With a large focus on efficiency and profitability, nearly all companies face the constant challenge of delivering more with less. We have seen big names such as Amazon (27,000 layoffs in 2023), Alphabet (12,000 layoffs in 2023), Microsoft and Meta (both with over 10,000 layoffs in 2023) Cognizant (3,500 layoffs in 2023) laying off huge swaths of employees leaving the surviving team members left to continue delivering with fewer resources. Even as teams work with fewer people, tighter budgets, and less tooling, the need for greater productivity and creativity becomes increasingly crucial. In this current era of Go-To-Market, it is a top priority to address this need to enable these teams to do more with less. Luckily, advancements in AI are readily available to build workflows, that weren’t previously possible which can act as a force multiplier of teams and allow organizations to maximize productivity while reducing costs, and optimizing resources.
Data visualization by Miranda Halpern, created with Flourish
The first hurdle many teams are facing is a reduction in workforce size, leading to the often overused ask for them to ‘do more with less’. AI has emerged as a compelling solution to not just take on those manual or repetitive tasks, but to leverage insights and data and help teams identify new opportunities, generate compelling content, and measure campaign impact on core KPIs. We have seen many examples already that illustrate how teams can leverage the assistance of AI to take on routine tasks such as data entry, lead scoring, customer segmentation, and email marketing and how those tasks could easily automated. Moving beyond the basics, generative AI can be leveraged by transforming and repurposing existing content, creating hyper-personalized campaigns, and iterating to increase conversion. This frees the team to spend their time and energy to focus on those more impactful, strategic, tasks such as relationship building with new or existing customers or creating differentiated product positioning. AI tools can also help maintain accuracy and consistency, removing the pain of divergent messaging and off-brand content that inevitably results from manual efforts.
It’s no surprise, that a constantly tightening budget is another reality many companies are forced to deal with. Budget cuts not only limit a company’s ability to expand its workforce and work with top-notch external agencies, but it also severely hampers the adoption of new technologies or investment in marketing campaigns. Luckily, there are many AI tools that are starting to replace the need for expensive agencies who have typically been relied upon for things (content creation, ad generation and execution, and SEO to name just a few). More importantly, if it is given the correct data, AI GTM products can often drive better results at lower costs. If your paid digital and content marketing budget is slashed severely, you want to ensure that those channels are able to convert significantly better make up for decreased spend if you want to keep your pipeline full.
While being forced to operate with fewer tools can seem like a limitation, it can also open An opportunity for greater resource optimization and less operational overhead. While the unbundling of software in general over the past decade has brought about many excellent solutions that may do one thing well, it, unfortunately, has forced teams to buy multiple tools to do their work, deal with multiple logins and permissions, and continually pass data back and forth across numerous tools (or worse yet, have disparate data that is housed in different locations). The new wave of solutions will be forced to serve multiple functions, and do so seamlessly. Teams are asking themselves if there is one tool that can replace multiple tools both now and down the road. From CRM capabilities and marketing automation to advanced analytics and customer engagement tools, a single platform such as Salesforce, Hubspot, or others can replace an array of standalone tools. This consolidation not only leads to cost savings but also simplifies workflows, while also lowering the learning curve, and ensures smoother and more accurate data collection. The good news is with all of the new AI tools newly available, it’s never been faster or easier to build robust software with limited resources!
While the demands of doing more with less may seem daunting, they also provide an opportunity to rethink and redesign workflows or even adopt new tools and processes. By enabling automation, facilitating data-driven decision-making, offering predictive capabilities, and personalizing customer engagement, AI products empower teams to work smarter, not harder, while also improving core business metrics.
