Selling SEO or AI Services? Your Sales Team Needs More Than a Pitch Deck
Sales is rewarded for signing/renewing clients. Rarely does performance matter (to them). Let's break down balancing financial incentive with setting up customers for success.
This week’s #SEOForLunch sponsors are Semrush and Jolly Search.
Roughly 10 years ago, I worked in the digital marketing division of a company generating more than $5 billion in annual revenue. Our team included approximately 50 SEO professionals, developers, and content writers responsible for delivering the services its sales team sold.
It was my first experience working alongside a true sales organization and my first exposure to the disconnect between what salespeople were incentivized to promise and what the delivery team could realistically execute.
The sales reps (mostly) weren’t dishonest or incompetent. Most were doing exactly what the company rewarded them for doing: closing deals.
The problem was that once the contract was signed, the salesperson collected the commission while someone else inherited the promise.
Thank you to Semrush Enterprise for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch
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Salespeople Aren’t the Problem. Their Incentives Are.
Salespeople are generally rewarded for:
Signing new customers
Increasing contract value
Renewing existing accounts
Shortening the sales cycle
They are rarely compensated based on whether the SEO strategy worked, whether the AI implementation delivered meaningful value, or whether the team executing could deliver against his/her promise.
That creates an obvious conflict. The easiest way to close a hesitant prospect is to reduce uncertainty, but SEO and AI should be an asterisk in any dictionary definition of “uncertainty.” If the rep makes the work sound faster, easier, or more predictable than it actually is, they improve their chances of making the sale while transferring the risk to someone else.
The Good: Strong Salespeople Create Opportunities
It’s easy for delivery teams to complain about sales. Trust me, I’ve bitched more than my fair share. But selling services is difficult. Prospects rarely arrive with a clearly defined problem, a realistic budget, and an executive team ready to act.
Strong salespeople create opportunities by:
Uncovering what the customer actually needs
Translating the executing team’s capabilities into business value
Building trust before specialists even enter the conversation
Handling prospecting, qualification, and follow-ups
Helping the company grow beyond referrals and reputation
Search professionals often underestimate these skills. Let’s be honest: our industry isn’t exactly overflowing with people skills or a willingness to compromise. Being capable of delivering great work doesn’t mean you can convince someone to buy it.
The goal shouldn’t be to restrain sales or turn every salesperson into a technical SEO. It should be to give them enough knowledge, structure, and access to specialists to recognize the right opportunity, and sell an engagement the team can actually fulfill.
Unfortunately, creating the opportunity is only half the equation. What the salesperson promises to close it matters just as much.
The Bad: The Delivery Team Inherits the Promise
The problems begin when the customer buys an outcome the executing team never agreed was possible.
The problems begin when the customer buys an outcome the delivery team never agreed was possible. This might mean:
Guaranteeing rankings
Committing to timelines before reviewing the website
Downplaying the client’s role in implementation
Selling the wrong combination of services
Promising results the product was never capable of delivering
Sometimes the salesperson exaggerated. Other times, they simply didn’t understand what they were selling. That distinction didn’t matter much to the client—or to me when my phone rang unexpectedly in the middle of the day.
I regularly received calls and emails from frustrated clients telling me their boss was on their ass because they weren’t getting what the salesperson had promised. By then, the client had repeated those promises internally and put their own credibility on the line.
My job was to determine whether the salesperson had lied, misunderstood the product, or sold the wrong solution—and then explain the gap without throwing a coworker under the bus or making the client feel like an idiot for believing them.
The salesperson received credit for closing the deal. The delivery team inherited an angry customer, an impossible expectation, and a relationship damaged before the real work had even begun.
And if setting expectations for traditional SEO was already difficult, AI has made it considerably worse.
AI Makes the Expectation Problem Worse
AI has taken an existing problem in SEO sales and multiplied it by 100.
Organic visibility has never been something anyone could guarantee. Results depend on the client’s business, website, competition, implementation, brand and link authority, search demand, and the constant changes made by Google. Now companies are selling AI visibility alongside SEO despite having even less control over when (or why) a brand appears in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, or other AI experiences.
That uncertainty should result in more careful claims. Instead, AI FOMO has created an opportunity to make bigger sales and bigger promises with less proof.
A salesperson can now point to:
A handful of prompts where a client appears
An AI visibility score from a third-party platform
A polished dashboard tracking mentions and citations
A competitor appearing in answers where the prospect does not
Unfortunately, “We’ll help you understand and improve your AI visibility” is harder to sell than “We’ll get your brand into AI answers.”
AI hasn’t made organic visibility more predictable (or easier) to track. It has simply made FOMO easier to monetize. When sales is incentivized by ink on a contract while delivery is judged by results, the two teams aren’t working toward the same goal.
What Sales Reps Actually Need
SSales reps don’t need to become technical SEOs or pretend to be “the expert” during sales meetings. But they do need more than a pitch deck, a product sheet, and a few impressive case studies.
They need:
Clear boundaries: What can never be guaranteed?
Qualification criteria: Which prospects can realistically succeed?
Approved claims: What can be said about outcomes and timelines?
Customer responsibilities: What must the client provide or implement?
Realistic case studies: What conditions and products made those results possible?
A feedback loop: Which promises repeatedly cause problems after handoff?
Shared accountability: How will sales be measured after the contract is signed?
Access to delivery: When should an expert join the sales process?
That final point might be the most important.
Some of the best sales reps I had worked with would call or email me before pitching a solution. They would explain what the law firm wanted to accomplish and ask which of our products (or combination of products) gave the client the best chance of getting there.
Because I understood the available levers and the capabilities of our products, I could connect the two. Sometimes that resulted in a larger sale because the client genuinely needed more support. Other times, it prevented the rep from selling a cheaper solution that didn’t have a chance in hell of producing the results being discussed.
Involving delivery doesn’t prevent upselling. Most of the time, it makes the upsell defensible.
The execution team shouldn’t first learn about the client’s goals during the kickoff call. They should be involved early enough to validate the opportunity, shape the solution, and flag expectations that cannot be met.
Businesses should consider tying a portion of sales compensation to account quality or early retention. If an engagement collapses within 90 days because it was never viable, that wasn’t a successful sale. It was delayed churn.
The tension between sales and delivery will never disappear completely. But if your salespeople win when the contract is signed and everyone else loses immediately afterward, you don’t have a sales problem.
You have an incentive problem.
If the signature is the only thing you reward, don’t act surprised when the promise is impossible to deliver.
~Nick
Thank you to Jolly for sponsoring this week’s #SEOForLunch
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~10 years ago I worked