Increase Revenue By Leveraging AI Technologies: Part 1
You are a small brick and motor business. You are good at what you do. You know how to build things but trying to figure out ways to increase revenue on a shoe-string budget. Have you considered using AI tools to address your challenges? For many, it might seem that a company needed to a behemoth like Amazon or Google to leverage and harness the power of AI. In the past, that might have been true as deployment of such tools were costly to implement. However, with the advancements of technology today, AI can be used by all types of businesses no matter their size, solve specific industry and functional discipline problems and what’s important, it is affordable. In this article, we will help you understand how using AI technologies can impact your sales numbers yielding higher revenue and profit margins.
Before diving into addressing how AI technologies can increase revenue, it’s important to define first what Revenue and AI is and how it applies to the health of a business. This will bring clarity within the context of this article.
In simple terms, revenue optimization is not only about improving earnings from your sales but the sum of your income. It’s taking actionable steps to increase your profits margins and the Return Of Investments (ROI). Artificial intelligence (AI) also called Machine Intelligence (MI) leverages computers and machines that aims to emulate the modality, problem-solving and decisions making capabilities like that of a human.
Now that we defined the two, we like to set the preface and breakdown how a business can deploy AI technologies to increase their revenue. This can we done through the use of AI in;
- Sales
- Marketing
- Digital Marketing
This article explains harnessing AI within the functional discipline of Sales.
AI Sales
Find Customers
By using AI sales tools or agents, a business can find customers who are seeking to buy their products and services specific to their industry. In addition, it enables a business to gain in depth knowledge about each customer, their background, personas, and characteristics.
We are not talking about leads or Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) though this inherently are one of attributes of what AI can also do as well.
360 Degree Customer View
A business may have information about their customers in their CRM or ERP systems. However, this information is static and can be myopic. Customers are not static but dynamic and a business needs to have real-time up to date information of their customers and user journey to make insightful data-driven decisions. Having a 360 view of your customers is imperative and a AI system can make this possible.
Predictive Customer Profitability
Based on a business transaction records, an AI system using RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value) score-based times series and other neural network based models can measure and predict a customer profitability. By doing so a business can segment and create target cohort email marketing campaigns with each customer based on the models inferences.
Predicting Customer Propensity
Customer propensity is understanding the behavior of a customer. It’s a model approach to predict the likelihood of explorers, visitors, leads, and customers are going to purchase a product or service. By doing so a business can only get customer acuity can but increase their Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).
Prospecting Intelligence
Buy harnessing the power of AI, a B2B and B2C entity can find customers anywhere on the www with a high degree of efficacy. Imagine a system running 24/7 prospecting the web finding customers. That’s the power of AI which aids in maximizing sales and acquire your Total Addressable Market (TAM).
Recommendation Engine
After all the customer data is collected processed and analyzed, it can be arduous to then make the right decision that will yield an optimal result. An AI- powered self -learning engine does not only predicts but prescribes what you must do and focus on. It’s constantly learning and computing millions of data points in order to provide the best recommendation. This decision support system takes the guess out of the equation. It helps a business make smart sales driven decisions.
Increase sales productivity and efficiency
With the above features, attributes and capabilities of a AI sales system, a business will see their an increase in efficiency and productivity while lowering SG&A costs. This accounts for more savings amounting to higher profit margins.
In summary an AI sales system or Customer Growth System can;
- Significantly increase sales
- Prioritize customer focus
- Understand and Influence customer behavior
- Gain 360-degree Customer intelligence
- Increase sales productivity and reduce Costs
- Increase ROI
Our goal help you understand how AI can help a business in many business facets. We encourage you to explore our site to learn more.
The Critical Role Of Positioning In Marketing and Sales?
Introduction
Before diving into how Positioning impacts your marketing and sales, a business must understand what Positioning is. With over 21+ years of transforming businesses, “positioning” is one aspect that I see almost all companies need to reassess and focus on. Business owners, CEOs, and sales and marketing executives think their Positioning can be done without refocusing. However, a business should rethink its Positioning based on negative customer feedback, low-win bid rates, lost opportunities, and poor customer perception. Remember, it’s not what we think of our company, products, and services but what your ideal customers and prospects think.
What is Good Positioning?
Simply, a company’s product/service positioning is about providing customer-centric value that best-fits customers who love and want more.
Positioning impacts many aspects of a business. It affects how you market and sell products, directly affecting revenue and ROI. It determines how customers perceive a business. It affects what you build and what is offered to customers. It impacts marketing and sales costs. From an operations perspective, Positioning affects a business’s COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) and SG&A (Selling, General And Administrative ) costs. Furthermore, good Positioning increases employee productivity from a people and culture perspective.
When it’s mapped out, the value of Positioning impacts nearly every financial measure of a business, particularly profit margins. In short, good Positioning impacts the health of a company. Based on our research and experience, companies must take the time to reassess their Positioning if they are facing marketing and sales challenges.
How to implement Good Positioning?
A business can develop and implement good Positioning by;
- Understanding clearly your best-fit customers’ personas and characteristics.
- Know your unique attributes and capabilities.
- Know the value and benefits of your product/services quantitatively and qualitatively.
- Understand your Competitors.
- Develop value-based context.
Utilizing positioning tools and techniques together with having discussions with the right team members in your company, a business can achieve good Positioning.
By executing the above strategically, a business will get continuous insights into the external market, create innovative alternatives, develop a business design and ensure the executability of that design by orchestrating and developing the organization’s capabilities. It is not principally about creating a positioning statement or document, although both play a role.
How can I ensure my Positioning Increases sales?
If a business’s Positioning is good, they will notice an increase in their prospecting rates, sales closure rates, and sales growth. Their Top-Line growth will increase. Furthermore, they will notice a reduction in their sales and marketing costs, that is if your your tracking them (which is very important to do). Moreover, pay close attention to the variances in a company’s profit margins with good Positioning. If executed right, monitoring and tracking their positioning change, they will increase the overall health of your company.
How good is your Positioning today? Do you want to get better?
A structured positioning assessment will clearly help you understand where you currently are and what need you to better position your business.
There is an adage “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result”. If you are stuck or challenged, make the correct change. Wrong Positioning may be a blind spot and pain point that you might need to mitigate.
Do you think you have a positioning problem? Acumentica can help by:
- Performing a Positioning assessment of your business through analysis and team-based interviews.
- Utilizing our fact-based positioning tools, processes, and methodologies.
- Executing the inferences from the assessment to reach a good positioning state.
- Tracking and monitoring a company’s positioning strategy.
Tips To Increase Your Online Conversion Rate organically
As a small business owner your working on a shoe-string budget. We get it. Over the 20+ years of experience working with GROWING small businesses online visibility and sales, there has been a plethora of learned lessons. We want to outline for you what steps you need to take that is going to help increase your digital visibility, foot traffic, conversion rate, and sales organically without any paid ads. We recommend not waste your hard earned money on social media and search engine marketing until you have optimally executed the below. We have seen this time and time again how companies burn $Millions with little or ROI to show for it.
- Conduct a Digital Assessment of your business – If you have not already done so, clearly understand the health of your website in real-time and fix your website issues based on the recommendations. Design your website that gives your targeted niche customers a better online experience from quote management, web chats, to purchasing seamlessly online. However, addressing the simple low hanging fruits will position your business better on various search engines radar screens.
- Search Engine Optimization – Use the right keywords that your targeted customers personas will query to increase page rank higher organically without ads. Always track and monitor your SEO.
- Map optimization – Is your business on all Search Maps? If not, this is a missed opportunity. The big search tech companies strategy is to use it’s Maps system to recommend businesses to customers or consumers. The goal is for your business to Rank higher organically without any paid ads.
- Enriched marketing content – Provide quality content your target market niche. Yes the marketing content you compile is very important. Big tech companies use business content as a benchmark to make the right business recommendations. If they see your business as an expert in your field, they will recommend your business.
- Google Business Page – Google business page is another linchpin system from Google that is imperative to have. A business that meets a search engines criteria gets a higher authoritative token. This then translates to recommending a business to a customer.
- Website analytics – Understand who is coming to your website and their user journey in real-time. If you know what they searching for on your website, you can then connect with them. This is a sales generating opportunity.
- Analyze Your Digital Data – Track and monitor the digital progress your business is making. Your data tells you a story about your digital performance. Getting insights into your web data and making improvements will accelerate your page rank.
We want to point our that this is a continuous improvement always making the right changes to be ranked higher. The goal is to increase your page rank without any paid ads. This will in turn, lower your marketing and sales costs and increase your foot traffic and revenue. We are here to help. Contact Us should you have any questions. If you don’t have the resources and bandwidth, Acumentica’s Artificial Intelligence Digital Growth System and expert team can increase your online growth.
Increase A Business Online Visibility And Sales
How to increase a business online visibility and sales?
By Team Acumentica
As a small business owner your working on a shoe-string budget. We get it. Over the 20 years of experience working with GROWING small businesses online visibility and sales, there has been a plethora of learned lessons. We want to outline for you what steps you need to take that is going to you help increase your digital visibility, foot traffic, conversion rate, and sales without any paid ads.
We want to set and precedent and recommend do not to waste your hard earned money on social media and search engine marketing until you have optimally executed the below. We have seen time and time again how companies burn $Millions with little or ROI to show for it.
So let’s get to it. Below are the steps a company needs to take:
- Conduct a Digital Assessment of your business – Understand the health of your website in real-time and fix your website issues based on the recommendations. Design your website that gives your targeted niche customers a better online experience from quote management, web chats, to purchasing seamlessly online. However, addressing the simple low hanging fruits will position your business better on various search engines radar screens.
- Search Engine Optimization – Use the right keywords that your targeted customers personas will query to increase page rank higher organically without ads. Always track and monitor your SEO.
- Map optimization – Is your business on all Search Engine Maps? If not, this is a missed opportunity. The big search tech companies strategy is to use it’s Maps system to recommend businesses to customers or consumers. The goal is for your business to rank higher organically without any paid ads.
- Enriched marketing content – Provide quality content your target market niche. Yes, the marketing content you compile is very important. Big tech companies use business content as a benchmark to make the right business recommendations. If they see your business as an expert in your field, they will recommend your business.
- Google Business Page – Google business page is another linchpin system from Google that is imperative to have. A business that meets a search engines criteria gets a higher authoritative token. This then translates to recommending a business to a customer.
- Website analytics – Understand who is coming to your website and their user journey in real-time. If you know what they searching for on your website, you can then connect with them through a personal email campaign. This is a sales generating opportunity.
- Analyze Your Digital Data – Track and monitor the digital progress your business is making. Your data tells you a story about your digital performance. Getting insights into your web data and making improvements will accelerate your page rank.
We like to point out that above is a continuous improvement always making the right changes to be ranked higher. The goal is to increase your page rank without any paid ads. This will in turn lower your marketing and sales costs and increase your foot traffic and revenue.
We are here to listen and help. Contact Us should you have any questions. And if you don’t have the resources and bandwidth, Acumentica’s Artificial Intelligence Digital Growth System and expert team can increase your online growth for you.
What is Prescriptive Marketing?
What is Prescriptive Marketing?
Before we touch base on the meaning of prescriptive marketing, it’s paramount to first understand the different maturity stratum of marketing analytics. They are;
Descriptive Marketing – In our point of view, this is the first level of marketing. It’s called the Data Collection phase. It has to do with Big Data. This is where data is collected and data mined from heterogeneous data ecosystems to gain insights into a customer, competitor or market. Organizations today have to pay close attention to this level of analytics because it ‘s the precursor to moving to next level. Emphasis should on validating and maturing your program logic to obtain a 360-degree view of your customer, competitor, market, and business data. The risk of not having good data will promote outliers and skewed data resulting inaccurate analysis.
Predictive Marketing – In this phase, the insightful information collected gets fed into built-in statistical techniques and algorithms to predict probable future outcomes of a customer based on their personas. Understanding data relationships aids in being able to segment a customer based on certain characteristics relationships. The data maturity roadmap should always be to move to a state to have deep personalized customer understanding. Sentiment analysis is a common type of predictive analytics. That is the input to a model in plain information whereas the output to the model is a weighted score that is positive or negative or a numeral variance between +1 or -1. In this case, the model computes and is predicting the data that we don’t have which is a sentiment label.
Prescriptive Marketing – This is the last stage of the maturity model of marketing analytics. In a nutshell, prescriptive marketing is a new way of thinking about customer-concentric relations utilizing the technologies of big data and machine learning which when coalesced is called Prescriptive Marketing. Applying Prescriptive analytics is going to big game changer to organizations today because it positively impacts customer experience at every customer value-life-cycle touch points; directly boosting customers loyalties and revenues.
We believe that Prescriptive Marketing is at its infancy stage and there is allot of untapped potential to discovering and learning more about building a personalized relationship with one’s customers.
The Customer Really Does Rule
Among the business lessons and rules learned over the years is that the customer really does rule. This was learned in the context of understanding that there are a finite number of sources of actual, hard cash for a business. Among the alternatives are:
• Borrowing it (in the form of debt or equity or venture capital)
• Selling assets (if you have them to sell) or
• Getting it in the form of revenue from customers
Among the three, it makes sense that if one could choose, they would choose revenue from customers. Debt, equity, and venture capital, in the beginning start up phases, are fine. Unfortunately each has continuing costs associated with it. Continued borrowing over time can become onerous and eventually lead to a company’s demise. Selling assets is fine until the assets run out. But over time, revenue is the sustainable source of cash that is the reward that the customer bestows upon a company for its excellence and the value of its offerings. There is nothing onerous in reasonably “growing the top line” on a continuing basis.
Now customers have numerous choices as to where they send their money and who they reward, i.e. they have alternative choices called “the competition”. A competitor, by definition, is “the customer’s alternative choice”. There are direct competitors (those that are very much alike in appearance), indirect competitors (those that do not look alike but serve the same customer need), DIY (do it yourself) alternatives and in some instances, doing nothing is an alternative choice for the customer.
So how does a business capture the customer reward?
Since the goal is to have the customer send you the money, and lots of it, the first step in maximizing cash from revenue is to find a group of customers that can be served in a meaningful and sustainable, economic fashion. This is called “target market selection”. One of the first major strategic decisionsthat any company makes is deciding what market it will serve. Since it can’t be all things to all people, it must be something meaningful to some group. In nature there is a saying “no species can live everywhere, but each species must live somewhere”. Translated into the business world, this means find a specific, relevant target market that is compatible to your business strengths. Focus on that market. Don’t spend a lot of time considering irrelevant markets; a waste of resources.
Once that target market has been selected, the second major strategic decision that a company must make is deciding what will be its basis for a sustainable competitive advantage. There will usually be alternative choices for the customer’ money in the target market; called competition. And in order to maximize the revenue stream from the customer, one must have a unique and distinctive advantage over those alternative choices. Lower cost, unique features, superb service, distinctive positioning, are a few of the alternatives for establishing a competitive advantage. Whatever one selects, be sure it is sustainable and affordable.
Well, having selected a target market and established a basis for competitive advantage, the next step is to set revenue goals and operational tracking measures that will be the predictors and evidence of the wisdom of the strategic decisions. Another lesson or rule is that one should always be number one in market share within the relevant target market, or at least a close number two. The customer’s response in revenue terms is what drives market position. The more they like and value what you are doing, the more revenue they will send you. Market leadership reflects the relevance of the market selected the strength of the offer’s unique and distinctive advantage and the value seen by the customer. Conversely a weak market position indicates the weakness of the strategic decisions and, of course, less revenue.
As noted above, operationally, the relative value of the offer as seen by the customer, in comparison to their alternative choices, is an accurate leading indicator of what their actual in market performance will be. Value can be determined by:
• Ranking and valuing the offer’s features in terms of their importance
• Rating one competitor Vs another on the features, and
• Rating each competitor Vs the other in terms of its perceived value (CVA score)
All these measures aid in predicting what the customer will do. Since customers usually behave in relationship to the value they perceive, the highest value score for a competitor will lead to the highest revenue stream to that competitor.
There is another aspect to being the market leader and that is the competitor with the highest market share (by virtue of selling the most volume) is usually the low cost producer within the selected market segment; or they should be. Through scale and experience effects, market leaders should have the lowest costs. Combined with the greatest revenue, this makes the market leader the competitor with the highest margins and returns, i.e. the financial leader. Not a bad combination.
In the long run, some companies seem to continually outperform the others in terms of market position, margins, returns, and creating shareholder value. Others do not, lagging behind in market share and financial performance. Since the marketplace is neutral to everyone, why do some companies do better than others? Winning companies have a winning strategy as it relates to target market selection, unique and distinctive offers, cost control and investing scarce cash resources. Winning companies become number one with their customers in their respective markets. And they understand the value of being the low cost producer. But most importantly, they recognize the value of the customer who is the final arbiter of their success. WHAT’S IN YOUR WALLET?
“Enjoy the value it brings it you”
Artificial Intelligence 101: A Snapshot
By Team Acumentica
What is Artificial Intelligence(AI)?
In plain and simple terms, Artificial Intelligence (AI), also called Machine Intelligence (MI), leverages computers and machines to emulate human problem-solving and decision-making processes.
What is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Model?
An AI system is built by developing AI models. An AI model consists of stochastic mathematical and statistical algorithms that collect, process, analyze, and convert data into predictive and prescriptive decision support systems to solve specific real-world problems.
What are the Different Types of AI?
There are two types of AI:
- Weak AI or Narrow AI
This is also called Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). It is AI trained and focused on performing specific tasks. Nowadays, weak AI is ubiquitous, found in smartphones, Amazon Alexa, Google Siri, Acumentica Frida, and autonomous vehicles.
- Strong AI or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) theoretically refers to a machine with intelligence comparable to a human being. It would be consciously aware of its surroundings and capable of learning, planning, and solving problems independently. While AGI is still in its theoretical phase, researchers and enthusiasts are actively exploring its development.
Difference Between Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL)
Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) are often used interchangeably, but they are distinct. Both are subfields of AI, with deep learning being a subset of machine learning.
Machine Learning
Machine Learning (ML) refers to technologies and algorithms that enable machines to recognize patterns, perform decisions, provide recommendation support functions, and self-learn and improve over time. The three types of machine learning are:
- Unsupervised Learning
Uses unlabeled data, allowing the system to identify patterns and associations. A common use is clustering, which groups similar data points together. Examples include e-commerce recommendation systems like those on Netflix.
- Supervised Learning
Requires human intervention. The system is fed labeled training data to learn and make predictions. For example, teaching a system to recognize images of apples involves classification problems, where the system learns to identify apples from labeled images.
- Reinforcement Learning
Involves rewarding the system for correct actions and penalizing it for incorrect ones. Over time, the system learns through trial and error, reinforcing good actions. This is similar to how humans learn.
Where is Machine Learning Used Today?
Machine learning is used in various domains, such as:
- Healthcare: Implementing dynamic treatment regimens for patients with long-term illnesses.
- Autonomous Cars: Tesla and Waymo.
- Traffic Light Control.
- Sales: Acumentica AI Customer Generating System.
- Stock Predictions: Acumentica AI Stock Predictive System
Additionally, machine learning is used in everyday applications like spam filtering in Google, fraud detection in banks, and voice recognition in Amazon Alexa.
What is Deep Learning?
Deep Learning is a branch of machine learning that uses neural networks comprised of many layers. Unlike machine learning, where the agent is given processed data, deep learning uses raw data and autonomously determines relevant data. This reduces human intervention and allows the use of vast datasets, both structured and unstructured. Deep learning systems become more intelligent over time with more data.
Where is Deep Learning Used Today?
Deep learning is used in various applications, such as:
- Fraud Detection.
- Natural Language Processing (NLP): Acumentica AI Growth System.
- Customer Relationship Management: Acumentica AI Customer Generating System.
- Stock Predictions: Acumentica AI Stock Predictive System
- Computer Vision.
- Agriculture.
- AI Voice Recognition System: Acumentica.
- Virtual Assistants.
- E-commerce.
- Manufacturing.
How Does AI Work?
AI systems work similarly to refining petroleum for vehicle fuel. Data, whether structured or unstructured, is collected and processed to remove outliers. The clean data is then fed into an AI system with intelligent learning algorithms that use the data to self-learn and solve problems with minimal human intervention. Big data plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of AI inferences.
Why Acumentica?
Your growth is our success. This is our DNA. We focus on building relationships and growing companies by increasing revenue, ROI, while reducing costs.
At Acumentica, we are dedicated to pioneering advancements in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) specifically tailored for growth-focused solutions across diverse business landscapes. Harness the full potential of our bespoke AI Growth Solutions to propel your business into new realms of success and market dominance.
Elevate Your Customer Growth with Our AI Customer Growth System: Unleash the power of Advanced AI to deeply understand your customers’ behaviors, preferences, and needs. Our AI Customer Growth System utilizes sophisticated machine learning algorithms to analyze vast datasets, providing you with actionable insights that drive customer acquisition and retention.
Revolutionize Your Marketing Efforts with Our AI Marketing Growth System: This cutting-edge system integrates advanced predictive analytics and natural language processing to optimize your marketing campaigns. Experience unprecedented ROI through hyper-personalized content and precisely targeted strategies that resonate with your audience.
Transform Your Digital Presence with Our AI Digital Growth System: Leverage the capabilities of AI to enhance your digital footprint. Our AI Digital Growth System employs deep learning to optimize your website and digital platforms, ensuring they are not only user-friendly but also maximally effective in converting visitors to loyal customers.
Integrate Seamlessly with Our AI Data Integration System: In today’s data-driven world, our AI Data Integration System stands as a cornerstone for success. It seamlessly consolidates diverse data sources, providing a unified view that facilitates informed decision-making and strategic planning.
Each of these systems is built on the foundation of advanced AI technologies, designed to navigate the complexities of modern business environments with data-driven confidence and strategic acumen. Experience the future of business growth and innovation today. Contact us. to discover how our AI Growth Solutions can transform your organization.
