Delivering Enterprise AI Enablement for Better Business Outcomes
Shapiro Negotiations Institute (SNI) partnered with Spark Novus to apply AI in strategic and responsible ways across marketing, sales, and operations, strengthening execution and consistency while preserving its human-centered approach.
SNI Is a Global Leader Turning Negotiation and Influence Into Advantage
SNI is a Baltimore-based, premier global leader for negotiation, sales, and influence training and consulting. SNI helps organizations improve negotiation performance, strengthen relationships, and achieve better business outcomes through experiential learning grounded in real-world application and behavioral science.
They stand out because of its proven best-in-class facilitators who bring real-world experience to every engagement, tools and methods that are immediately applicable in business situations, a long track record of demonstrated return on investment across industries, and programs that are customized and highly interactive to meet each client’s unique needs.
The Situation
Innovation has long been central to how SNI delivers impact. The organization was an early adopter of online training, mobile app-based reinforcement, and immersive virtual reality-based learning well ahead of industry norms.
CEO and Partner, Andres Lares, recognized AI as an important next chapter for the organization. Rather than treating AI as a standalone technology initiative, he saw an opportunity to apply it thoughtfully across the enterprise in ways that aligned with SNI’s human-centered philosophy and emphasis on rigor, preparation, and real-world effectiveness.
Marketing, sales, and operations play a central role in supporting SNI’s work, from thought leadership and events to sales coaching and client engagement. As activity expanded, there was an opportunity to introduce more structure and shared systems to support scale while preserving quality and consistency.
Objectives
The engagement focused on strengthening marketing, sales, and companywide operations by embedding AI in ways that improved focus, scale, and execution across the organization.
The objectives were to:
Bring greater clarity, consistency, and operating discipline to marketing strategy and execution
Strengthen sales coaching and sales enablement through structured, repeatable support
Adopt AI across the organization in practical, governed ways that improved execution while preserving trust and quality
The Work
Spark Novus partnered closely with SNI leadership to introduce AI as a strategic capability across the organization.
Marketing Strategy and Operations
The work began by aligning SNI’s overall marketing strategy with business priorities, ensuring clarity around audiences, messaging, and execution standards. From there, AI was applied across key marketing areas to help a lean team scale impact without adding complexity.
Content strategy and ops: A formally defined brand voice, writing style guide, and audience personas were established as the foundation. These were operationalized through a RAG-based approach. Building on this foundation, a content marketing strategy enabled more targeted, SEO/GEO-aware, and accelerated content creation, with the same principles applied to social media through AI supported adaptation and efficient distribution.
Brand discovery and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): The shift beyond traditional SEO reflected the growing importance of AI-driven brand discovery. Efforts focused on ensuring expertise was represented accurately and credibly within emerging generative search and answer environments, establishing a foundation for sustained visibility and influence.
Creative and video applications: AI-enabled workflows allowed a lean marketing team to produce visual and video assets more efficiently without increasing overhead, supporting AI-assisted image creation, rapid design and layout, and streamlined video scripting, editing, and production.
Email engagement: AI was used to support more timely, personalized, and effective email communication across audiences, including automated newsletters that improved consistency and relevance in ongoing engagement.
Marketing operations: Marketing operations were streamlined by leveraging AI to automate task handoffs, updates, and status changes across collaboration and project workflows, reducing manual coordination and improving visibility as activity scaled.
Sales and Sales Enablement
Sales coaching and sales enablement focused on applying SNI’s proven negotiation rigor consistently across coaching, content, and outreach, supported by AI-enabled systems and workflows.
Sales coaching: Sales coaching was strengthened by embedding SNI’s negotiation rubric into AI models that analyze and advise sales calls, enabling more consistent and objective coaching at scale.
Sales enablement: focused on making marketing content easier to find and apply within the CRM throughout the sales process. AI supported faster access to relevant materials, helping sales teams sustain engagement across the buying journey.
Sales outreach automation: Sales outreach was supported through AI-assisted prospecting and follow-up workflows. These workflows scaled outreach activity, improved consistency across sales motions, and reduced manual effort while maintaining visibility and control for sales leaders.
Organization-wide Staff Enablement
AI was deployed across the organization with clear guidance on governance, responsible use, and internal support. Practical applications were established across marketing, sales, and operations to ensure AI was used consistently, effectively, and in alignment with organizational standards.
Client-facing AI innovation
The engagement shaped the strategic direction for a deal negotiator chatbot, defining the concept, use cases, and execution roadmap to extend SNI’s expertise into an AI-assisted client experience. The initiative reinforces SNI’s methodologies and complements existing training and advisory offerings, while preserving human judgment and decision-making.
The OUTCOMES
The work positioned SNI as an AI-forward organization, with a clear and responsible approach to adopting AI across the business. AI moved from isolated use to an integrated capability, grounded in governance, shared standards, and practical application aligned with SNI’s values and methodologies.
Across marketing and sales, AI-enabled systems strengthened consistency, scale, and execution without increasing complexity.
Marketing gained clearer standards and faster, more focused output across content, social, creative, and email.
Sales benefited from more structured coaching, improved access to relevant content, and more efficient outreach, all aligned with SNI’s established negotiation framework.
From an operations and employee enablement perspective, AI became a day-to-day productivity layer across the organization. Every staff member has access to AI tailored to their roles, enabling teams to work more efficiently, reduce friction in routine tasks, and operate with greater effectiveness across functions.
“Our approach to AI is grounded in our values and how we serve our clients. Spark Novus helps us apply AI strategically and practically across the organization, including strengthening how our marketing and sales functions operate and scale.”
Andres Lares
CEO and Partner
Shapiro Negotiation Institute
Ready to Enable AI as a Real Operating Capability?
Progress accelerates when AI is applied with structure, governance, and intent.
Spark Novus partners with marketing leaders to enable AI strategically and responsibly across the marketing organization. The work focuses on strengthening execution, consistency, and operating discipline, embedding AI into day-to-day workflows without disrupting strategy, trust, or quality.
The result is a marketing organization better equipped to scale, align with sales, and operate with clarity as complexity increases.
If this reflects where your marketing organization is headed, it may be time to connect with Spark Novus.
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AI enablement means putting structure around how AI is used so it improves execution, not just productivity. It includes clear standards, governance, and workflow integration that allow marketing teams to use AI consistently and responsibly as part of day-to-day operations.
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AI works best when it is grounded in existing strategy and brand standards rather than treated as a separate initiative. By defining guardrails around voice, messaging, and use cases, AI can support execution while preserving clarity, credibility, and decision-making integrity.
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Experimentation focuses on isolated wins. Meaningful adoption focuses on repeatability. When AI is enabled across shared workflows with clear standards and governance, it becomes part of how marketing operates instead of a collection of disconnected tools.
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AI can support alignment by reinforcing shared frameworks, improving access to relevant content, and creating more consistent handoffs between teams. The goal is not automation for its own sake, but smoother execution across the buyer journey.
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As discovery shifts into generative search and answer environments, brands need to focus less on rankings and more on how expertise is represented and interpreted. This requires clearer structure, stronger authority signals, and consistency so AI systems surface accurate and credible brand narratives.