4 min read

AI in Revenue Operations

2021 March 18 16:00 GMT-06:00

 

AI in Business | Theia Marketing

Revenue operations serve to promote interdepartmental collaboration in an organization. It focuses on aligning the objectives and strategies of customer-facing marketing, sales, and customer success teams. 

A successful RevOps approach provides real-time visibility into the state of every deal sales is currently working on and the level of engagement and activity of these potential customers. 

In recent years, the increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) has helped countless companies become more efficient. By decreasing operational expenditures, facilitate engagement with prospects and customers, and providing teams insight into their departments current state of affairs, AI has ultimately improved their operational and management efforts 

With this in mind, how does AI impact organizations and help them make better use of their resources? What are the ways of its integration and its fundamental benefits? 

The role of AI in Revenue Operations 

AI plays a pivotal role in sound revenue operations strategies.  

By integrating an AI-based software solution, such as a CRM, organizations can save time, cut back on data overhauls and confusion, and get a clearer picture of how everyone contributes to acquiring new customers and predicting revenue. 

Caroline Lee, Marketing Director at CocoSign, shares how her organization uses AI. 

"AI has helped our business in different ways.  

Unlike the traditional way of doing things, AI has helped us in automating operations. This makes our services convenient, and customers are responded to on time. This allows us to capture more clients because they perceive us as reliable due to our online presence.  

AI automates messages and calendars, thus ensuring we do not miss out on essential business functions. This maximizes our effectiveness and productivity in our business. The AIat times, will fill in the CRM saving us time to engage in other things. It runs on a 24/7 basis, unlike humans who will tire and miss out on a lead. " 

 AI-powered solutions are great for assessing historical deal patterns and trends, which help marketing and sales understand the state of every deal currently being worked onNot only that, but AI has a substantial impact on helping raise brand awareness across social media platforms. 

By identifying which deals are inherently at risk of falling apart and which ones are worth investing more time and energy to close. Teams no longer need to wait for someone to build a report with quarterly results  a sound tech stack can give them all of the information they need.  

4 Ways AI helps Revenue Operations 

AI-powered technology does a lot to equip organizations with the technological know-how to get the job done and measure progress along the way.  

There are several ways that artificial intelligence can ensure significant revenue operations success.

Measurement of common metrics 

AI couples technology with advanced analytics. A good analytics strategy can measure and identify significant results, trends, and patterns that can positively influence business outcomes.  

Measuring standard metrics across various teams can help determine areas where more cross-team collaboration is required. Under this premise, marketing, sales, and customer success are up to date on how their individualized actions contribute to their overall revenue objectives. 

For instance, if marketing tweaks its demand generation tactics and doubles the number of qualified leads it sends over to sales, but sales do not close these deals, thesomething along the way needs iteration to create real value. 

RevOps requires monitoring precise metrics, and with AI-powered software, marketing and sales can pinpoint where they are falling short. 

Providing solid evidence  

good collaboration between marketing and sales team members is essential for revenue operations alignment. 

There are many reasons why a prospect fizzles out, falls behind in the customer journey, and sales cannot close a deal with them. To understand and pinpoint the root of the problem, it is crucial to follow the prospect's journey. 

To do this, AI helps eliminate the guesswork of the often-controversial aspect of determining misaligned cross-departmental objectives by deciphering where along their journey the prospect fell off of the bandwagon through the use of data. By assessing the right analytics, team leaders can recognize what worked, what did not, and the existing gaps.  

Peter Horne, Content Lead at Geoff McDonald and Associatesexplains the role of artificial intelligence. 

"We use AI to help us analyze large sets of data faster and more accurately. In doing so, we can gain insight into how our leads are behaving, giving them different lead scores according to their behavior, and then targeting those closer to converting from a lead to a client.  

Without AI, this process becomes tedious, and mistakes can often be made, and valuable leads are lost. By merging a human element with AI, we've streamlined and improved this process and are getting much better lead conversion rates than before." 

Lifecycle insights  

Departments that work in a siloed way have exclusive access to the tools, analytics, and data trends that support them and their department-specific objectives.  

While this can undoubtedly help a marketing department improve its marketing campaign results, home in on their target audience, attract quality leads, and improve its ROI. However, that is as far as this approach can go. 

A sales department can improve its sales operations, provide sales material to educate potential customers, improve its sales quota process to achieve the number of deals closed, and sell more.  

While all of these achievements individually benefit its respective department, they do not benefit the organization. 

With AI tools and advanced analytics can provide insight into, organizations can explore their options beyond a singular department. By using AI with a revenue operations approach, it becomes easier to identify insights throughout the typical customer lifecycle, allocate resources more appropriately, and leadership can make better decisions for the business. 

Julien Raby, founder, and owner of Coffee Works, shares the role AI has in his organization. 

"In our company, we utilize AI for Automated Ad Placement and Audience Targeting. AIs today don't just look at customer data; they also look at many social and sales data, which can be much more valuable than you would think.  

For example, a good AI will figure out which payment options and channels have a higher success rate with your target audience, especially if you don't know where to look for or evaluate this data. The ability can also be used to automated ad placement and on the right platforms to attract the business you want. When used correctly, it has the potential to transform a company's earnings." 

Reduction of human error in AI 

As humans, the possibility of a miscalculation can lead to losing a high-quality leadnot closing a sale, or failing to retain current customers. 

Artificial intelligence can help to properly reduce these human factors and minimize the possibilities of leads, prospects, and current customers losing interest in your business throughout their customer lifecycle.  

How to start implementing AI 

You should first figure out what your business needs by determining what issues can be eliminated or points improved using AI. 

Setting the proper objective for AI use in your business can mean any of this: 

Automatization of tasks, prioritizing a concrete value (appraisal of the business and financial price of AI implementation), adding AI capacities to your existing products and services 

AI and RevOps go hand in hand  

RevOps is an essential way for companies to ensure that all of their revenue-generating activities are coordinated and working towards common organizational targets. With AI, RevOps becomes even more powerful.  

Coordination is improved, costs are mitigated, customer experience is enhanced, and resources are laser-targeted towards meaningful big-picture business goals. 

Karen Lopez

Written by Karen Lopez

Karen Lopez is Theia Marketing's Marketing Manager.

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