Ep. 154: Shiv Narayanan, How To SaaS | The AI Visibility Imperative and Driving Pipeline From Search

0:00Hey, everybody. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to take an opportunity to tell you about my new book, AI Marketing Blueprint. It just hit number one bestseller status across multiple categories on Amazon, and it walks you through a proven framework that we are taking our clients through here at How to SaaS and how to stay relevant and visible in a world with AI platforms. One of the biggest problems that we have seen across clients and companies is that the traditional channels that they relied on, like paid search or SEO, have declined significantly or are getting more expensive and competitive.

0:33The reason for this is that a lot of buyers are starting to self-educate themselves and research on AI platforms. So a lot of that volume that was previously going to those channels is now moving to these new AI platforms. So to stay relevant, the book walks you through seven new rules that companies in all kinds of verticals and industries need to consider so that they can continue growing their pipeline and revenue and ultimately their enterprise value. So if this applies to your business or one of the companies that you've invested in, I definitely recommend that you pick up a copy. It's available on Amazon, on Apple Books, on Barnes & Noble, and even share it with your teams.

1:10Grab a bunch of copies so that you can kind of consume the content together and start to apply it to your business. And with that said, let's move on to the episode. Welcome to the Private Equity Value Creation Podcast, where we interview leading investors, operators, bankers, and advisors to help you answer one question. How do we increase the enterprise value of our companies? My name is Shiv Narayanan, and each episode, I will dive deep with a guest to help you become a better value creator and capital allocator. So with that said, let's jump right in and let's get started with today's episode.

1:45Hey, everybody. Welcome to today's episode. It's a different type of episode today. I speak at a private equity event every single year down south. It's called Silicon Y 'all, and it has investors from across North America and founders that come together, and they share best practices and a bunch of insights. And it's an event at which I speak every single year. And every time I go to this event, I get an opportunity to share everything that we've learned with the audience and with our private equity partners and a bunch of founders about what's working and not working on the marketing side and what is the next thing that founders and companies need to really be aware of so that they can ensure that they're growing at the rate that they want to and avoid business continuity risks.

2:25Well, this year I talked about the importance of AI visibility and how we're seeing a lot of our clients struggle with this problem because they're not taking it seriously enough. And meanwhile, buyers are making decisions in a very different way. And you probably are familiar with this, that my new book, AI Marketing Blueprint, covers this topic. But even since that book was published, all kinds of new technologies have emerged and there's new patterns and new things that we're seeing with our clients. And so I wanted to share that on stage and the talk was incredibly well received. It's one of the best presentations I've personally ever given.

2:57And there's a lot of great content in it that you yourself as an investor should be listening to. You should also be thinking about your portfolio companies and how they could be applying the same insights. And there's a huge slide deck that accompanies the presentation that you can download and share with your portfolio company. So that's what today's episode is. It's a recording from that talk. The video is incredibly high quality. There's a bunch of slides that I'm walking the audience through. There's also a Q &A period during the episode. So check it all out. And I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of great takeaways for you to think about how you're creating enterprise value for your companies in a world with AI and how they can be better set up for success so that they can close more deals, leveraging AI platforms and improving their visibility.

3:38So with that said, I'll leave you to it. Enjoy the episode.

3:50thank you um okay so i'm going to talk about something i've been coming to this conference for almost 10 years and every year i try to share new things that we're learning as we work with our clients as we work with our private equity firms that are our partners and we learn we learn new stuff every year because we see hundreds of companies, we have thousands of conversations. Every week I'm talking to five to seven P groups, I'm talking to ten plus companies and I'm seeing their realities, I'm seeing their data and I'm learning a bunch. And I'd say this year like what I'm about to share is probably one of the biggest changes or transformations that I've seen in a very long time and I hope that that's what you guys leave here with because I think some of the things that I'm about to share have major impact on business continuity and what you guys actually need to be focused on.

4:42One of the patterns that I've seen is that companies, when it comes to AI, they have spent a lot of time thinking about product and how to make sure that the product is still competitive, is not exposed to threats from AI, and has AI embedded into whatever it is that they're selling. On the sales side, they're thinking about how to leverage agents and be more efficient or have reps enabled. But on the marketing side, there are not nearly enough conversations happening. And from my perspective, when we look at these companies, how the buyer is making decisions has completely changed. But the companies and how we sell has not.

5:21And even now, when I talk to companies about their AI strategy on the go-to-market side, they kind of talk about it as like there's SEO and AEO and they're kind of like the same thing. and that's about all that they're really talking about. And so that's what I want to actually address. And just as a quick, to start this off, just for the room, just put up your hand if you've done a search in the last 12 months or even this week where previously two years ago you would have done this search on Google and now you're doing it on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. Look around the room. Like, it's basically everybody.

5:52And it's in every market. It's in every vertical. It is affecting enterprise B2B. It's affecting transactional. It's in retail. It's in every single market that you can think of. And there's some data on this as well. ChatGPT's search volume is climbing while Google's search volume is declining. And so many companies in this room have been built on inbound search, or it's one of their top three channels where people come, they do a search, they come to your website, they sign up for a demo, they talk to a sales rep, and they get to close one. And meanwhile, as we just surveyed the audience here, how people are making buying decisions in B2B has changed significantly.

6:2894 % of B2B buyers are doing research online before they talk to anybody. 67 % of buyers would rather not talk to anyone before they actually get to a decision point. And one of the number one sources cited by buyers is using these AI platforms. And at the same time, on platforms like Google, the number of zero-click searches is increasing significantly. People search for something that, like two years ago, they would have searched and then went to a website and tried to learn more information. Now they just read the AI overview and they leave. And so this means for all your companies, you're not getting the traffic, you're not getting the leads, you're not getting the volume, you're not getting the opportunities.

7:06And AI overviews, if they exist on a particular search result, the number of clicks that go to subsequent websites is cut in half. And if you are cited in the AI overview, then you get a little bit more share of the clicks. with the point is that wherever there's an AI overview, it changes how users behave. And so this is really about real estate. About five years ago, if you did any type of search, like CRM software, real estate software, cybersecurity software, there would be four paid links, and there would be like 10 organic links, and the user would click two or three of those and maybe go to your competitor's website and your website, sign up for four or five demos, and then make a decision.

7:46Now they're reading the AI overview at the top, then there's paid links, then there's organic links, and they're not clicking anything because they're just reading the AI overview. And the order of these things can change, but the point is that on every single query out there, there's way more competition than ever before. And this is having a meaningful impact on companies. This is HubSpot. They're the pioneers of inbound marketing. They saw their traffic decline from 24 million a month to 6 million a month. And we are seeing this with all of our clients. There's 30%, 40%, 50 % declines in just organic traffic to things that people previously took for granted and they actually had built big companies on.

8:24And at the same time, paid media is getting way more expensive. In every single category, in every single vertical, every single cost per click for campaigns in all of these different verticals has gone up by 20%, 30%. In some cases, you can see like 12%, 15%. But what we're seeing when you get into the actual data of like outside of branded keywords that you would be bidding on, it's all gone up by a lot more because it's just hyper, hyper competitive. And so this is a core message that I want you guys to leave here with is that this is an existential problem. When we talk about business continuity, I was talking to somebody at our table, one of the PE investors here from Edison, on one of the things that they're struggling with is underwriting deals to figure out like what's the business continuity in a world with AI but I'd say like if you're not visible on AI platforms, that's one of the biggest business continuity threats that exists inside the market.

9:20How I think about it is like two, three, four, five years out, 20 % of the companies that exist in every single vertical, like most markets are fragmented, right? There's like 30, 40 players. In two, three, four, five years, 20 % of the market will have everything because the rest of the market is not visible on AI platforms. So even if you're not seeing it in your data right now, you are going to see it because of how buyers are actually buying and self-educating themselves. And the point is that invisibility compounds. So if you're not visible on AI results for the types of queries your customers are asking, over time that's going to mean that you're going to have lesser traffic, your cost of acquisition is going to go up, you're going to have lesser opportunities, you're going to have lesser close one deals, and those are the alternative futures.

10:02If you're invisible, you're going to see global metrics decline, and if you are visible, you have a huge opportunity in front of you to actually get a lion's share of the market. And this is also true in the sense that if you are favored by AI platforms and you are being cited by these platforms, all your other channels are going to perform better because people see you on the AI search because they trust AI as like a trusted advisor. If that's recommending you, then your organic traffic is going to go up, your paid traffic is going to improve, and all your other channels like your sales rep outreach is going to be better.

10:38At trade shows, you're going to be perceived better. If somebody met you somewhere else and then they go to the AI platform to confirm if you're the best solution for them, they're going to trust your recommendations better and maybe treat your proposal differently. And the visibility on this impacts metrics across the board. You're going to see better conversions on your website, better conversions through different stages of the funnel as well. And I'm going to send this deck to you guys so you're going to have all these metrics as well, but feel free to take screenshots and all that as well.

11:05The QR code here, by the way, is one of the ways to get the slides. The point to mention is that this is not about SEO. People keep comparing SEO and AEO and go, a lot of clients that we work with, they have agencies that have sold them an extension of their SEO engagements into AEO saying, yeah, this is going to improve your visibility, but it's not the same principles. This is like a holistic business strategy shift that needs to happen inside companies because the buyer, let's say three, four years ago, would have come to your website or talked to your SDR or account executive and then gotten all the information.

11:40Now they're doing all of that on the AI platform itself. They're bypassing all these stages of the customer journey. And meanwhile, you have all these sales reps that have been hired to have these conversations, but that's not the person that your customer is talking to and learning about. So if four years ago, they would have done all this research with you and with your competitors to figure out what's the best solution for them. They're bypassing all that and having these conversations with AI platforms and then making a decision with you at the end. Or once the AI platform says, hey, this is the one solution you should go with, they end up coming to that company and signing up for a demo and getting to close one.

12:16And with this, the core idea to understand is that you could ignore SEO. Especially if you were an enterprise B2B. Let's say you were selling to the 600 biggest hospitals in the country. You could say, yeah, we just need to sell to certain hospital administrators or the CO of the hospital. But with AI visibility and AI acting as this trusted advisor, you cannot ignore this channel because people are having these conversations in real time. And if you look at the buying committee that you sell into, let's say you sell into CFOs, and the CFO gets a controller involved, and then the controller may have a certain bookkeeper, and then you've got to get the CEO of their buy-in to actually make the decision.

12:59Now AI is one of the key stakeholders, and I'd say it's the most important stakeholder because every other stakeholder that you sell to, once they meet you, one of the first things they're going to do is go on the AI platforms and ask what does the AI platform think of you. And if they get a negative recommendation or if you're not visible, they're not going to buy from you. So it's not just about visibility. It's a form of sales enablement that's happening. And so this is not optional. major continuity risk and at the same time it is a huge opportunity because the companies that figured this out have a huge opportunity in front of them to capture a big share of the market and the same thing happens every time a new channel emerges like we've seen this happen over and over again in the last 25 years every time a new channel emerges more new big companies are built when search and SEO kind of took off but companies like TripAdvisor and Yelp really took off when you had meta ads really take off companies like Warby Parker and Casper took off, right?

13:55So with AI answers right now, we actually don't have true category winners because people haven't figured out how to be visible on these platforms. And yes, of course, we have companies like Salesforce that are the leaders in CRM, but there is a huge opportunity for a tiny CRM company that's hyper-focused on certain verticals, let's say real estate agents, to completely out-compete Salesforce just by being visible on AI platforms and building a product specifically for that vertical and that ICP. And a big reason for this is that customer queries cascade. So think about even just how you yourself search.

14:34Earlier, Zach asked, like if you check your LOIs on ChatGPT, you didn't just ask one question. You ask the first question, then you upload the document, then it gives you a recommendation, then you follow up with additional questions, you give clarifications, you give context, You're feeding all of this information to the AI platform until you get a final recommendation. It is not a one-query search, whereas on Google five years ago, it was a one-query search. It was just like, give me a template for X or give me the top 10 CRM softwares for real estate agents. And so because queries cascade, the nature of content we need to address those queries dramatically expands.

15:19It's an exponential expansion. because I can ask 20 different types of questions as a follow-up to figure out what is the best fit for whatever it is that I want. And purchases are decided in the ultra-long tail. So if in the short, if like the short form is like best CRM, the long form could be like, I need a CRM for a team of 12 people that's targeting this specific market in this state. This is how much budget I have to spend and I need to be able to implement this in 30 days. That's so specific and in five years ago you would never create content for the situation because nobody was searching for that but on an AI platform people are asking this question.

16:00Your ICP is definitely asking this question and AI platforms need to be able to find that to be able to answer that question effectively and there's kind of self educating. So here's an example right like I could say I'm looking for a CRM give me some recommendations and Claude and ChatGubiti you know, I run a consulting firm. So initially just gave me like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, et cetera. Then I said, actually no, I'm a$25 million logistics company. Now give me some recommendations. So then it gives me definitively Salesforce. Then I say, well, I have a thousand customers. I have an account list of 27 ,000, like a total addressable market that I've defined.

16:33Which one would you recommend? Still Salesforce. Then I said, Salesforce feels clunky and expensive. What would you recommend instead? It gives me HubSpot. And how do customers rate HubSpot versus Salesforce? Suddenly, HubSpot is rated higher. And then finally, I asked a more qualifying question. I said, is there a CRM built specifically for logistics companies? And all of a sudden, Salesforce and HubSpot are out of the equation. That last question, it recommended a company called SalesDash. Never heard of this business. But imagine if I'm SalesDash and I was never in the first five answers. If I never asked that sixth question, that customer is never going to consider SalesDash as a potential purchase.

17:12They're still going to go to one of those four or five websites. And so the point is that whatever it is that you're selling for the context that you're selling in, you need to have content that addresses each of those types of queries that your customer has. And if you don't, then your competitor is going to be the one that's recommended. So it has to be super specific. It has to be for the situations that your customers face. It has to be for a specific company profile. And it has to address certain scenarios and problems that you specifically solve as a business. And the second part of this is that with AI platforms, reputation is currency.

17:45Because not only is the customer trying to answer specific questions, but it's also asking, like, what kind of results have other people experienced? And from the AI standpoint, what you say about yourself is important, but what your customers really think and other people think about your business is more important. Because that's what's feeding the signals of how it's actually making these decisions. And trust is a very high factor. So it's asking, your customers are asking questions like, is this company legit? Will I get the kind of ROI that I want from this business? They're asking me to invest this much.

18:16What are my alternatives? What are you saying about the competitors in this market? Like all of these kinds of questions are influencing their decisions, and AI is checking the entire internet to get an answer. It's checking your review on G2 and Keptera. It's checking what people are saying on Reddit. It's checking out YouTube videos. Like Gemini has access not only to the content on YouTube, it has access to how long people watch the content. So imagine if there's a specific video about your market that people are watching all the way to the end. What that video says about your business is super relevant to whatever Google recommends in their AI overviews.

18:51And this is a list of how these sources are being ranked and tracked and being cited in what the answers are. But this list will keep changing. Reddit is a great example for this. When AI first kind of came out, it was one of the biggest weighted sources. and then it kind of crashed dramatically a few months back. And now it's kind of stabilized around 20 % to 30 % of the time. It's still cited because people are still talking. And YouTube is growing because more and more video content is important. So I'd say one of the takeaways is like you as businesses have to be producing more YouTube content because it is going to be used as training data across the board.

19:27The other thing worth mentioning is that in B2B software in particular, your own content matters. So if we were, let's say, evaluating like iPhone cases, In that particular market, there are so many review websites that what a particular business says about their own iPhone case matters less than what all the other review sites say. But in B2B software, there aren't that many sources to go after. So what you say about yourself and what you're publishing on an ongoing basis really matters in terms of what is actually being cited and referenced inside these queries. So that's the preamble or the context.

20:00I want you guys to really understand that because this informs how we behave going forward. and that is AI is trying to answer a very specific question. It's trying to answer what is the best possible answer for this query and who has the best possible answer to this query. And the who part is more important than the what part because it's trying to figure out like which entity, person or business has the most requisite expertise in this market or is adding the most value to this market so I actually trust their recommendation to be able to use them in my citations and recommendations for the customer.

20:34And so as we work with our clients, we've identified four pillars. And this is, like, I'd say one of the core things of this presentation, is there's four pillars that you need to build as a business to be more visible on AI platforms. The first is your business and what your product is and who you sell it to, basically your value proposition. This is your product marketing content, your sales enablement content, and there's some technical optimization work. A lot of companies we meet don't even meet this first pillar. So get this first pillar right, or you won't be visible at all for anything else that you do.

21:09The second is contextual, which is what we've been talking about, which is hyper-specific to all the different ICPs and all the different situations that you can actually help your customer in. And this should be showing up in all forms of long-form content on your website, on your help site, in your videos, and everything else. Third is reputation. Anywhere where your product or your competitors are being recommended and what businesses or other people are saying about you, making sure that that's really dialed in. And then the fourth pillar is expertise. This is what is the thought leadership that you're putting out in this market and why should people look at you as an expert?

21:44This could be the fact that you've written books, the fact that you have a podcast, the fact that you're producing a ton of content or active on social media, like all of these things feed into expertise. And you can't just do one of these things. You have to do all four of these things at the same time. So let's talk about the core side. When I say product marketing, sales enablement, technical optimization, like in these things, whoever it is that you're selling to, what are the core benefits that you offer? What are the situations in which you help? Do you have all of these things visible? When we talk about sales enablement, when we think about our sales reps, in most companies, sales reps are put through some sort of a training program.

22:20We give them market insights, we teach them about pricing and packaging, we teach them about the customer, we give them a wholesale suitcase. And meanwhile, a lot of this stuff is hidden from AI platforms. They can't use it as training data because it lives in your SharePoint or some sort of sales enablement software. And the sales rep has this in their heads, but the customer has questions about it. And if they're asking AI platforms these questions, but the AI platform has nowhere to go to retrieve this information, then where is it going to get that answer from? It's probably going to go to your competitor's website or a different website.

22:50So you need to make all of this content visible to AI platforms so that it can actually start referencing these things. And historically, like your customer would have gotten this piece of information from different sources. It would have gotten from different websites, from your sales reps, on social, and now they're going to the AI platforms to get the same answer. So you need to think about all the different questions that your prospect will be asking at different stages of the buyer journey, and make sure that you have answers to that visible on all your different properties, and you need to distribute that.

23:24Because AI platforms are built for retrieval. There's this massive database of information that they're querying, and the answer is not always the same. In Google, I could ask the same question 10 times, and likely it would give me the same answer 10 times. But on AI platforms, because of context, It gives a different answer every time. It's probabilistic. It's retrieving information. So you need to get all this training data available to the AI platforms. It should be on your help site. It should be on your main website. It should be on your social media. It should be on YouTube. It should be on all platforms.

23:56And then the AI platform will be actually able to retrieve that and answer certain questions. Then on the contextual content, you want as much long-form content to exist across all these properties. because the AI platform is constantly trying to figure out, okay, it's a CRM software, but what's the CRM software for real estate agents versus therapists versus construction versus any other market that you potentially serve in? The answer in each of those markets at different sizes might be different. And so for each of those, you need to be able to kind of fan out. It's called fanning out, and it's a technical term, but the idea is that you need to be able to expand queries into subsets and answer all those separate questions.

24:37So what's the best CRM software for a small agency that's also under$50 per user per month? That's an example of something that you need to answer. And you want to do this for every single ICP, every single vertical, every single market that you actually want to compete in. And the more you answer different questions related to that market, the more likely you are to be cited. And this should lead to, like, an extensive roadmap. across your different ICPs, across your different verticals, there should be hundreds if not thousands of pieces of content you need to produce. And here's an example.

25:10If you're a project management software, under each vertical for marketing agencies versus construction firms versus software teams, how are you talking to these markets at different stages of buyer journey? Where do these pieces of content live? And the more you have content for each of those scenarios, the more it's going to cite you in queries for those specific verticals. And one basic step you can take is un-gate as much of your content as possible. In a lot of enterprise companies, as an example, pricing is gated. But one of the most common questions asked on AI platforms is, how much does this software cost versus another software?

25:46Is the ROI there? And you might think, yeah, I'd like the salesperson to be able to control that conversation, to be able to close the deal. But with AI platforms, the AI platform is getting that answer one way or another. They're getting it from a Reddit community or a forum or on G2 or Capterra, and they're giving that answer, or competitor. They're giving that answer to your customer. So it's better that you provide it, regardless of what market that you're in. And you want to do this for everything that you have that's kind of hidden. It could be sales enablement assets. It could be comparison guides.

26:17It could be case studies. What are all the assets that you currently have behind some sort of a wall? And make that visible to AI platforms. Third thing is reputation. What are other people seeing about you? and you need to get on top of this as soon as possible because, again, this is one of the biggest buckets of questions that your customer is asking AI platforms about you. So what are the reviews on Capterra or G2? I can't go backwards. Okay, yeah. What are your recommendations on Capterra, G2, or other platforms? What's being said in different communities about you? What are the conversations that are happening?

26:53And what is the user-generated content saying about you? Like there could be somebody that's not part of your business that has just created a YouTube video comparing you to the five other solutions in this market. And what did they specifically say in that article? Do you have someone reaching out to these different folks to make sure the right things are being said? Or are you updating what is being said about you? And this should also be guided by you as a project. This is like an essential project that needs to be happening in every company right now because that's one of the most common queries that customers are asking.

27:24So if people are criticizing your product on G2 Crowd or Capterra, you better be taking that feedback and giving it to your product team to improve that, and then go back to your customers and improve the reviews on those platforms because your future customers are going to be asking those kinds of questions. It could be that you need to improve a CS process. It could be that you need to update how your sales reps are handling like LOA, excuse me, from opportunity to close. And so for each stage and each type of feedback that your customers are giving you, you need to make sure that you're addressing especially negative sentiment.

28:01Because the only thing worse than being invisible to AI is for AI to know what you do but having something negative to say about you because then it's a lock. Nobody's buying from you, right? So you need to be able to control what's being said on those queries. And a good way to track this is looking at the sentiment that AI platforms are recommending. And the sentiment really kind of helps you understand the specific buckets of issues that you need to address. Some of those things can be addressed by your go-to-market team. Some of those things can be addressed by your product team. And a lot of companies that we talk to are not doing this full feedback loop, where they look at the sentiment, they look at the negative thing, and the product team is actually addressing it because they understand the importance of visibility.

28:44but it's like a critical growth initiative that needs to happen. And you need to be doing this analysis on an ongoing basis because AI overviews and how they're looking at your business constantly changes. Like you're going to release something, something new is going to come out in the market. Six months later, the sentiment has changed. There's a new set of reviews. Like you have to constantly be updating this as part of your product and marketing effort overall. And there's different solutions across different departments that you can kind of be implementing across the board. And I can send you guys this after.

29:13There's a bunch of good examples. The fourth thing is expertise. And I often lean into this because I think at the end of the day, this is the long game. Like if you showcase to AI platforms that you are an expert in a particular market, your likelihood of being cited is significantly higher than if it doesn't think of you as an expert. So making sure you're investing in multimedia platforms or social media platforms that are relevant to your market. For some, it might be YouTube. For others, it might be podcasts. For others, it could be LinkedIn or Instagram or other verticals. are you present and actively publishing content on an ongoing basis at a rapid clip?

29:50Like this, one of the big mistakes that I see inside companies is that the rate at which they produce content is just not fast enough. If you're releasing one blog post a week, like you're basically like non-existent. You may as well not do it because you need to be publishing like one or two things per day, minimum. And if your marketing team is working too slow, then they're not leveraging AI enough to help them work faster. And that's one of the other skill gaps inside companies is people don't understand how to leverage AI to be able to do this stuff fast enough. And the important thing here is like you've got to train AI like a sales rep, and eventually you need to train AI like an expert.

30:24Because it needs to know everything that you know about your ICP and your customers and all the things that help them solve their core problems. So the more contextual it is, the more relevant it is to your ICP, the more omnipresent you are across all social platforms. that increases your authority and engagement is a very critical signal there. If AI platforms can see, oh, this person publishes a lot of YouTube content and they get a lot of views or they get a lot of comments or there's a lot of engagement on LinkedIn or the CEO's actively followed on LinkedIn and whenever the CEO posts on LinkedIn, a bunch of people come and engage with their content.

30:58Like all of these things help AI platforms see you as an expert. And a big part of it, we call this iconic positioning. A lot of companies do what's on the left of this slide. They just talk about pain points related to whatever it is that they sell. So if you have a certain feature in your product, you just talk about the pain point associated with that, and then you tie your product marketing and messaging to that feature, and then you eventually get the person to either try from you or do a demo with you. But what you really want is more on the iconic side is extending way beyond your product.

31:29What are the 20, 30, 50 other problems that your ICP has? and let's address all of those issues as well because then the market perceives you not just as a provider of a product or a service, but also as an authority figure in that space. Like this conference is a great example of this. Like Founders is an investment bank, but we're talking about all kinds of topics, legal stuff, financial stuff, marketing stuff, right? You want to do that for your market because your ICP wants to learn about all this other stuff. And then they will still work with you. They'll still buy from you because now they trust you a lot more.

32:01And there's examples here, like if you're selling payroll software, you might still publish content on how to hire a head of HR or how to build a right-sized marketing team because it's super important and the person kind of making the decision on the payroll software is tied in to deciding who to hire as their head of HR. Same thing on the e-commerce side, like we could talk about the features of building an e-commerce store, but we should also be talking about how to use Facebook ads to promote your e-commerce store. All of these things are interconnected, and you want to distribute your expertise everywhere.

32:32It should be on your website. It should be on your blog. It should be on your help site. It should be integrated with your product. And here's a couple of great examples of this. This is Shopify. They have almost a million subscribers on their YouTube channel. Yes, they sell e-commerce software, but that's not what their channel is about. It's about all the things an e-commerce founder could do to grow their business faster. Here's another example. There's a company called Jobber. They sell field service management software, but they have a podcast for people that own field service businesses.

32:58and how to actually run a field service business better. There's a lot of companies that do this type of stuff. You'll see a big similarity. Their ICP is being interviewed on the podcast, gives them a long-form piece of content. It can be published on multiple platforms, and you can answer hundreds of queries at the same time because you don't need to just have questions on blog posts being answered like a question answer, like an FAQ. It can be answered on a long-form podcast that is engaged with, that has visibility, that is on social, that is being shared, and then all that content is in the transcript.

33:29And then AI platforms go, oh, yeah, this company has expertise in this area. The final thing, and I have eight minutes, so I'm making good time. Final thing is, what does the actual technical process look like? So I wanted to make sure you guys had this as well. This is the process we take all of our clients through. Step one, you want to audit your baseline. Like, how visible are you today? And I can tell you, we've done this for$200 million companies. We've done it for$500 million companies. companies that have high rankings on a lot of SEO terms, they're spending millions of dollars on paid ads, and if we audit their visibility baseline on AI platforms, it's like less than 20%, because they have not built content for the context of their customers on these AI platforms.

34:13So audit the baseline. Are you showing up 10 % of the time, 15 % of the time? Let's understand that. Step two, find the biggest gaps in your market or for your business that you're currently not showing up for. Third, you want to execute in order, like what is the most core thing that you should be producing and work through those pillars that I had mentioned. And then finally, you want to track over time. Is your visibility actually improving? And what you actually want, I'd say in the next 12 months, is let's say your starting baseline is like 12%, you want that number to get to 30, 40, 50%.

34:46And that would mean that you're actually executing on this content and you're being more visible. And I guarantee your pipeline will also increase at the same time. There are a lot of companies in here that I've talked to briefly that are saying they're getting more leads from AI search than ever before. Because people are querying, they do show up, they come inbound, and they convert, right? So we know that that works, but it's definitely tied to visibility. So you need to be more visible, and then you're going to see your global pipeline metrics improve. And how you want to do this is, first, you want to look at your baseline.

35:14People are like, how do I figure out what percentage of time I'm actually showing up? Well, you need to build an exhaustive list of questions. So those 25 questions I had on the slide, you can expand on that and then you can go through your sales calls, the recordings. You can go through what's happening inside communities. You can look at what people are seeing on Quora or Reddit. You can look at your NPS surveys and hear what people are seeing there. Are there feature requests that your customers have made? All of these things are starting points for you to understand the full nature of queries that your market is actually asking for.

35:46And then you want to figure out, like, of those, like, what percentage of time do you actually show up? And you want to expand those queries by using that fanout approach that I mentioned. Like, so not just what a CRM, but for specific context. And over time, you're going to have an extensive roadmap. It's going to look something like this, but much longer. There might be thousands of items on that list. And you can see what percentage of time are you showing up on ChatGPT versus Gemini versus Perplexity or any other platform out there. and you're going to find that you're not showing up for certain terms at all.

36:17And we see this for a lot of companies. Like they show up 30 % of the time on ChatGPT, but 0 % of the time on Gemini or Claude. So what is that visibility percentage overall? And then you want to see, like, where are the big gaps? Because you're going to see that for some of the searches, your competitor or indirect competitor is showing up, even though you're a better fit for that ICP. That's a major miss, right? Like, how can an AI platform recommend an indirect competitor when you are actually built for that specific scenario? And so you want to track this over time. You want to look at yourself versus every competitor and see, like, what's my visibility versus their visibility?

36:57Where am I winning? Where am I losing? And where should we be showing up where they are or vice versa? And try to build an extensive roadmap. And you want to look at how does AI see your positioning? Because AI might be recommending you for specific scenarios. Like they might recommend you for a specific sized revenue business or a certain size team or for ease of use or for pricing, right? But they might not be showing up for other scenarios like integrations or specific verticals or markets. And so where are those big gaps for your business? And as you identify those gaps, you want to figure out what are your focus areas.

37:34And that kind of feeds into what does your roadmap need to look like? because you can start to focus on specific assets that help you increase your visibility across the board. And this kind of feeds into what you're prioritizing and then you're looking at your mention rate and your citation rate across the board and you can kind of build these extensive roadmaps. And I'll share this with you afterwards as well. And then you want to execute in the right order. So you want to make sure at least your core stuff is nailed down because over time that's going to help the AI platforms understand where you should be winning and who you're actually for.

38:06And you kind of want to work your way down the rest of the list. The roadmap should look something like this where you have a roadmap for your core content, your contextual content, your reputational content, and ultimately your expertise content. And your team should be kind of working on all of these slowly. And you have like a combined roadmap across all of these for your business. And as you start to execute on these terms, you're going to start to see your metrics improve. And you want to track like new metrics. So like in the old world, you'd kind of track your rankings or your click-through rates and things like that.

38:34Now you want to be tracking what percentage of time you have a share of voice and AI answers. What's your citation rate? What's your branded search volume? Things like that that really affect your AI visibility over time. And then once you have that baseline, you start to track, like, am I actually improving these metrics or not improving these metrics? And there are different metrics that you should be tracking. It's not just about opportunities and your cost of acquisition and your payback period. Those metrics are still very important, but you should be tracking all these other things as well, because these are leading indicators that are going to impact how much your business grows over time and is visible.

39:09And as you kind of work on all this stuff, your visibility is going to improve and it's going to connect overall to your pipeline and your revenue. So that's it. If you guys want the slides, the QR code is there. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Before we close off, if you haven't already, go grab a copy of my new book, AI Marketing Blueprint. It just hit number one bestseller status on Amazon across multiple categories, and it walks you through a proven framework on how to scale revenue and pipeline in a world with AI platforms where customers are self-educating and learning a lot more off your website and where companies are struggling with declining inbound traffic volumes from paid search, paid social, and even organic and SEO channels.

39:50So if that sounds like you or a company that you're invested in, go grab a copy for yourself, your team, or your portfolio company, and I'm sure it's going to help you out on your journey with that business. and with that said thanks for listening today and we'll see you guys next time