Is GEO actually a distribution strategy? A skeptic's take on place in B2B SaaS (feat. Liam Moroney)

Liam Moroney: Making the list does not make you part of a consideration set.

Host: All right, I did, I want to move to Place because we haven't talked about Place yet. We've talked price, we talked promotion, we've talked product. But Place I think is right now um, a really interesting spot right now for, for B2B SaaS. I think there's a couple reasons for it. Uh, one is first off just the move by a lot of tech companies to go to headless architecture. And I think that's just a really interesting decision on Place because now essentially it's not just the place now isn't your own ui but also you lose distinctive brand assets because I'll say often your SaaS, your user interface is one of your big distinctive brand assets and you essentially are punting on that largely to go plug into an LLM right now. But then there's also uh, AEO and Geo in and of itself as this new place now where you're being told that this is where buyers are making decisions or creating their vendor shortlist. And, and I certainly know you have feelings and opinions on this and, and I certainly do too because I highly doubt a, a, a you know 12 year CFO is going to punt his, punt his decision uh, making to, to uh, to chatgpt, you know to shortlist a bunch of buyers. I'm sure he has been meeting with lots of buyers for financial close software for years that has a very good understanding of the landscape. So I want you, you to

Liam Moroney: your

Host: POV on place right now in B2B SaaS because I think there's a lot of smoke out there but I'm not sure how much of it's actually real and fire.

Liam Moroney: Yeah, I think about this far too much and I think before Even doing the B2B example, place itself generally means distribution. It means where do people buy a product like this? And in the CPG world there were big issues with this. Remember when D2C was a really big thing and you would like away Suitcases and Casper and all of these different brands and they all ran into the same problem and almost all D2C brands eventually do and they reach a certain scale which is eventually it helps to be on the shelf in the store where they buy all the other brands and they always mattress discounters.

Host: Right?

Liam Moroney: Yeah. And you know like uh, you know I remember when Casper started to do pop ups in the mall. I'm like there it is. Like eventually you realize you have to physically be in the places that the most of the buyers spend most of the time buying the kind of thing that you sell. And you can be easily look at something like SaaS and go, well we don't sell a physical product that lives on a shelf. It's online. You go to our website, that's our place. But that's not really true. What it really means is how do people go and buy a product like yours? And sometimes there are very literal intermediaries. There are some products where if you don't work with a systems integrator or if you don't work with a consulting company, you don't have an access point to certain companies, they will buy through them. Some companies buy through their agencies, especially at the bigger end. So like that's a very obvious and simple place, that's a partnership problem. But on the other side there is how do I as a buyer go and find the options that exist? How do I choose the options and are there things and places where I would expect them to be that could take them out of the running for me? And an easy example of this is there are plenty of companies who, as much as they like you, if you're not in the Gartner quadrant, you are not someone they can justify to the rest of the organization. No one likes it, it's pay to play but it is absolutely fact because it's an insurance policy. So that's a one example but then kind of going towards the LLM side of it and things the assumption being made in AEO and GEO and however you want to determine it is that AI is now become this oracle that tells people what to buy and that's a big, big assumption and it might be true at some levels. There are absolutely products where you know, like simple example, I, I'm going through this completely nerdy exercise of doing a smart home thing. Everything is going to be smart plugs and this, that and the other. And I went down a rabbit hole of like why this, not that? And I knew none of the brands. And yes, genuinely thanks to Claude, within you know, a week of my hyper fixation on going way too into the world, I now know all the brands and I've weird, I already have like beliefs of like well I kept seeing everyone in the Reddit threads mention this brand. No one mentioned this one. I now assume this one is probably the one that everyone likes and so there's definitely cases where we'll go coming in blank. But as you get more and more expensive that gets less and less likely. You know, you look at the $0.06 data, uh, for the most part Most buyers have bought from the category to some degree and have a career of doing so. It's not common that someone in a professional environment has no idea idea who the CRM brands are, the ERP brand, if it's relative relevant to their job, they hear it from peers, they see it at trade shows, they're absorbing information. And back to the other point of uh, it, if even if they go to an LLM and say tell me which of these is the best telecom communication provider, you're coming in with some pre existing idea.

Host: Yeah.

Liam Moroney: So just being ranked there doesn't hurt, but it's like being on a shelf. If you go into a, you know, go into a uh, I don't know, Target, Best Buy, whatever and you're buying TVs and there's like Samsung TVs and then there's this other brand you've never heard of next to them on the shelf, it's not gonna make a lick of difference because just because it's on the shelf doesn't mean I'm going to consider it. Same thing is true of being in an LLM. Making the list does not make you part of a consideration set. What does is, do I hear about you from people? Do I see you out in the world? Do people talk about you? Are you a uh, sponsor at shows where all the other people who I would have considered are sponsors? Are you in the lists that review when they come up? Like that's all part of place, it's all the criteria that well, I would have expected you to be there and if you weren't there, that's somewhat of a red flag to me.

Host: Right. And it's not just like, and you said it also with the, with the aeo, like what's the first thing you did when you kind of looked at that list? You started to go down Reddit thread. So even, even when you talk about place, there's levels to place and then just because the LLM, um, tells you this or feeds you this back doesn't mean you go, don't go and do more fact checking back checking on some of those recommendations and then see, well, what do my peers say about it? And then there's another aspect of place also which is like how well you, you plug in to your point, plug in and play with other, with other softwares that you use. Right. I mean one of the first things that people want to know when they buy your product is well, can you work with these other, in these other places that I also work. Right. Which is why there's just been this enormous rush to, obviously for any software player at the moment to want to plug in, create an MCP or a direct API into ChatGPT or Cloud, because this is the way that we work now. So if I can't, if I don't exist, or you can't work in this place with my software, going back to the headless architecture point now, I'm increasingly irrelevant and it doesn't matter whether how good my interface is or how good that works. If I'm not, If you're, If I'm not able to work in this place with this software, it's just not going to make my buyer list at this point.

Liam Moroney: Yeah, and the line between place and product gets very blurred when you go through those lens, for sure. And those are product requirements as much as they are distribution. But if I can't access you through somewhere, if you don't work with them, if you don't participate in this thing, then yeah, all of that is going back to the real point of, uh, what most of it is in B2B. It's risk, it's how do I make you less risky of a purchase and more secure and do the job with confidence. That's what it all comes back to.