We hear the announcements and on repeat about how the Agentic Era is here to transform the B2B and B2C landscapes. These changes will enable us to work smarter, more efficiently, and focus on those strategic goals faster. While these concepts should rightfully create excitement, the reality is that most organisations have established processes using their existing systems, and the teams already have a specific skill set that matches the current operations of the business. But what can you do to ensure you are set up for success in the Agentic Era?
Creating a business case
We all know that AI is being integrated into the B2B marketing workflows and that Marketing Cloud Next is the future of customer engagement. However, that is not a use case; you are just following a trend. You must be clear with your requirements and how success will be measured before you can embrace the necessary changes and get buy-in from the business to fix your foundations to support this next wave of AI capabilities.
While deeply embedded foundations and processes are challenging to overhaul, revisiting and optimising these are critical for future success. After all, AI models learn from your data, and having bad data guarantees your output will be affected, and this is not ideal when working with a consumption-based product (as you want to avoid any wasted spend!).
Agentic Data Quality
Gone are the days when you only had to focus on the basics, such as ensuring the prospect has a first name populated for personalised emails. This is about ensuring that all information collected has a genuine purpose, can be leveraged, and is captured consistently.
Questions to consider:
- Is the data you’re collecting beneficial for your Sales and Marketing? Will you use the information moving forward? If you don’t need it, don’t collect it.
- Are you standardising naming conventions for campaigns and/or UTMs across platforms for better identification?
- Are fields used in critical processes being date-stamped so you know when that process was confirmed?
- Do you have free-text fields that can be converted into picklists/dropdowns to create better segments?
- Have you created any siloed processes that can be opened up to a regional or global level?
Analytical Mindset
One of the biggest shifts within a marketing team will be the need to be analytical, and bonus points for having the ability to manipulate data as well. The best people for this are those who understand the data architecture of your business, the Salesforce ecosystem, but can also recognise patterns in areas such as buying behaviours, buyer characteristics etc.
Learning fundamentals in SQL or attending a course in data-driven marketing would be advantageous here.
Things to consider:
- Do you know which Salesforce object contains the information you need?
- Is information stored in separate systems?
- Do you know how to combine and manipulate your data if lacking the full picture?
- Is your reporting done inside the Salesforce Ecosystem (Reports, Dashboards, CRM Analytics or Tableau) or elsewhere?
Process Design
You will need to re-engineer your processes by taking a look at how they function and identifying any manual steps that an agent would be able to perform or optimise for your regular team. It is also worth remembering that processes were built around humans, and some processes can be legacy/outdated in nature. These will need adapting for the agentic era.
Things to consider:
- Which process takes a considerable amount of time to complete? Will there be any opportunities for an AI agent to step in?
- Can there be a better handover from Marketing to Sales?
- If using an agent, establish clear guardrails on how these new processes will work and any shifts in organisational accountability i.e. Who fixes things if they go wrong?
- How will you measure if the re-engineered process is performing better?
- What will be the impact on the human workforce?
In summary, you will need to leverage your creative thinking and be hands-on with the new products, but it is the bottom line that counts, and if done right, it will set you up for success.
