Order and Chaos: Organising Unstructured Data

The modern enterprise is swimming in data. From customer history to buying signals, marketers have more information than they know what to do with. Yet, nobody is happy with the state of their database. Customer churn is part of that - a B2B marketing database is always outdated simply due to people changing roles within customer accounts. More fundamentally though, marketers just want a more detailed view of their prospects.

Using Call Notes

Sure, you can get budget estimates and technology installed base for most large enterprises. Although, that data is never accurate enough for every campaign despite the best efforts of HG Insights and others. However, many sales organisations do have a clear picture of the competitor landscape and budget availability for the top accounts. It's just not neatly categorised in the CRM system. It's saved in call summaries or account plans - the enormous expanse of unorganised information that analysts refer to as 'unstructured data'.

Fundamentally, busy sales reps have better things to do than update every field for every account in the CRM system. Thankfully, there are new technologies in the stack that can do it for them: namely Agentforce or Microsoft Copilot. Generative AI is excellent at summarising long documents or scattered notes. It can find snippets of information from across the enterprise and categorise it. It's the same technique that OpenAI and Perplexity are using to disrupt web search.

Human vs Machine

In recent months, there has been a lot of talk about agents replacing human staff. The reasons for that will be discussed in a future article, but using AI to replace humans does neglect the key advantage of the technology. It complements humans, streamlining admin and grunt work. From an ops perspective, AI works best when it performs the tasks that no one wants to do anyway. For most sales reps, updating your pipeline in CRM is definitely one such task.

It goes beyond that though. Agents can also uncover that critical profiling question which data brokers can't sell, but you want to collect anyway. It could be a highly specific sizing question, or a key detail about the buying process. Every business has at least one custom data point they wish to use in targeting and audience selection. It's certainly asked during Sales qualification. There may even be a field for it in CRM, although no one ever fills it in. Regardless of what information you need, Generative AI can extract it from customer notes and populate it in a picklist field on the account record. You just need to ensure the relevant question is included in sales scripts, so the AI can find it.

A Question of Accuracy

Now, hallucinations are a concern, but purchased data is not 100% accurate either. Even the gold standard data vendors such as D&B are often incorrect, and that's just for core profile fields such as industry and annual revenue. Generative AI should only be used for workflows where errors can be tolerated. That requirement should influence how the data is used, but it should not prevent the technology from being used at all. Data management workflows are inherently inaccurate, that's the nature of data.

Every data cleansing workflow should have a margin for error. Manual data normalisation techniques always do. Machine learning based data cleansing workflows have long come with a confidence score, indicating how accurate the output is. Generative AI is no different. No database is perfect, and no data cleansing process will ever be completely accurate. Data is constantly changing, but AI is a valuable tool in the ongoing battle to keep customer profiles timely and relevant. In many respects, it's an evolutionary change. However, it does open up new data sources for marketing use. In that one respect, generative AI is genuinely revolutionary.

Salesforce Summer 25 Release

The latest Salesforce release is taking place over the next few weeks. Naturally, this includes many of the Agentforce updates announced over the last few months. Most notably, it includes an upgraded SDR agent, as well as the ability to use AI to make decisions within a flow. Account Engagement customers may also be interested in the WhatsApp Business integration, which allows messages to be sent to prospects through the platform.

Demand Agents: Do Customers Want AI?

AI has been pitched as a technology to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Has anyone considered whether their customers want the AI option? In a recent article on my personal blog, I examine the major use cases for agents in B2B and consider whether customers will accept the replacement of human workers with AI.

Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix

A Marketing Operations Roadmap is an essential strategic tool that aligns marketing priorities with your overall business goals. Any roadmap begins with understanding where your marketing organisation is right now, and then defining where you want to get to. This free Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix from CRMT Digital allows you to do exactly that.