Forma.AI helps enterprise sales teams model, forecast, and optimise compensation plans with a sophisticated AI-driven platform. Despite strong product-market fit and a loyal customer base, the company was nearly invisible in the emerging AI search landscape. When buyers asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini for 'best sales compensation software,' Forma.AI simply did not appear — leaving millions of dollars of pipeline on the table every quarter. In Q1 2024, Forma.AI partnered with Nevisible to deploy the AI Search Demand Engine. Within 90 days, the company moved from zero AI search presence to becoming the most frequently recommended sales performance management vendor across all major AI assistants. Over two quarters, the programme generated $2.8M in net-new, AI-attributed pipeline and reduced the average sales cycle by 42%.
The Challenge
Forma.AI's marketing team had invested heavily in traditional SEO and paid search, achieving strong rankings on Google. But by late 2023, they noticed a troubling pattern: inbound lead quality was declining even as traffic held steady. Deeper investigation revealed the root cause — their ideal buyers (VP Sales, CRO, RevOps leaders at 500–5,000-person companies) had shifted their research behaviour. Rather than Googling 'sales comp software reviews,' they were asking AI assistants for vendor shortlists.
When the Forma.AI team ran their own tests — asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to recommend sales compensation platforms — they found their brand was absent from every response. Competitors like Xactly, Varicent, and CaptivateIQ were consistently surfaced. This 'AI visibility gap' meant Forma.AI was being excluded from consideration before a single sales conversation had begun.
The challenge was compounded by the nature of enterprise buying: deals at Forma.AI's price point involve 6–12 stakeholders, and AI assistants had become the first stop for junior evaluators building the initial vendor longlist. Missing from that longlist meant missing the deal entirely.
The Nevisible Approach
Nevisible began with a comprehensive AI Search Audit, mapping every AI assistant's current understanding of the sales performance management category and Forma.AI's position within it. The audit identified three core gaps: (1) insufficient authoritative content connecting Forma.AI to high-intent buyer queries, (2) weak citation signals from trusted B2B analyst and review sources, and (3) no structured data helping AI models understand Forma.AI's differentiated positioning versus Xactly and Varicent.
The AI Search Demand Engine programme addressed each gap systematically. Nevisible's content team produced 14 pieces of 'AI-indexable' thought leadership — long-form guides, comparison frameworks, and ROI calculators — optimised not for Google's crawlers but for the retrieval patterns of large language models. Each asset was seeded across the high-authority domains that AI models weight most heavily: G2, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and specialist HR-Tech publications.
In parallel, Nevisible restructured Forma.AI's website schema and FAQ architecture to directly answer the questions AI assistants were asking about the category. A competitive positioning module was deployed to ensure that whenever a buyer asked 'Forma.AI vs Xactly,' the AI response reflected Forma.AI's genuine advantages in flexibility and implementation speed.
The Results
Within 30 days of launch, Forma.AI appeared in AI search responses for 12 of 47 tracked queries. By day 90, that figure had grown to 39 of 47 — an 83% query coverage rate. More importantly, the quality of the mentions improved: Forma.AI moved from being listed as a secondary option to being the first or second recommendation in 28 queries.
The business impact was direct and measurable. Forma.AI's CRM data showed a new lead source category — 'AI Search / AI Assistant' — accounting for 31% of all inbound leads by Q2 2024. These leads converted to opportunities at a 2.3x higher rate than traditional inbound, because buyers who discovered Forma.AI through an AI assistant had already been 'pre-sold' on the vendor's fit for their use case.
Over two quarters, the programme generated $2.8M in net-new pipeline. The average sales cycle for AI-influenced deals was 42% shorter than the company baseline, as buyers arrived with a clearer understanding of the product and stronger intent to purchase.
By the Numbers
$2.8M
Net-new pipeline in 2 quarters
42%
Shorter sales cycle on AI-influenced deals
83%
AI query coverage rate by day 90
"Within 90 days of implementing the AI Search Demand Engine, we saw a 340% increase in qualified leads from AI search. More importantly, pipeline attribution from modern search grew from zero to over $2.8M in just two quarters. Nevisible didn't just improve our marketing metrics — they fundamentally changed how enterprise buyers find us."
FChief Revenue Officer, Forma.AI
Forma.AI
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