AI in 2024: Marketers 2x Usage, While AI-Using Sales Teams Report 1.3x Revenue Increases

This week on Funnel Frontier: A new AI + data juggernaut? Salesforce & Workday to launch new AI-powered assistant for employee services + Act! CRM gets a bold new jetpack upgrade!

This week:

• Marketers are 2x-ing AI in 2024
• The missing link between sales and AI 
• What is a lead source, anyway?
• EMR vs EHR vs PHR
• 4D chess marketing ideas (via EngageBay)

Stat of the Week

44% of unprepared sales pitches are ignored by customers. (LinkedIn)

Marketers 2x their AI use in 2024, says report

AI stonks go up. With marketers, they go up 2x to be exact. 

In 2024, use of AI among marketers has hit 74% compared to 35% last year. So says research from HubSpot, featuring stats gleaned from 1,000+ folks from SMBs. 

The most popular AI tools include chatbots (35%), AI-enhanced CRM (25%), and productivity tools (23%).

AI is seen as a productivity multiplier, a means for marketers to generate more leads and higher-quality content. 

Still, despite AI's growing role in content creation (43% used it), marketers still prefer to edit AI-generated content before publishing. So hey, don’t blame the bot when something’s cringe.

Fears of a yuppie version of Skynet taking one’s job have not materialized—actually, 68% of marketers feel AI positively impacts their career growth. 

Meanwhile, 70% felt AI boosted cross-team collabs, and 69% said it did real good for personalization. 

What’s the big pic? “Marketers who lean in and collaborate with AI to make their own work better are the ones who will win,” said Nicholas Holland, Hubspot’s VP Product and GM, Marketing Hub.

There you have it, folks. AI, it’s how you win!

The Week @ CRM.org

Best Contact Management Software. With contact management software, forgetting client names becomes intentional.

Gmail CRM. Chaos reigns… no more. Ideas for streamlining your workflow with Gmail-CRM integrations.

Weekly Bloom

Lessons in CX from the Ritz-Carlton. It’s a place where even the towels get treated well. How do they do it? We investigate in search of take-aways.

The sales-AI missing link—discovered!

Hold the fort. It says here the link between AI and sales has now been proven. 

A new report, commissioned by Salesforce, says that sales teams using AI supped upon a revenue growth of 83%, compared to 66% of AI agnostics. 

AI’s charm? Apparently it boosts data accuracy, understanding of customer needs, and—in the ultimate irony—uses its non-person-ness to personalize interactions. 

The report’s survey reveals that 67% of sales reps don’t expect to meet their quotas, largely due to non-selling tasks eating up 70% of their time. AI thus appears as the Marvel hero that 81% of sales teams are embracing. 

B2B appeared as a big beneficiary of AI, given the extra-important role of seller-buyer relationships there. 

Sellers gestured to 5 key AI benefits: 

• Better quality, more accurate sales data 
• Improved understanding of customer needs
• More personalization (via predictive analytics)
• More accurate sales forecasting
• Faster customer communication (via genAI)

In spite of AI’s benefits, spooky associated problems, like resource limitations and data trust issues, keep on haunting. 33% of respondents did sad face emoji on account of lack of resources or headcount; the same amount said training was an issue for supporting AI use. 

Still, it seems AI isn't just keeping sales reps in the game, it's also reducing burnout and upping staff retention. 67% of reps on AI-teams said they had no plan to leave their job in the next year, compared with 56% of non-AI team members.  

Stellar Strategies: Tips & Tricks for Sales, Marketing & Service

Lead source 101 (via Zendesk)

Every rose has its thorn. Every lead has its source. 

Lead sources are the breadcrumbs that lead your sales team to that sweet, sweet cheese. 

These are the channels through which potential customers first learn about your business, whether via social media, referrals, or even an edgy billboard. 

Knowing where your leads come from helps tailor your sales and marketing tactics. It’s like having a GPS for your sales journey—more accurate targeting, better conversion rates, and fewer angry wrong turns. 

Essentially, without knowing your lead sources, you're just throwing darts in the dark. And pardon the moralizing, but that’s just plain dangerous.

More here. 

EMR vs EHR vs PHR

Are you lost in the wilderness of health IT acronyms? 

Here's the crash course: EMRs are like your grandma's recipe book, specific to one clinic. EHRs, on the other hand, are the entire family cookbook, shared among all your doctors. PHRs? That's you jotting down your health notes on stickies.

EMRs and EHRs keep docs in the loop, but cost a pretty penny and can be a pain to learn. 

PHRs put the patient in the driver’s seat, but rates “that don’t impress me much” with the pros.   

Feeling some nascent understanding, mingling with confusion? Our in-depth comparison article unties acronymic differences with surgical precision.

Embracing “4D Chess” marketing ideas (via EngageBay)

Got a biz, need some marketing spice? 

First, grasp that, yes, digital marketing is king, but traditional methods still pack a punch. 

Think creative content, social media promotions, and guerrilla marketing—remember when IHOP became IHOB? Yeah, that kind of crazy. 

Don't forget experiential marketing for deep customer connections and influencer partnerships to extend your reach. 

As for the future? AI will (probably) rule, TikTok's getting bigger, social commerce is skyrocketing, and user-generated content is gold. 

Trust me, you don’t want to be left sniffing last year’s marketing fumes. A lot more ideas here.

Galactic Gourmet

CRM blips from around the web

Boston Pads releases new Agent CRM. The real estate agent CRM features rental CMA, quick listing lookup, and QR codes for clients, which gives quick access to an agent’s listings, as well as putting them on the client roster.

Kustomer gets a new Chief Customer Officer. The appointment of Lauren Gold to that position follows the customer service CRM’s recent AI improvements, such as a newly improved Kustomer IQ (Customer Assist) and the launch of KIQ Agent Assist.

Astronomical Assets

Significant Stock Moves from Last Week

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