The CFO returned to the GEO-coded proposal, most of which did not reject the AI search, but none of the numbers in the brief were collected. The sales team is asking for money with the 18% increase in the brand's reference to ChatGPT, and the CFO hears a symbol of vanity that he can't verify and answer to the board. How did this B2B Saas break down a Taiwan B2B Saas rewrite the same thing as a CFO signer -- the point is not to make numbers look beautiful, but to have a line to Pipeline behind each number.
Background: Why was the first version of the proposal returned?
This company is HR SaaS, which spends about two to three months on a six-digit annual program. For the first time, the sales manager came to the management meeting to propose GEO plus, and the slides are three images: the brand's reference rate in ChatGPT, the number of times quoted by Perplexity, and a self-made cross-platform visibility score. The CFO asked just one question and ended the meeting -- "How much less do we have if we drop these three numbers? "There's no one to catch it. The reason for the withdrawal is not that GEO is not working, it is that the report stopped at a level that sells what it can understand, and did not go up to the level where the finances can make decisions.
CFO's really asking three questions.
Translating the CFO's silence will reveal that he is not against GEO, but that the proposal does not answer the three questions he asks about every trial budget. Any answer that doesn't change the dollar is no answer to him.
- What's the change? What I want is a new, qualified business fund in Chinese currency, not a number of exposures or references.
- What's the rate, how long? Is every dollar brought in a high or low line compared to the current Google Ads, SEO?
- What's the next risk of not doing? How many questions would we lose if our opponent squeezed us out of the AI answer?
Step one: connect visibility to a funnel instead of a fraction
The first thing the team did was to stop taking visibility to the end, and then put it up top of the funnel. They redraw a five-part chain, each with an actual conversion rate, with a GA4 custom conduit and server journal cutting out "the working session from AI" and not allowing it to be mixed in Direct and Referral. In this way, visibility is no longer an isolated percentage, but the amount of water at the top of the funnel — up and up — so that there is something to calculate in each of the cells downstream.
- First paragraph: Brands are mentioned in target questions by AI.
- Second paragraph: quoted with a clickable source link.
- Third paragraph: Users from AI to actual access.
- Fourth paragraph: Call for a demonstration or a price upon arrival.
- Fifth paragraph: Deal, in exchange for the amount of the contract at the price of the currency.
Step 2: Redefining in Chinese currency instead of percentages
With a funnel, you can turn the percentage into a dollar. The team responded with three months of actual numbers: AI brought in about 40 sessions per month, six of which entered the request template and ended with 1 to 2 deals; and annual fees and retention of the main program were pushed back, equal to an additional six-digit eligible pipeline per month. This number CFO understands, because it's the same size as the commercial money in CRM. And then they took a look at the value of the line that put each single dollar in the GEO, and Google Ads, who already had SEO, put it in the same table so that the CFO itself could see which pipeline had not reached its peak.
We didn't increase the reference rate, we just switched it to the one that CFO was looking at every day -- the eligible line for the dollar. The same data, the price of the conference room, changed.— Tenten GEO consultant team
Step 3: Give CFO a downside risk, not just a top profile.
Imagine everyone drawing, and it's often the next-level risk that really moves CFO. The team used Brand Radar’s competition to point out that two opponents have been firmly elected by AI, and that they are only mentioned in 30 percent of the questions, in high-profile questions such as HR recommends “comparison of leave management software”. The gap was converted into a risk fund: the monthly inquiries of the respondents, if they continue to be taken away by their opponents, are equivalent to the release of a line equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars each season. The CFO does not want intimidation, it wants to be a lower-value figure with the same price as the previous file, so that he can make real trade-offs between pay and risk.
Second edition of the proposal: One page will pass.
The second version of the proposal has only one page left. The top line is the conclusion: how much money is invested, how much more money is expected to be added to the pipeline each season, and how much money is expected to be added to the pipeline, and how much money is expected to go back for a few months, while keeping abreast of the high-profile questions that are currently being lost. The following three blocks respond to three questions from the CFO: pipe increments, cross-channel reporting, risk-free amounts. Seen points back to the list, not the lead. The version passed on the spot -- not because GEO suddenly became more effective, because it finally spoke in financial language.
This approach can be replicated, but only if you have a funnel that you can pick up, and a competition that comes out of your own question. Most teams are stuck in places where they don’t film, but where they don’t even link AI’s visibility to the lines in CRM, so they can only convince a person who only looks at the dollar for a percentage of money. If you want to know what your visibility gap is, and which one you're supposed to fill, you can expect 30 minutes of GEO diagnostics, and we'll run a round with your actual questions, and we'll get this wire out of the pipe.
