Your buyers are finding you through an AI tool. Are you ready?
A CEO inside my ICP found me organically. I went back through every touchpoint he hit before we ever spoke.
I had a really interesting discussion with a SaaS CEO about the business I’m growing.
Some context. The only way I’ve ever generated business thus far with consulting is warm referrals. Referrals from friends, past colleagues and former partners. But this time I had someone right within my ICP, the CEO of an established B2B software company, decades in business, who found me organically.
The first thing I asked was: how did you find me?
Google search and AI were the two primary ways. In his words, roughly: he ran a search, I came up as one of the key people, then he ran the results through their AI tool and it narrowed the field to three candidates based on their needs. I was one of the three.
I’ve been honing in on my AEO, so that was validating to hear. AEO sits on top of SEO. You can’t cite what you can’t crawl, and a page that ranks poorly is usually a page that gets ignored by retrieval too.
This really shows how much research the buyer is doing beforehand. This is the CEO of a company that’s been in business for forty years. This is an established company. And what it tells us about the buyer is how much SEO and AEO work together, and that you have to make sure your copy, your marketing, is targeted to that specific buyer in that specific moment.
That is the opening. The rest of the essay, and every one that follows, goes out on Substack.