In a meeting with our project managers, I proposed an annual plan for every client for 2027. They pushed back: they wouldn’t really follow it, and they see very few opportunities. Then came a line about our clients that stung: “They reject AI.”
We already run AEO reporting for those same clients. We track how AI assistants talk about them and turn that into briefs for new content. They never asked for it. We brought it to them while presenting new HubSpot features, and they grabbed it straight away as “the new SEO”.
What bothered me wasn’t that they don’t see opportunities. It was that they would rather wait for an enquiry to come in. And this isn’t just our problem. Every company that lives off its existing clients has people who know the client best and tell them the least about their future.
A project manager often knows the client better than anyone else in the company. They know the processes, the people and the problems. But they are so busy delivering what was agreed that there is no time left for what the client will need tomorrow.
The thesis is simple. If all we do for a client is deliver what they ordered yesterday, someone else will sell them what they need tomorrow.
In calm times, waiting works. The client knows what they need and calls someone they know.
Now the cards are being reshuffled. According to this year’s 6sense study of 4,611 B2B buyers, advances in technology are the most common reason a company starts looking at all: 39% of purchase evaluations begin this way.
A client can’t ask for something they don’t know exists. None of these clients ordered AEO. When we showed it to them, they grabbed it. No request for AEO ever came. We did.
Once the cards are dealt, the window of opportunity is much smaller. The same study shows how much smaller. The vendor a buyer favours before contacting anyone wins 82% of the time. So an enquiry isn’t where the sale begins. It’s the last page of a story we never read.
The study looks at B2B purchases in general, not at existing clients specifically. But one number applies directly to them: 71% of buyers say their view of vendors changed between two purchases. If we haven’t told the client anything new in that time, they form their opinion from what someone else told them.
The project manager is right about one thing. An AEO report is not AI in their processes. A client who wants to know what ChatGPT says about them hasn’t agreed to let AI near their data.
But “they reject AI” is not an answer. It’s the end of a conversation that never started. A client may be rejecting the risk, the cost or a project without a business case. Sometimes they really don’t need AI. A consultant’s job is to find out what exactly they are rejecting. Whoever knows that has an opportunity. Whoever says “they reject AI” never even looked for one.
Project managers aren’t lazy. Their objection is a logical response to a system I built myself. We measure them on delivery: deadline, budget, utilisation. Nobody measures them on how many new ideas they have shown the client.
So an idea for a client sounds to them like selling, and selling sounds like betraying the trust they spent months building. But trust is exactly why the idea has to come from them. If a competitor brings it, the client won’t ask the competitor what took so long. They’ll ask us: “Why didn’t you tell us?”
The project managers are right about one more thing. A twenty-page annual plan is theatre. You write it in January, and by February nobody opens it.
A plan that gets done is short: two ideas per client per year, one small and one big. Not as an offer, but as an observation: “Here’s what we see in your business.” I don’t expect project managers to sell the client something twice a year. I expect them to tell the client something useful twice a year, something the client couldn’t see on their own. The project manager brings the observation, sales closes the deal. They don’t have to become a salesperson. They just have to stop waiting.
This isn’t theory. Before that meeting, in October, I asked the project managers to prepare concrete initiatives for each of their clients. The first ideas they presented have already opened new sales opportunities. And yet at the meeting we talked as if there were almost none. So the problem isn’t that the opportunities aren’t there. The problem is that we still treat them as the exception, not as part of our job.
Most clients never ask the question in the title out loud. They simply give the next project to whoever did tell them.
igor.pauletic@frodx.com
See how to build a sales process that looks for opportunities instead of waiting for them.