Wayne Lockwood: 5 Ways AI Can Help Sales and Marketing Alignment

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us. It’s how Google answers our searches, Amazon recommends products, and Pandora plays another song.

For marketers, AI enables scalable growth, drives revenue, and personalizes customer experiences. Savvy marketers are discovering that AI is an exceptionally powerful strategy. It empowers them to excel in their roles by engaging with their audiences through personalized, targeted messaging—all at scale.

AI technologies are also creating key internal opportunities that drive better alignment between marketing and sales resulting in an increase in revenue and a healthy pipeline.
Let’s look at five ways AI can help marketing and sales continue to tear down silos.

1. Support Sales with Relevant Customer Experiences

Customers have come to expect personalized experiences and interactions through their preferred format or channel. Nothing says, “I’m not listening” like getting an automated email about a free trial that a lead already signed up for with a sales rep. In fact, “irrelevant content” is the #1 reason that customers disengage.

Engaging thousands of prospects and customers through personalized content is impossible without arming your marketing forces with artificial intelligence.

AI-powered predictive content tools are empowering marketers to be more strategic, while simultaneously lightening the workload. These AI-powered marketing programs can crawl your site for blog articles, case studies, white papers, ebooks, videos, etc. Once the content arsenal is assembled, AI predicts which collateral will appeal to—and ultimately convert—each audience segment. Insights can be used to engage visitors across email, web, social, and mobile channels for a full omni-channel approach. The result is one-to-one value marketing that businesses weren’t previously able to achieve without considerable scaling.

A marketing engagement platform powered by AI technologies equips marketers with data-driven intelligence that aligns company-wide strategies for a unified brand conversation.

2. Agree on Qualified Leads and Accounts from the Beginning

Now more than ever, closing deals requires an orchestrated alignment between marketing and sales. Historically, one of the most difficult areas of alignment is agreeing on what qualifies a lead, or in an account-based marketing scenario, what makes for an “ideal customer profile.”

Of course, marketers are equipped with a wide range of lead and account scoring tools and strategies, resulting in an automated qualification process, but even automation has its limitations. It can be difficult to set up scoring in a meaningful way that aligns broad audiences, product offerings, and sales tactics.

However, predictive lead scoring and predictive account scoring provide value where other solutions may not, resulting in a strong foundation between sales and marketing. Predictive scoring programs scan digital signals from across the web to find prospects who match your brand’s ideal customer profile. All you have to do is get together with sales to identify those “perfect” customers or clients.

3. Personalize and Scale Messaging with AI Insights

Google has been using AI and machine learning longer than most marketing teams, and they’re more heavily invested in it than most of us combined.

Google’s machine learning program, RankBrain, monitors user engagement 24/7/365 in order to provide the best search results for every query that someone types into a Google search bar. The results of that constant investigation is displayed in every search engine results page (SERP).

If your company develops EHR software, for example, data-driven insights into your audience are one Google search away. Search “EHR” and look at the answers Google’s AI is providing. Is it a definition? Are they product pages? What related searches are listed at the bottom?

Those are all keys to understanding the language your audience is using, the questions they’re asking, and the key criteria that define your ideal customer profile—which is crucial information for both marketing and sales. You can get this vital information by reverse-engineering organic search results.

4. Make Analytics Actionable

Leveraging data to design better customer engagement strategies is key to winning your customer’s heart. This means testing, measuring and analyzing.

The irony lies in the fact that marketers use artificial intelligence to drive more meaningful human interactions. AI-powered platforms are not only capable of collecting and aggregating marketing metrics—they empower marketers to draw meaningful analytics and applications out of that data and apply it to being more personal with their customers.

A great platform will monitor the metrics, flag anything that needs attention and makes some basic changes or adjustments as necessary. Sales and marketing can align on these powerful data points and insights to apply creative solutions and meaningful engagement.

5. Focus on Creating a World-Class Strategy

AI and machine learning-powered programs effortlessly offload monotonous tasks resulting in more time reserved for strategy development.

AI can consolidate data, hone customer profiles, select and send next-step content to leads, and more. This results in a marketing and sales team focused on doing what they do best – developing strategies that create valuable customer experiences.

AI for Marketers + Sales Reps

AI is opening a lot of doors for marketers, and there is still time to get on board before your competition.

Machine learning should never live solely within the marketing department. Sales and marketing will be better equipped to orchestrate coordinated impactful efforts by leveraging AI. Whether it’s improved collaboration on qualifying leads, content delivery, messaging, analytics, or strategy, AI technology serves up excellent opportunities to align internally and drive meaningful customer engagement.

What potential do you see with AI built for marketers? How might it help your sales and marketing alignment? Tell me your thoughts in the comments.

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