How a B2B company gets sales leads from ChatGPT, not just mentions

Plenty of companies celebrate a mention in ChatGPT. Fewer can show a lead that came from one. The gap is almost always the same: the work targets general questions, while leads come from buying questions. Here is how we close that gap for B2B clients.

Work on buying questions, not how-to questions

"How does supplier risk management work?" brings readers. "Which firms help a 200-person manufacturer set up supplier risk management?" brings buyers. The second kind is where an assistant names suppliers, and where enquiries come from.

• "Who should I hire for…" and "which firms do…" questions.
• "Best X for a company like ours" questions, with size, industry or location.
• Cost questions: "what does X cost" and "is there a fixed-price option".
• Comparison questions: "X vs Y" and "alternatives to Y".

Give the assistant a reason to recommend you

An assistant recommends a supplier when it can say who they serve and why they're a good fit. Your site should make that easy, with pages that state plainly who you work with, what you deliver, typical timelines, how pricing works, and examples of results.

Get named by others

For buying questions, assistants lean on reviews, directories and comparison articles even more than usual. A B2B company with ten genuine reviews on the right platform will usually beat one with a better website and none.

Make the next step obvious

Someone who arrives from an AI answer has already been told you might fit. Don't send them to a generic homepage. Land them on a page that confirms the fit and offers one clear next step, such as a short call or an audit.

Track leads, not mentions

1. 1Tag referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com in your analytics.
2. 2Add "How did you hear about us?" to your enquiry form, with AI assistants as an option.
3. 3Record the source in your CRM, so you can see which leads closed.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client story: take a 30-person compliance consultancy that ChatGPT mentions for general questions like "what is SOC 2", but that gets no enquiries from it. The buying questions, such as "which firms help SaaS startups get SOC 2 in under six months", name three competitors.

The fix is one page answering exactly that question: who they help, a typical timeline, how fees work and two short client examples. Then reviews on the platform cited for those questions, and "AI assistant" added as an option to the enquiry form's "How did you hear about us?" field. That field is how they would know, a quarter later, whether the work is producing leads and not just mentions.

Mistakes that cost leads

• Celebrating mentions for questions buyers never ask before purchasing.
• Sending AI visitors to a generic homepage.
• Not asking new leads how they found you.

We built a page on exactly this: getting B2B leads from ChatGPT and AI search.