How are you handling the inbound of your BD when AI is changing how prospects find you?
Something we've been working through lately that I wanted to get other perspectives on is the way prospects arrive on the first conversation has shifted enough that it's changing how we think about BD pipeline altogether.
What is happening more often is that by the time is a prospect reaches out, they've already formed a view of us. Not from our sales outreach, but from whatever they found in AI tools, forums. community mentions, content that came up when they were researching the problem we solve. The sales convo is starting much later in their decision process than it used to before, which means the inbound infrastructure feeding the top of pipeline its earning increasing importance.
That has pushed us to think about BD and marketing as one system rather than a separate thing. We've been working with Foxvisits to build the kind of off page brand presence that influences how we show up in AI generated answers, any of the mainstream models like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, instead of just traditional search rankings. The logic being that if a prospect asks an AI tool about solutions to their problem, we want to increase the chances we are part of that answer before any outreach happens. It shortens the trust building of the sales cycle significantly when prospects already have context on who we are.
However its also hard to attribute cleanly, which is the part I'm most curious about from a BD perspective. How are others measuring the influence of inbound brand visibility on pipeline quality and sales cycle length? Also is there a framework for connecting that on the top presence to actual BD outcomes?