Being a small marketing team in a large international organization can sometimes feel like the old stories of a small group of soldiers fending off the invading army. Instead of being “The 300” standing against the Persian horde, we are the half-dozen facing down a tidal wave of PowerPoints and RFPs. Our greatest weapon in this battle is AI, and it has enabled our rag-tag little squad to function as a full-service marketing agency for our many regions and departments.
To start with, this is NOT another story about using AI to automate the harassment of leads and prospects. In the B2B world, our audience has a low tolerance for “AI Slop.” In fact, elevating the human touch in sales and marketing has become an advantage in generating interest. This IS a story about using an automation tool for what it does best: taking all the most tedious tasks off our plate and letting us focus on what we do best.
Ending the Endless Game of Document Fetch
If your organization uses SharePoint, or any other document repository, then you are probably already familiar with its inherent flaw: the more documents and material you collect, no matter how organized it is, the harder it is to find what you need.
For years, we would create templates, presentation repositories, and case study databases, all to fail at swatting away the incessant “Hey, do we have anything on ____ I can use for my upcoming meeting?” And while that seems like a small matter, it means a constant drip of interruptions throughout our day to play fetch.
But then came AI! Suddenly all our hard work in sorting, tagging, and methodically organizing all our content paid off. With such a clean data set to work from, Microsoft Copilot was able to easily start fielding those requests. Now, any member of our organization can ask Copilot to find them the case studies, slides, and templates they need.
Now the constant drip of interruptions is gone… almost to the point where it seems TOO quiet sometimes.
Brand Consistency on Autopilot
Any marketer knows the importance of brand consistency, but in a large organization, getting everyone to follow the best standards and practices is like herding cats into a moving vehicle. While our weeks used to be filled to the brim with hours of cleaning up proposals and presentations, now we can use AI to automate the process of getting everything in line with our consistent “look and feel.”
For those of you who have tried, you might already be aware that even the most advanced models (at the time of writing this) are NOT the best at graphic design. AI models can spit out a hundred ideas quickly, sure. Getting them to make concise, consistent, and well-represented content is another story.
This is where careful workflow development comes into play. Through some hard work on model selection, training, and a healthy dose of trial and error, we were able to use Anthropic’s Claude to automate the process of “first round clean-up.” Now old templates and rogue presentations can, at the very least, be updated to match our colors, fonts, and general layouts with a simple prompt.
All this means that our team can focus on what really matters: telling a great visual story to make an impact in our sales and client meetings.
From Quarterly Reporting Slogs to Weekly Insights
Another time-suck and bane of any marketing team is the constant need for reporting. Some days, it can feel like you spend more time explaining what you are doing than actually doing the things that need to get done. Again, AI has been a huge game changer in this area.
Marketing data is usually scattered over a dozen different services — Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, and every social media platform using its own tracking system. This means that to truly pull insightful information together required a lot of time or a sophisticated unified data warehouse strategy.
Now, we can connect all our platforms through an AI agent that can pull and correlate data into easy-to-read and insightful reports. Incorporating a few rounds of structured back-and-forth with our campaign manager ensures that the information presented is both accurate and still maintains a human level of discernment and context.
This has all enabled us to produce robust reports on a weekly basis that used to be week-long efforts once a quarter.
But that’s not the only benefit! We were also able to replace a $35,000 yearly contract with AI-automated sales account dossiers. Now when the sales team needs intelligence on a new lead or account they are meeting with, we are able to turn around robust reports that incorporate all publicly available information about an organization in a single business day.
Boosting Leads Through A Concierge That Never Sleeps
Last to mention, but not least, we engaged with Qualified, part of Salesforce, to build a live AI agent for our website. This agent helps visitors to our website find the information they need quickly, ask questions, and get routed to the most appropriate subject matter expert to help effectively address their needs.
Much like SharePoint, websites have their own “information paradox.” You want to put enough information on the website to address every visitor’s situation, but the more information you have on the site, the more visitors feel lost or overwhelmed with choices.
Having a “concierge” to chat with greatly improves the conversion rate of a website, but dedicating a person to be available for live conversation can be very difficult and expensive. Qualified’s AI agents do a great job at filling this role.
We have found that people are more likely to engage with an AI agent if we are transparent and direct about the fact that it is AI. Inbound visitors are 2x more likely to fill out the contact form, even if they don’t utilize the AI to schedule an appointment.
The AI “Goldilocks Zone” — Getting AI Right
The mistakes most companies are making with AI fall on either side of thinking too small or too big. On one side, they think of AI and LLM chatbots as work “assistants” only, helping with content or image generation. On the other side, they try using AI to automate a role and fill in inappropriately where a human really needs to be present.
By integrating AI into every workflow we have, we have been able to do the work of a team 3-5x our size. There isn’t anything we do that doesn’t have some AI automation integrated into the process, and nothing we do removes the human touch either. This gives us the best of both worlds, and it has done nothing but elevate the value of our team.
The biggest key to all of this has been adoption and up-skilling. Each member of our team takes the time to learn and experiment with new tools and models as they continue to evolve. Our company culture has done a great job of both encouraging AI adoption and listening to the team on what is or isn’t feasible to apply to AI.
If your organization needs help understanding how to realize the value and return from AI, feel free to visit us at www.marlabs.com. You can chat with our agent, Noria, for yourself, and when you are ready, she will connect you to a real person too! 🙂
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