As AI becomes even more prevalent in society and business, leaders are looking for ways to embed the new technology into their go-to-market motion. Gartner predicted in 2023 that 35% of CROs would establish an internal AI Operations team by 2025. These teams help to manage change, compliance and adoption to ensure new technology is used in a way that promotes the company’s goals.

Whether you’re considering establishing a new AI Ops team or looking to expand your existing team’s effectiveness, consider a few questions to guide execution. The most successful sales organizations are able to quickly capitalize on new technologies because they have strong, unilateral strategic alignment on their go-to-market message and process. These questions can help you set a strong foundation to implement AI for the GTM team in a way that drives results.

1. Are you informing the tools with the right guiding principles?

While AI tools are rapidly evolving, they still rely on us to educate them. Your organization’s AI toolset is only as strong as its inputs, and the most transformative instances of AI usage are customized to your company’s solutions and processes.

As you set priorities for your AI Operations team, consider: Do you have a universal source of truth for your sales messaging, differentiation, and process? We recommend every leader asks the following four essential questions to their executive team and across their organization:

1. What problems do you solve?
2. How do you solve those problems?
3. How do you do it differently than the competition?
4. What’s your proof?

Most of the time, you won’t get the same answer from everyone. That basic level of alignment is crucial to efficiently reaching your revenue goals and growing your market share, and it’s the baseline of the strong customized AI strategy. If your go-to-market teams and your AI tools aren’t operating on the same standards of what great selling looks like for your specific solution an customer, you risk missing out on revenue.

2. Do you want the tools to be powered with what your reps are doing now?

Before implementing new tools, your AI Operations team should conduct an audit of your current go-to-market process. Are there any inconsistencies in how deals are prospected, managed and executed?

Most organizations have performance gaps between A-players and B-players, but if you’re hoping that AI tools will be a quick fix to elevate your underperformers, you’re out of luck. AI tools are more likely to exacerbate the execution challenges and exaggerate the performance gaps you’re already experiencing.

But what if you could provide a formula that would elevate your ‘good’ players to ‘great’ and make AI more than just a neat tool or shortcut, but a productivity multiplier? Imagine the productivity of a team who is able to execute on the topline revenue strategy at the point of sale, enabled by the power of AI. That’s only possible when your AI Operations team starts with a strong blueprint for sales execution. 

3. Are you informing the tools with best practices and not simply what worked in the last deal?

Every deal is different. That’s why we encourage sales leaders to implement frameworks like the Value Messaging Framework and MEDDICC in their organizations. A framework is not a talk track or a product list — it’s a functional guide that provides a universal source of truth and best practices for your organization which can be overlaid onto the priorities, use cases and business outcomes of any deal.

The same is true for your AI tools. You want them to be able to identify patterns, predict risks and solve problems — not just parrot siloed and subjective information. To do that, they need clear logic and content outlining the ideal sales process.

As you inform your internal AI operations team, ensure that you arm them with a customized framework that aligns everyone in your organization on what a great deal looks like for your organization. Tap cross-functional data from customer success, sales, pre-sales, marketing, legal and any other department involved in the customer engagement journey. Uncover not just what works, but why it works and how you can replicate it at scale. That’s the kind of data that will create a strong AI-enabled motion where technology augments revenue-driving activity to accelerate growth.

Ensure Measurable ROI from Your AI Strategy

Just like any successful sales initiative, powerful and transformative AI results are built on a solid foundation of processes, content and data about your solutions and customers. Any organization can purchase a tool, but the ones who see the greatest impact on revenue will be those who embed the technology into their go-to-market motion. Read our leadership guide for more strategies on driving revenue through AI for sales.