Sell to businesses that get it

Summary

Nick Saraev argues that AI and automation providers should be selective about their target customers. Local businesses may have significant opportunities to improve their operations, but they can be difficult to sell to. Owners may have limited technical familiarity, need extensive education to see the value, or simply lack interest in growth.

Digital businesses are often easier prospects because they tend to understand ROI and may already have experience with AI.

Business Takeaways and Playbooks

• Choose customers before choosing the product. Don’t settle on selling voice or chat agents before validating a niche. Test different offers with different audiences, then prioritize what gets traction.
• Evaluate local businesses carefully.
  • Opportunity: Even small AI additions can substantially improve workflows where technology adoption is low.
  • Sales challenge: Prospects may not recognize the value of automating familiar processes, such as purchase orders, and may be content with their current size and methods. Sales may need to explain the value from first principles.
  • Prospecting challenge: Local businesses may be difficult to find through scraped data or email lists, and may pay less attention to email. Cold calling or in-person approaches may be more practical.
• Consider digital businesses as an alternative. They are generally more familiar with business economics and ROI, and may already use AI—making sales conversations easier throughout the process.
• Broaden targeting when a niche is hard to identify directly.
  • Amazon sellers may not identify themselves with that keyword on LinkedIn or company pages.
  • Instead, source a broader, easier-to-scrape list of non-D2C e-commerce businesses, then qualify prospects by asking whether they sell on Amazon.
  • Use the follow-up pitch to explain the relevant offer to those who do.

Examples and Figures

• Purchase-order automation is an example of a potentially useful improvement that a traditional local-business owner might resist.
• A friend’s business selling baby cribs illustrates how an e-commerce company could be approached with a simple qualifying question: “Are you guys on Amazon?”
• Targeting estimate: A broad e-commerce list might have 50% or more overlap with the desired audience. The speaker suggests accepting that some contacts will not be a fit in exchange for cheaper, easier-to-source data.
• No revenue, margin, CAC, LTV, or timeline targets are provided.

Presenter/source: Nick Saraev, Nick Saraev Unfiltered.