When most people think of artificial intelligence (AI), they think of futuristic innovations like self-driving cars or humanoid robots. But AI is becoming embedded into nearly every facet of life. Facebook uses AI now to determine what to show in your social newsfeed, Netflix uses AI to determine which movies you might want to rent, and H&R Block uses AI to help you find the best income tax deductions.
So it’s no surprise, then, that people are starting to think about ways to apply AI to B2B marketing and sales. How can AI be used for better B2B lead generation?
One easy answer is that AI will be used to streamline all the steps typically used as part of the B2B sales funnel. In short, AI will help to improve the quality of the leads that go into the sales funnel in the first place, and then help at every step of the sales funnel to improve the overall conversion rate.
Here’s just one example: AI can be used to hone in on the best possible targets. Based on all available data, including data already residing in your CRM, AI tools can help to slice and dice the prospects, coming up with a list of the ones that are most likely to result in a future sale. The key here is being able to spot relationships between the data that a human might miss. It’s literally being able to find the needle in the haystack.
And, throughout each step of the B2B selling process, AI has a role to play. For example, it can make it easier to know when to check back in on a prospect, and what type of message might work best to move the prospect to the next step of the buyer’s journey. For example, AI can check months, years or even decades of data, to see if there are any patterns that can be exploited.
But just remember – the value of any AI tool is only as good as the data used to “teach” it. Thus, it’s worth taking a quick look at the state of your data right now. It might require a bit of scrubbing before its’ ready to be used by an AI tool.
But it’s easy to see AI making it more efficient and more effective for B2B marketers to find the best possible leads. It might lead to improved scoring systems, for example, in order to qualify the leads. Or it might lead to a better understanding of how prospects move along the buyer’s journey. You might find that certain preconceptions or biases that you have are completely wrong. And it will reduce the amount of “grunt work” that’s required during the whole selling cycle, making the whole process much more automated.
As a result, don’t be surprised if more and more vendors continue to roll out AI solutions for marketing. It’s the next logical step after Big Data and predictive analytics, two areas that have already had a huge impact on B2B marketing.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.