Welcome to the world of tomorrow – today! While we at KLA Group are accustomed to working with the fast-paced world of technology with clients like IT Solution Providers and IT Managed Service Providers, whose businesses are constantly changing, suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the rapid change. AI has taken center stage, pushing boundaries, and changing the marketing and sales game entirely. It’s jump on or jump out. Jump out? Not us. We’re embracing it to take our clients to another level.
Am I moving too fast? Sorry, it’s the pace we’ve been running at since ChatGPT was introduced and news sources picked it up with a frenzy.
Generative AI tools are making waves in businesses. The impact? Huge. The potential? Limitless. All the ways you can use it in your business? Expansive.
At KLA Group, we’re right in the heart of this revolution using AI for marketing and sales. AI makes marketing and sales incredibly exciting right now. We’re honing our own AI skills and tools. Our goal? To spark a surge of innovation for our clients.
We’re not just using AI in marketing and sales – we’re embracing it, understanding it, and using it to craft truly tailored strategies, tools, and content for our clients. AI is a big piece of the future of marketing and sales.
So, fasten your seatbelts, and let’s delve into how we plan to leverage AI in our marketing and sales work for our clients.
How KLA Group Uses AI
1. Your KLA team will use AI to research faster – but we don’t use AI alone as a fact finder.
AI is our research buddy. Unlike Google, you can give AI general, descriptive statements, and it will return answers. Now, they may not be the answers you want, or exactly right, but you can hone it from there.
We use AI as one of our research tools, not the only tool. Combined with our subject matter expertise, we know what information we’re looking for and how to use it for our clients. Sometimes the answers generated allow us to think even further outside the box than we always do – and that’s pretty far.
However, AI isn’t our only fact finder. One-on-one interviews, subject matter experts, and other research sources are still important elements. Our own knowledge of our clients, as well as our marketing and sales expertise, are also critical factors. AI supplements human knowledge, but it doesn’t replace it.
At KLA, we use our knowledge and expertise to conduct the right research, then analyze and assess what we’ve uncovered to make critical decisions on what to use – and what to eliminate.
Sales Research
Take an AI-for-sales example. We ask AI to generate a job description for an outside salesperson who has hunter sales skills but will also have some marketing responsibilities. AI responds with a list of responsibilities. That’s a good start. But it’s not enough. We evaluate the responsibilities and experience that best fit your sales situation and add other duties we know are important to your business. Now you have an outside salesperson job description that fits your unique needs, and we build on it in your sales hiring coaching.
Marketing Research
Picture this. You want to tap into a new market, but you don’t know a lot about it. As we develop your marketing plan, before we define the digital marketing strategy, we use AI. It’s an information reservoir about your new market. AI serves as one piece of the puzzle, supplementing our human expertise and insights. With it, we can help you enter this new market confidently, knowing you’re armed with all the information you need.
2. Your KLA team will use AI for topic ideation – but we don’t use AI alone to create content.
Part of your marketing plan is your content strategy. This involves keyword research for SEO and target market knowledge to focus on the right decision makers and their hot-button problems. Your content strategy defines what content we’re developing to help you be seen, heard, and remembered. You want to be visible. You want that visibility to convert into recognition when prospects in your target market need the services you offer.
AI for Marketing Topic Ideas
We use AI to generate lists of ideas for topics to include in your content strategy. As part of your marketing plan, we identify a list of the top trigger events your target market is grappling with. You’re able to describe them in a few different ways, but not enough to write about each problem in 5 different articles, a video script, and a high-value offer asset for your website.
If we press, it creates pressure for you. And frustration.
Instead of pushing you, we use AI to generate a topic list. Then we refine and expand those AI-generated lists based on our knowledge of your business. You review and approve.
AI for Sales Topic Ideas
If we’re training your sales team how to cold call, we brainstorm topics with them for their calls, LinkedIn messages, and emails. If we’re conducting consultative selling training, we’re teaching them how to identify the consultative selling questions to ask to get the information they need to make recommendations clients will listen to.
Salespeople don’t have time for content development. They struggle with how to write messages that will grab attention and get replies. They grapple with shifting from comfortable requirements, gathering questioning, to business-centric consultative discussions.
When we provide your sales team topics and content for their prospecting, sales meetings, presentations, and closing, they aren’t just grateful. They’re more confident and productive.
AI Is Our Marketing and Sales Ideation Sandbox
Your business is constantly changing. Your prospects are experiencing a similar rate of change. Capturing and retaining your market’s attention requires a constant stream of fresh ideas in both marketing and sales.
AI becomes our sandbox for creativity and innovation. It lets us toy with unconventional concepts and blend them into something truly unique and compelling.
Whether it’s developing your marketing content strategy or identifying topics for sales prospecting campaigns, topic ideation is a constant need. Our creativity brings a steady stream of ideas for you.
3. Your KLA team will use AI to create content outlines – but not write complete blogs, collateral, tools, or assets.
You’ve probably already read some of those AI blogs and wondered, Who the heck wrote that? It sounds formulaic or repetitive. Perhaps you didn’t recognize it as AI-generated. Perhaps you did. That’s not the message you want to use to be seen, heard, and remembered by your target market.
With practice, you can improve AI-generated blogs, but it’s the subject matter expertise and marketing and sales knowledge that make them interesting and informative.
Where AI assists us is by speedily creating content outlines. Starting with a topic and a key message, then brainstorming an outline can take time. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a blog or book chapter and rewritten the full piece because I didn’t have my outline nailed down.
Yes, we all learned the value of outlining in high school, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
AI gets the outline started. From there, we throw parts out. We build on it. Throw some more out. Add some we see are missing. It’s an iterative process. Ultimately, we finish with an outline that’s exciting and on point with the message we’re trying to convey for your target audience. It’s why we’re known for the quality of our content development. AI assists, but it doesn’t do the writing.
What I wouldn’t have given to have had an AI generator to help me outline chapters when I was writing The Sales Magnet book. I would have spent far fewer Saturdays at the library writing!
4. You will use AI for content drafts – and we will humanize and perfect it.
Our clients are forward-thinking entrepreneurs and business owners. They are trend setters. Many eagerly embrace new ideas, and that includes AI.
We ran a Coffee with Kendra webinar on What is ChatGTP? and 12 ways to use AI effectively in your business. Over 300 people showed up. It’s a hot topic. We knew it because our clients have been playing with ChatGPT to see what it does and how they can use it in what we’re doing together.
Our clients get inspired and want to seize their ideas. They turn to AI to help them quickly encapsulate what they’re thinking. AI creates initial drafts for them. Being busy business owners, marketers and salespeople, they don’t spend too much time on it. That’s not their primary job. They capture their ideas and entrust them to us.
Humanize AI Content for Your Brand
We remove the robotic AI-speak. We weave your unique voice into the content, ensuring it’s unmistakably you. The content fits your target market and audience. We use your stories and examples, solutions, differentiation, and specific language.
We retain the AI-generated elements you liked, so nothing of value is lost. Above all, we make sure the content aligns seamlessly with your hard-earned brand identity.
Humanize AI Content for Google and SEO
Humanization is critical, not just for voice and brand, but also for SEO. Google has clearly stated that using automation for the purpose of manipulating search rankings is a violation of its spam policies. Google wants to see content that is valuable and relevant. Content that demonstrates expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
That’s our focus for all marketing and sales content we develop for clients. When our clients use AI to generate content and pass it to us to perfect, we’re humanizing it for their brand and to highlight their expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Crafting content of this caliber takes time and expertise. Our clients value that we’ll take their great ideas and turn them into something that represents exactly what they want to convey – whether in marketing content or sales messaging.
5. Your KLA team will use AI for elements surrounding content.
Once content is written, AI is an excellent tool to create the elements around it. For marketing, we use AI to create meta descriptions, image descriptions, and content summaries. Short bits of content based on something we’ve already written, that has just the right voice and message.
AI for Marketing and Sales Emails
We use AI for email subject line ideas to go with the email we’ve carefully crafted for your email marketing or sales prospecting campaign. Sometimes the subject lines are spot on. Other times the AI-generated content is the spark for what the subject line should say.
In sales, the close of an email is the last opportunity to get a reply from a prospect. It’s the closing immediately before the signature. We want something engaging and fun, but it’s not popping to mind. AI may have one we like. (Often they are too long, but AI provides a running start for sales.)
We always review what AI has generated to put the finishing touches on the content, so it’s polished just the way we know you like it.
6. Your KLA team will use AI to brainstorm – but not as the sole source.
I’ve already shared that we use AI for topic ideation. That’s for tactical marketing and sales. When we get into strategic marketing and sales planning, we’re thinking about your revenue generation system. All the aspects of what needs to be part of your marketing and sales.
You might want to enter a new geography, launch a new product, close a location, become the local authority on a topic. Your marketing and sales strategy are your avenue to succeed in any of these, and you turn to us to help.
We are experts in sales and marketing. As experts, when we’re doing strategic planning as part of your revenue-generation system, we’re using every resource available to us. That includes generative AI for marketing and sales. We ask it off-the-wall questions about concepts we’re pondering for you and see what it returns. Then we follow the path to the next place our mind goes to see what new thing it returns.
It’s through our marketing and sales expertise, combined with how we learn about your business as if it is our own, that we know what to ask.
AI Is a Brainstorming Tool That Needs Guidance
AI is a tool. But it can’t think if you can’t tell it what to think about. That’s what we do. We tell it how to think. Then we apply the answers to your business.
Why KLA When There Are AI and ChatGPT?
While tools like ChatGPT can bring impressive AI prowess to the table, nothing quite matches the value of human expertise and insight when it comes to understanding your business and target market.
At KLA Group, we’re not just AI users, we’re seasoned professionals in marketing, digital marketing, content, and sales strategy. We apply our in-depth understanding of your unique needs, tailoring our approach to your business model and market dynamics. This level of customization and strategic direction is something that AI, as advanced as it is, cannot fully replicate. Nor do you have the time to attempt to replicate through AI.
Isn’t It a Marketer’s Job To Use AI?
You may be thinking that this is precisely why you hired a marketing coordinator or marketing manager, and AI will help them do everything they need to – faster.
Remember the above example about using AI to determine the responsibilities of a salesperson in an outside sales role? Do that activity for your marketing role. Or simply review their job description that you wrote before you hired them. It probably includes marketing planning, social media, events, campaigns, blogs, websites, videos, case studies, sales meetings, sales presentations, and more.
When you consider all the responsibilities of a marketer, it will come down to 2 things: Do they have the capability, and do they have the time?
Often one of those is lacking. There are so many things you want your marketer to do, there isn’t time to do all the marketing and sales activities they need to do. They need support.
Can your marketer use AI to do their job?
Yes. They can. If they have the capability.
Should your marketer use AI to do all the activities it can help with in their job?
No. They probably don’t have the time. Something will drop. That something could be critical to your business.
Why KLA if You Have AI for Marketing and Sales?
Our expertise extends beyond using AI as a tool. We interpret, analyze, and assess the information it provides, turning it into actionable marketing and sales strategies, tools, and content for your business. Using AI in conjunction with our seasoned insight, we ensure your marketing and sales strategies align with your brand vision and business goals.
Our ability to create meaningful relationships and connect with your target audience on a deeper level sets us apart. So while AI and ChatGPT can be a great assistant, KLA Group serves as your dedicated, expert marketing and sales team, propelling your business towards success.
Don’t just rely on AI. Boost your marketing and sales with the human expertise that understands your business beyond what any machine can. Contact us and let’s leverage AI together to build your business.