Before buying any AEO tools, mine your sales and customer success call transcripts (e.g., from Gong) for the exact questions customers ask. Then, manually input these questions into various LLMs to see how your company gets cited. This provides a foundational, customer-centric baseline for your strategy.
Uzair Dada, CEO of Iron Horse, dedicates every Friday afternoon to hands-on building with AI tools. This practice of "being patient zero" has spread organically, encouraging his leadership team and company to embrace experimentation and drive tangible innovation from the top down.
An enterprise company spent big targeting over a million people on LinkedIn, Meta, and Google. After analysis, their true addressable audience was only 20,000. This 98% waste highlights a common failure: launching expensive campaigns without doing the foundational work to precisely define the audience.
Senior marketing leaders get promoted for their craft but then get bogged down in management. AI tools reduce latency from functional handoffs (e.g., waiting on design), allowing experienced leaders to get "unshackled" and return to the high-impact building and creative work they excel at.
Marketers often overcomplicate growth with complex funnels. Iron Horse CEO Uzair Dada simplifies the entire B2B engine into three core stages: "Get Discovered" (primarily off-domain via SEO/AEO), "Get Chosen" (on your website), and "Close" (sales context). This framework clarifies focus and resource allocation.
Iron Horse replaced typical business updates at the start of leadership meetings with a mandatory "show-and-tell" where each leader demonstrates what they've built with AI. This peer pressure fosters cross-functional inspiration, proving more effective than top-down mandates for driving company-wide adoption.
While social media showcases endless AI possibilities, the reality for enterprise companies is much slower. The primary obstacle isn't the AI's capability but internal IT, security, and governance teams who are cautious about implementation, creating a massive gap between what's possible and what's permissible.
When every company has access to the same powerful AI tools, the competitive advantage is no longer budget or technology. The real differentiator becomes human taste, judgment, and the ability to apply a unique point of view to guide the AI, separating average, generic output from exceptional work.
Don't just focus on ranking for broad, initial LLM queries like "best CRM platforms." The real conversion opportunity lies in the highly specific follow-up questions users ask, which reveal their true context and intent. Brands must ensure they appear in these refined, long-tail answers to get chosen.