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The Background
Sandler is one of the most recognized names in sales training and performance globally. For more than five decades, the company has equipped enterprise sales organizations, the leaders, enablement teams, and frontline sellers inside companies with 500 or more reps — with the methodology, processes, and technology to sell effectively at scale. Peers see Sandler as credible and aspirational because it sits at the intersection of methodology and modern enablement, and because it is willing to evolve its own playbook as buyer behavior changes.
That willingness has never mattered more. The modern B2B buyer behaves fundamentally differently than they did even a few years ago. They research through answer engines instead of search results. They arrive at sales calls with strong opinions formed before any rep gets a chance to engage. They expect hyper-relevant conversations from the first second. Sales organizations that can't adapt to this new buyer lose deals before reps ever get on the phone.
Sandler's mission is to make sure their customers don't lose those deals. But to deliver on that promise, Sandler had to first reckon with the same shift inside its own marketing.
The Challenge
When the Buyer Stops Coming to Your Website
Sandler's enterprise customers were watching their top-of-funnel disappear. The sales leaders and enablement teams they served, the people who depend on Sandler to help them sell to the modern buyer, were seeing their own prospects research through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity instead of clicking through Google. Buyers were forming opinions about vendors, narrowing their shortlists, and sometimes making decisions before ever landing on a website.
For Sandler to credibly teach 500-seller sales organizations how to navigate that shift, it had to navigate it first. And inside Sandler's own marketing function, the same erosion was happening in real time.
Emily Davidson, Director of Enterprise Marketing at Sandler, was the one carrying that pressure. Operating in a post-acquisition environment with a leaner team and limited resources, she was accountable for proving the ROI of every motion while answering the question every CMO is now being asked: what are we doing about AI? She needed an answer leadership across the newly acquired portfolio could stand behind.
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Flying Blind Through a Channel That Didn't Exist Yesterday
The honest answer was that no one really knew. Sandler had no way to see how often its brand was being cited in AI-generated answers, no way to compare against competitors, and no clear starting point for a content strategy that would actually influence those answers. Existing tools either gated the data or stopped at the snapshot. Sandler was stitching together signals from Google Analytics, Semrush, and paid search campaigns to guess at AI-driven traffic, roughly 16 hours a week of manual reporting that still left the picture incomplete.
"You're kind of throwing darts at a wall, hoping something sticks," Emily said. "Search terms do not equal what prompts people are typing in. That is a very big difference. You can search for something and have results come up. But when you type in a prompt, you want an answer. How do we become part of the answer?"
That was the harder problem. Without visibility, Sandler couldn't measure its presence in the channel where its customers' buyers were now making decisions. Without a strategy, leadership had nothing defensible to point to. And without speed, the gap between Sandler and a more AI-native competitor would widen month by month — exactly the gap Sandler exists to help its own customers close.
The Solution
Giving Buyers a Reason to Find Sandler in the Answer
The buyers Sandler's customers needed to reach weren't searching anymore, they were prompting. They were asking answer engines for the best sales training and enablement providers, the right methodologies for enterprise sales teams, the most credible partners for organizations with 500+ sellers. To stay relevant to its own customers, Sandler had to become part of those answers.
Emily turned to HubSpot AEO. She set the tool up with Sandler's website, ICP, competitor domains, and product details, and the dashboard immediately scanned ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to return a single Brand Visibility Score across all three engines, plus a competitive ranking view showing exactly where Sandler stood against the names buyers were comparing them to.
For the first time, Emily could see the channel. She could watch the score move when new content was published. She could see which prompts triggered Sandler mentions and which ones didn't. The 16 hours a week of stitching together half-signals collapsed into a 15-minute daily check-in.
From Insight to Action: The Recommendation That Closed the Loop
Visibility was the first step. The harder part, the part other tools never solved, was knowing what to actually do about it.
Using HubSpot AEO's prompt suggestions, Emily's team built targeted prompts segmented by ICP, product line, and region — the questions Sandler's enterprise buyers were likely asking answer engines. Where Sandler ranked low on a given prompt, HubSpot AEO surfaced a specific, executable content recommendation. For one prompt about top sales training and AI analytics platforms, the tool recommended creating a listicle on a blog page covering exactly that topic, with guidance on the language and structure most likely to be cited.
That was the moment AEO stopped feeling like a dashboard and started feeling like a strategy. "This is where it goes beyond the data and the snapshot," Emily said. "It makes it actionable in my marketing strategy. I love the blunt — just what do I do about this? Here's the recommendation."
Within weeks, AEO had become a driving force in Sandler's content strategy — shaping how the team thought about blogs, FAQs, and every piece of content they published. The team checked the brand mention rate and citation breakdown daily, building content around prompts instead of keywords.
The Transformation
The Buyers Sandler's Customers Need to Reach Are Finding Sandler Again
The first sign that something had shifted came from the buyers themselves. The sales leaders, enablement directors, and enterprise decision-makers Sandler serves started arriving on the website again, this time through answer engine citations instead of paid search. In a few weeks, AEO-driven content brought 8,000 new visitors to the site. Half of them,4,000 were ICP-fit prospects matching Sandler's Network and Enterprise personas, the exact 500+ seller organizations Sandler is built to serve.
And these visitors converted at 2.7 percentage points higher than typical marketing-sourced traffic. They weren't browsing. They had already done their research inside an answer engine, decided Sandler was worth a closer look, and arrived ready to engage. That ripple landed in the pipeline: 12 new account conversions, a 10% year-over-year increase, and a measurable two-point lift in Brand Visibility Score that drove more form fills, more MQLs, more SQLs across the funnel.
The deals are moving faster, too. AEO-sourced opportunities are progressing through the pipeline at a noticeably quicker clip than other marketing-sourced deals, because the buyer arrives further along in their decision than buyers used to.
From Throwing Darts to a Defensible Answer
The internal shift was just as significant. Emily no longer walks into leadership meetings without a story. The post-acquisition pressure to prove the ROI of marketing's AI strategy now has a clean answer: a daily-tracked Brand Visibility Score, a content engine tied to specific recommendations, and a measurable line from prompt-level performance to pipeline.
The team plans content around prompts, not keywords. Decisions about what to publish are tied to specific HubSpot AEO recommendations and tracked against brand visibility movement. Conversations with leadership have shifted from "what should we do about AI?" to reviewing measurable wins. And the broader portfolio, newly acquired sister brands also wrestling with the AEO question, now has a model to point to.
For Emily, the shift is personal as much as professional. She went from being the marketer who had to apologize for not having a clean answer on AI to the one whose practice gets cited as the example.
"Before HubSpot AEO, we were piecing together signals and hoping something stuck. Now I open one dashboard, see exactly where we're showing up, and know what content to build next. It changed how I do my job — and how I show up for leadership."
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