4 Ways AI can drive profitable growth

Does your operating plan call for profitable growth in 2025? How will you achieve it? You could use your old playbook… or employ AI, arguably the biggest game-changer in decades. Let’s look at four ways to use AI for growth-driving competitive advantage.

You can use AI to boost efficiency or effectiveness. Said another way, you can use it to do work faster or better. Sometimes both. It depends on your starting point. For instance, if your salespeople are not doing pre-call preparation today, AI will help them do it better… which we know leads to increased sales and profitable growth.

If they are doing pre-call preparation today, AI will help them do it faster. Much faster. This frees up time to make more sales calls, also leading to profitable growth. Efficiency gains like this may not lead to better quality of work, but they do allow for greater quantity of work.

Let’s look at two ways to employ AI for near-term profitable growth, and two ways for longer-term profitable growth.

Example 1: Sales Call Preparation

According to Forrester Research, 75% of B2B executive buyers say salespeople are not knowledgeable about their business … and do not understand the issues they face. This lack of preparation undoubtedly leads to reduced sales and profitable growth. The same research found only one salesperson in four was able to secure agreement for a next meeting.

This lack of preparation is understandable. B2B salespeople are often in a reactive mode, responding to urgent requests from customers and the home office. Sure, preparation leads to profitable growth, but who has time to conduct in-depth research to prepare for that next call?

AI changes everything: The sales professional can use AI to generate incredible insights about the account they’re about to visit. They can do this by writing their own AI prompts for ChatGPT, Perplexity, or similar engines. For clever suggestions, I recommend reading chapters 32-34 in The AI Advantage, by Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino.

Too busy to write your own prompts? The AIM Institute developed SalesPrep^TM software for this. (For a 2-minute video, visit www.SalesPrep.com). You simply enter the customer name, your type of offering, and the customer’s job-to-be-done (application). In 60 seconds, you see on your phone or desktop an AI-generated report that includes:

1. Company news: You don’t want to be surprised by their new acquisition, divestiture, president, or company announcement. And this background can give you great “icebreakers” to start your meeting: “Are you personally impacted by your company’s new acquisition?”
2. Market trends: You’ll be able to engage your customer more deeply if you’re conversant in the trends their specific industry is facing: “I’ve been reading about this trend, and I wanted to get your opinion on it.”
3. Common problems: When you gather the top 15-20 problems faced by companies in your customer’s type of business, it helps in two ways: 1) If your customer brings up one of these problems, you’ll be prepared to discuss it, and 2) you can ask them if they are dealing with some of these issues.
4. Process steps: Do you understand the steps your customer goes through when using your type of offering? This lets you explore the process steps you could help them to accomplish faster, better, or cheaper.
5. Company overview: This includes company size, their leadership team, main products organized by company structure, their chief competitors, and their published strategy.

Example 2: Sales Probing Skills

Consultative selling was born in the 1970’s and accelerated in 1988 with Neil Rackham’s research behind the landmark book, SPIN Selling. By monitoring 35,000 sales calls, he proved that the most successful sellers ask customers great questions.

The most successful sellers ask customers great questions.

Our own research confirmed a strong correlation between asking good probing questions and beating sales quotas… which drives profitable growth (See VOC Skills that Drive B2B Sales.) This research also revealed that…

• Traditional sales training programs do not lead to improved VOC (voice-of-customer) skills.
• It can take several decades for sales professionals to gradually build good probing skills through experience.

Once again, AI can help. The only way to improve a skill like this is with practice, practice, practice. But now you don’t have to wait for synchronous practice with a human coach. You can practice asynchronously any time with an AI coach.

This is a completely new approach to skill-building, with major implications for profitable growth. Here’s how it works with the SalesPrep system: You ask the AI customer if they have any problems using your type of offering in their job-to-be-done. After each response, Claire—your AI Guide—gives you feedback and advice based on our What-Why-Clarify probing method (see www.everydayvoctraining.com)

Imagine your company produces corrugated boxes (your offering), and you’re meeting with someone at Amazon (your customer) to talk about the way they package and ship merchandise (their job to be done). The conversation might start like this:

Example 3: New-Product Market Research

You’ve seen two ways AI can drive profitable growth in the near-term: 1) improved preparation before sales calls, and 2) improved VOC skills during sales calls. Next, we’ll examine ways AI can help with longer-term profitable growth, namely superior new product development.

Returning to our last example: Imagine your R&D team is considering a new innovative corrugated box design… one that includes a self-adhesive bonding strip incorporated into the box blank. They think this might speed up box assembly time at a company like Amazon. But they’re not sure this is even a problem, and don’t fully understand the current box sealing process.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could vet your new-product ideas in minutes?

In the past, you might schedule interviews with Amazon and other customers, or perhaps with an industry expert in a paid network such as GLG, AlphaSights, or Guidepoint. While these are still great options, wouldn’t it be nice if you could vet your new-product ideas in minutes? You can with AI prompts of your own. It’s best to give sufficient context to the AI agent you’re using.

Your AI prompt might go something like this:

You are a packer in a warehouse that ships merchandise to consumers. Please describe in detail how you seal corrugated boxes after you fill them with merchandise.

Try it yourself: You’ll see an AI-generated report loaded with helpful detail. If you still want more information, then you can learn more with human interviews, which will be more costly in terms of time and money.

The SalesPrep tool mentioned earlier has three types of 2-page briefs built in: Trend Briefs, Problem Briefs, and Process Briefs. Simply click the appropriate Problem, Process Step, or Market Trend in your SalesPrep customer report. Each takes less than 60 seconds to generate.

Why use these instead of your own AI prompts? In addition to speed, SalesPrep Briefs use robust prompts to deliver highly detailed information and recommendations:

• Problem Brief: Problem summary, causes and conditions of problem, relevant metrics, and impact of solving the problem
• Process Brief: Process step summary, responsibility, location, training, support, options, timing, issues, and possible improvements.
• Trend Brief: Trend summary, negative implications, positive implications, and recommendations

Example 4: New-Product Voice of Customer

Consider a second way to drive longer-term profitable growth. Even with the best possible AI secondary market research, it’s unwise to develop a new product without primary market research. That is, you still need to get out there and speak with real customers. We’ve been training companies how to interview their B2B customers since 2005 with a process called New Product Blueprinting.

You still need to get out there and speak with real customers.

It begins with a round of qualitative Discovery interviews, in which you try to uncover all of customers’ desired outcomes… which usually manifest as problems they want to eliminate. Then you conduct quantitative Preference interviews so you can focus your new product design on the important, unsatisfied outcomes.

AI can accelerate the Discovery interview phase. For three decades, voice-of-customer practitioners felt the need to do many human interviews to uncover most of the target market’s needs. In our recent research, we’ve learned that you can “interview” AI and uncover 60-80% of the needs you’ll uncover with extensive human interviews.

This has allowed the client teams we coach to reduce the number of human interviews approximately in half. This allows teams to move into the quantitative Preference interviews much more rapidly than pre-AI days. And that’s important because additional research has shown these quantitative interviews to be the most critical determinant of new product success… and hence, profitable growth.

Next steps…

With many technology shifts of the past, you could get away with a “patient” approach to adoption. I’m not sure that’s the case with AI, which is experiencing an unprecedented rate of adoption. This offers an unprecedented opportunity for competitive advantage—or disadvantage—for profitable growth.

If you’re not taking full advantage of AI for profitable growth today, here’s a simple way to get started: Sign up for a free, no-credit-card, 30-day trial at www.SalesPrep.com. There you can experience the first three of four ways we’ve covered for using AI to drive profitable growth:

1. Sales call preparation: Just enter any customer name, your type of offering, and the customer’s job-to-be-done. You’ll generate an impressive SalesPrep report, viewable on your desktop, phone, or in PDF format.
2. Sales probing skills: Take e-learning module #3 to learn our What-Why-Clarify probing method. Then go to “AI Guide” and practice your probing with an AI customer on your type of offering for their job-to-be-done… and receive advice from “Claire.”
3. New product research: Open the SalesPrep report you created in point #1 above. Download a 2-page Brief for any Market Trends, Common Problem, or Process Step you see in your report.

Best wishes on your AI journey to profitable growth!