Microsoft and Salesforce are already taking action to unlock the application of generative AI in sales and marketing

# As generative AI becomes popular, discussions about its specific applications are also becoming lively. As the digitalization process of enterprises continues to deepen, what role can generative AI play in the sales and marketing of enterprises? Perhaps we can get a glimpse of this from the latest moves by Microsoft and Salesforce.

Powered by OpenAI’s GPT, Viva Sales from Microsoft enables salespeople to create concise and tailored customer emails, get alerts and recommendations, and extract insights about prospects. Einstein GPT from Salesforce can generate customized content, increase employee productivity, and improve customer experience.

Application of Generative AI in Sales

The development of the sales industry is unpredictable, challenging, dynamic, and volatile , which makes it difficult for many salespeople to keep up with the pace of development in the industry. AI is used in sales to streamline and improve the sales process. Of course, this doesn’t mean the entire sales process needs to be automated. On the contrary, just adopting a few cutting-edge AI tools can help salespeople save a lot of time, allowing them to focus more on selling.

Research reports show that salespeople spend approximately 33% of their time selling products, and most of their time is spent on tedious tasks such as dealing with a series of to-do items, drafting follow-up emails, and arranging meetings. For example, developing proposals, email templates, and other sales materials takes a lot of time for salespeople. Generative AI can create these materials quickly and efficiently, giving salespeople enough time to focus on their primary work.

AI is an ideal solution to turn around sales. Generative AI can become sales support for sales staff and provide the sales team with the assistance they need, including but not limited to:

(1) Create content

Generative AI It can be used to create different forms of content such as case studies, email templates and product brochures. It not only ensures that all materials are concise, unified and up-to-date, but also helps the sales team save time and energy.

(2) Personalization

Generative AI can develop personalized sales materials that meet specific customer needs and interests, helping sales staff increase sales opportunities and strengthen customer relationships. .

(3) Find potential customers

Generative AI can find potential customers and design unique marketing campaigns. For example, it can discover new customers by analyzing data on a company's website, then generate customized emails and social media posts to attract them.

(4) Sales Analysis

Generative AI can analyze sales data to reveal what is effective and what is ineffective. Sales teams can use this data to streamline their processes and perform better.

(5) Develop training materials

After understanding the unique needs and skill levels of the sales team, generative AI can help the sales team develop tailor-made training materials .

(6) Virtual Assistant

Generative AI can help sales teams create chatbots and virtual assistants to answer customer questions around the clock, provide product recommendations, and help with sales trade.

Application of Generative AI in Marketing

In addition to sales, generative AI can also reshape the way marketing professionals work. It can create personalized ad copy, generate blog posts or images, summarize long articles, extract content snippets, comb through unstructured data, and more. By using AI tools, marketers can generate more effective content faster and more efficiently than ever before.

In an IBM survey, 35% of participants believed that generative AI is one of the most popular future technologies and may significantly change business processes, including marketing, in the next few years. Of course, AI cannot completely replace it. In order to achieve the desired results, marketers still need to contribute strategic insights, empathy, and a deeper understanding of the target audience.

By producing content from scratch, generative AI is expected to promote the automation of marketing efforts. These automated assistance include but are not limited to:

(1) Content production automation

Based on large language models and natural language processing technology, generative AI can accept a large number of copywriting jobs. AI-generated text can be used for a variety of content development tasks, including screenwriting, product descriptions, blog posts, emails, and more.

(2) Summarize the main points of the article

Generative AI can collect core points from the article or report for use in catalogs, abstracts, briefings, and even with internal interests Summary descriptions shared by stakeholders greatly improve work efficiency.

(3) Generate social media posts

Based on generative AI tools, people can enter a prompt such as "Write an engaging caption about XYZ product on Instagram" and get a tailor-made attention-grabbing post.

(4) Generate SEO keywords

For enterprises, it is necessary to find SEO-friendly, relevant, high-level keywords and phrases to strengthen their Digital marketing performance. Generative AI will examine large amounts of data to discover consumer behavior trends, helping marketers generate SEO topics, conduct SEO keyword searches, check appropriate content titles, create structured content, etc.

(5) Generate images/videos

In addition to text, multi-modal generative AI can also automatically create images/videos for online stores, social media Media platforms and other marketing materials provide product photos, design logos, create pleasing advertisements, and produce professional marketing and product demonstration videos to promote marketing implementation.

(6) Understand customer activities

AI can be used to automate customer service, quickly grasp consumer concerns, and respond to them faster than manual customer service, including Provide 24/7 chat robot customer service, automatically send emails to quickly respond to customer inquiries, etc.

In summary, generative AI is a powerful technology that has the potential to significantly change the way businesses do business in the sales and marketing world. Of course, generative AI should not be used to replace sales and marketing staff, but to assist them in their work. Enterprises should encourage and guide employees to learn and acquire AI expertise in the fields of sales and marketing to better perform their jobs. The opportunities brought by generative AI are limitless, and if harnessed correctly, companies can improve the capabilities of their sales and marketing staff and get twice the result with half the effort.

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