Building pipeline for a category that did not exist yet

The challenge

Trustifyer sells something that, functionally, did not have a name a few years ago. As AI answer engines increasingly stand between brands and the people trying to find them, Trustifyer helps companies and executives stay visible and trusted inside those answers, not just on a search results page. The discipline now has a name, GEO, but the market’s understanding of it has not caught up to the market’s exposure to it.

That gap is exactly what made this hard to sell. You cannot run a generic, feature-led outbound motion against a need nobody has articulated yet. Caption’s job was not to compete for a budget line that already existed. It was to make the case for one that did not, to the right people, credibly enough that they would take the meeting.

The market Trustifyer is selling into

This is not a hypothetical shift. It is already showing up in the numbers.

• 35% of US consumers now start product discovery in an AI tool, against 13.6% using traditional search. Similarweb, 2026
• Zero-click Google searches climbed from 56% to 69% in the year after AI Overviews rolled out. Similarweb, 2025
• AI-referred visitors convert at up to 15.9% from ChatGPT and 10.5% from Perplexity, against 1.76% for average organic search traffic. Seer Interactive, 2025
• 92% of marketers plan to invest in GEO. Only 40.6% have actually implemented it. ConvertMate, 2026

That last figure is the one that matters most for a sales development campaign. The market has already agreed this is coming, but most of it has not acted yet. That is a narrow and genuinely valuable window: a buyer conversation that is early relative to the market, not early relative to reality.

The approach

1. One engine, not three separate channels

   Outreach ran across call, email and LinkedIn as a single coordinated campaign rather than three disconnected activities layered on top of each other. Every touch carried the same narrative and built on the last one, so a prospect who saw a LinkedIn message, then took a call, then read a follow-up email experienced one consistent case being made, not three different pitches from the same company.

2. Teaching the problem before selling the fix

   Because GEO is a new category, the earliest job in every conversation was making the problem real, not pitching the solution. Outreach led with the shift itself, the same zero-click and AI-referral data above, before it ever got to what Trustifyer does about it. That ordering matters. Skip it, and even a perfect pitch lands on a buyer who does not yet believe they have the problem it solves.

3. Selling the discipline earned media already proves

   The mechanics of GEO happen to favour exactly what Trustifyer already does. Brand mentions and earned media correlate roughly three times more strongly with AI citation than backlinks do, 0.664 against 0.218 across a 75,000-brand study, and 82% of AI citations trace back to earned media against just 6% from paid or owned content. Digital PR is not Trustifyer’s pivot into GEO. It is the pre-existing discipline GEO turns out to run on, and outreach was built to make that connection explicit.

4. Targeting both the brand and the person behind it

   Trustifyer’s offer spans company-level reputation and an individual executive’s personal brand, so the targeting did too, reaching marketing and communications leaders making the case for the business and the executives who have their own visibility on the line personally. Widening the angle this way opened conversations that a single, narrowly defined ICP would have missed entirely.

The results

• $12m+ in qualified pipeline generated so far, and the campaign is still running.
• Pipeline built inside a genuine first-mover window: 92% of marketers plan to invest in GEO, only 40.6% have started.
• A full-channel engine that got a still-forming category in front of buyers before most competitors were having the conversation.
• Pipeline built across both company-level and executive-level buyers, reflecting the full breadth of what Trustifyer offers.
• A consistent narrative held across call, email and LinkedIn rather than fragmented messaging by channel.

Why this is the hard version of sales development

Selling into an established category is a targeting and execution problem. Selling into a category that does not have a settled name yet is a belief problem. The work is getting a buyer to agree the problem is real before they will evaluate whether you are the right answer to it. Most outbound is not built for that. It is built to compete for attention within a need the buyer has already accepted.

The pipeline number is the proof, but the harder evidence is what sits behind it. This was not volume against a well-understood ask. It was credibility built, conversation by conversation, backed by real data rather than hype, for something the market is still catching up to naming.

Sources: Similarweb AI Search Report (2026); Similarweb Zero-Click Study (2025); Seer Interactive, AI Referral Conversion Analysis (2025); ConvertMate, GEO Adoption Survey (2026); Ahrefs, AI Citation Correlation Study (75,000 brands); Muck Rack, AI Citation Source Analysis (2025); Princeton/KDD Generative Engine Optimization research (2024).

No one knows outbound like these guys. The best salespeople I’ve ever worked with. They defined a market that didn’t exist yet. Wildly impressed.