As Mediafly’s CTO, with over 20 years of experience in engineering, consulting, product management, and executive roles, I’ve witnessed groundbreaking technological innovations that have reshaped our world. From the Internet and mobile proliferation to client-server, ASPs, and SaaS, each disruption has had a profound and lasting impact on personal experiences and company operations, particularly in B2B sales.
Now, we have Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence), the latest game-changing advancement. Over the past 5 years OpenAI has been releasing increasingly powerful versions of its Generative AI technology called Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT). GPT, along with other Large Language Models (LLMs), are generating significant buzz and have the power to revolutionize how B2B revenue teams approach the market.
The potential impact of GPT and LLMs on revenue teams is immense. That’s why organizations are willing to spend on these technologies. GPT and LLM tech are certainly the topic du jour, and OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, is expecting $200 million in revenue by the end of this calendar year —- a 1900% year over year increase.
Anyone involved in market facing activities should investigate opportunities to use Generative AI. Where do you start? In this blog, I will share some of the initial use cases that will help revenue enablement, revenue operations, and sales enablement professionals take advantage of this new tech.
The Power of Generative AI, GPT and LLMs
Generative AI is an emerging class of AI technology that understands and can generate images, text and video. LLMs are advanced AI models capable of understanding prompts and generating human-like text based on the context provided. These models have demonstrated a remarkable ability to create relevant and coherent content in various domains, including content marketing, customer service, and sales. GPT is a specific implementation of LLMs that have been built by OpenAI over the past 5+ years. The capabilities these technologies have is causing a massive stir in the B2B industry, with GTM teams chomping at the bit to see how they can help them sell.
“Watching a generative AI tool such as ChatGPT provide accurate responses to questions, generate blogs from a couple bullets, and do things like pass the Wharton MBA exam gets salespeople dreaming about what they can do with a tool like this.” – Forrester Principal Analysts Seth Marrs and Anthony McPartlin writing in a March 2023 Forrester Blog Post
How Generative AI is Revolutionizing Revenue Enablement
Revenue enablement is the process of aligning an organization’s sales, marketing, and customer success teams to optimize customer and potential customer interactions to drive revenue growth.
Generative AI can transform this process by providing contextual and comprehensive actions based on customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. By analyzing large volumes of customer data, these AI models can uncover hidden insights and trends, allowing organizations to create targeted, personalized content that resonates with their audience.
Use cases we are experimenting with include leveraging Generative AI to:
- Automatically create emails to both internal and external audiences for any step in the sales process. For example, the AI can generate personalized emails to customers 90 days before renewal with a contextual opening, overview of current products under contract, the renewal dollar amount, and a direct link to renew the agreement — all without the rep lifting a finger.
- Automatically score seller and customer engagement activity and recommend and prioritize coaching actions. By tying together data from various systems (both within and outside of the Mediafly platform), Generative AI can augment the manual work a sales manager would have had to do before a 1:1 meeting with a rep or team pipeline meeting. This saves both the sales manager rep significant time.
- Generate customized sales pitches, product demonstrations, and marketing materials that engage customers and address their unique challenges. With just a few sentences to describe what they want, marketers can generate 90% of a presentation, product sell sheet, and other marketing materials like blogs and thought leadership. This content would be perfectly on-brand and leverage the latest content available in its construction. Marketers can then deploy this as a template for their sales teams with just a few clicks, saving valuable time and effort, while consistently producing high-quality content.
Don’t wait too long to get started. Gartner predicts that “By 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated.”
How Generative AI is Revolutionizing Revenue Operations
Revenue operations (RevOps) is the strategic integration of sales, marketing, and customer success operations to optimize processes, tools, and data. RevOps teams are increasingly relying on data to be agile with their strategic planning and to optimize their GTM teams’ effectiveness. Generative AI, and GPT in particular, can play a pivotal role in streamlining these operations and improving collaboration across teams.
As Stephen D’Orio, Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute notes, “Most sales and marketing executives have limited acumen or background in analytics”.
Leveraging these tools, RevOps leaders and their teams can act as data experts, ensuring everyone in go-to-market roles is on a winning path.
Example use cases that we are already experimenting with internally today include the ability to:
- Get rapid answers to questions about specific accounts, opportunities, deal stages, contacts, and more. For example, “What stage is the ACME Corporation renewal at?”, “What do the total weighted forecast for Q2 and Q3 look like, and how many opportunities make that up?”. The possibilities are nearly endless.
- Summarize all email threads and call transcripts with customers to share with the team and key stakeholders, one day in advance of the next meeting. This brings the data reps and their managers need to prep for each meeting to their inbox, at the most impactful time.
- Enrich contact roles for all contacts in an account, automatically. This allows our teams to better identify whether they are properly multithreading our relationships and whether they are aligned with the Economic Buyer and Champion (per the MEDDPICC process).
GPT introduces an incredible opportunity: it can generate real-time insights and recommendations, enrich data like humans, and automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry and analysis. Used the right way, these AI models can help RevOps teams and organizations identify growth opportunities, answer fundamental questions about the status of their pipeline, and ultimately close larger deals faster.
How Generative AI is Revolutionizing Sales Enablement
Sales enablement focuses on equipping sales teams with the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to maximize their productivity and effectiveness. Forrester’s Sales Activity study finds that sellers spend 27% of their time on non-selling activities such as looking for, creating, and modifying content. Generative AI can empower sales teams by quickly generating personalized content, automating outreach, and providing real-time insights that help reps better understand and anticipate customer needs.
“Sales teams have a tremendous opportunity to increase the scale and personalization of their communications to clients and prospects. Many sales teams are already leveraging generative AI to support a variety of tasks” – Forrester Analyst Rowan Curran & Researcher Jeremy Vale write in a February 2023 Forrester report
Example use cases that we are already experimenting with internally today include:
- Creating custom sales training materials based product sheets, technical documentation, even source code, and personalize it to align with your company’s unique sales process
- Building interactive product demos and call scripts, by feeding in a combination of best-practice call transcripts and product information
- Summarizing competitive products and identifying key differentiators
By leveraging the power of Generative AI, sales enablement practitioners can equip their reps with the resources they need to close deals and exceed their quotas.
Conclusion
The integration of Generative AI, and specifically GPT today, into revenue and sales enablement and revenue operations functions has the potential to revolutionize the way B2B organizations drive revenue growth. By automating tasks, generating personalized content, and uncovering actionable insights, these AI models will enable companies to be agile, optimize their customer interactions, streamline operations, and empower their sales teams to deliver predictable efficient revenue.
At Mediafly, we are excited about the potential of Generative AI and are committed to incorporating these powerful tools into our solutions. By harnessing the power of AI, we can continue to provide our customers with cutting-edge solutions that drive business success in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
To learn more, join us for conversation with myself, Mary Shea, co-CEO of Mediafly and our guests, leading AI experts Seth Marrs, Principal Analyst at Forrester, and Lisa Palmer, Chief AI Strategist at AI Leaders. Register here!
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