December 14, 2024
Managing Partner
A strategic and unified approach to fully harness the transformative potential of Generative AI in marketing, sales, and service functions, as many leaders currently lack confidence in their GenAI strategies despite its anticipated crucial role in these areas.
Organizations in marketing, sales, and service are fully committing to the potential of artificial intelligence. Leaders are investing heavily in launching pilot projects driven by the belief that AI, particularly Generative AI (GenAI), will be crucial in reshaping these functions in the years ahead. However, many early adopters in the B2B sector who have implemented AI to enhance short-term productivity need to witness the expected returns on their investments. According to recent research from Santiago & Company, nearly half of these companies either need more confidence in their GenAI strategy or feel indifferent about their plans.
While achieving quick wins can help make incremental improvements and familiarize the workforce with GenAI tools, the path to substantial, scalable impact lies in using AI to transform these functions fundamentally. Leaders must articulate a unified and ambitious AI vision that compels marketing, sales, and service teams to rethink core processes and workflows. This vision should inspire the creation of new, innovative experiences that enhance the customer journey.
Santiago & Company's ASCEND transformation framework offers a strategic approach for marketing, sales, and service functions to adopt GenAI effectively. Following this framework, these functions can scale individual GenAI use cases while working collaboratively to maximize organizational value. Generative AI (GenAI) is making significant inroads in the corporate world, particularly in the marketing, sales, and service sectors. Among companies, the top 10% identified by Santiago & Company as GenAI leaders are beginning to harness substantial value from this technology. They leverage it to enhance efficiencies, improve customer experiences, and increase revenue. Research conducted by Harvard Business School, and BCG indicates that adopting GenAI can lead to 40% higher quality results and a 25% increase in output speed. Companies that need to catch up to adopt AI. Analysis of future-ready enterprises highlights AI as one of six critical attributes that enable companies to withstand disruptions, capitalize on innovation, and outperform peers across various financial and non-financial metrics.
Despite the potential, there needs to be more clarity between what leaders expect from GenAI and how they implement it. A survey by Santiago & Company involving over 1,000 executives from middle to c-level management across diverse industries and regions reveals this gap. Leaders overwhelmingly view GenAI as transformative, with 90% believing it will be crucial to marketing, sales, and service processes within the next three years. Furthermore, nearly three-quarters anticipate that GenAI will enhance key business metrics, such as operational efficiency and sales volume.
Sources: 2024 GenAI Sales & Marketing Survey, Santiago & Company Analysis
However, there needs to be more confidence in current strategies. While leaders are eager to invest in pilot projects to explore GenAI's potential, they must be more cautious about the expected return on investment. Over 70% of leaders report that their organizations have piloted at least two GenAI use cases. The most common applications include:
Despite this, nearly 80% of leaders plan to increase GenAI investments in the coming year, yet close to half express uncertainty or neutrality about their current GenAI strategies. Both organizations and their leaders need to be fully prepared to adopt GenAI. Many leaders, including 75% in marketing, 70% in sales, and 67% in service, feel their organizations need more time and are neutral about their preparedness. This sentiment stems from several challenges in adopting GenAI, such as data quality and knowledge, determining where to start, security and privacy concerns, and integrating AI with existing systems like customer relationship management applications.
Additionally, on a personal level, more than half of the leaders do not use GenAI daily or have only experimented with it, highlighting a gap in personal readiness to embrace this transformative technology. Launching a bold AI transformation requires more than deploying AI use cases to enhance productivity. Many organizations stalled, making only minor improvements without realizing AI's full potential. To truly create value, leaders must embrace the opportunity to reshape marketing, sales, and service fundamentally. This involves reimagining the processes within these functions and inventing new experiences throughout the customer journey.
Santiago & Company's ASCEND framework offers a strategic approach to AI transformation. It guides organizations from deploying GenAI in everyday tasks to reshaping critical functions for radical efficiency and effectiveness, ultimately inventing new experiences, offerings, and business models.
The first step in transforming these functions is establishing a unified AI ambition. This ensures that marketing, sales, and service integrate technology and data architecture into key processes across the customer journey while maintaining control over their operations. This ambition encompasses all forms of AI, including automation, predictive analytics, and GenAI.
The goal is to identify what changes marketing, sales, and service need to make to enhance organizational value. For instance, if email creation isn't an issue, AI-based email tools should be optional. However, if sales still need opportunities due to slow responses to requests for proposals, a priority could be developing an AI-driven process to deliver RFP responses within 24 hours. From there, functions must determine how they must engage differently with customers, partners, or employees to create value and assess the required changes.
Defining the AI ambition sets the stage for reshaping functions. Marketing, sales, and service must interpret how this ambition will manifest, using AI to transform operating models, customer touchpoints, and the skills required.
Data is a critical starting point. To reimagine these functions, foundational data and governance to ensure data quality are needed. With reliable data, building AI-based use cases is more manageable. After identifying necessary first- and third-party data, functions should design a shared database to manage it. Unifying the data layer across the customer journey acts as a force multiplier, enabling the creation of use cases by leveraging insights from various touchpoints—something impossible if data remains siloed.
Next, functions should explore additional AI tools to support identified changes. Santiago & Company's research shows top GenAI performers combine GenAI with other AI forms, such as automation and predictive AI. While GenAI excels at creative tasks, predictive AI excels at analytical tasks.
It's critical that marketing, sales, and service must take responsibility for data governance, shared data layers, and tools and set objectives for reshaping their functions. Implementing strategies should focus on user experience and adoption, enhancing the appeal of new tools and processes.
Early adopters' experiences demonstrate the significant value reshaping can create. GenAI has tripled content production speed in marketing and reduced costs by 70%. In sales, response times to simple RFPs have improved. These examples highlight efficiency gains and shifts in expertise, from creation to perfecting messaging.
Another core goal of a bold AI ambition is to create entirely new ways of working. For marketing, sales, and service, this typically involves inventing new experiences rather than new products. These new experiences generally fall into two categories:
Creating such experiences may involve building new AI models, adopting cutting-edge tools, or using existing applications in innovative ways.
Here’s what the AI-driven transformation could look like:
By reshaping functions and inventing new experiences, enterprises can harness the full potential of AI to transform marketing, sales, and service—unlocking both immediate efficiencies and long-term strategic advantages.
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