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Maximize AI’s return in time and in value with incremental investments
Most sales organizations have already made spot investments in AI. For those that haven’t, now is not the time to go big given budget constraints that many organizations are facing because of the pandemic. Instead, consider opportunities to apply small, incremental AI investments in existing systems and data to solve ever-more-granular AI problems. For example:
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Incremental AI investments promise higher ROI by identifying and fixing specific sales problems. They can pave the way to transformational AI opportunities in the mid-term, while also delivering short-term ROI.
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Above all, go all-in on customer experience and where it intersects sales processes. Create a vision for segment and product-specific promotions.
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Go broad and deep with your sales data management investments. Don’t let data exhaust or data fatigue prevent you from capturing and exploiting data to shape customer demand preferences.
Sales leaders need to fix their data management and data science skills gaps by focusing on their teams of data-aware and data-trained salespeople who can manage data-driven insights. In the next generation of AI data models, sales leaders won’t hire Apex code experts or other software specialists. Instead, they’ll hire domain experts among generalist business analysts who are good problem solvers and data-driven thinkers who can also code and describe problems well enough to apply PAYGO AI by creating Catalyst Partnerships with payers and insurers to test what works using Post-COVID Discount Models — COVID-applied models that unbundle and rebundle value and cost in a multiteam and symbiotic ecosystem model.
In short, AI is increasingly becoming table stakes. AI will continue to automate more services and processes, and it will increasingly reshape commercial relationships at scale, increasing buyer outcomes — and will continuously enable more accurate and granular customer targeting and tighter access control — as it turns buyers and sellers into citizens and consumers at the same time.