5 ways CRMs are leveraging AI to automate marketing today

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming marketing operations. Leading customer relationship management (CRM) and other marketing platforms are integrating sophisticated AI capabilities that promise to assist with key functions like gauging customer sentiment, training employees, making product recommendations, enriching data and even auto-generating targeted campaigns. 

Salesforce launched its Einstein AI capabilities back in 2016, but a lot more has happened recently. Let’s explore the current marketing applications of AI in CRMs and how you can best position your teams to capitalize on this disruptive innovation.

AI in marketing platforms and CRMs

There’s been a threefold increase in organizations piloting generative AI in the past year, per a recent Gartner survey of over 1,400 executive leaders.

Where are companies using AI the most? It’s in customer-facing operations. Up to 47% of organizations are using AI to help them with sales, marketing and customer service, with marketing operations at the top. Almost one in five executives are using or testing out AI to improve their marketing processes this year.

“Organizations are not just talking about generative AI, they’re investing time, money and resources to move it forward and drive business outcomes,” said Frances Karamouzis, a Gartner analyst.

Most major customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing platforms are already introducing AI functionality into their products, with more releases planned in 2024. As a marketing leader, you must focus on these areas to fully leverage one of the most disruptive technologies in recent memory.

1. Sentiment 

AI can understand speech and text, and the more your marketing team uses your CRM system for phone calls, chats, notes, calendars and email conversations, the more these systems can start gauging the sentiment of your prospects and customers. 

Trained to pick out negative and positive words and phrases, new AI features can identify cases where customers are particularly satisfied — or unhappy — with your company’s products and services. Most CRM applications that offer this functionality can monitor conversations in real time and then provide reports to management, alerting them of potentially unhappy customers. 

Future iterations of this technology will allow automatic emails to customers depending on their sentiment, with your prior approval. Happy customers can be leveraged for more sales, testimonials or referrals. Those who are unsatisfied can be contacted before they seek out your competitors and hopefully turn around.

Dig deeper: Integrating marketing with technology: Best of the MarTechBot

2. Training

Today’s CRM and marketing platforms are being trained to closely watch how your sales and marketing professionals perform their jobs. They are learning to track activities such as calls, emails and texts compared to their team’s counterparts or benchmarks. These systems can also accept your training procedures, scripts and guidelines and compare these rules to your team’s actions. 

Based on this knowledge, suggestions can be made in real time (e.g., “before you leave the call, make sure to thank them for their business” or “try to avoid discussing politics or other controversial topics”) while still interacting. Reports can be generated afterward with recommendations for the team members and the manager. Results can be compared to others in the group and matched against the production of leads, opportunities and closed sales by each team member.

Dig deeper: How generative AI is improving customer experience and service calls

3. Proposed products/recommendations

Every first-year business school student is taught that their existing customers are the best source of new sales for a company. Many of us who have been in business for a while can validate that. Unfortunately, we get caught up in the romance of bringing on new customers and ignore the opportunities that we have with our existing customer base. AI can help solve this issue. 

Based on prior purchases, a customer’s industry, similar customer transactions or other demographic information you include in your CRM database, new AI tools can suggest to sales and marketing team members additional services and products that can be offered to the customer. 

Even when a prospective customer declines a sales or marketing pitch, other suggestions can be made based on public information about the company and where and how they do business. The idea is for AI to act with a customer or prospect exactly like a competent salesperson would engage in a retail store, suggesting additional add-ons and accessories based on what they’re hearing from the customer.

Dig deeper: 4 AI categories impacting marketing: Personalized customer journeys

4. Enriched data

Have you purchased prospect lists only to discover incomplete or inaccurate data? Many in marketing share this frustration. Even top database companies, despite their cost, may not provide consistently accurate information.

AI is already changing that through enriched data. Many CRM vendors have partnered with database firms to allow users to automatically populate contact and company records with updated information with just a click of a button. AI is used to:

• Look at the focused customer or prospect record.
• Search for the most recent demographic data about the target from one or more external sources.
• Provide the most recent information after checking matching databases. 

This is done instantaneously and allows marketing teams to work with more reliable, regularly updated data. 

5. Auto-creation of campaigns with deeper personalization

Many of today’s AI offerings feature generative AI, meaning your team asks a question in everyday language, and then you get an answer. But in the not-too-distant future, there could be an evolution toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). If that happens, you’ll have a full-functioning assistant that thinks like a human. 

On a voice command, you’ll instruct your CRM system to “Send an email to contacts that have purchased X product and offer them a discount on Y product, and when positive sentiment responses are received, respond with a link to a personalized landing page where the customer can buy that product and then make recommendations for accessory products,” and this will just be done. 

You can intervene, authorize and approve any such campaign while it’s happening. But the end result will be AI acting as a fully-fledged member of your marketing team.

Dig deeper: 6 ways to use generative AI for your marketing

Capitalizing on the next wave of marketing innovation

All of these features are either available now or are coming soon. Most are still in their very early stages, so beware and proceed cautiously. As a marketing leader, your job is threefold.

• Make sure your database is as complete and accurate as possible. Otherwise, this automation won’t work very well. Use this year to clean it up in advance of implementation. 
• Formulate a written AI policy. Be clear about who can use AI in your company, what AI features are allowed and what functions it can do. 
• Lean into your software vendors. They’re investing in this stuff and want you to use it so that you continue as a paying customer. Ask them what features they’re working on and when they’ll be available. Then, test, play and use. 

It’s all new and exciting. But to fully leverage your CRM system’s AI, you’ll need to appreciate what it can do for your business both now and in the future and fully invest in its potential.

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