Positioning AI Around Buyer Outcomes

The overwhelming pressure on B2B tech and SaaS providers to talk about their AI capabilities can unintentionally shift messaging toward features rather than buyer outcomes. Experienced product marketing teams recognize this classic mistake and know that a label, even if it is the biggest buzzword ever, does not necessarily convey value or credibility to customers and prospects.

The Pressure to Lead with AI

Many factors contribute to this focus on AI capabilities, despite the market being saturated with AI messages. The first is fear. When competitors, analysts, and the media talk nonstop about AI, it’s easy to worry that you don’t put AI front and center; it signals that you lack innovation and are falling behind. In truth, while some providers are doing truly exceptionally innovative things with AI, in many categories and markets, all the players are applying AI in the same way.

An inward focus on AI also plays a role. Tech and SaaS companies are at the forefront of AI adoption, both in their internal use of AI and in the solutions they sell. This unrelenting focus on AI adoption makes it easy to lose sight of the fact that customers and prospects may have very different expectations and goals for AI.

Tech companies are also heavily influenced by their most advanced customers, who push them to do more and deliver greater innovation. This can skew messaging towards leading-edge adopters. However, the sophistication, knowledge, and needs of these customers typically do not align with those of most of the customer base.

Assuming Buyers Will Connect the Dots

The biggest risk with much of today’s AI messaging is that it focuses on the technology rather than the customer’s needs and assumes that buyers will connect the dots themselves. Experienced product marketers know that what buyers care about most is having their problems solved and needs met. Outcomes are more important to buyers than the technology powering the solutions they use. In many segments, concerns about risk, compliance, and trust play as important a role in decision-making as outcomes.

Even customers and prospects who are technology laggards recognize that AI has the potential to improve workflows, processes, and efficiency. However, it is extremely unlikely that many prospects are sitting in their conference rooms saying, “If we could just get a new [insert solution] with AI functionality, it would really take us to the next level.” Instead, they are more likely to focus on improving their workflows and outcomes, and that may or may not involve AI.

Lost Differentiation

The ubiquity of AI in media, popular culture, and advertising reduces its value as a differentiator. If customers and prospects are not already numb to AI references, they soon will be. Everything is “AI-powered” today, from CRM solutions to the browsers on our phones to the assistants that help us plan our vacations. This ubiquity inevitably leads to expectations and assumptions – “Doesn’t everything have AI in it today?” And if everything is assumed to have AI capabilities and functionalities, AI itself is no longer differentiating.

Lessons from Early SaaS Messaging

The pattern resembles early SaaS, messaging when that technology first became mainstream. SaaS technology enabled an explosion of new providers across every category. SaaS providers often lead with their “SaaS” status when messaging against traditional on-premise solutions.

Unfortunately, many buyers struggled to separate meaningful differences from buzzwords. Too often, SaaS messaging assumed that prospects would readily see how SaaS would make their operations better, faster, etc. The most effective messaging made the connection to outcomes for the prospect: Your sales reps will always have access to the latest information. Your supply chain can be updated in real-time.  

Explain Why AI Matters

Experienced Product Marketing teams understand they need to help customers and prospects understand how and why AI capabilities will make a difference for them. One of the product marketing team’s key skill sets and contributions is translating customer needs for internal audiences and helping buyers understand the benefits of new technologies. In the case of AI, this means identifying customer needs and pain points where AI could make a meaningful difference in the customer’s eyes.

Just as important is identifying where customers will be reluctant to use AI capabilities for the foreseeable future. For example, if a customer uses high-touch service as a differentiator, they will be reluctant to use AI-generated customer emails, even if it is more efficient. The product marketing team needs to identify how AI capabilities enable the customer to deliver high-touch service rather than focusing on content-generation efficiencies.

How Market Insights Help Connect AI to Outcomes

Research can help you position AI in a way that resonates with customers. To connect the value of AI capabilities with your buyers, you need to know where they are in terms of:

  • Overall knowledge and sophistication
  • What do they know about AI and its capabilities?
  • Do they think in terms of how they personally use LLMs to help generate content?
  • Do they understand how AI could be operationalized?
  • Does their company have AI policies and strategies, or is AI adoption decentralized?
  • Do they view AI capabilities as differentiators or as threshold conditions?

Fit with current workflows

  • What aspects of their processes and workflows are the ones where they believe AI can make a difference? It is important to note that these may not be the biggest potential wins from your product’s perspective.
  • What are the pain points where they don’t believe AI can make a difference in their outcomes? These beliefs may be misinformed.
  • What parts of their process would they be concerned about implementing AI because they see risks to their brand, customer experience, compliance, etc.? Here again, these beliefs may be misinformed.

Profiling these dimensions will help product market teams and other internal stakeholders understand how to connect the dots for buyers – our AI capabilities will help you achieve the outcomes most important to you.

It will also enable you to communicate your AI capabilities at a level that aligns with your market, without insulting sophisticated buyers or confusing the less technical ones. Most importantly, by connecting AI to customer outcomes, AI can be a competitive differentiator for you, rather than a threshold condition.

If you’d like to read more about Isurus’ perspectives on messaging, check out these related posts:

5 Tips for Creating Compelling Messaging that Differentiates —  A practical lens for evaluating whether your messaging is relevant, credible, and distinct in a crowded market.

Are You Messaging to Threshold Conditions? — Why table-stakes requirements matter for product decisions—but rarely for gaining buyer attention.

Beyond Buzzwords: Making AI Matter to Your B2B Buyers — How to connect emerging technologies to real buyer outcomes instead of relying on hype.

When to Use ROI in Messaging — Why ROI claims often resonate later in the buying process—and how timing affects credibility.

If you’d like to talk about a messaging challenge you are facing, you can reach us via our contact page: https://isurusmrc.com/contact