The 2008 financial crisis, the e-commerce boom, and the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the market in significant ways. Now, AI is making a splash. 

AI augments people and processes, enabling them to be more productive. But, with endless possibilities, many go-to-market teams don’t know where to start. “The universe of potential AI investments is really intimidating,” shares Davis Giedt, Director of Analytics and Research at the Alexander Group.

To make AI feel more accessible to the masses, Davis recently sat down with CaptivateIQ Co-CEO & Co-founder Mark Schopmeyer and Senior Director of GTM Strategy and Operations Andrew Morales. Keep reading for a recap of that discussion, which covered how to use AI to boost your acquisition and retention efforts.

Assess Your AI Readiness

Before going all in on AI, consider how it will fit with your organizational structure. AI is an addition, not a replacement, to people and processes. Ensure you have clearly defined roles and workflows in place before introducing AI. For example, sellers should be comfortable conducting email outreach before you implement an AI-driven tool that personalizes emails.

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Once you’ve built the groundwork, consider investing in more mature players before testing the waters with newer technologies. “LLMs only became popularized over a year ago, so it’s still early days,” says Davis. LLMs, like ChatGPT, are incredibly powerful but may require more tinkering to implement effectively.

3 Ways To Use AI To Support Revenue Growth

Once you’ve decided your organization is ready for AI, it’s off to the races. Here are three ways AI can help you bring in more money for your business. 

1. Improve Seller Productivity With Automation 

Most sales reps don’t spend enough time on high-value selling activities. According to the Alexander Group, the average sales rep only spends 25% of their time on engaged selling. Time spent on administrative tasks means less productive sellers and less revenue for your business.

Automating routine tasks can free up time for your sales reps to focus on what matters most – selling. Here are a few ways to use AI to improve sellers’ workflows.

Automatically make CRM updates

Making CRM updates is one of the most disliked sales tasks, which means it often doesn’t get done or it doesn’t get done correctly. AI can help automate this process so your CRM is always up-to-date with calls, emails, and notes. The Alexander Group found that automating CRM updates saves the average sales rep 2-3 hours per week. 

Surface insights sooner

Gathering insights from conversations to train and coach reps is tedious and time-consuming. But having access to those buyer pain points and goals helps seal the deal. AI-driven tools like Gong analyze all conversations (across emails, calls, and more) to help teams identify what’s resonating and what isn’t. Access to deeper insights enables more effective coaching and more productive buyer conversations.

Suggest next steps

GTM teams can use AI to analyze conversations from top performing reps, identify the ingredients to their success, and use that to suggest actions for other sellers. With CaptivateIQ Assist sellers can access personalized guidance that helps them close more deals.

2. Give CSMs Time Back in Their Day

AI also provides massive time-saving benefits to customer service teams. On average, 30-40% of a customer service rep’s time is spent on tedious activities. This often leaves them with little time to focus on delivering a top-tier customer experience. That’s where AI comes in. 

Using AI, customer success teams can:

• Automate repetitive or lower-tier service interactions and direct people to the right resources on the website.
• Uncover insights based on past positive interactions and use that intel to train and onboard new customer success team members faster.
• Design and write more effective customer feedback surveys for higher response rates and deeper insights.

Underpinning all prospect and customer interactions is a strategic data-driven RevOps team.

3. Empower RevOps With Clean, Unified, and Enriched Data

RevOps teams are responsible for wide-ranging initiatives from segmentation to compensation management. To effectively partner with the go-to-market organization on these tasks, RevOps leaders need access to high-quality data. Here’s how AI can help.  

Keep data up-to-date

Making data updates is typically a manual and time-consuming process. AI tools can help you automate activity tracking and data capture for more accurate forecasting.

Enable strategic business initiatives 

AI organizes data and brings insights to the forefront, enabling you to become a more strategic partner to your entire go-to-market organization. Using ChatGPT and LLMs, Andrew and his team built a sophisticated account tiering model in less than a week. They cleaned up non-proprietary data and created industry groups, resulting in more focused account lists for sellers. Now reps can spend time on the accounts that will drive the most revenue for the business.

Streamline compensation management processes

Managing compensation plans requires culling through many inputs and systems. AI helps automate data mining and surfaces insights sooner. Using CaptivateIQ Assist, you can quickly set up comp plans, analyze commissions data, and understand rep performance.

Take Your Business to the Next Level With AI

AI won’t automatically transform your go-to-market organization. But when it’s used effectively alongside people and processes, it can save your team time and help you uncover deeper insights. Harnessing the power of AI gives you a leg up on the competition.

Watch our on-demand webinar to hear more from Davis, Mark, and Andrew on how to use AI to streamline GTM processes and drive more revenue.

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