Automating Revenue Creation
In today’s modern enterprise, speed to revenue matters. Indeed, speed and the necessary automation are increasingly essential to compete with more sophisticated competitors like Amazon, Netflix, Google and so many others. Revenue is created through a combination of marketing and selling motions. Historically, these motions have been mostly manual, people-intensive and done on cycles. Today, they need to be ‘always-on, always-optimizing’. That takes an entirely new technology stack to accelerate the automation of marketing and selling. AI is rapidly enabling businesses to connect these different front-end functions, draw insights from holistic customer interactions, and make smarter, revenue-driving decisions.
AI applications are transforming both the B2B and B2C marketing experience. AI is powering the rise of new marketing channels, including messaging. Nearly 90% of consumers indicate that they would like to be able to communicate with businesses via text, but more than 50% of businesses are not equipped to do so. Companies such as Attentive, Emotive, and Tone help enterprises reach customers in their preferred channel, with personalized AI-enabled text messages.
AI-based reinforcement learning analyzes customer behavior in real-time and empowers personalized ecommerce experiences through marketing creation (offer, copy, message, pricing testing, etc.) automation, and recommendations without time-consuming A/B tests. Companies such as Contentsquare and Persado utilize this technique to provide digital experience analytics that improve customer conversion and satisfaction.
Sales has historically taken a back seat to larger customer service divisions in the adoption of AI. The advent of COVID, however, catalyzed massive growth in AI-enabled digital sales. The digital sales process begins with transcription and analysis tools such as Gong and Chorus. AI Sales Assistants such as Automation Hero and tact.ai empower sales teams with recommendations during both the sales process and post-sale interaction. Revenue intelligence players such as InsightSquared, Clari, and people.ai focus on applying AI to traditional sales challenges – driving pipeline, improving productivity and accurately forecasting revenue. Additionally, these companies’ platforms connect to marketing and customer service divisions to build pipeline and reduce churn.
Customer Service automation in ecommerce and enterprise sales is expected to grow at a 24% CAGR to reach nearly $30B by 2023. AI-enabled bots and the companies that create them, such as Rasa an open-source platform for bot development, have transformed the first steps of customer service through digital self-service options. Once a customer is actively engaged, companies such as ASAPP, Uniphore, and Cresta’s conversational AI and AI-enabled analytics empower service teams with real-time agent coaching and resolution suggestions. Capgemini asserts that adoption of conversational AI results in greater than 20% reduction in both customer service costs and overall customer churn. Additionally, Gartner predicts by 2025, organizations that embed AI in their multichannel customer engagement platform will elevate operational efficiency by 25%.
Enterprises are increasingly creating “revenue operations” divisions with a single IT backend and set of industry KPIs. According to Gartner, by 2023, 25% of organizations will amalgamate marketing, sales, and CX into a single function. Cross departmental insights are critical in building a revenue operations department that is stronger than the sum of its parts. Enterprises must, therefore, connect various data sources – CRM, social media, ERP, third-party analytics – into a central platform. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) such as ActionIQ normalize disparate data streams, build holistic customer views, and utilize AI to offer customer insights.
For a deeper dive into the many ways AI is transforming, unifying and automating revenue operations, join key players in the space in a discussion on Automating Revenue Creation at The Montgomery Summit 2021 presented by March Capital on March 3rd and 4th. To register for the 2021 Summit, please click the following link: https://cvent.me/mqWNGX. If you have any questions, please contact info@montgomerysummit.com.
