I cold-emailed 200 CMOs about AI visibility. Here's what I learned.
I'm building Storyzee, a tool that audits how brands appear inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. The premise: your SEO can be perfect and you're still completely invisible where buyers increasingly ask questions.
What I found after 200 cold emails
Out of 200 emails to French CMOs at B2B SaaS companies:
~12% open rate (industry average for cold outreach)
The most common reply: "Interesting, we haven't looked at this"
Second most common: "Is this the same as SEO?"
Third: silence
The silence is fine. The second reply is the problem I'm actually solving.
The real challenge isn't the product — it's the category
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) doesn't exist in most marketing budgets yet. There's no line item for it. No VP of AI Visibility. Nobody owns this problem.
So I'm not selling a solution. I'm selling awareness of a problem first.
What's working (and what isn't)
Working: Warm intros from SEO freelancers. When an SEO consultant tells a client "you need to think about AI visibility," the client listens. I'm building a reseller network around this insight — wholesale audit pricing, white-label reports.
Not working: Leading with the score or the technology. Nobody cares about a "score out of 100" until they understand why being invisible on ChatGPT costs them leads.
The question I'm wrestling with
How do you build demand for a category that doesn't exist yet in your market?
Specifically: do you try to educate the market (slow, expensive), or do you find the early adopters who already feel the pain (faster, but who are they)?
Would love to hear from anyone who's launched in an emerging category.
