Customer Data, AI, and Sustainable Growth.

In today’s ever-changing and highly competitive business landscape, customer engagement is more important than ever. Brands of all sizes must understand how to use customer data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to gain deeper insights into their customers’ needs, optimize customer engagement, and drive business growth. 

Your customer data is arguably the most valuable resource for any brand, yet so often it is neglected, and the value is lost. By leveraging your customer data and AI tools, marketing,  sales, and customer success teams can gain a deeper understanding of their customers, automate segmentation processes, improve sales conversions, and increase customer lifetime value by delivering a better customer experience.

This article will provide five ways that you can use your customer data and AI to drive business growth. We believe that in order for any organization to have sustainable growth they must tap into the insights that are held within their customer data. By using AI to enable these insights you can move faster and gain a competitive advantage.

Why Customer Data is Crucial for Business Growth

This may seem rather elementary, but the integrity of your customer data is crucial for business growth. By having a healthy customer database, marketers gain deeper insights into their customers’ behavior and preferences. Additionally, sales and customer success are able to build stronger relationships by understanding their needs better and create personalized customer experiences that increase customer loyalty.

This is all necessary for sustainable growth to occur and why organizations need to begin investing in the sustained integrity of their customer data.

Using AI to Analyze Customer Data

So much of the talk about AI in the B2B marketing, sales, and customer success space has been focused on generative AI (Bard, ChaptGPT, Writer, etc.). While using AI in this type of capacity may be useful, if it is the only way that AI is used, it is like buying a Ferrari and using it as a golf cart. 

AI can go far beyond automating routine tasks and developing content. The ability of AI to derive insights from your customer data in a matter of hours (for what used to take weeks and months) speeds up the ability of brands to accelerate their go-to-market. These virtually real-time insights enable organizations to:

• Build and implement intelligent segmentation models  
• Create hyper-personalized campaigns 
• Identify customers that are more likely to buy 
• Provide real-time measurement for continual analytics and optimization

Going Beyond Intent

It is not new news that leading organizations use predictive analytics in their marketing and sales approach as a means to collect intent data.  This is used particularly in account-based marketing (ABM) approaches.  However, many of these analytics solutions only look at the digital actions that are taken by an individual within a target account. This information can be helpful and indeed show intent, but it does not provide all of the context to ensure you are enabling meaningful engagement. 

In B2B circles, I have often heard all of the talk about B2C companies and the insights they have on their customers. B2B organizations can also have the same by applying AI tools and insights. While you surely want to capture intent, understanding the customers or buyers personality, and what preferences they have. Are they an early adopter or laggard or are they more of an innovator? It is these insights that will provide a window into the way to engage across digital channels and human interaction and allow you to personalize accordingly.

The Benefit of Customer Lifetime Value

So much of B2B marketing and sales is focused on customer acquisition. Of course, every brand needs to acquire customers, but that is only a small part of the revenue equation. B2B organizations should focus more of their efforts and investment on maximizing customer lifetime value, meaning understanding how to retain and expand those customer relationships. 

This idea brings us back to using your customer data and AI solutions to creat meaningful engagement across all stages of the customer journey. By doing so, you have the ability to segment according to needs and preferences. Having this granular insight better enables marketing, sales, and customer success to tailor their outreach and engagement. 

AI can identify customer behavior trends that will indicate the likelihood of another purchase (expansion) or the potential to lose that customer due to dissatisfaction. 

By having a defined data governance process and the right application of AI tools, you can build the right foundation for sustainable business growth. If you would like to see where your organization is on its growth journey, take a look at our Growth Maturity Index™ to see where you are doing well and what other areas may need improving.