Generative AI: Powering a Dynamic Future for Sales and Marketing

Everything you’ve been hearing is true: generative AI looks like it will be a game-changer for every department in every business in every industry.

Much of the excitement around generative AI is due to its obvious potential to free up time and improve productivity. At CI&T, our focus is equally on tapping into generative AI’s amazing abilities to help businesses engage with their customers in exciting new ways. Starting right now, that engagement—the province of sales and marketing teams—can get a real boost.

Implemented effectively, generative AI can help you:

- Reimagine customer acquisition and customer relationship management.
- Free yourself from at least some of the CRM grunt work that slows you down.
- Deliver impactful insights as it digests your data and makes new kinds of connections and correlations that have never crossed your mind.

That’s because generative AI can find patterns in data, such as demographic information, existing customer data and market trends, to identify potential customers and target them with personalized content. It can also create unique content tailored to a target audience's needs and preferences. This helps you create more effective marketing campaigns that are more likely to resonate with their target audiences.

Even better, the valuable insights generative AI provides—insights you have never been able to discover before—can reveal the path forward, helping you make better decisions about your future sales and marketing strategies. 

Before you Begin

AI has been around in one form or another for many years, filling in blanks, making good guesses and enabling predictive analytics. What’s different now is that generative AI can simulate a grasp of semantics and meanings. The models have gained the ability to create sequences that are logically sensible. It can put things together in a way that previous generations of AI couldn’t. 

Unfortunately, marketers who begin to grasp the potential power of generative AI can find themselves overwhelmed by the art of the possible. What should they do today? Tomorrow? Implementing generative AI in an existing workflow isn’t trivial. The biggest challenge is establishing the right kinds of guardrails, especially if generative AI is used in an application like a customer-facing chatbot. You don’t want the generative AI application to offer up false information or, just as bad, recommend your competitors’ products to your customers. 

How does that happen? So-called “hallucination” in generative AI refers to the phenomenon where an AI model generates outputs that seem plausible but don’t actually represent either the input data or reality. This can occur in many ways: biased data; overfitting (lack of comprehension of important exceptions to the pattern); or limitations in the AI model's training data. The risk of hallucination is that it can lead to misleading or incorrect information being generated by the AI system. It’s the clearest example of how good data leads to good AI… and bad data doesn’t.

Fascinating Possibilities

What might you try with generative AI? In customer experience (CX), you endeavor to create highly personalized content and offers based on each customer's behavior, characteristics and purchase history. Generative AI can help. You can use it to provide sales teams with the right data and customer insights to meet demand, helping speed up growth by improving overall sales performance. 

Generative AI can also increase sales efficiency and results by automating some of those irritating routine tasks, allowing more time for interacting with current and potential customers while also potentially lowering costs. Personalization is always attractive to customers. AI, combined with company-specific information and context, allows for detailed consumer insights, enabling personalized marketing and sales offers for B2C businesses. B2B companies can also benefit, from going beyond typical account-based marketing to focus more heavily on hyper-personalized outreach.

A Supercharged Sales Journey

Here are some of the ways generative AI can assist as you work your way through a marketing and sales journey with buyers:

- Find patterns in customer and market data, segment and target audiences and analyze and identify the best leads. 
- Optimize marketing through A/B testing of things like page layouts, ad copy and SEO, using predictive analytics and data-driven recommendations to ensure maximum ROI.
- Provide continuous support to the sales team through the entire sales process, from proposal to deal closing.
- Generate personalized content and messaging, including hyper-personalized e-mails at scale and 
- Offer chatbot support far superior to the kinds of experiences we’re used to today.
- Provide salespeople with real-time negotiation guidance and predictive insights based on analysis of historical transactions, customer behavior and current market pricing.

Keep in mind that generative AI is not capable of replacing a writer, a sales rep, or a coder. What it can do is offer assistance and ideas—multiple iterations of ideas, in fact—to make their work easier and more efficient, assuming that it’s inserted into business workflows optimally.

Get Your Data, and Your Business, Ready

Generative AI is powered by data, and if you want to use your data, you may need to clean that data up first. The big caveat: good data makes for good AI. The more data you have, and the cleaner it is, the better your results will be. 

Achieving data maturity can be a challenge for any organization, but it’s an important preliminary step. Interestingly, it’s worth pondering to what extent AI can do that work for you, looking for patterns and making logical categorizations within your unstructured data the same way it reads Internet content to generate intelligent real-time conversations.

More Efficient Sales and Marketing Workflows for the Future

As you begin on your generative AI journey, you’ll also have to think about how, exactly, you’d like to implement it within your organization. You could choose to build custom applications around a generative AI engine, access it through one of the several currently available services, or add it to your existing workflows. For many businesses, the last option may prove to be the easiest way to get up and running quickly and start experimenting and iterating, learning along the way how to ask the right questions and glean the most meaningful insights.

There will certainly be a learning curve with generative AI, but it’s important to start climbing that curve now. Your competitors are already on their way. Get started soon. The potential positive impacts on your sales and marketing efficiencies and productivity are just too compelling to ignore.

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