The strategic imperative for CMOs now is to move beyond tasks and begin combining AI and automation into the entire operational fabric of their target account’s journey. 

The pressure on marketing leaders continues to increase. You're expected to drive growth, prove ROI on every dollar, and deliver world-class experiences, all while navigating budget and headcount constraints. The only way to scale excellence is to build smarter, more connected operations.

At Inverta, we’re taking a look at the entire account journey, from awareness, to sales engagement, to onboarding, to retention, and identifying where we can make the most of AI to improve experiences.

Don’t use AI for AI’s sake.  Use it to improve your customer experience

Every manual handoff, every delayed follow-up, every time a prospect has to repeat themselves creates internal friction and generates cracks in the customer experience. Your buyers and customers feel your organizational gaps. Clunky internal processes manifest as a clunky customer journey, putting renewals and expansion revenue at risk.

So, why is this the critical focus for CMOs right now?

1. The Experience Moat: Products and services are increasingly commoditized, and the quality of the customer journey is the last true differentiator. Your competitor is already figuring out how to deliver proposals faster and onboard customers more smoothly. AI-powered automation isn't just about making your team's life easier; it's an offensive strategy to lock in customers with a superior experience.
2. The Efficiency Imperative: The mandate to "do more with less" isn't going away. Instead of cutting budgets and hoping for the best, you can remove the costly, time-consuming friction from your most critical revenue-generating processes. Automating things like proposal drafting, buyer research, or sales-to-service handoffs directly protects your margins and frees up your most expensive assets (your people) to focus on strategic work that a machine can't.
3. The Strategic Evolution of AI: Your CEO and board are looking for the next chapter of your AI story. Moving from human-initiated, task-based AI to process automation demonstrates true strategic maturity. It shows you're not just experimenting with a trend but re-architecting your operations for a new era of business.

How to Find the Friction Worth Fixing

So, how do you pinpoint the automation opportunities that will have the biggest impact? You can't just guess. You need to get the people who live the process every day to show you where it hurts.

We do this in a simple 2-hour workshop using a collaborative canvas like Lucid Spark. The goal isn't to boil the ocean; it's to create a visual map of the current state and identify the most painful, and potentially most valuable, moments to fix.

Here's the step-by-step process:

• Step 1: Assemble Your Cross-Functional Team: Get the right people in the physical/virtual room. This isn't a marketing-only exercise. You need representatives from the entire account lifecycle: Sales, Program Managers, customer Success, Support, Consultants - whatever roles you have that touch customers. The opportunity lives in the handoffs between these teams, and you need all perspectives present to see it.
• Step 2: Visualize the Account Journey: Start with a simple timeline representing the key stages of the customer journey, from initial awareness and consideration through to purchase, onboarding, and renewal/expansion.
• Step 3: Document the Key Activities & Rate the Moments: Going stage by stage, have the team document the critical activities. Then, for each key activity or handoff, ask them to place an emoji on the board: a smiley face 🙂 for a smooth experience or a sad face 🙁 for a clunky or frustrating one. This captures pain points for both customers and internal teams.
• Step 4: Dig into the "Why" Behind Every Sad Face: This is the most important part. For every 🙁 on the board, have the team member who placed it explain why. What about that step creates a negative experience? This analysis uncovers the root causes, whether they are time constraints, information gaps, or inconsistent approaches.

By the end of the workshop, you'll have a visual backlog of the highest-impact problems to solve.

You've Found the Friction. Now, Where Do You Start?

The output of a friction-finding workshop is a backlog of opportunities. The temptation is to try and fix everything at once. Don't. Effective automation starts with prioritization. To prioritize, run your list of friction points through three key lenses.

1. Where does it hurt both your customer and your team? Pain is a powerful motivator, and friction that causes pain on both sides of the relationship is a goldmine. Fixing these issues provides a dual return: improved customer satisfaction and increased internal efficiency and morale.
2. What can be automated with low effort? Look for opportunities that don't require a six-month data cleanup project. Quick wins are perfect for proving the value of this approach and building the organizational muscle for more complex projects down the road.
3. Where can you leverage untapped knowledge? Ask yourself: "Where is valuable knowledge trapped in our organization?" A great automation target is one where AI can tap into these sources to synthesize insights and create net-new value that traditional automation never could.

The sweet spot is where these three circles overlap. Start there.

Defining Clear Automation Workflows: Triggers, Inputs, and Outputs

Clear definitions ensure impactful automation - that hasn’t changed.. Every workflow needs three components:

• Triggers: These start the automation. They can be time-based (like a quarterly check-in), user action-based (like marking a deal "Closed-Won"), or signal-based (like a spike in website engagement).
• Outputs: This is the specific, tangible result the automation produces. It could be a personalized proposal draft, a competitive brief, or a summary of next steps after a meeting.
• Inputs: This is the raw material the AI needs to generate the output. For a personalized proposal, inputs would include CRM account data, call transcripts, and past customer interactions. For a competitive intelligence brief, it would be external market data, VOC analysis, press releases, and industry news.

Four AI-Powered Moments for Immediate Impact

These four automations can be deployed quickly to improve your account journey:

1. Automated QBR Briefs: Each quarter, trigger an AI action to pull and analyze customer support incidents, client services call transcripts, and intent data from. The outcome is a brief covering not only activity associated with your business, but insight into what challenges, goals, or competition your customer may be looking into.
2. Personalized Proposal Drafting: When a proposal is initiated in your CRM, trigger an AI to create a customized first draft tailored to the customer's specific needs and pain points discovered during the sales cycle (use your call transcripts!) The outcome is a rapid, highly targeted proposal.
3. Dynamic Sales-to-Service Playbooks: When a deal is marked "Closed-Won," automatically compile a comprehensive onboarding playbook. This output should include everything the sales team learned: key customer objectives, potential challenges, and stakeholder personalities. The result is a clear, aligned handoff that enhances customer experience and operational efficiency.
4. Executive Sponsor Briefs: Triggered by scheduled updates or lifecycle milestones, have an AI automatically generate KPI summaries, progress reports, and actionable insights by pulling data from deliverables, email exchanges, and utilization reports. This keeps executives informed and frees up your team from manual report creation, allowing them to focus on high-value strategic tasks like actually engaging the customer about the information.

Unleashing Your Talent: Automating the Admin, Not the Expertise

Let's be candid: the word "automation" makes people nervous. Team members immediately wonder, "Is a robot coming for my job?" If you don't address this head-on, any AI initiative is doomed before it starts - there’s evidence that indicates a third of employees actively sabotage AI initiatives. The key is to reframe the entire purpose. We are not automating jobs; we are automating the administrative friction around jobs.

Think about what your best people are uniquely good at. It’s not filling out CRM fields or summarizing notes. Their real value comes from building trusted relationships, asking insightful questions, and talking through complex problems.

This is the right way to frame AI automation: We are building a system that automates the process of taking the brilliant knowledge in your head and making it visible for the rest of the team. This isn’t about taking away jobs. It's about giving your people the time and space to focus on the parts of their job that they (and your customers) value most.

To make this real, you must follow up the strategic framing with practical support. Train teams thoroughly, provide clear playbooks, and deliver these insights directly into the tools they already use, like Slack or Teams.

Measuring Success and Scaling Your Efforts

To prove ROI and justify further investment, track metrics that matter: monitor cycle times, error rates, and customer engagement levels. At first, use human review to QA and refine the AI's outputs, gradually reducing oversight as accuracy improves. Continuously refine your prompts based on user feedback to enhance the accuracy and utility of the automated outputs over time.

Conclusion & Next Steps

CMOs who leverage AI-enhanced automation will drive unparalleled personalization, strategic depth, and efficiency. You will transform your account journeys from a series of disjointed, manual steps into a seamless, intelligent, and highly satisfying experience for your customers.