Human-Centric AI The B2B Experience Now

First came 2020, and then the dawn of AI. Now, the B2B experience has the potential to fall further and further away from its human-centric nature, and for many companies, it has. Statistics show that 59% of B2B marketers use AI to identify prospective clients, and 87% use it to improve email marketing.

While such tools are useful for time efficiency, the statistics suggest a reliance on such methods, and the B2B sales experience should only be put partially to chatbots and AI-generated emails.

Today, Salesmrkt looks at 4 key ways to remain human-centric in an increasingly AI-driven industry, and the best way to stay ahead of the game in an AI world. The tactics may surprise you.

 

How to Stay Human-Centric in 2023/2024

1. Personalize your Outreach and Correspondence

Many companies conduct AI B2B lead generation, by implementing it into cold-emailing, client onboarding, and lead nurturing. It can be useful for generating templates by which you can facilitate conversational sales, but they require the human touch for maximum effect. Plus, personalization should be employed throughout the process. But this doesn’t mean simply adding the client's name to the top of the email. Instead, learn salient information about their business and show them how you can assist them.

Use Expertly Crafted Connection Sequences

Here is an example. In your initial connection emails, you could say “I noticed that you are particularly reputable regarding XXX. [Company] can assist with this by performing XXX.”

Summing up the company’s USPs and mission goes a long way, as it shows an understanding of what they are about and how your separate mission can be beneficial to both parties. The same strategy should be applied with consistency in your follow-up emails too. Reliable templates go a long way, especially when you optimize them with details applicable to the prospect in question.

An expertly crafted multi-channel sequence approach is key to success here. When they’re created with B2B conversion in mind by teams who understand the niches they are engaged in, the opportunities for lead generation and business growth are significant.

1. Be Present During Meetings

There will come a time when one of your prospects turns into a client, and this is where the seeds of B2B opportunities and B2B growth are planted, watered, and nurtured. So, it’s doubly important to retain the human touch here, as this is where you will become familiar with them as people and hear more details about their mission.

It’s important to consider having one or two of your expert team join the client during this dialogue, rather than prepare a pre-recorded video for them to digest. The latter option leaves no room for other voices, and hearing the voice of your clientele, and hearing yours, is a staple of the human touch.

Schedule Regular Meetings

As you develop your client relationship, it’s healthy to remain in touch throughout the process, whether through a messaging service such as Slack or regular virtual meetings. This offers the client the chance to refine their strategy with you, along with a number of extraneous benefits.

Optimize Communication & Alignment: Consistent meetings give you the chance to align your research aims and collaborative goals together.

Connect More Strongly: Meetings provide a bonding platform where you can share stories, humor, and common ground, leading to empathetic comprehension of your clients, and understanding their strengths and weaknesses. Ergo, it defines the areas where you can most effectively assist them.

Understand Their Brand Voice: Listening to your clients will help you to understand their brand voice, allowing you to produce relevant content that utilizes it, thus producing better work. Your client is more likely to stay with a company that knows what they are about and can emulate their established brand.

Collaboration & Teamwork: Meetings put you far beyond the realm of a company providing a service. They allow you to integrate with the client’s workforce, see into their workplace culture, and collaborate more efficiently.

1. Facilitate Feedback and Updates

You can also facilitate client feedback through multiple platforms. This is a particularly effective element used in the B2C sector, which could have great benefits for B2B companies.

• Gain a Higher Client Retention: It’s said that 70% of consumers are likely to make purchases from brands that understand their needs. Staying human-centric in this way shows that you are working hard to understand their brand, and clients are more likely to stay with you.

Improve Your Services: Feedback, whether it’s positive or negative, will improve your services and/or products. As of now, AI in B2B marketing is incapable of processing and actioning feedback, and so it’s the plight of corporate companies to do it.

Build Trust and Client Loyalty: Collating and actioning customer feedback is one of the key ways to build trust and loyalty in your clients.

How to Approach Feedback

As you work with your client, you will generate performance indicators and KPIs to focus on more rigorously. You and your client can then share these with one another and measure the results. Transparency is another key factor. Be declarative and curt about your progress with the projects you are undertaking for them. This shows your genuine, personable work ethic which, when yielding favorable results, will keep the clientele happy with your services.

1. Train Your Workforce Accordingly

Human-centricity is a game-changing ethos, but it won’t accurately represent your team unless your workforce as a whole is briefed on its importance. So, all of the methods described above should also be imparted to the team, and trained to follow them. This is the process of standardizing human-centricity as a pillar of your company, and over time creates a cohesive work culture wherein an expert team has people as one of its core values.

Clients Are Customers 

It’s important to remember that clients are customers too, and therefore it’s vital to maintain the quality of human-centricity. Creating a corporate culture where people, their stories, and prospective USPs are at the forefront of your company’s modus operandi, will not only make content generation more fluid, but add further value to your company’s #SalesExperience.

Where AI is Effective

Contrastingly, turning your back on AI entirely is unrealistic, as it’s here to stay. To optimize your AI use, discover the areas in which it is appropriate and implement it. Meanwhile, study the key areas described above and facilitate the human-centric strategies where they count.

To exemplify it further, here are a few ways that you can effectively use AI.

1. Data-Driven Decision Solutions

AI has tremendous data collation capabilities, which companies can use to make informed decisions on their #SalesStrategy. As a human being, it would be impractical, time-consuming, and costly to analyze these large volumes of data. Using AI algorithms you can discover prospect behaviors, and pain points, and craft sales strategies.

1. Automate Tasks

In the world of B2B sales, there are numerous repetitive and time-consuming tasks that AI can allay. This includes data, lead qualification, and scheduling meetings. Much of this can be assigned to AI, meaning you can spend time building relationships, and understanding client needs, and tasks of a higher value. As long as you implement human-centricity where it counts, AI can be helpful here.

Keep Ahead of the Game: Stay Abreast of AI trends

Yes, this article espouses human-centricity above all else, but the best way that you can stay ahead of the game in 2023 and beyond is to watch the AI trends in the same manner that you study your prime competitors. The better you understand its evolution, trends, and how companies are using it as part of their B2B growth strategy, the greater your capacity to make a difference as a company.

A good example is the sheer number of guides out there that proclaim the efficiency of personalized outreach through AI. If companies continue to use AI as a prime lead generator, they are likely to fall further and further away from human-centricity. If your company uses this as an impetus to remain human-centric and add value to the #SalesExperience by showing a genuine interest in the people you partner with, then your company will stand apart, and provide value for its clients.

The Verdict

In review, there are many steps throughout B2B collaboration where you can implement human-centricity, from the onboarding to teamwork, to review. If you personalize your outreach, onboarding, and collaboration processes, while having regular strategy talks with your clients and offering them an open invitation to provide feedback, then you will build a human-centric client relationship, and be a valuable force on the market.

This methodology will rise to prominence even further once you train your workforce to treat prospects with this same level of human-centricity. Remember, the human touch needs to be a staple of your company’s overall culture to make a consistently positive impact.

If you are looking to increase your company’s brand awareness and reach those premium clients, consider booking a meeting with our expert team. We offer top-tier marketing skills from video to web design, to Copy OnDemand.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I stay abreast of AI trends?

You can read newsletters, blogs, and other online resources, but the most effective way is to use AI and learn about its capabilities. This can inform the way that you use it in business but also teaches you to recognize the trends.

Is it okay to use AI for lead generation?

Yes. When onboarding a client, AI in B2B marketing is an efficient system to implement, as it removes many of the tedious manual processes. For instance, integrating a chatbot onto your website to answer the initial onboarding questions saves time, informs you of the prospect before you have the initial in-person meeting, and is useful for time management.

Once you have your first meeting though, it’s important to be present. Also, if you use AI to generate multi-channel connections, it’s important to edit the copy to keep it relevant to the prospect’s business, potential pain points, and needs.