Traditionally for years, marketers were obsessed with casting wide nets for fishing believing the theory“ attract enough fish into the net and you are bound to end up with a keeper or to” but with the evolution of time another philosophy opted and net with a spear started replaces wide nets. Similarly, the marketing strategies changed and account-based marketing flips the traditional marketing funnel on its head. The equivalent is followed by demand generation strategies, and now a new concept of it is going to be introduced as the best option for demand generation and that is ‘Artificial Intelligence. Sales is the root of any business, if one wants to run a business effectively then its sales team should be extraordinary to make its service delivery to the consumer. As said by Jeremy Donovan, SalesLoft’s VP of Sales Strategy – “ Sales is an art and a science.” Artificial intelligence is on its way to making its place in B2B demand generation. Before moving to how AI is getting into demand generation let’s know about AI and demand generation.
AI or Artificial Intelligence is a set of algorithms that have the capability of producing the results without having to be explicitly instructed to do, according to the AI researcher whereas scientist with technological knowledge believes it to be a terminator like a figure that has the rational capacity to work on its own. In short, AI is an intelligent entity that is capable of performing tasks intelligently without being precisely instructed having human-like rationality, and acting accordingly.
On the other hand, demand generation refers to a marketing strategies host that makes the product stand out making customers keen about it focusing on the long-term relationship building and retention with prospects and existing customers. The demand generation strategies include multiple touchpoints consisting of different types of campaigns and the use of multimedia to embed the brand’s identity into the customer’s mind.
AI in Demand Generation-
We have indulged artificial intelligence so well in our lives even without noticing it. It has got into our business and marketing as well. It helps companies in boosting the lead volume, close rate, and overall sales performance. Companies are using AI in all kinds of innovative ways to advance their businesses. Particularly, AI has shown its value in sales. With the introduction of AI in businesses, the sales team has their paths to where to focus on. By using an AI algorithm, sales managers are capable of predicting with a high degree of accuracy of next quarter’s revenue that indirectly helps companies to manage their inventory and resources better.
For example, in Apps like Netflix or Amazon, if you go in the search section using only a few keyboards, it automatically shows the results related to your search and also affects your decision by showing relevant options.
Even the pop ads you see while using, your social media like Facebook, Instagram you can see the relevant ads on them regarding the search results you have done on the other apps, Or if you used car pull services like OLA, Uber ever and opens it again, your destination search option will have the destination name where you have traveled earlier by using these apps. All these automatic suggestions are available because of Artificial Intelligence.
The change caused by Artificial Intelligence in increasing sales-
AI is not just about automation but a technology analyzing large datasets. By using advanced computer science techniques and superior computational firepower to extract insights from data and these insights can be used to make predictions, recommendations, and decisions. AI is machine learning that empowers the most impressive capabilities in sales. As per estimates of McKinsey analysts writing in Harvard Business Review, the value in marketing and sales created by AI can be $1.4 to 2.6 trillion.
Specifications that can help in increasing sales-
- Forecasting prediction-
AI systems can predict future outcomes by using earlier data informing future results. Common predictions sales AI systems include-
- Prospects most likely to close
- Prospects to target next
- Interested new customers
The accuracy of the predictions may vary as per the data quality and systems that are used. Through this data analysis, one can forecast the sales team’s performance.
- Lead scoring and prioritization
AI helps in identifying the good leads that must be prioritized by the sales team. Victor Antonio, CEO of Sellinger Group noted in his Harvard Business Review, says “ with AI, the algorithm can compile historical information about a client, along with social media postings and the salesperson’s customer interaction history and rank the opportunities or leads in the pipeline according to their chances of closing successfully.” As a result, AI can bring a level of logic and standardization to the process that humans are not capable of.
- Recommendations by Experts
AI can work as an expert that can advise sales actions that make the most sense to the sales team based on business goals and insights from the data. Recommendations like price, next target, etc, basically work as the target guidelines helping salespeople in taking actions making them free from bandwidth to close deals.
- Enhancement of performance and productivity
Ai can help in managing the calendar, scheduling meetings, assessing a sales tea, pipeline automatically as per the data available to make decisions enhancing the productivity of the team.
Artificial Intelligence has become pervasive in the B2B market in the past few years. The conversion rate of B2B median is just 2.23% which means more than 97% of the money and time is spent in targeting and nurturing useless leads that will never convert into customers and the solution for this issue with profitable results is Artificial Intelligence. AI is a helpful solution that can cure many things like connecting with users and leads with the teams and making it user-friendly with a personalized experience. The AI in B2B marketing is the secret to a successful demand generation strategy as it can complete tasks faster with more efficiency than humans ever could.
Approx 74% of organizations accepted that AI is in their mobile strategy and is becoming the norm and not the exception. It can analyze massive datasets instantly interpreting them presenting the right content to the visitors
How is AI used in B2B Marketing?
In a survey, the buyer’s 57-90% of the journey is completed without getting in touch with B2B teams, but if one using AI-driven personalization software, these hot leads when arriving at the website navigating them to the blogs and landing pages for more information. The self-nurturing landing pages allow leads to educate themselves at their own pace. Another thing is Content Hubs adaptation. The AI system with personalized content recommendations makes your visitors spend more time at your website. The adaptive content hub organizes the content into categories making it more user-friendly.
AI tools Vendors for sales
There are plenty of vendors that offer AI to sales organizations of various sizes-
- Salesforce
The company’s AI is named “Einstein” which automatically prioritizes leads for sales reps evaluating the deals to shut and empowers developers to bake AI into their salesforce apps. The Senior Data Scientist, Univent Sara Natali said “Einstein has transformed how we do business. Our sales reps have insights at their fingertips and we have seen a 20% increase in win rate.”
- Drift
It helps companies use conversations to remove friction from their buying process with chat, email, video, and automation products which work 24/7. It is a great chatbot with specific and personalized features one can create playbooks and interact with site visitors.
- Conversica
It is a major AI vendor with $87 million in funding. It provides automated AI sales assistance engaging the leads in conversation. It conducts conversations with leads and qualifies them further before the interaction with the representative. 100M people are contacted by Conversica AI Assistants and $20B in revenue has been unlocked for its customers.
- Exceed.ai
It uses AI to engage with every sales lead that enters a business pipeline using email and chat. Aaron Wood, Chief Strategist at Clear shift supported this AI has helped his company in exceeding the sales-ready leads by 25%
- Crayon
This can track 100+ data types across hundreds of millions of sources identifying exactly what competitors are up to online and the information that is driven is used to automatically build updated sales battle cards to get results. George Baier IV, the Head of Competitive Intelligence at Dropbox says- “Crayon isn’t just a research tool—it’s our CI platform. It’s where we gather insights on competitor online activity, collaborate with our team and x-functional partners, and distribute tailored content to drive impact for our lines of business.”
All the companies always face challenges in finding new ways to grow their revenue, cost reduction, market share expansion, and minimizing the risks simultaneously. t’s become apparent to leading-edge companies that leveraging their existing internal database, and mining it for brand spanking new opportunities using AI, will allow them to try to do so prudently. If data will be useful then companies can generate actionable insights making salespeople close more deals.
