The Easiest Ways to Use AI for Marketing and Sales Enablement

If you're a business owner or a marketing and sales leader, chances are you've spent a lot of time thinking about, stressing about (don't!), or tinkering with AI tools. Who among us hasn't prompted ChatGPT out of curiosity to test its capabilities and hope it would magically generate the perfect results? 

As AI tools like ChatGPT surged in popularity, the topic of conversation instantly jumped to leveraging AI for marketing content creation. Don't get us wrong, this is still a valuable aspect of AI's capabilities, but it's also just one very limited feature of AI's capabilities for streamlining marketing and sales efforts.

Let's broaden our AI horizon outside of content creation (we'll cover that too) and start thinking about using AI for:

Marketing: A/B Testing and Recommendations

A/B testing compares two versions of content to see which performs better; it doesn't require AI. AI can support that process by helping you create variations and analyze results. One of AI's strengths is processing large amounts of data and spotting patterns. From A/B testing to audience development, use those capabilities to help identify what is working and what to test next. 

As a quick shoutout to sales: consider using AI to analyze your meeting outcomes, keywords, and sales calls too. 

You can also use AI to make content, performance, or product recommendations based on datasets such as your CRM, audiences, or purchasing behaviors. Try using Google Cloud's recommendation tools to make personalized recommendations based on your customers' preferences. 

Marketing and Sales: Content Creation

Watch the original HubSpot Content Assistant demonstration (4:39), included in this July 2023 article. The video shows the interface available at that time.

There's already been a lot of chatter about this one but it's still worth diving into further to expand the way you're using AI. Don't forget about sales when it comes to content creation! Marketers jumped into AI for predictive text generation for email, landing pages, and social posts, but BDRs and SDRs can still lean into AI for their sales content needs too. 

Try using AI to create content for:

• Sales prospecting emails and outreach
• Call scripts
• LinkedIn content
• Rep-specific landing pages
• Case studies
• Chat responses for lead qualification

Resist the temptation to think about AI only in the context of marketing content. 

It's important to remember that any predictive text AI tool needs proofreading, editing for a human element, and fact checking. AI's content creation abilities will certainly improve over time, but it's important to remember that your generative results won't necessarily be factually true. Your ability to prompt and edit are still crucial!

There are a lot of AI writing tools out there like ChatGPT and Jasper. HubSpot has also built a number of AI features directly into the marketing and sales tools. 

Sales: Lead Generation and Qualification

Aside from creating content, AI can play a huge role in streamlining sales efforts. Remember, AI is fantastic for simplifying and identifying trends in large data sets which means AI is great for gathering lead intelligence and helping you qualify those leads. 

If you have a list of ideal customers in your CRM you can use AI to create a profile of ideal customers as well as their purchasing preferences, platforms, etc. You can also automatically segment customers or prospective customers based on your list criteria or activities.

AI is also great for researching and summarizing competitive analysis as well as prospect research. As an illustrative example, a rep might reduce 10-20 minutes of sales-call prep to 1-5 minutes using AI-generated research summaries. Actual time savings depend on the task, available information, and the review needed. 

Lead qualification and data enrichment are another great opportunity to lean into AI's capabilities. Consider factoring AI into your sales efforts with:

• Predictive lead scoring
• Data enrichment platforms like Crystal Knows, Cognism, Seamless AI, and many more

Of course, this doesn't even scratch the surface of AI's capabilities. 

But, it's critical to start ethically incorporating AI into your processes to better automate and accelerate your efforts. It might feel overwhelming at first, but start slow with a couple of the suggestions outlined above and figure out what works best for you and your team. 

With the rapid changes in AI's capabilities, there's going to be even more that's possible with AI tools down the road. Becoming comfortable with building AI into processes now lays the foundation to keep tweaking, iterating, and optimizing as AI improves.