Every company has or will have an Artificial Intelligence (AI) initiative. To remain relevant, you need to prove the value of your AI initiatives to your customers and partners. The other challenge is to ensure that you can drive significant revenue growth from your AI investments.
At Revenue Growth Strategy, I have been helping B2B companies position and win with breakthrough solutions including AI, Cloud, Internet of Things, SaaS and many other technological trends.
There is a five step process that I follow to help companies maximize their ROI from AI. Whether you are a solution provider with AI solutions or a company that has integrated AI into your internal solutions, these 5 steps get you from concept to results.
1. Create the Industry Use Cases
The first step is to map the use cases and business processes that benefit from the application of AI. As we consider each use case, there can be different levels – strategic vs tactical. There can also be use cases developed at the business level, functional or team level and user level. All are important to flush out.
When you provide a solution or service, you can improve a business process through automation, optimization and AI acceleration. All of these benefits should be captured as part of your use case..
2. Determine the Pains/Business Challenges that are Addressed
You want to eliminate the fallacy of technology in search of a problem. Normally I conduct a strategic messaging workshop to help identify all of the pains and business challenges that you address with AI and your optimized use case. It is not unusual to identify 5-10 business challenges that are addressed with every use case.
For instance, if you integrate AI into your call center for customer support, you may be able to significantly reduce or eliminate long customer wait times, excess time to resolution, truncated support only during business hours, and a growing customer issue backlog.
3. Validate the Positioning and Value Created with Your Target Audience
Once you understand all of the pain/business challenges and corresponding value that you create that is addressed by AI and your use case, you can validate the importance with your target audience. I have found that targeted surveys with decision makers help you prioritize the importance of the challenges you solve and value you deliver.
4. Build Your ROI/Cost Justification Case
When you apply AI to a business process, you can determine the value created before and after the application. Next, I measure and monetize the value created so that a ROI or cost justification can be built. Many technology proposals or projects are “dead on arrival” because they do not have a sound financial and business justification.
5. Deliver Your Adoption Offers/Quick Start Program
Finally, when you have a new AI or technology offering, you want to accelerate adoption. Rather than offer a free trial or proof of concept, I work with every company to create a quick start program. It clearly states what will be accomplished in 30 or 60 days so expectations can be met and exceeded. This approach also helps to eliminate the risk of your solution or service working in the client’s environment.
All of these 5 steps, when taken together, enable you to bring significant technological advancements to the market such as AI with a powerful formula that leads to adoption and revenue growth.
If you value what I have shared in this blog, download my Revenue Acceleration System here, which includes a detailed infographic to see how you can follow my unique framework to scale your business, step-by-step.
