Prove you're aligned
Here’s the question I keep coming back to: how do I brilliantly prepare my clients for brilliant buyers?
Some buyers now bring help. They can describe their property and what they want to an AI assistant, then ask it to compare the companies that come up. I can’t tell you how many do this today, and I can’t tell you exactly how any of these tools weighs what it finds. But the preparation holds up either way, because a careful buyer with no software at all wants the same things.
What it seems to come down to is radical transparency and information sharing.
Talking points were built for a short look
A lot of marketing is built to win a few seconds of attention with a few good lines. Quality work. Family owned. Free estimates. There’s nothing wrong with those lines, and getting noticed still matters.
They just don’t help much once someone starts checking. A buyer doing real comparison isn’t asking which company sounds best. They’re asking which one fits. So the job changes. It’s less about persuading and more like this: prove that you’re the right company. Prove that you’re aligned.
Aligned is a narrower claim than best, and an easier one to back up. Nobody has to be the right company for everyone. They have to be demonstrably right for the buyers they actually want.
What that looks like
Here’s a hypothetical. A homeowner on a steep lot wants a retaining wall and planting that won’t need much care, and asks an assistant which local companies would suit the job.
One company’s website says it offers full-service solutions for every outdoor need. Another says it does design/build work, a lot of it on sloped lots. It shows finished walls with the town each one is in, explains how a project runs from first visit to final walk-through, and says plainly that it doesn’t take on small maintenance jobs. Its reviews, in customers’ own words, talk about walls.
That doesn’t promise the second company gets recommended. But it has given a person, or a piece of software, something to match against. The first company may do excellent walls. Nobody could tell.
Be there, say it, back it up
Be there. I want to make sure my clients are there, and listed accurately. It sounds too basic to mention, and it’s the part that’s easiest to leave half done: services, hours, service area, the same business described the same way wherever it appears. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and its guidelines ask for a business to be represented the way it’s recognized in the real world.
Say it. What the company does, who it does it for and what it doesn’t do, in plain words on the page. That includes the unflattering limits. A service area with an edge and a job size it won’t take are useful information to the right buyer.
Back it up. Saying isn’t enough. If a company says that’s what it is, there has to be some evidence that it’s not just making it up. Photos of real jobs. Credentials that can be looked up. Reviews written by actual customers about the actual work. An explanation of how the work gets done, detailed enough that only someone who does it could have written it.
There’s no secret layer on top of this that I can point to. Google’s own guidance on its AI features says no special optimizations are needed to appear in them, and no new AI text files or markup. It points back to the ordinary basics, including a current Business Profile and important content available as text. That’s Google talking about Google, and other tools work their own way. Still, it’s a useful thing to remember when someone offers to sell the secret.
One company, not a different one for every buyer
Here’s where this could go wrong. If software can match a company to a buyer, it’s tempting to tell every buyer a different story. A page for this kind of customer, another for that one, each describing a company that happens to be exactly what they wanted.
The trouble shows up after the sale. A residential maintenance company that talks its way into commercial work it isn’t set up for hasn’t found a good customer. It has found an unhappy one. Alignment has to survive the first visit, which means it has to be true.
The honest version is a choice, made once. You would want to position yourself for a reasonable addressable market, and pick the segment of the market that is conducive to the type of business you want to run.
Both halves of that matter. Reasonable means there are enough of those buyers within reach to support the company. Too broad and the company says nothing. Too narrow and nobody’s left to call. Conducive means the work suits the business the owner actually wants to run: the crews, the season, the margins, the kind of day it makes.
The other side of the AI question
I’ve written about what AI doesn’t bring with it: years of tested experience and your own history. This is the other side of that. A company can’t control what any tool says about it, but it can decide what true, specific and checkable information is out there to be found.
A buyer who checks doesn’t need a clever story. They need a true one, with the evidence next to it.
Chris