When using AI to improve your individual marketing output, think first about your customers rather than specific tools. Or vice versa: this is all about your individual efficiency and creativity, after all.
But if you want to go beyond your siloed, day-to-day AI use to meaningful results across your organization... that takes cross-functional cooperation.
"We are very clearly past the point of pure experimentation with AI and are now at the point where we want to get adoption and scale across our organizations," says Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing.
In his MarketingProfs presentation, "Accelerating AI's Impact Across The Entire Buyer and Customer Journey," he asks marketers to consider how AI can impact each customer's experience—from awareness to retention (and around again).
"This isn't just about demand gen and net new funnel coming in," Matt says. Rather, it's about every customer touchpoint.
And as we all know, the journey is not just about those of us in Marketing. It's also about Sales and Customer Success. You need to involve them in the conversation early to help prioritize your best use cases for AI rollout—where it'll ultimately have the most impact on customers, who are your North Star.
That's especially true when introducing new tools and processes that disrupt someone else's status quo.
"There are so many ways you can think about using AI across functions," Matt says. But AI is ever-changing and still scary for many people afraid of misusing it.
He suggests bringing Sales and Customer Success a curated list of possible pain points you face across the customer journey that AI can help address. That way, you're not asking everyone to start from scratch (and your collaboration doesn't devolve into a free-for-all).
Check out this clip from his presentation for some suggestions to kick things off:
"Which of these are things we don't get to enough, and what could we do with AI to generate that today?" It could be social media or content across more market segments. Or it could be something especially onerous and time-consuming, like win-loss analysis, that keeps getting relegated to the back burner. This is all about your team and your customer needs.
Find consensus on what to address first, then investigate potential tools, including features already built into your CRM, automation systems, and other tools in your martech and salestech stacks.
You should be strategic and you should think beyond one-and-done projects. But just because you're scaling bigger-picture adoption doesn't mean the individual activities you've built into your workflows don't matter.
"Little things you're doing with AI build up into massive value," Matt insists. So, record how your marketing, sales, and customer success teams use AI across the journey in a cross-functional AI strategy document. A spreadsheet works great for keeping the details organized—like this template from Liza Adams at GrowthPath Partners.
Documenting is "going to make it a lot easier to tell a broader story of the impact it's having" on your business objectives and for proving the value of what you are doing. And not just to Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success: "When you can point out the impact that it's having on things that your CFO cares about, that your Board cares about—things that either you're able to do better or faster, or things you can get to that you couldn't before—that starts to lay the groundwork for expanding the impact," Matt says.
And that can mean bigger budgets and greater acceptance of your AI use from your more cautious colleagues in IT and Legal.
Watch Matt's complete AI for Demand Gen Marketers presentation to learn more about adopting and scaling AI and applying it to the buyer and customer journey.
