Welcome to the dawn of AI-ification, that period in human history when overwhelming demand for AI fuels a mad dash to AI-ify anything that isn’t bolted to the floor. No task is too trivial, no scheme too grand to be coded into an automated bot that will do it for you—sometimes better than you ever could, other times, well, probably not worse than the average you could.
It is, of course, inevitable. Just as the dotcom boom saw every business transaction turned into a web service, and the social media revolution saw every man, woman and cat turned into a social network profile.
AI-ification will be ubiquitous, exciting, annoying and dangerous. The pressure on businesses to AI-ify is intense, driving adoption faster than most companies really know what to do with it, or to work out the details.
Witness Google’s faceplant with their much-touted Gemini release. Adobe repeated the identical mistake only a few weeks later. Undoubtedly there will be plenty of new fiascos to come.
But what should we make of this wholesale leap into AI as marketing and sales professionals?
Whether you’re tasked with adopting AI for yourself, your team or your company, it’s critical to find the narrow line between hype and reality.
- There are many exciting things AI can already do well.
- There are many things AI is being promoted for that it will likely never do well.
- There are disaster scenarios holding many companies back from doing even fundamental work with AI that will put them way behind their peers.
- There are pitfalls many companies are overlooking that could eventually swallow their company whole.
The only way to find that line for your business is to dive in and start using the tools. Here’s how I advise our customers on how to take that approach.
Start with something you are already doing well.
It’s really difficult to figure out the application and ROI for AI if you’re applying it to something you’ve never done before, or that isn’t working well. For example, I see a lot of companies in the IT Channel expecting AI to fill in the gap for marketing and lead generation practices that have been failing for years.
AI isn’t going to magically fix your broken outbound email system—it’s only going to help you continue to do bad things faster. Worse, you won’t have any idea what aspects of AI are actually working well, because the whole approach may be wrong.
Instead, start with elements of your sales or marketing process that function well, and play around with AI to see how it can help you save time, scale your practice or extend your budget.
For example, if you’re currently using a newsletter to reach your customers but it’s taking too much time and effort to put together, explore ways to use AI to speed up your content development and delivery. If you’re currently using email to connect with customers, explore ways to use AI to expand your repertoire of email communications, or to improve the strategy or messaging of your approach.
When you apply AI to things you already know, it’s much easier and faster to see what’s working, and it’s a better way to get familiar with AI’s strengths and weaknesses.
Expand to things that represent gaps in your practice.
Another great way to explore AI in marketing and sales is to fill gaps in your process that aren’t getting done. When’s the last time you updated your value proposition? How complete are your sales support materials, and how fast are they generated after introducing a new product or service? Have you ever completed customer personas, or generated an Ideal Customer Profile?
With AI, there’s really no excuse to avoid leveraging these powerful but often under-utilized tools. In the past, they were easy to overlook because they are difficult, time-consuming tasks that often take a trained professional or consultant to complete. Not anymore.
There are dozens of engineered prompts available, (including from MotiveLab), to help you quickly and easily complete many different types of marketing frameworks and templates, from formulating value propositions to customer personas.
Don’t sell them short—they are very useful tools to help you clarify your strategy and message, and effectively communicate it to your team. They were easily overlooked in the past because of their cost; now they’re a no-brainer to help you and your team get ahead.
Step up to innovations that challenge you.
By the time you’ve taken these simple steps to apply AI to your sales and marketing practice, you’ll have a much better sense of how AI works, where it tends to fail, and how to sift through the hype that clouds day-to-day reality.
At this point, you’ll have a much clearer view on how AI can help you innovate your sales and marketing approach, whether it’s mining CRM data for more intel on leads, or building a custom GPT to manage distributed campaign content generation across your partner community.
One way that we do this in our own business is to review our priority list of projects, find one that always sits at the bottom due to time and resources, and use AI to make a run at it.
We had a training manual, for example, that we’d long wanted to digitize into a database for on-demand training, but no one had the time to dedicate to the long slog of editing and loading into a db. So we turned it into an AI project, and knocked it out in a fraction of the time expected. That gave us the confidence to move on to other projects that continued to push the edges of our comfort and experience with generative AI, and it accomplished something on our list that had been languishing for months.
Making Sense of AI-ification
The way to keep your head straight in all the noise and fluff about AI and the breathless news that will cover the AI-ification of everything, is to keep your eye on the fundamentals of your business, and keep your hands on the AI tools that help you accomplish what matters today.
The tsunami of AI will do its thing no matter what you do. Don’t get swept away. Focus on the fundamentals, and the relevance of AI to your daily practice. Before you know it you’ll be riding the wave yourself.
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