Applying AI to Marketing and Sales

Introduction

The last time marketing technology changed this quickly was when the spreadsheet shipped. Today, Applied AI is reshaping martech in every conceivable area, from awareness to conversion. 

At Grit Capital Partners, we’ve spent our careers driving go-to-market success, so we are thrilled to fuel this change. After decades as marketing practitioners, building businesses by finding and serving customers, we are thrilled to support martech companies revolutionizing what’s possible for businesses all over the world. 

What follows is our perspective on where the most compelling innovation is happening, where founders should tread carefully, and why this moment matters so much for the future of marketing and sales.

The Martech AI Revolution

Martech is software that helps marketing and sales professionals generate awareness, inspire consideration, and win customers in a crowded and competitive field. Compared to the media business, which sells attention, martech exists to sell products and services.  

Applied AI is revolutionizing the way that each of these three marketing stages are done. 

Awareness

Applied AI is re-inventing awareness-raising tasks for products and services by enhancing efficiency, personalization, and engagement across various marketing activities. Key ways AI is transforming these efforts include:

1. Hyper-Personalization

AI enables the creation of highly tailored marketing messages by analyzing vast amounts of customer data, such as preferences, behavior, and demographics. This ensures that content resonates deeply with individual consumers, increasing engagement and brand recall. Tools like Tofu, Dynamic Yield, and Evergage are examples of platforms that use AI to deliver real-time personalized experiences.

2. AI-Enhanced Content Creation

Generative AI tools like Jasper AI and Copy.ai automate the production of content, including blog posts, social media updates, and video scripts. AI driven image and video generation are being used in ads, social media posts, or product pages to capture attention and drive awareness. HubSpot reported a 94% higher conversion rate for AI-driven emails compared to traditional methods. These tools, properly used, reduce the time and cost associated with traditional content creation while maintaining brand voice and audience relevance. 

3. Social Media Management

AI-powered tools such as Hootsuite Insights and Sprout Social optimize social media strategies by automating tasks like post scheduling, monitoring brand mentions, and analyzing performance metrics. These tools help brands maintain a consistent online presence while identifying opportunities for improved engagement.

4. Automated A/B Testing

AI accelerates A/B testing by dynamically testing and optimizing website elements such as headlines, CTAs, button colors, and layouts in real time. This helps ensure that high-performing variations are implemented quickly to maximize conversions. For example, AI tools like Intelligems and Shoplift automate these tests to identify and apply the most effective strategies.

5. Programmatic Advertising

AI optimizes ad campaigns through real-time bidding, audience targeting, and creative adjustments. Platforms like Adext AI and Albert.ai dynamically adapt campaigns based on performance data to maximize ROI and engagement.

6. Brand Health Monitoring

AI tracks brand awareness metrics using machine learning algorithms that detect subtle patterns in consumer recognition across digital touchpoints. Predictive models forecast future awareness trends, enabling brands to refine their strategies effectively.

7. Modeling the Media Mix Faster

AI helps drive the speed and reaction of budgeting and spend across both traditional and digital media impression categories, engagement methodologies and outcomes.  Automating the areas between the connected determinism of digital marketing and sales channels, and the probabilistic modeling of traditional media channels and their in-person retailing counterparts. AI can do this in time for it to matter, with impact moving from the marketing plan to the P&L, ultimately to the earnings call. Incremental is a good example of this. 

Consideration

Where Awareness introduces the potential buyer to a solution, Consideration makes a product or service stand out amongst the various options. 

Applied AI is advancing the tasks of raising consideration for products or services by streamlining decision-making amongst a qualified group of products. Here are the key ways AI is transforming this stage of the customer journey:

1. Personalized Product Recommendations

So far only used by product or service marketplaces, product recommendations use AI algorithms to analyze user behavior, preferences, and purchase history to offer tailored product or service recommendations. For example, platforms like Amazon and Netflix use AI-driven recommendation engines to present personalized suggestions.

2. AI-Powered Product Comparisons

AI tools such as Ai4 Product Comparison and AWS Marketplace’s comparison feature simplify the evaluation process by generating detailed comparisons of products or services based on criteria like price, features, and customer reviews. These tools provide side-by-side analyses, helping customers make informed decisions quickly and effectively.

3. Sentiment Analysis for Customer Insights

AI-driven sentiment analysis processes customer feedback and reviews to identify key factors influencing purchase decisions. This allows businesses to refine their offerings and highlight features that matter most to potential buyers.

4. Generative AI for Tailored Content

Companies like Hightouch use generative AI to create customized marketing materials, such as emails, ads, or landing pages, that emphasize the unique benefits of a product or service. By addressing specific customer needs and pain points, these materials help prospects move closer to making a decision.

5. Real-Time Assistance with Chatbots

AI chatbots provide instant answers to customer queries, offering detailed information about products or services while addressing concerns in real time. This has been one of the most-deployed AI services across industries. 

Conversion

Whether it’s an ecommerce transaction, a no-touch software purchase or a seven figure, three-year contract, Conversion is all about closing. The ultimate point of the marketing funnel is getting a prospect to sign on the line that is dotted. 

Here are the key ways AI is transforming this stage of the customer journey:

1. Enhanced Lead Management

Knowing where and with whom to spend your time is a crucial skill for salespeople. AI powered products from companies like 6Sense analyzes vast datasets to prioritize high-quality leads, helping sales teams focus on prospects with the highest conversion potential.

2. Personalization at Scale

Falling out of touch with a prospect is a guaranteed way to lose a sale. Generative AI can craft personalized outreach emails and follow-ups based on customer data, company updates and recent news.

Companies like Augment.co take this to another level by re-imagining the buyer journey. From matching the best seller for the buyer’s needs to providing a collaborative space for interactions, there’s incredible opportunity for innovation here. 

3. Automation of Repetitive Tasks

Good salespeople are generally terrible at paperwork. AI can automate data entry, campaign management, scheduling follow-ups, and report generation, improving data quality and freeing sales reps to focus on closing. By automating repetitive tasks, sales professionals save around 2 hours and 15 minutes daily.

4. Sales Coaching and Prep

Generative AI tools support sales coaching by analyzing team performance, identifying improvement areas, and offering tailored recommendations for skill development. Companies like Bounti and Rox build sales support software that combines breaking news with lead lists to generate research and next-best-actions for enterprise sales reps. 

5. Cross-Selling, Upselling and Technical Sales Support

Recommendation systems powered by AI identify opportunities for cross-selling or upselling based on customer purchase history, increasing revenue potential. Sales support and sales engineering, often a bottleneck in the sales process, is being automated by companies like DocketAI.  

6. Conversion Rate Optimization

CRO uses advanced algorithms and machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data about how users interact with your website or campaign, including how long they spend on your site, what they click on, and what they buy. By making sense of complex user behavior patterns, AI can predict future visitor behavior and make real-time adjustments to increase conversions. AI-powered CRO technologies continuously learn and adapt, leading to more precise and effective strategies than traditional conversion rate optimization tactics.

Beyond the Point Solutions

Luma Partner’s Martech Map lists over 300 software vendors across four major product categories. But Grit Capital sees another, larger Applied AI opportunity in the martech space: the possibility for a marketing system of record. 

Currently, martech is fragmented by the jobs-to-be-done for individual marketers and marketing managers. But we believe that unifying the strategies, tactics, and results across a product, division and company’s marketing efforts would yield incredible marketing alpha. In order to bring these disparate tasks, teams and systems together, however, a solution would need:

• Marketing Expertise: AI-based best practices and recommendations that any marketer from any role can interact with to perfect their craft.

• Marketing Software Recommendations: Help sorting through the hundreds of tools and point solutions to find the one that best fits the marketers’ needs. 

• Expert Consultants: It will be some years before AI marketing agents (see below) can execute marketing tasks as well or better than humans can. Any future marketing platform would need to provide its customer with on-demand, pre-qualified humans to take on the marketing tasks that their in-house team can’t handle. 

• Workflow and Reporting: A unified marketing platform is no use without overall coordination between tasks, people, teams and results. 

• Billing and Spending Optimization: Managing a marketing budget for results is an ongoing and crucial task that any aspiring marketing system of record must include. 

A tall order, and not here-to-for possible with pre-AI technology. However, the benefits of a unified and holistic marketing platform would be tremendous. At Grit, we’re currently looking for just such a new martech possibility.

Beyond the Human Marketer?

Agentic AI refers to autonomous artificial intelligence systems capable of independently managing complex marketing tasks, making decisions, and optimizing strategies with minimal human intervention. Millions of venture dollars have been invested creating hundreds of AI Agents for sales and marketing. 

In general, agents are best for “needle in a haystack” type problems - finding research papers, people to network with, or prospects from a lead list. These are tedious tasks with a low cost of omission. 

At Grit Capital Partners, with the current state of technology, we think most marketing is too important and too complicated to leave to unsupervised machines. Moreover, much of what is called “Agentic” AI is just martech software rebranded or FOMO consulting pitches. 

Agentic technology is moving rapidly, so this will change, but there are three specific areas where agentic AI is making inroads into marketing and sales processes:

• Ad price negotiation - Negotiating price has shifted over the past 15 years from insertion orders, to machine programmatic and header bidding, back to old school negotiating with retailers like Amazon and Walmart. A new generation of AI agents will navigate both the dynamism of the marketplace, and a privacy-forced cookieless world of automated bidding. Much of this will be based on commerce media, where lookalike probabilities and inference from previous SKU based sales often replaces tested ID technologies.  

• Automated Outreach - The lowest wrung of the sales ladder, and the way into a career for many college grads, is a compelling use case for agentic AI. For one example, try the demos from 11x. Their competitor AiSDR highlights recent bad press that 11x has received. Qualified makes an AI SDR chatbot which doesn’t demo well, but has incredible reviews on G2. Unify, Floworks, Artisan and others offer outbound SDR AIs to prequalify leads. For businesses with large target markets and low ACV, these options are worth exploring. 

• Enriched Data - The work of augmenting customer and prospect data has seen the rise of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) category, and the data “clean rooms”  set of software companies has mostly played out with Databricks, LiveRamp and others, but AI offerings from Clay, Tektonic, and others are demonstrating higher accuracy, deeper coverage and constant updates than their human competitors. 

At our current state of AI, qualified prospects and existing customers are too valuable to leave alone with unsupervised agents. But at Grit Capital Partners, we don’t see this state persisting for long. 

Machine to Machine Martech

We see a day in near future when at least the initial buying tasks are delegated to software agents. There are only a few solutions now, but given the size of most product competitor sets, it will increasingly make sense for purchasers to automate initial research, discovery and vendor qualification to AI agents. 

When that happens, sellers and seller AIs will respond by deploying marketing and sales tactics to address that new kind of prospect. Many readers will have seen the video of two AIs switching to a non-human language to improve communication.  We foresee a day when a material amount of commerce is transacted machine-to-machine. 

Please Get in Touch

If you are working on technology or businesses rethinking martech given the capabilities of Applied AI, please reach out to us at Grit Capital Partners: opportunities@grit.vc. 

This is an incredible time to re-imagine finding, educating and converting prospects and customers, whether they be human or computer. We’d love to help you realize your vision.