Riley Kearl is a B2B SaaS Growth Marketer & Fractional CMO.

 

1. You have lots of experience working with companies in the B2B SaaS industry, what have been some of your career highlights when helping your clients scale their digital sales results?

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I have seen great success defining sales funnels and clearly showcasing the data a company needs to make informed decisions. The positive effects you get from this type of sales funnel clarity heavily impact marketing ROI and bottom line revenue. Some of my career highlights are seeing this revenue impact and building marketing trust with CEOs, founders and leadership teams. I’ve enjoyed touching all parts of marketing strategy and execution and creating data systems that allow B2B SaaS companies to more easily figure out what is working and what is not.

 

My career highlights include bringing my clients and companies I work with on the journey so they also clearly see where to spend more time and money and where to scale back. It’s all about the data and once you get the picture of your end-to-end funnel, the decisions on where to focus come a lot easier. B2B sales/marketing funnels are often more complicated with long sales cycles. This makes it more difficult to prove cause and effect for marketing spend, but once the machine starts to work, it’s the experience of scaling these results and finding out the answers to these complicated questions that has been very rewarding.

 

Funnel language differs across organizations but some of the results I’m proud of include increasing opportunities by 585%, appointments by 400%, and sales by 650% across 25+ different clients.

 

2. With your early background being in the digital start-up space working across video and social, from a digital sales perspective what advice would you give when it comes to visual storytelling and enhancing brand influence and engagement online?

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Stay on message, communicate simply, be authentic, and take the leap. Your message starts with your website and if you really nail your homepage and main product/service pages first, then all your other assets will follow (blogs, video scripts, social posts, ad copy etc). This is about communicating your value proposition and what your customers are there for. You are solving a problem for them, so speak to the problem and the solution you provide for them. Aim to resonate deeply with your customer profile(s), guide them with a plan and a clear CTA. It should be easy for them to convert on your site without confusing wording or too much text. Don’t talk about yourself or your company too much if at all, you want to show prospects why you are the best solution for them.

 

Second, be authentic. People buy because of people so be real and limit corporate jargon if you can.

 

Of course you will utilize AI, but make sure there is a human component to your sales process. At the end of the day a person is going to make a decision to buy from you because of an interaction with another person from your company. Authenticity and real human connection will differentiate you from those who rely too heavily on AI and automation.

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Lastly, for videos and visual content, getting it done is better than being perfect. Of course you want it to be good so take care with it, but don’t overthink it. Get it out there and if the message is good and you keep it authentic as described above, it doesn’t need to be polished 4K or top level professional. All it has to do is communicate your value prop, resonate with your ICP and you win. Take the leap and get feedback quickly!
 

 

3. What is it you love most about the digital sales industry and why?

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Working with nice people who value collaboration over competition. Usually this is the case and most professionals are willing to help and share ideas or experience with you. I try my best to make sure I work with those that are supportive and just nice people. Just like clients, business owners should also have the choice of who to work with. All of us may not be in this position, but it is better if you can try and work with those you gel with. I also enjoy the flexibility and variety of work that I get to dive into on a daily basis.

 

4. You’ve spoken at a number of events and conferences. What themes or insights are you most passionate about sharing with today’s digital sales leaders?

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I’m passionate about sharing how to increase revenue by attracting engaged traffic that creates quality leads. We all want to be successful in our businesses and marketing departments which is why revenue is the main driver. Marketing can be a great success by being directly attributed to revenue … or it can be a big unknown whether it is actually generating quality leads that convert into sales.

 

Executives can lose trust and feel they are throwing their money away, some have had bad experiences with marketing and lost faith. I’m passionate about clearly showing the results you can (or should) get from marketing, and maintaining or gaining back executive and leadership trust in the marketing function. I have seen a similar theme across many different companies and I enjoy the challenge of implementing successful marketing strategies that show where the revenue and ROI is coming from and how to scale these programs across the company. The happy faces I see when the results come in are priceless!

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The top insight I can share with you is to get to know your sales funnel inside and out. Understand the numbers and aim to automate live data capture at each stage. The goal of your very basic sales funnel is to:

 

- Attract Engaged Traffic

- Create Quality Leads
- Increase Sales/Revenue/MRR/ARR

 

Know each data point and the delta % in between each. Start with the above but then get more detailed with advanced stages. Adapt it to your company terminology as the exact stages your company uses may differ. Here is the more advanced version of how I view the sales funnel and is a good starting point to adopt into your company or marketing teams. The % in brackets denotes a delta from the value above and below it:

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- Interest/Awareness/Impressions
- (Traffic %)
- Traffic/Introduce to website
- (Bounce rate %)
- Engaged Traffic
- (Trial/prospect rate %)
- Prospects
- (Lead rate %)
- Leads
- (Close rate %)
- Client/Purchase
- (then calculate ARPU/ASP and also CLV/MRR/ARR, retention/churn etc)
 

 

5. AI is a big part of your offering now. How are you helping companies adopt AI to grow their online sales results?

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Use AI (ChatGPT or comparable tool) to accelerate your efforts so you can do more deep thinking that AI cannot do (For example customer messaging that resonates). ChatGPT works with what you give it, so if you are feeding it quality work it can give you back quality edits. If you ask it to create something from scratch or with very little input you will likely not see good results. For example you could write an ad campaign and get ChatGPT to refine it and maybe replace certain words or company names across many lines that are similar. Save time where you can but be careful not to rely on it too much, we still need to exercise our critical thinking brain and differentiate our work creatively (something AI cannot do). See question 7 below for my thoughts on future trends which includes more about AI.

 

6. Do you recommend any useful digital sales tools or platforms that can help professionals raise their online sales expertise?

 

One tool I like and recommend is SEMRush, I’ve used it quite extensively with great results. For proposals I like Proposify and for any Ecosystem/Partnership Led companies take a look at Crossbeam. I have CRM recommendations but will not list them here as the needs differ so much between companies. But please use a CRM, do your research/test a few platforms, and make CRM use a habit for your entire team. You can always export your data and import to a new tool but you won’t want to do this too often.

 

7. What do you feel will be the future key trends that B2B SaaS sales professionals need to adapt to and be ready for?

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There are many proven strategies within traditional channels like SEO, paid ads etc. But what is the big thing we hear about day in and day out? It’s AI. I think it’s worth an overview to hopefully make this key trend a little clearer.

 

So how should we think about this in B2B SaaS in regards to optimization, is it AI SEO? Can we still influence and optimize for AI? I think the answer is yes but the waters are muddy. 

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First a quick reminder on the meaning of SEO - Search Engine Optimization (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. Search engines only)

Second, I want to clarify the meaning of AEO or Answer Engine Optimization.

 

In my mind AEO has been around for a long time through search engines in the form of the snippets/question box shown in Google. But AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity also have an AEO function and take it to the next level, sometimes only giving one answer/result. Sometimes AEO is now being used as a term to describe optimizing for AI even though historically this has not been the case.

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In any event, the incoming trend we’re discovering is a ‘wild west’ of traffic optimization. It’s not AI SEO as the ‘SEO’ term is for Search Engines specifically, and it shouldn’t be called AEO either.

 

We are seeing new terms surfacing like GEO/GSO/LLMO. 

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• GEO - Generative Engine Optimization

• GSO - Generative Search Optimization

• LLMO - Large Language Model Optimization

AEO - Answer Engine Optimization (used interchangeably but also relates to search engines)

 

These terms essentially all mean the same thing and you may come across other terms or acronyms as well. There is no common standard for what it’s called yet, and there are also no proven strategies/playbooks on how to approach it. Many companies are testing to see what results they get with some being successful with their efforts. Making it easier for AI bots to access site information might be a good place to start (using a LLMS.txt file, similar to robots.txt). But I’m no expert here and am still researching these topics myself…but I think I can give a good overview on where it fits into the overall marketing mix. For simplicity let’s combine the terms above into one and just call it GEO from now on.

 

There are many proven strategies within traditional channels like SEO, paid ads etc. But what is the big thing we hear about day in and day out? It’s AI. I think it’s worth an overview to hopefully make this key trend a little clearer.

 

So how should we think about this in B2B SaaS in regards to optimization, is it AI SEO? Can we still influence and optimize for AI? I think the answer is yes but the waters are muddy. 

​

First a quick reminder on the meaning of SEO - Search Engine Optimization (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo etc. Search engines only)

 

Second, I want to clarify the meaning of AEO or Answer Engine Optimization. In my mind AEO has been around for a long time through search engines in the form of the snippets/question box shown in Google. But AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity also have an AEO function and take it to the next level, sometimes only giving one answer/result. Sometimes AEO is now being used as a term to describe optimizing for AI even though historically this has not been the case

​

In any event, the incoming trend we’re discovering is a ‘wild west’ of traffic optimization. It’s not AI SEO as the ‘SEO’ term is for Search Engines specifically, and it shouldn’t be called AEO either. We are seeing new terms surfacing like GEO/GSO/LLMO:

​

• GEO - Generative Engine Optimization

• GSO - Generative Search Optimization

• LLMO - Large Language Model Optimization

• AEO - Answer Engine Optimization (used interchangeably but also relates to search engines)

​

These terms essentially all mean the same thing and you may come across other terms or acronyms as well. There is no common standard for what it’s called yet, and there are also no proven strategies/playbooks on how to approach it. Many companies are testing to see what results they get with some being successful with their efforts. Making it easier for AI bots to access site information might be a good place to start (using a LLMS.txt file, similar to robots.txt). But I’m no expert here and am still researching these topics myself…but I think I can give a good overview on where it fits into the overall marketing mix. For simplicity let’s combine the terms above intoone and just call it GEO from now on.

​

I've added GEO as a channel of traffic into all my strategies as something to explore as there seem to be some good tactics that might pay big dividends down the road. Of course with these tools, it depends on what the prompter/user inputs as a question. And what we want to know is if you are showing up and how your business can become the answer within AI tools (this is GEO). We can guess that the trend will move further away from search engines like Google so more effort should be invested here. This is where you will need to do more digging into the world of GEO. Test, learn and measure results. Then do it again.

But since these strategies are largely not proven, don’t put all your eggs in the AI basket. Your industry or business type may benefit from GEO but it could also work against you (For example if ChatGPT only displays the info you provide, you could get zero credit/clicks from a link or citation within it). I would recommend sticking with the proven channels that are working as well starting to slowly introduce GEO, the percentage mix is up to you. Like we saw in the early days of SEO, efforts were quickly wiped out with one algorithm change, this will likely be the same with AI platform updates (so don’t fully bank on it or invest too heavily).

 

Look at all 7 channels of traffic and decide how much time and money you will invest in each. Ask me how I break down the 7 channels of traffic and I’m happy to provide you with a free website audit.​