How to Personalize Customer Interactions with AI

AI is so freaking cool y'all! We're 9 days into 2024 and my newly built AI-automations have already both saved me a ton of time and improved my client onboarding experience. Here’s a peek into how I've used AI to improve my most popular AI marketing team training package in 2024, for both me and my clients: ⬅️In 2023, these trainings began with a one-hour call with my client to identify the most helpful AI use cases for their team, followed by 30-45 minutes of planning and email drafting on my end. Although effective, this process was time-consuming. While I loved the conversations, figuring out the necessary assets I needed for personalizing each team's training was my least favorite part of my work. ➡️This year, I've leveraged AI to transform my approach so I can focus on what matters most: delivering an impactful AI skills training for my clients' teams! Here's how I've used AI automation to enhance the experience for EVERYBODY: 1️⃣ First I analyzed all of my 2023 trainings and feedback to create a brand new 'AI use case menu' of 29 popular and highly impactful options. Now, my busy marketing leader clients select their use case preferences through a streamlined onboarding form, that also gathers the other information I'll need to personalize their training. This eliminates the need for a logistics meetings and is quick for clients to complete, saving us both time. 2️⃣ The onboarding form links to Zapier, triggering a cascade of automated actions when it's submitted. The responses go to the OpenAI API, where GPT-4 meticulously matches them to the necessary items for personalizing a perfect training for my client. Once completed, Zapier emails me the exact details I need for each client's personalized training. I then perform a crucial human-in-the-loop review before sending the personalization needs list to my client. ⏱️ Time Saved, Value Added: This isn't just about cutting down my workload. It's a dual victory. My clients now breeze through onboarding, investing mere minutes where they once needed an hour. Meanwhile, I have taken 1.5 hrs of my own work down to only 5 minutes. 🌊The ripple effect? My clients now enjoy a richer, more focused engagement. The time previously reserved for preliminary discussions is now rechanneled into a valuable 30-minute post-training debrief session, offering marketing leaders space to ask any questions they may have around supporting their teams' AI adoption. 🧠Implementing this system wasn't instantaneous. It took several hours of work gathering and creating the data necessary, considering the automation steps, creating and testing detailed prompts for GPT-4, ensuring consistent, accurate outputs, and guaranteeing a positive client experience. But now, having seen it in real-world action, I am immensely grateful for the time and energy invested in building this system (which is just one of many I've developed to streamline my efficiency in 2024)!

I was wrong. AI is not going to "kill the SDR" anytime soon. In fact, here’s two specific use cases where AI actually makes the SDR 10x MORE valuable: 1. DATA HYGIENE Some reports say SDRs spend as much as 40% of their time updating bad data and contact information from the CRM. AI coupled with web-scraping tools can integrate databases and information sources to create a MUCH MORE accurate view of an individual and help ensure that SDRs are connecting directly to relevant contacts a higher % of time. Revenue leaders like Kyle Norton at Owner.com are adamant they want SDRs with as high a connect rate as possible and Owner is executing on that premise in an industry (restaurants) that has historically low connect rates.  And yet, the unit economics powering the Owner(.)com machine are powerful and even with an SMB sale, the business can have SDRs supporting AEs. 2. TRUE PERSONALIZATION AT SCALE Over the past 10 years, we’ve been sold the idea of “personalization at scale” from the revenue orchestration and sales engagement companies.  But we knew it wasn’t really possible.  Sending the same email to 10,000 people using a mail merge to add their name is NOT personalization at scale. It’s just spam. But today, using AI tools like Copy.ai, you can create truly personalized messages, leveraging your contact’s entire online presence to write compelling messages that go deeper than where your prospect went to college or what their favorite hobby is. In this world, SDRs are still needed to oversee and orchestrate the campaigns and, of course, to have useful and meaningful conversations with a prospect who engages.  TAKEAWAY: Contrary to what I've said the last few years, the SDR is still here and the role is still valuable.  AI doesn’t REPLACE SDRS. It make the best SDRs MORE PRODUCTIVE.  

I’m so proud of these 24 ways we’ve built AI into Sendspark this year👇 . . . Just kidding, but a lot of CEOs wouldn’t be. Multiple friends have shared with me that they are getting pressured by their boards to add a new feature every 2 weeks. IMO, that actually hurts the product. The new features use “AI” just to check a box, and don’t actually solve problems for their users. Sometimes, they make things worse by taking up space and making the product more complex. That’s not to say that AI isn’t awesome, or that you shouldn’t add it into your product. This is just how you should think about it: Look at problems you have acquiring, activating, and retaining customers. Where do people get stuck? Why are they getting stuck? What would help them move further & faster through your funnel? Think about what you would do if ANYTHING was possible And then see if you can implement any of these solutions using AI in a way that might not have been possible a year ago. This way, you can please your board, and actually improve your product experience. Some ways we’ve done this: - we saw customers were uncomfortable with how they looked on camera, so we added AI filters to touch up your appearance - we saw some customers didn’t know what they should say in their first few videos, so we added an AI video script writer to spark some ideas - we saw customers were frustrated by how long it was taking them to record personalized videos, so we built in an AI intro feature to let users take one video and automatically add “Hi first name” to the beginning of it for mass outreach. We’ve also added a ton of new features that help people personalize videos at scale that are not AI, because our goal isn’t to make a “great AI video platform,” it’s to make a “great video selling platform.” And if that means AI, awesome, we'll do it! But our customers' success will always be our true north star ✨