lead generation, analytics, and reporting. They’re pressured to answer the questions that clients and shareholders want to know — what’s working and, subsequently, where should we be investing our money and with whom should we be spending our time and energy?

With the rise of Martech, or specifically CRMs, sales teams have gained the ability to share, analyze, and optimize data and information with other teams in a streamlined process.

Sales teams are also eager to know what content will click with their target prospects. Successful marketing teams work closely with the sales team to identify continuing challenges they face in order to create more effective and personalized messages for their core audience.

The growing need for close alignment to collaborate on executing a unified business strategy has brought about the birth of smarketing teams. These teams have more streamlined communication and alignment, and studies show that tightly aligned smarketing teams see 36% higher customer retention rates, and 38% increase in win rates.

Leave Traditional Sales Strategies In The Past

Disruptive technologies tend to open new markets and destroy old ones. Let’s talk about lead scoring: an outdated methodolgy where one predicts the likelihood of a potential customer conversion by scoring them based on their interactions with the brand.

The underlying assumption of lead scoring is that website behavior determines intent. A quick self reflection about human nature will quickly refute this idea: people’s thoughts and actions are generally difficult to categorize and understand, and only through speaking directly to your potential customer will you find their individual needs and wants.

But a sales representative can only talk to so many people and address all their questions and needs in a single day. Their time and effort may also go in vain, which makes the process frustrating and disheartening.

This is where AI can step in and help eliminate repetitive questions and conversations, and utilize reps when they’re needed the most.

Correcting Misconceptions and Introducing Potential Benefits of AI

As we move into the uncharted territory of AI, the fear of the unknown can blind and prevent us from adopting and integrating technology that may help us achieve goals at far more efficient and effective rates.

Studies have shown that fears of AI disrupting and getting rid of jobs, specifically for sales and marketing teams are exacerbated and unfounded.

In fact, the opposite appears to be true — AI takes over repetitive, time consuming, and ultimately boring tasks so that smarketing teams have more time to focus their attention on higher-value tasks.

Organizations who adopt and utilize AI enjoy a competitive advantage against those who are slow to integrate the new technology at hand. Hiring more humans to complete tasks that one machine can complete will only be more cost effective and inconsistent in results.

Rather than disregarding or seeing new technology with a fearful or skeptical lens, we should look to leverage the powers of artificial intelligence to work for us. Identifying painpoints and unnecessary uses of manpower to offload to a machine can help teams brainstorm and implement changes faster, ultimately producing greater results.

Questions Smarketing Teams Need To Ask To Utilize The Right AI Solution

All businesses can find, with careful analysis, day to day processes that could and should be automated. The pandemic has driven consumers indoors and onto the digital market, which has pushed companies to focus on translating their in-store experiences digitally and making the process as seamless and trouble-free as possible.

With all that being said, a few questions may help you decide what the right AI solution might be for you:

1. What are my current needs?

Where are your biggest bottlenecks? What sort of processes are taking the longest, and how can you reduce or eliminate repetitive tasks? Is booking meetings something you dread and would love to offload to an automated assistant? Is updating every lead in the CRM a strenuous and time consuming process?

1. Is it interoperable?

Does the AI solution work with your current workflow? Does it work well with your existing tech stack? You’ll want a solution that could easily pass data from one platform to another.

1. Is it future-proof?

Is this solution too gimmicky? Is it only solving a small temporary problem, or is it alleviating a painpoint that has affected your business for a long time? How customizable and configurable are its automation features?