AI in RevOps
It’s been reported by HubSpot that 74% of marketers are now using AI. Mostly in the content creation space, but there are various ways that AI has made an impact on RevOps and the Marketing Operations industry. Most companies now have some sort of AI feature to better improve their service.
But how can we as RevOps professionals better utilize AI in our day to day?
Start simple.
A common problem most professionals have is dirty data. Something simple you can do with AI is by asking it to help you identify list criteria to capture junk and dummy data. For example, it can identify contains logic that will capture button smashed values from form fills that you won’t want to keep in your database or will at least want to segment.
Another simple option is using AI to assist in your google sheet or excel data analysis by helping with complex formulas. Here are a few examples:
- QUERY: Run SQL-like queries for advanced filtering.
- REGEXEXTRACT / REGEXMATCH: Analyze and extract text patterns.
- VLOOKUP / XLOOKUP: Find data across tables.
Of course since so many tools have unique and specific AI features you can also dig into their capabilities and start testing them out. Here is a list of common tools in the industry that you might have and may want to check out.
- HubSpot recently released their AI suite of tools called Breeze. Some of its features include: content creation, social media insights, sales prospecting, data enrichment, and predictive sales forecasts.
- Salesforce Einstein can write emails enriched with customer data, generate concise summaries of sales calls, and assist with automations.
- Salesloft/Drift uses AI to enhance the chat experience by enriching, identifying qualified leads, and speeding up the process of information with potential customers.
- ABM platforms use AI-driven account identification and predictive analytics to help their customers with pipeline creation.
Many of our tools use AI so if one of your tools wasn’t listed above review their site and see what other ways you can be using AI.
End of Year Audits
Many times the end of a business year introduces opportunities to evaluate what has been accomplished over the past year. Budgets are being reviewed and next year plans are being made. Whether this is the case for you it never is too late to evaluate your tech stack.
Why is it important to audit your tech stack?
- Identify underutilized tools that could allow for additional budget in other areas.
- Learn new features and capabilities of the current tech stack.
- Understand what tools are providing your team with the most help.
- Identify any tools that overlap in capabilities.
- See areas for training improvement.
Where should you start?
- Start by making a list of all the tools that your team uses. Make sure to include renewal dates, tool owner, team member usage, and a general description of benefits.
- Once you have completed that for you team move to neighboring departments to identify what they are using. This is helpful in identifying tools that have overlap.
- After you have all the tools listed, begin to put them in tiers of need, nice to have, and don’t renew. See below for a way to tier your tools.
- Of course throughout this process it is important to communicate with key stakeholders as certain tools may be a need for someone else when it isn’t for you. This can highlight an area for potential training.
- Once this is done you’ll have an inventory of all the technology used and their use cases. Review the items that have been marked, “Don’t Renew” and identify any nice to haves that can be moved to don’t renew. Now when those renewal dates come you can be prepared for closing that out or negotiate a decrease on your plan.
How to assign a tier to each tech stack tool?
Use the questions below to help determine the usefulness of the tool.
- What’s the purpose of the tool?
- What challenges do you have with the tool?
- What integrations does the tool have? Does the integration work well?
- What is the customer support like for the tool?
Optional:
Feedback is gold. Depending on the size of your team it may be a good idea to send out a tech stack survey to understand what tools your team likes, dislikes, and maybe even what they wish they had access to.
This can highlight team sentiment and what tools, if removed, would be a huge disruption to their work. It can also provide opportunities for team members to champion a tool and provide training to those team members that may not get as much use out of that tool.
How often should you run an audit?
An audit can be done quarterly or yearly. Use your contract lengths as a guide to identify the best cadence for running an audit.
