Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), the often-awe inspiring technology that can generate text or images, is here and here to stay. That much we know. What it means for business, policy and society is still being decided. For many industries, those changes are taking place in real time. They often occur quickly, bringing disruption, innovation and uncertainty.
It’s also just the beginning. Investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI-related companies. With the biggest tech companies in the world locked in a technological arms race, it’s reasonable to assume that this technology is as bad as it ever will be.
The implications for marketing and sales are especially profound.
Sam Altman, the AI evangelist and leader of Open AI, maker of ChatGPT, predicted that 95% of the tasks currently handled by agencies, strategists and creative professionals will be impacted by AI technologies. Similarly, the Harvard Business Review, citing a working paper by Wharton Professors, notes that many marketing positions “rank within the top 20% of occupations that the authors predict will be most affected by new AI language or image-generation models.”
Similarly, a McKinsey study posits that “generative AI is poised to transform roles and boost performance across functions such as sales and marketing, customer operations, and software development.”
With GenAI available and improving, sales and marketing teams face the innovator’s dilemma. They can either embrace disruption or adopt a wait-and-see approach. In 2024, the choice is clear. Sales and marketing teams must adapt, shifting their tactics to account for the always-changing trends that define this critical profession.
Here are three ways GenAI can shape and empower enterprise B2B sales and marketing teams right now.
1. GenAI Brings Structure to Unruly Data Sets
“Data-driven” is just a buzzword unless it actually informs decision-making processes. For many sales and marketing teams, it’s more of a masquerade than an actual strategy. According to Oracle’s research, 78% of business leaders say they “often make decisions and then look for the data to justify them.”
It’s a forgivable offense.
Eighty-five percent of leaders say they suffer from data distress as the speed, volume, and complexity of company data continue to escalate, making it more, not less, difficult to make important decisions. As a result, a separate executive survey revealed that less than one-quarter of businesses self-report that they are data-driven brands.
GenAI can help solve this problem.
Trained on enormous unstructured data sets, these technologies can make unruly data sets organized, accessible and actionable. They can take expansive, unstructured data sets and make meaning from them, creating actionable insights that allow marketers to innovate quickly and precisely.
2. GenAI Unlocks Experimentation at Scale
The best sales tactics and marketing strategies are personal and responsive. They are also tested and refined so the best strategies rise to the top while less effective approaches are left behind.
Experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS), a systematic approach to assessing the efficacy of marketing tools and techniques, lets brands conduct control experiments using A/B tests to identify the strengths and weaknesses of new products, services, and messaging.
While practical limitations once hindered this tactic, GenAI unlocked experimentation at scale.
For example, when marketers pair key demographic insights from market research with A/B-tested copywriting strategies, such as modifying headlines, experimenting with various ad creatives, and crafting targeted landing pages, they can pinpoint the messaging that most effectively resonates with their target audience.
This makes marketing collateral more precise and sales outcomes more robust.
3. GenAI Supports (But Doesn’t Replace) Human Creativity
GenAI technologies are amazing, but they are not omniscient, and their products often lack distinction. Creating original content from pre-trained algorithms doesn’t always result in responsive, culturally relevant, and customer-enthralling outcomes.
In other words, if every business curates its sales and marketing funnel using GenAI by, for instance, turning DALL-E images or ChatGPT copy, creative click-through rates (CTRs) will immediately plummet. Customers will notice and may not find it as fun, innovative, or cutting-edge as you hoped.
That’s why sales and marketing teams should consider GenAI products as tools to be leveraged, not shortcuts to exploit.
GenAI Requires Sales and Marketing Teams to Pivot
GenAI may still be in its infancy, but it’s powerful and here to stay. It demands that sales and marketing teams explore its potential to unlock how businesses approach data, experimentation, and creativity.
Currently, many sales and marketing professionals are still behind. Sales and marketing teams are some of the least familiar with GenAI and are among the least likely professional cohorts to use the technology for work-related tasks.
GenAI is certainly not a magic wand, but it does have the potential to empower sales and marketing teams like never before. It’s time to pivot, embrace GenAI’s strengths, learn about its limitations, and let it play a collaborative role in sales and marketing efforts moving forward.
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