Exploring the Productivity Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Sales and Marketing

Intro

Artificial intelligence, especially since the public launch of ChatGPT, has swept across the globe, impacting every industry and surging productivity. As fields that rely heavily on messaging, written marketing materials, and graphic elements, sales and marketing have both been heavily impacted by the rise of artificial intelligence.

Generative artificial intelligence is able to streamline tasks, automate production, and increase the speed with which a marketing or sales team can create new content. With a market of over $100 billion that’s expected to grow to almost 2 trillion dollars by 2030, AI has the potential to radically increase productivity in a number of fields.

In this article, we’ll dive into marketing and sales, documenting the productivity impact that artificial intelligence is making by outlining its most important improvements. We’ll discuss how AI integrates into the sales process and how it streamlines marketing, outlining the substantial improvements it can make.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Impact the Sales Process?

The sales process is already heavily associated with emerging technology. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen the core methods that teams use to sell products and services adapt to the available technology they have at hand. As AI continues to grow in usage and utility, the sales workflow will increasingly rely on its technology.

There are a number of ways that artificial intelligence can impact the sales process and drive productivity:

• Increasing the Probability of a Sale

• Mature Leads

• Streamline Quote Generation

Let’s break these down further.

Increase the Probability of a Sale

In their report on the impact of generative AI on international markets, one of the core areas where McKinsey sees the potential for productivity gains is in the sales process. Generative AI can increase the level of personalization that a brand offers to customers, helping to streamline sales and create a more positive association with the company – right from the first touchpoint.

Equally, generative AI can use customer profiles, structured data, and unstructured data to create more precise pictures of what certain customers respond best to. From there, it can offer sales teams insight on how best to approach certain situations throughout the customer journey, helping to improve positive outcomes.

By using AI tools and functions throughout the sales process, businesses are able to improve the probability of a sale and boost individual worker productivity in this department.

Mature Leads

One of the most important aspects of securing leads and moving them further into the customer journey is initial response time. If a sales representative doesn’t respond to an initial lead rapidly, there is a much higher chance that it will bounce. With generative chatbots, the first point of contact with a customer will already be covered by artificial intelligence – creating an instant reply system.

By providing a link between a new lead and the company from the first minute of contact, there is a higher chance that the lead will mature and move through the customer journey. Automating this part of the sales process will also help to gather information for the sales team, allowing them to feel more prepared when going into initial discussions.

Streamline Quote Generation

Sales quote generation is a notoriously complex field, having to take into account the potentially thousands of possible product and service combinations, discount systems, and other variable factors before landing on a first quote. When doing this process automatically, there is a high chance that a sales representative fails to accurately create a quote, leading to problems down the line.

AI tools can completely streamline this process, automating the production of a sales quote and reducing the chance of human error to zero. Not only does this speed up the quote generation process, but the increase in precision will help to keep customer and company expectations in line.

As the sales quote generation process is often a time-consuming part of a sales representative’s day, this also helps to free up their time for other, more important, tasks.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Improve Productivity in Marketing?

Much of the work involved in marketing comes down to creating and distributing content. Teams will create copy for a new advertisement or blog article and then distribute it across all connected marketing mediums that they have available. Artificial intelligence is phenomenal at creating baseline content generation, allowing users to cut back on the time it takes them to produce content.

For example, a marketer could use AI to

• Generate a chain of emails to send to clients in one click

• Create an outline for an eBook that represents their products

• Rapidly create alternative ads for A/B testing

The broad range of applications that generative AI directly connects to the inherent flexibility of the marketing industry. With a huge number of internal disciplines and focuses within marketing, generative AI can seamlessly provide its generative capabilities to whatever tasks are at hand. By accelerating the process of creating new content, marketing teams can optimize their production process and increase overall productivity.

Streamline Workflows

Another powerful way of improving productivity in marketing by using artificial intelligence is by streamlining and optimizing available workflows. Many processes in marketing are resource intensive, with people having to spend hours creating content or refining available content for new uses.

Alongside the generative capabilities of AI, marketing teams can implement AI tools into a range of different current practices. Marketing is a broad field, with each specific section, like PPC marketing and email marketing, having its own uses for AI. For example, by using an AI email signature generator, marketing teams can streamline the generation of new email signatures, matching them directly to the recipient of the email.

With this strategy, marketing teams can get more from every single email they send out, automatically changing the attached email signature to provide the best possible resources. Over time, this can lead to major improvements in terms of the productivity of several internal sectors of marketing, boosting productivity and ROI.

Final Thoughts

Artificial intelligence is a radical emerging technology that has the power to significantly impact and innovate workflows across many industries. Especially for those that rely on generative tasks and those which can be automated, AI is the perfect way of improving productivity in these fields.

Across the board, from streamlining workflows to boosting the probability of success, AI is a powerful integration into marketing and sales. As this technology continues to improve, we’ll likely see it become a core part of every marketing and sales team across the globe.