By Sowmya Kannappan
AI in marketing and sales! Is it something that we have already achieved or is it just a hype? Has AI penetrated into the lives of sales and marketing professionals at an in-depth level or do we still have a long way to go? As intriguing as these questions might sound…AI Brains took the theme for its second meetup from these questions! And when we went ahead to make our quest into a candid discussion between GTM professionals from multiple domains and companies…that’s where it all began for us with a cup of coffee! So, what did we talk about in our March meetup and how did we take our quest about GTM teams and AI Tools to the next-level? Let’s dive into this blog and get it figured out!
The Who, The Where, The Why, and The When?
It was a fine Saturday morning when our AI Brains team and the GTM professionals gathered in a warmly-lit cabin to discuss AI tools! Oh! It was all perfect! From everyone showing up at the venue with a smile and sharing their side of the story with AI to them dreaming about how it will change the future, we had a spectacular day with discussions that resonated with reality!
The participants for our event ranged from experienced professionals in GTM domains like sales and partnership, customer success, product management, to sales and marketing heads,etc., And as we nestled in the middle of our cabin to exchange ideas, that’s where our candid conversations began to spread like wildfire and led us into a curious quest of leveraging AI for reaching GTM goals!
A sneak-peek into the everyday chores of GTM professionals!
Drafting marketing plans, crafting content, sending emails, writing follow-up mails, taking calls, analyzing meeting notes, drawing reports, analyzing data and ensuring that customers get exactly what they wanted in the end! While the everyday chores of a GTM professional changes based on the role and the company they work for..the mission’s always about building long-lasting relationships with their clients and delivering the best customer experience for them!
So, where does AI come in this equation? And how are professionals coping up with the AI wave that’s growing to sweep off the companies through AI transformation in the upcoming years?
When we asked our participants to pitch out their opinions and suggestions on how to embrace the AI wave and use AI tools smartly…here is what they shared with us!
Pearls of wisdom shared by our participants!
1. AI tools have the potential, but will need human intervention.
Given the pace at which technology is advancing everyday and the expanse of data that’s available for us to leverage, AI tools definitely have the potential to change the way we work everyday! From making tedious tasks effortless to repetitive tasks less monotonous, AI tools could open unthinkable creative doors for the GTM professionals! However, if there is one thing we need to be aware of while implementing them, it’s all about how well we define the context!
Better the context given to the tools, precise will be the responses they will give! It’s important to keep in mind that we still have a long way to go and must never overestimate the capabilities of the AI tools we use!
2. Areas where GTM Teams use AI Tools
When it comes to the lanes of reality in marketing and sales, the following are the areas where GTM professionals implement AI!
Marketing and Sales Research
Be it marketing or sales, research plays a vital role in understanding the clients and their needs. Today, GTM teams use various AI chatbots and search engines to research!
Email Marketing and Drafting Responses
Writing professional emails that convince the target audience to take action have always been a challenge for GTM teams! While writing gripping emails is one side of the story, drafting follow-up mails and responding to clients is another thing to do! And here is where AI email assistants change the story for us!
Content Creation, Competitor Analysis & Presentations
With various AI tools for writing precise and crisp content, marketing people, of course, use them to reduce the time spent in doing research and creating campaigns, blogs, product copies, presentations, etc., ! However, as the policies and SEO principles still emphasize on human written content, the use of AI-written content must be rephrased and fact-checked!
Augmented Analytics and Predictive Analytics in Sales
Sales professionals use augmented analytics to get deep insights on their customer behavior, sales trends, client profile, and leverage data from their CRM and do sales forecasting.
Transcribing Meeting Notes and Analyzing Them
Sales representatives use AI tools for keeping a record of their clients calls in notes and later analyze them to get a better perspective on how their call went.
1.Most Commonly-Used AI Tools For GTM Teams
Merlin AI’s ChatGPT extension for Chrome and other platforms makes it easy for GTM professionals to research, share and write email responses and other content effortlessly.
Being one of the best interactive search assistants, Perplexity AI is an AI chatbot that answers queries with precise responses. GTM folks use it to do research and find it amazing as it points out to the sources and fetches the answers from real-time data from the web. It summarizes documents and features images too!
From documenting sales processes to helping professionals identify best screenshots to share with their teams, Scribe makes documentation of sales processes easy and less time consuming!
It’s an AI software that helps in lead-generation and email tracking. With a wide contact base and seamless interface with CRM, Apollo AI helps sales representatives to understand their clients and gives them data on emails they send. It simplifies outreach efforts and improves response rates and on the whole enhances sales!
Revolving around conversational intelligence in sales, Gong.io is one of the most commonly used AI tools by sales executives and representatives to analyze calls, get insights on market trends, deals and people! In addition to transcribing and analyzing calls, it also helps in coaching sales teams and enhances decision-making in sales.
Lavender AI’s email assistant happens to be one of the most popular tools used by GTM professionals to write and personalize emails. From giving real-time feedback on email drafts to
helping GTM teams to research about their prospects, Lavender AI makes email writing more personalized and effortless!
Writesonic is an AI writing tool that provides more than 100+ email templates and helps GTM folks in finding keywords, rephrasing content, generating catchy subject lines and much more for email writing. It also comes handy in making interactive presentations and draw charts, etc.,
Open AI’s Chat GPT still ranks as one of the most-commonly used tools by the GTM professionals for research and other marketing and sales activities.
Other tools discussed in the event!
Notion: (for project management)
Clari: (AI-powered revenue operations platform)
Feedhive: (social media post scheduling & management)
Drawify: ( for presentations with engaging visuals)
Dripify: (LinkedIn automation and prospecting tool)
Clearout.io: (Email verification, email finding and sales prospecting tool)
Tome AI: ( Professional presentation tool)
Playbook AI: (for sales orchestration)
Avoma: (AI meeting assistant)
Alphaa AI (NLP- driven analytics platform)
Clickup AI (for marketing and sales teams)
Dooly AI (Sales enablement platform)
While most of our time during the event went into discussing how these AI tools change the working style of marketing and sales professionals today, let’s look into what the leaders had to tell us about supporting their teams with AI tools in the next session of this blog
Leaders’s take on supporting GTM teams with AI
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- With several AI tools for GTM competing in the market to capture the attention of marketing and sales professionals, there is no doubt that AI will bring new ground-breaking changes into how we bring outcomes and results to the table in marketing and sales, however, here is how leaders are welcoming these changes with open-arms!
- With several AI tools for GTM competing in the market to capture the attention of marketing and sales professionals, there is no doubt that AI will bring new ground-breaking changes into how we bring outcomes and results to the table in marketing and sales, however, here is how leaders are welcoming these changes with open-arms!
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- Leaders are ready to support their teams with AI tools if it paves way for more productivity and solves problems at a macroscopic scale.
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- They are already encouraging their teams to use AI chatbots and other tools for researching and getting trained about new products, etc.,
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- They believe AI tools will make training sessions comfortable and fascinating for their teams.
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- One thing we have to keep in mind about the AI-driven future that’s blooming out there is that, learning and upskilling in using AI tools is definitely a stepping stone in everyone’s career!
End Note:
Having traced the story of how we lured some of the best GTM teams to have a cup of coffee with us in our March meetup, we hope all these key takeaways from our event will help you in scaling up your game in marketing and sales. That said, we would like to thank all our participants for helping us to understand how AI is changing the future for us!
