There’s a technology revolution happening right now, and if you’re currently on the sidelines, you need to get in the game fast.
The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and virtual design technologies has given small businesses the ability to create sales, marketing, and design assets that once required a whole team of experts. It’s increasingly probable that your competitors have already started incorporating AI tools into their operations. To maintain your competitive edge, it’s important that you also become familiar with these tools as they continue to become more prevalent and widely used among businesses in your industry.
While ChatGPT has quickly become the most widely recognized, there are countless AI tools that provide an array of benefits across the entire spectrum of the sales and design process. Best of all, as great as these tools are, AI is still in its infancy — the quality and variety of what’s possible is improving almost daily. Here is a small taste of how AI can help improve your business starting right now.
- Write a Marketing Plan: With the power of AI, you can tap into valuable insights relating to customer behavior, preferences, and demographics. AI tools can analyze this data to help you create a marketing plan that hits the bullseye. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of consumer segments, identify the best marketing channels, craft personalized messaging, and even automate tasks like ad placement and content creation. This not only saves you time and resources, but also ensures your marketing efforts resonate with your target audience.
- Create an Email Campaign: Let AI take your email campaigns to the next level by personalizing content, subject lines, and send times based on recipient preferences and behaviors. AI-powered tools analyze customer interactions and engagement, allowing you to deliver targeted and relevant emails that grab attention. Plus, you can automate tasks like segmenting your email lists, running A/B tests, and tracking performance, giving your campaigns a boost in effectiveness.
- Improve the Quality of Your Team’s Salesmanship: AI can provide sales training and coaching to your team, helping them enhance their skills and sales techniques. AI-powered virtual assistants can simulate customer interactions, analyze sales conversations, and provide real-time feedback, enabling your employees to refine their approach, overcome objections, and close deals more effectively.
- Create More Impressive Proposals: Wow your clients with visually stunning and personalized proposals, made easier with AI. By leveraging AI tools, you can automate the process of assembling proposal templates, adding relevant content, and tailoring proposals to suit individual client preferences. This not only saves you time, but also ensures your proposals are polished, consistent, and tailored to meet your clients’ specific needs.
To fully leverage AI, it’s important to use it for the right job. The current crop of AI tools has enormous potential to improve your sales and marketing efforts, plus a broad array of other capabilities. Tools like Copy.ai, Writesonic, and Jasper are built specifically for marketing, with built-in wizards to help you improve your SEO keywords and content, social media, and email marketing, among other tasks.
Visualization tools are another powerful emerging trend, with interactive 3D models, immersive 360-degree environments, and AR technology taking the forefront. These tools can help bring presentations, demonstrations, and needs discovery meetings to life, allowing customers to visualize products or systems in an ultra-realistic residential or commercial virtual environment. Imagine bringing the smart home showroom to your customers on your laptop or tablet, enabling the client to simulate automation capabilities like lighting, motorized shades, security, and more. These tools greatly enhance the customer journey and help enlighten and educate your clients about the possibilities your solutions provide. These visualization tools also quickly and dramatically differentiate you from your competitors, leaving a lasting impression with the customer.
Don’t let your competitors get ahead of you. Start experimenting with AI and 3D visualization tools to improve your marketing and sales game. With the tools available today to optimize and consistently produce copy and create compelling visuals that engage and convert your sales prospects, you have no excuses. Either evolve or get left behind — the choice is yours.
Dave Chace is president of Cogent360, a CI-focused design firm specializing in interactive media, based outside Philadelphia, PA. Chace founded the company in 2007 after many years as a training director and classroom instructor for a nationwide AV and custom integration specialty retailer, with a goal of revolutionizing how organizations educate their sales channels and consumers. Cogent360 is on the leading edge of immersive media and breaking new ground in the realm of virtual technologies and advanced instructional design. They work with many of the most prestigious companies in the industry, including Lutron, Harman, URC, LG, and many others.
