AI in Marketing and Sales—Uses, Benefits, and Implementation Tips

Despite being around for only a few years, commercial AI tools have seen outstanding adoption across industries. According to a Salesforce survey, 86% of IT professionals believe AI will play a significant role in their organizations down the line.

Among its many use cases, AI solutions are especially useful for marketing and sales. If implemented correctly, they can trim the fat from your sales cycle and ensure faster, more abundant conversions. 

Need proof? Look no further than us—leveraging AI halved the number of our outbound emails while doubling our positive responses.

In this guide, we’ll share our secrets to getting the most out of AI in marketing and sales. You’ll learn how this tech can be used, why you should implement it, and what challenges to expect. We’ll then show you how to overcome any obstacles and implement AI effectively. 🚀

What Is AI for Marketing and Sales?

AI for marketing and sales is a subset of AI tools designed to automate various processes throughout the sales cycle. Such tools leverage advanced technologies like machine learning and natural language processing to free up more time for high-value work.

A particularly common type of AI used for sales and marketing is generative AI. You’ve likely already seen tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT that can create human-like text, which can drastically cut the time you’d otherwise spend on creating marketing and sales materials. ⏰

Generative AI is only the tip of the iceberg. Forward-thinking businesses are leveraging an ever-growing array of AI tools to improve their outreach, get comprehensive campaign analytics, and build more meaningful relationships with clients.

What Are the Main Use Cases of AI for Marketing and Sales?

The most common ways marketing and sales pros are using AI solutions include the following:

1. Lead generation and scoring
2. Data enrichment and cleanup
3. Market research
4. Data analysis and visualization
5. Content creation and personalization
6. Workflow automation

Below we’ll discuss these use cases in more detail to show you precisely how AI streamlines different marketing and sales tasks.

Lead Generation and Scoring

The traditional approach to prospecting and lead generation relies a lot on manual work. It’s a drain on resources—your business might waste countless man-hours hunting down prospects by scouring company websites, LinkedIn, and other sources.

AI tools are revolutionizing lead generation to help your marketing and sales teams avoid such tedious work. These tools can help with many lead generation tasks, such as:

By choosing the right AI solution, you can find and qualify leads more effortlessly, which lets you focus on targeting them with the right messaging.

Data Enrichment and Cleanup

Successful outbound campaigns are all about how well you know your prospect. Sending out generic emails is a waste of time and resources because you most likely won’t get the response you want (or any response at all).

With the right AI tool, you can effortlessly scour numerous websites for the data you need to engage a prospect in a meaningful way. All you need is a solid prompt or other input, and your AI platform can take care of the heavy lifting. 🦾

Besides the basic information you can get with a typical web scraper, you can uncover valuable data such as:

• Buyer intent signals
• Likes and preferences derived from social posts
• Company funding information
• Current tech stack

The extent to which you can automate the data enrichment process largely depends on your chosen platform. Ideally, you’ll opt for an option that doesn’t only return a bunch of scattered data but can also organize it without much effort on your part.

A comprehensive AI solution can perform various data cleanup tasks, such as:

• Deduplication
• Validation
• Normalization

By choosing such a tool, you can get a ready-to-use dataset in no time.

Market Research

Whether you want to monitor competitors, explore new product development opportunities, or stay on top of market news and trends, AI can be an excellent companion. It offers prompt-based search and provides all the information you need in one place so that you don’t need to sift through tons of web pages. 🔎

AI tools can also summarize your research to deliver a high-level overview of the key data without unnecessary information that might waste your time. You can pick up a whitepaper from the web and tell your tool to extract the key points so that you only get actionable information.

A particularly useful type of research an AI tool can simplify is social listening. Prompt a tool to find recent mentions of your brand online, and you can see precisely what others are saying about it. This way, you can stay on top of your reputation and overall customer sentiment. 

Data Analysis and Visualization

AI can analyze extensive amounts of data to turn raw figures and stats into useful insights. This is particularly beneficial when you’re analyzing prospect data like intent signals, which an AI tool can use to show you which stage of the buyer’s journey your prospects are currently in. You can leverage these insights in many ways, such as:

• Outlining your sales funnel
• Targeting prospects at each stage with the corresponding initiatives
• Getting quick wins by prioritizing highly qualified prospects

A capable AI platform can also visualize your data to give you a digestible dashboard instead of overwhelming text. As a result, it supports streamlined sales reporting and effortless ongoing monitoring. 📈

Content Creation and Personalization

Few sales initiatives are as effective as a solid email outreach campaign. Unfortunately, many marketing and sales teams don’t reap its many benefits due to a lack of proper email personalization.

AI data enrichment lets you overcome this to an extent by giving you abundant data points—but you still need to leverage them through your emails. 📧

That’s where generative AI can help. It can whip up an email draft in minutes, helping you scale your outreach process. Better yet, a capable solution can pull relevant information directly from your database to create hyper-personalized emails in seconds.

Of course, you can use AI to create other types of content, such as:

• Website copy
• Blog posts
• Social media content

While the content might still require some human oversight to ensure accuracy, it can be created much more quickly and efficiently.

Workflow Automation

Administrative work can eat away at your team’s productivity and prevent you from creating an efficient sales process. Without automation, your team might have to complete many tasks manually, such as:

• Data transfers between platforms
• Status changes and sales updates
• Everyday data entry (prospect data, sales meeting notes, etc.)

While these tasks might seem minor, there are enough of them to significantly impact your overall efficiency. Luckily, you can hand off such tasks to AI so that your team can focus on more value-packed activities. 🌟

💡 Bonus read: Want to learn more about the specific tasks AI can take over? Read out guides on using AI for sales enablement, guided selling, and sales training.

Many AI platforms come with templates and pre-built workflows that go beyond basic if-this-then-that automation. With time, your platform can recognize workflow patterns and improve your process continuously.

Benefits of AI-Assisted Sales and Marketing

Besides the obvious improvements in efficiency, AI can bring various benefits to your sales cycle, most notably:

• 💸 Cost-effectiveness and ROI increase—AI lets you maximize the amount of work each SDR can do without putting excessive pressure on them. As a result, you can save considerable resources and boost your ROI
• ⏫ Scalability—Due to the significant resource savings, you can scale your sales process without hefty investments. AI can also remove various bottlenecks and productivity issues, ensuring your process remains efficient
• ⚔️ Competitive edge—As with any technology, being an early adopter means you can get ahead of the competition. AI is still relatively new, so there’s still time to enjoy such an advantage
• 👱 Personalized experiences—Thanks to AI data enrichment, you can build stronger relationships with prospects and customers at any stage of the buyer’s journey. Not only can you close deals more effectively, but you can manage current customers with in-depth insights to ensure they stick around

Key Challenges of AI Sales and Marketing

While adopting a sales and marketing AI solution, you might run into a few challenges because AI is still far from perfect. The most notable issues you should keep in mind include:

If these issues are making you think twice about leveraging AI, don’t worry—there’s an easy way to overcome them.

How To Adopt AI Successfully 

To explore the potential of AI tools with little to no disadvantages, you should take these steps:

1. Assess your needs
2. Explore different solutions
3. Train your team

Assess Your Needs

Before choosing an AI solution, you’ll need to consider a few internal factors, most notably:

• Specific marketing and sales processes you wish to automate
• Amount and type of data you want to collect
• Your team size and budget

By taking these factors into consideration, you can avoid the mistake of investing in a solution that doesn’t fit your workflow. 

If you plan on using AI for data enrichment, you should also consider the nuances like specific data points you wish to collect and your preferred source. For example, some platforms are tailored to finding contact information from websites, while others are oriented toward LinkedIn prospecting.

To find the best option, outline your sales and marketing workflow, and find the main source of inefficiency. This way, you can choose the most impactful platform that will uplevel your sales cycle. ♻️

Explore Different Solutions

Before committing to an AI platform, shop around to see what’s out there. Besides filtering your options based on basic factors like pricing and features, pay attention to the following criteria:

• Contract terms—Prioritize flexible platforms over those that require annual commitments to avoid vendor lock-in
• Integrations—Opt for a solution that seamlessly integrates with your current tech stack to ensure a cohesive workflow
• Learning curve—Overly complicated AI platforms can do more harm than good to your efficiency, so choose simple and effective solutions
• Non-AI features—Not every aspect of your marketing and sales workflow can be automated, so make sure your chosen platform can still streamline such tasks

Train Your Team

AI is meant to empower your SDRs, not replace them. Your team members should still have the final say because AI can’t be held accountable the same way a human can, so make sure your team receives proper training. 

Your training should cover all the key aspects of AI use, such as:

• Data literacy
• Technical workflows
• Responsible AI use
• Troubleshooting

With the right platform, training shouldn’t be extensive, which brings us back to the importance of finding a simple yet powerful tool. If you need a solution that’s ready to use out of the box and can help each SDR hit their targets more effortlessly, Clay can be an excellent option. 📌

Clay—An AI-Supported Marketing and Sales Powerhouse

Clay is an all-in-one data enrichment and sales automation platform that leverages AI to streamline lead generation, optimize outreach, and automate workflows. 

The first and most notable of Clay’s AI-powered solutions is Claygent—a robust AI researcher and assistant powered by ChatGPT that performs numerous tasks, such as:

• Finding and enriching leads with numerous data points
• Summarizing news, prospect profiles, and company data
• Intelligently changing your outreach messaging based on data like a company’s mission statement and recent social media posts
• Automating outreach campaigns based on pre-set sales triggers

Everything in Claygent happens based on simple prompts and minimal input so that you can automate your workflow without hassle. 💨

When it’s time to execute your outreach campaign, Clay has you covered with its AI Email Builder. It automatically pulls your collected prospect information to write highly personalized emails at scale. 💌

To further simplify the process, Clay offers various templates that allow you to:

• Write personalized emails based on website data
• Mention a product update in an email
• Find SMB contact info and write a compliment

This is only the tip of the iceberg regarding AI Email Builder’s capabilities. It can create match-ready emails in no time, helping you convert prospects faster.

Want to see how to write hundreds of cold emails in minutes, check out this video:

Clay + OpenAI—A Powerful Combo

Besides leveraging ChatGPT in Claygent, Clay further expands its AI capabilities through a robust OpenAI integration. It lets you tap into the power of ChatGPT to complete various tasks, some of which are shown in the following table:

Beyond AI—How Clay Enhances Marketing and Sales Workflows

While AI features are among Clay’s main differentiators from many other platforms, they’re only a small part of the platform’s entire offering. Some additional features that set Clay apart include:

• 50+ data providers—Whether you want to find someone’s email or phone number, career insights, or company data, Clay ensures maximum data availability. It integrates with over 50 data providers, allowing you to leverage their databases without having to create additional accounts 
• Waterfall enrichment—When you search for a data point, Clay scours its sources one by one until it finds the information. Everything happens on autopilot, so no effort is needed on your part 
• Chrome extension—If you want to pull prospect data as you visit a website, you can use Clay’s extension to do it in no more than a few clicks
• 200+ powerful integrations—Besides data providers, Clay integrates with email warmup platforms, CRM solutions, email verifiers, and plenty of other tools to help you create a streamlined workflow

Thanks to these robust capabilities, Clay automates virtually every aspect of your marketing and sales strategy—powerful AI is only the cherry on top. 🍒

Flexible, Competitive Pricing for Everyone’s Pocket

If you want a taste of Clay’s AI features and core capabilities, you can use the platform’s generous free plan. You’ll get access to some of the most useful features and integrations, and you can enjoy them without time limits.

As your marketing and sales processes scale, you can upgrade to one of the following paid plans:

Plenty of users believe Clay is well worth the investment—here’s what one of them had to say:

Ride the AI Wave With Clay

If you want to leverage some of the most capable AI sales and marketing features and evolve ahead of the curve, you can get started with Clay in three steps:

1. Visit the signup page
2. Enter your name, email address, and password
3. Explore Clay’s AI features

For more information about Clay’s features and product walkthroughs, visit Clay University. You can also join the Slack community to see how others are using the platform and sign up for the newsletter for valuable sales and marketing tips.

💡 Keep reading: Want to learn more about the value of AI in marketing and sales? Check out these guides:

• AI email finder
• AI in B2B sales
• ChatGPT for sales
• ChatGPT prompts for sales emails
• ChatGPT lead generation