Generative AI in B2B Marketing

How AI in B2B Marketing Streamlines the Buyer Journey

Imagine how an enterprise buyer acts today and how cumbersome and time-consuming the journey can be.

First, the buying team engages in the research of potential solutions, going through industry reports and attending trade shows to identify potential products or services.

Then, this team goes into the funnel and gathers more specific information about the solution or product, going through a sea of brochures, white papers and case studies.

Then, there is the internal battle of aligning stakeholders, establishing specific needs and priorities and outlining the decision criteria. Depending on the nature of the item, an RFP is issued, responses are analyzed, a provider or set of providers is chosen and contracts are finally negotiated.

Condensed into a paragraph, that process — or a similar one — could take weeks or months in a traditional enterprise, primarily because most of the work involved was very hard to automate until the advent of AI.

Today, AI in B2B marketing simplifies and accelerates most of these processes. Perhaps it is not advanced enough to dictate outcomes, but it can streamline the data and present it to humans who will. Let's examine how.

Enhancing Real-Time Interactions With AI in B2B Marketing

Sellers will have to adapt quickly to this new reality. AI in B2B marketing will bring them multiple efficiencies and challenges.

AI bots can enhance real-time user interactions, from providing better support to personalizing outreach. AI is already supporting the automation of content generation to enable more personalized experiences for different buying groups. Multiple vendors are also using AI to create new segmentation, better lead scoring and forecast conversion probabilities more accurately. Some of them have already started to implement more sophisticated features, such as modeling better real-time pricing strategies for prospects depending on their stage in the customer journey.

But what’s a caveat for the buyer — AI bias — is going to change the game for the seller dramatically, as their audience and addressable market are not just about humans anymore. It’s also about bots. I recently wrote about how AI visibility optimization (AIVO) will become a cornerstone in sellers' marketing efforts because this will be one of the ways to influence bots.

The substantial shift in the buyer journey will favor those who move faster. Not long from now, a significant portion of B2B customers will be machines. Both buyers and providers will eventually leverage their digital doubles to conduct research and negotiations. The role of the rep will be profoundly transformed from a product evangelist to a trustworthy advisor. The human is still going to be relevant, but its reach will diminish.

The role that emotions play in the process is going to evolve as well. Marketing teams will have to start marketing to bots — bots that make decisions based on data, reputation and reviews. Your brand will have to earn bots' trust.

Marketing to bots will impact not only the way we present content but the content that we produce. Ecommerce and content platforms, whose primary focus today is humans, will have to evolve to better serve the bots that will be buying from them. All these changes are going to require a new mindset from organizations because this will not just affect their technology stacks. The organizations that thrive in this new reality will be those who transform beyond their technologies and who totally rethink their business strategies, processes and culture.