Selling AI is hard
GTM in the AI era
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It’s a strange era. Paradigm-shifting, reality-bending, market-twisting AI-native technology is simultaneously blowing minds and not closing deals.
It is hard to sell AI.
Case in point: one of the most talked-about AI-native companies, Clay, spent its first six years not knowing how to sell itself. As recently as three years ago it was doing close to zero in revenue.
Was the product bad? No, in fact, every demo would blow minds. Their prospects would be forced to scrape their own grey-matter off their own floor as they crawled back to their own sad reality. Blowing minds could not close a deal.
Are you building a new AI product? Does this feel familiar?
At this moment, a million amazing AI products are being demo’d in front of CIOs who are never going to buy them. At this point, their previously blown minds are turning numb. Wow has turned into yawn. Enthusiasm has turned into a polite smile.
What is going on here?
We just hosted an ON_Discourse Group Chat that featured 4 separate founders of AI native products and businesses, and heard 4 distinct GTM approaches. And this is what we heard.
PROVOCATION OF THE WEEK
No one knows how to sell AI
I assure you this is not a criticism. Our session featured some of the most exciting new product leaders, founders, and thinkers in the market who offered a wide range of considerations that might help you avoid 6 years of revenue-free exploration (it goes without saying that Clay finally figured it out.)
I can’t tell you who was in the room, but I can tell you what I heard.
I heard three things in that room.
1. Wow is now noise.
Every AI demo is spectacular. Buyers have sat through a thousand mind-blowing demos this year and closed on almost none of them. It has numbed the brains of all prospects.
2. The winning pitch happens between two machines.
One founder in the room put a button on their homepage that hands their API docs directly to the visitor’s own AI. The prospect shares those files with Claude or ChatGPT which triggers an agentic sales pitch that covers the proposition, the eval, and the negotiation without any human intervention.
3. Nobody has settled how to price this.
One founder in the room prices per outcome: the customer pays when the AI closes the ticket, books the meeting, or wins the case. Another prices as labor replacement: the customer pays what the human it replaced used to cost, minus a discount. The first sells to the P&L. The second sells to procurement. Nobody has settled which one becomes the default.
The market is full of different strategies. If you feel yourself grinding, do no despair yet; it is a market that is trying to make sense of a new type of reality. It takes time to settle in.
This is part one of a multi-part series.
What’s Next
If you have thoughts, feedback, or a perspective worth sharing, reach out: chmiel@ondiscourse.com. You might see your reaction in next week’s edition.
ON_Member Events
ON_Discourse Group Chat: Follow My Flow - How do I do that??
Tuesday, July 21 11am-12pm
Zoom
We’re flipping the script on the Follow My Flow series. For one week only, we will be turning our Show and Tell series into a “how do I do that?” series that is built around the very aspiration of one of our most vocal members, who really wants to build an AI stack that efficiently distributes content across all of his channels.
How can he set up a stack that turns real-time analysis of industry trends into a prompt that helps him write his own content that AI can distribute?
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