Event highlights:
The power of B2B events in the age of AI marketing
Chief Nation recently hosted a carefully selected group of marketing and sales leaders for another successful CWO At Home event.
The subject of discussion was B2B events in the age of AI marketing. This clearly struck a chord with attendees, who arrived eager to unpack the relative merits and challenges from top to bottom. Craig McCartney, Chief Nation co-owner and Manager Director, led guests on an engaging discussion about differing perceptions and the application of AI within the B2B marketing space.
According to a recent Chief Nation report, over 92% of marketing and sales leaders say that the benefits of AI and automation are limited unless supported by personalised, one-to-one interaction. And a further 83% cite the human touch as an essential part of implementing AI for B2B marketing.
The message was clearly echoed by conversations at this event. While AI has its use in creating efficiency and helping the data and analytics processes, the actual selling and converting of a C-suite audience still relies on human connection.
Here are the key takeaways from the night:
Where AI is the most useful
While guests may not have agreed on every detail, consensus emerged that AI is best used at the top of the funnel. This includes using Gen AI for content creation and ideation, as well as automating previously manual processes like data sorting. One caveat to this is that in almost every context, the output from Gen AI requires human intervention before it is ready to be used in the marketing and sales process.
Based on perspectives shared during the night, AI is fantastic at speeding up output and helping to personalise and ideate, but as we get closer to converting, a human touch is very much required.
Creativity, efficiency, and scale
The relationship and information gap between sales and marketing also came into focus during our discussions. Guests noted that applying AI to content creation and information sourcing has made collaboration between teams easier. Specifically, less time is being spent on sales collateral overall, which helps marketing and sales teams to sing from the same hymn sheet and allow creativity to thrive.
However, there are some guests who still suffer a strained relationship between their teams. It seems that marketing teams can sometimes put a lot of work into plentiful lead gen, yet sales teams are not fully equipped with the resourcing to follow up in a timely manner. Or if they do, they tend to follow up with only the leads they deem closest to converting into pipeline.
AI and personalisation
Our guests all use AI extensively to gather information and personalise outreach to high-value targets. However, none of them would execute a sale without one-on-one human involvement. When it comes to audience generation, partnerships and access to quality databases are deemed more influential than AI.
92% of marketing and sales leaders say that the benefits of AI and automation are limited unless supported by personalised, one-to-one interaction.
There's no replacement for humanity
Without exception, every voice in the room emphasised the importance of human connection when directly engaging with the C-suite. Referring to the statistics from Craig McCartney’s opening talk, the consistent opinion is that while AI can help augment our capabilities, the output is still too machine-like to persuade in high-risk environments.
Guests also stressed the importance of continuity in marketing and sales. For a prospect, building a relationship that is constant from nurture to follow-up is pivotal in their buying decisions. Having the same people with them throughout the process results in much higher conversions, something that attendees suspected may not be possible to replicate using AI alone.
Augmented intelligence wins out
And so our stellar cast of marketing leaders concluded that the human touch is not yet dead. It is, in fact, vital to the success of B2B marketing. The engagement, the excitement, and the opportunity of B2B are all driven by the uniqueness of the human experience behind it. Every touchpoint is a chance to galvanise that human connection. AI is simply a tool to reinforce it; not replace it.
Buyers and sellers alike thrive on the connections between one another. They build relationships, act on information gained, create use cases, and make decisions based on context. AI is a powerful accelerator of processes and an alleviator of manual tedium. But it is yet to be trusted as a sales closer or relationship builder.
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