Guest Post
By Mark M.J. Scott
President of Northern Pixels Inc.
Most AI startup founders spend 70% of GTM resources hunting leads they’ll never close. The founders winning at scale know a secret: the magic isn’t at the top of the funnel — it’s in the middle, where buying committees align, executive sponsors emerge, and POCs convert to revenue.
The paradox facing AI startups under $25M in revenue is deceptively simple: More outbound activity, more meetings, more pipeline — yet the actual revenue hasn’t kept pace. Your SDRs are booking meetings. Your AEs are running demos. But somewhere between first touch and contract signature, deals evaporate into endless POC cycles, technical evaluations led by buyers with no budget authority, and competitors gaining ground while your team burns cash on pipeline that doesn’t convert.
This isn’t a sales execution problem. It’s a go-to-market architecture problem. Specifically, you’re starving the middle of your funnel — the stage where high-intent buyers actively compare vendors, where buying committees build consensus, and where trust gets built at scale. When middle-of-funnel (MOFU) content and stakeholder education are weak, even a strong top-of-funnel machine produces low-quality opportunities that sales can’t close.
Why Top-of-Funnel Velocity Doesn’t Guarantee Revenue Growth
Traditional GTM wisdom says: Drive awareness. Generate leads. Hand them to sales. Let conversion rates sort themselves out. For AI startups, this playbook fails spectacularly.
Here’s what actually happens when you over-index on top-of-funnel:
The Awareness Trap: Cold outreach captures low-intent prospects who don’t yet understand why they need your solution or what problem you solve. These conversations start at zero credibility, requiring months of education before the prospect is ready to consider buying.
The Multi-Stakeholder Bottleneck: Modern enterprise deals involve 10+ decision-makers across procurement, IT, finance, operations, and the business — yet most founders only build relationships with a single technical champion. When your message doesn’t reach the CFO, the VP of Operations, or the IT director, deals stall waiting for internal alignment.
The POC Quicksand: The “curious geeks” who drive POCs often lack executive sponsorship or buying authority. They commission technical validation experiments that consume weeks or months and end with “interesting, but we need approval from leadership” — only to disappear into reorg cycles or budget freeze.
The Forgotten Win Timeline: Many AI startup founders obsess over top of funnel vanity metrics — pipeline volume and meetings booked — versus stage-by-stage conversion rates. Here’s the harsh reality: even when you generate quality meetings, typical B2B SaaS conversion rates mean only ~20% of demos convert to closed deals. But that assumes you’re reaching and effectively influencing the right buying committee members. When your middle-funnel strategy is weak and you’re only connecting with junior technical champions without executive sponsors, conversion rates can fall to ~5% or lower. At these rates, closing 20 deals requires running 400 demos — a brutal cost-per-deal that burns cash while competitors with stronger middle-funnel narratives close more deals from half the activity. Guess who wins….
Market Shaping Empowers Your Middle Funnel GTM Performance
The Middle Funnel: Where Buying Committees Decide and Market Shaping Takes Hold
The middle of the funnel is where your GTM strategy either multiplies in force or collapses under its own weight. This is the consideration and evaluation phase, when prospects have moved from casual curiosity to active research. They’re comparing vendors, building business cases, and socializing the decision across stakeholders.
At this stage, the buying committee shows up in force. Finance asks: What’s the ROI and total cost of ownership? IT wants to understand integration, security, and scalability. Operations questions change management and adoption risk. The business champion who initiated the search suddenly realizes they need sign-off from three other departments.
This is where market shaping activates. By positioning your company as the category authority — not just another vendor — you create a powerful, defensible advantage that satisfies the entire buying committee.
When prospects and their buying committees encounter your thought leadership, analyst validation, customer ROI case studies, and ecosystem partnerships before they speak to a sales rep, the entire dynamic shifts. You’re no longer fighting for credibility. You’re educating decision-makers on why your category matters, which inherently positions your solution as the category standard. This builds internal consensus across the committee and accelerates deal velocity.
The outcome? Shorter sales cycles (~40% faster), higher win rates, larger deal sizes, and stronger NRR — all driven by buying committees that arrive pre-aligned and ready to champion your solution internally.
Five Ready-Made GTM Strategies to Master the Middle of Your Funnel and Break accelerate to $25M
1. Create Multi-Stakeholder Educational Content That Builds Buying Committee Consensus
The Problem: Your existing content speaks to a single buyer persona — usually the technical champion. But buying committees don’t move forward on champion enthusiasm alone. Finance, IT, procurement, and operations all need reasons to say “yes.”
The Strategy: Develop distinct content narratives for each stakeholder group within your target buying committee, addressing their unique concerns and objections.
- For Finance: Build ROI calculators, TCO comparisons, and case studies quantifying business impact (revenue lift, cost reduction, efficiency gains)
- For IT/Operations: Create technical integration guides, security and compliance documentation, and implementation timelines.
- For C-Level Sponsors: Produce strategic positioning content showing how your solution aligns with corporate growth goals, competitive positioning, and market trends.
- For Practitioners: Develop day-in-the-life use cases, workflow diagrams, and adoption guides.
Implementation: Map each of your top 10 target accounts to their likely buying committee roles. Develop 3–5 pieces of content per role, then chain these narratives together into a cohesive account-based strategy. Test on 10–20 target accounts, measure reply velocity and pipeline speed, then scale.
Why It Works: When buying committees encounter content tailored to their specific role and concerns, engagement jumps ~50% compared to generic messaging. More importantly, stakeholders who previously stayed silent in the sales process become active advocates internally, accelerating consensus and closing timelines.
2. Build Analyst and Third-Party Validation Into Your Middle-Funnel Narrative
The Problem: Your sales team claims your product is category-defining. Your prospects’ IT security teams want proof from independent analysts, not vendor claims.
The Strategy: Develop relationships with 3–5 industry analysts who cover your space, brief them quarterly, and position your executives as subject matter experts for their research.
- Schedule analyst briefings every 3-6 months to share your vision, customer wins, and competitive differentiators
- Provide data and early access to significant announcements; position your CEO/CTO as an expert source
- Seek analyst quotes and validation to use in middle-funnel content, proposals, and sales enablement
Implementation: Identify analysts who brief your target prospects (e.g., Gartner, Forrester, industry-specific research houses). Request briefing slots. Share customer metrics, roadmap details, and category positioning. Monitor which analyst mentions appear in prospect conversations; double down on relationships that generate pipeline.
Why It Works: Analysts influence >50%+ of enterprise technology purchases. When prospects encounter independent analyst validation during their evaluation phase, procurement and C-level gatekeepers gain confidence that you’re a “safe” choice, not a startup bet. This transforms your middle-funnel narrative from “vendor pitch” to “trusted advisor recommendation.”
3. Deploy Comparison and Battle Card Content That Frames Your Category as Standard
The Problem: Your prospects are comparing you against incumbent vendors. Procurement wants a simple “why us vs. them” narrative. Sales gets stuck defending feature claims instead of category differentiation.
The Strategy: Create comparison content that frames your category as the emerging standard, not your specific product as superior.
- Comparison pages: “AI-Native vs. Retrofitted AI” or “Real-Time ML vs. Batch Processing”—frame the approach, not the vendor
- Battle cards: Internal sales guides showing how to reframe prospect objections as outdated category thinking
- Category education: Ultimate guides explaining why your approach outperforms legacy methodologies
Implementation: Audit your top 5 competitive objections. For each, create a comparison resource that educates the prospect on category evolution, not feature comparison. Distribute through sales teams and embed in your middle-funnel nurture sequences.
Why It Works: When you frame competition as a “category debate” rather than a vendor battle, you position yourself as the category authority, not one of many choices. Buying committees digest this framing and often repeat it in their own internal discussions, reinforcing your narrative across stakeholder groups.
4. Develop a Customer Advocacy and Reference Program That Educates the Full Committee
The Problem: Your sales team relies on one customer reference per deal. Finance never talks to another finance leader. IT never hears from a peer IT director. Each stakeholder evaluates in isolation, leading to misaligned buying committee decisions.
The Strategy: Build a structured customer advocacy program where referenceable customers actively educate buying committees across multiple stakeholder groups.
- Recruit 5–10 reference customers across verticals and company sizes; develop detailed customer stories for each
- Segment advocates by role: finance advocates for financial stakeholders, IT advocates for technical buyers, operational advocates for process teams
- Arm advocates with talking points on specific outcomes: cost savings, implementation speed, team adoption, competitive differentiation
- Schedule advocate reference calls mapped to buying committee roles, not just the primary lead
Implementation: After each win, identify 1–2 advocates willing to participate in future deals. Develop case studies and reference materials. Tag them by role in your CRM. When a prospect advances to the middle funnel, identify which buying committee members need references, then match with relevant advocates.
Why It Works: Buying committees trust peer voices far more than sales teams. When a prospect’s CFO hears directly from another CFO about ROI and financial impact, procurement concerns evaporate. When the IT director speaks to a peer IT director about integration and security, technical objections resolve much faster. This dramatically accelerates middle-funnel conversion.
5. Optimize Your Middle-Funnel Content for AI Answer Engines and LLM Discovery
The Problem: Your competitors are already showing up in AI answer engines (Clause, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews) when your prospects research your category. Your middle-funnel content isn’t being cited.
The Strategy: Restructure your middle-funnel content (comparison guides, case studies, category education) to be discovered and cited by AI answer engines, which increasingly influence middle-funnel buyers.
Use question-based headers and direct answers (first 40–60 words) to match how LLMs extract information.
- Implement schema markup (FAQPage, HowTo, SchemaOrg Article) to help AI systems understand and cite your content.
- Include statistics, expert quotes, and customer data to increase citation-worthiness for LLMs
- Update evergreen content regularly (quarterly) to maintain recency signals that AI systems favor
Implementation: Audit your top 10 middle-funnel pages (comparisons, category guides, case studies). Restructure with clear question-based headers. Add schema markup. Test your pages in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview tool — do they cite your content when prospects ask category questions? If not, revise for clarity and authority.
Why It Works: > 50% of enterprise buyers now use AI research tools during evaluation. When your middle-funnel content is cited by answer engines, you gain top-of-mind awareness during the exact moment your buyer is evaluating solutions. This multiplies your middle-funnel velocity without requiring additional SDR spend.
The Payoff: Middle-Funnel Mastery Drives Revenue Acceleration and Market Position
Founders who have scaled AI startups past $25M in ARR rarely do so by outspending competitors on SDRs or top-of-funnel campaigns. They do it by dominating the middle of the funnel — by building buying committee education, analyst relationships, comparison narratives, customer advocacy, and discoverable content that transforms low-intent leads into deal-ready opportunities. Founders who embrace GTM market shaping strategy position themselves to capture category leadership, build sustainable competitive moats, and deliver on their vision to reshape industries and create lasting impact.
About the Author:
Mark M.J. Scott is founder and president of Northern Pixels Inc., a go-to-market advisory firm specializing in AI and deep tech startups. As a 3x founder, Mark has successfully exited to AppDirect, Toyota, and Battery Ventures. He focuses on the $1-$25M revenue growth — where most founders make critical GTM mistakes that compound for years. His market shaping framework helps Series A & B startups master this phase, establishing the competitive moats and category positioning that enable sustainable growth trajectories.
