Your buyers ask AI who to pick. Make sure it’s you.
Gets you selected acrossChatGPTClaudeGeminiPerplexity
RocMode shows you whether AI picks you or your rival, finds the work that changes it, builds that work, and sends it to you to approve. Then it proves what moved.
We ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your buyers ask, and show where they pick you and who they pick instead. Free, no login. What’s the Score? Or sign up free and try everything for 14 days.
RocMode · Live read · Monday by Nine (example)
Asking ChatGPTBefore
The AI marketing and sales platform
Marketing and sales, rebuilt for the age of AI.
Your website in. A whole marketing and sales team’s work out. RocMode learns your brand from your site, then does the work: strategy, website, ads, social, PR, partners, email, design, and the deck that wins the deal. You approve every piece.
Other tools do one job. This does all of them, as one story.
Other AI guesses. This works from your facts and proof.
Other tools stop at the post. This follows it to the signed deal, and learns what won.
How it works
KnowWhere you really standActWhat to fix firstCreateWe build the work. You approve itProveDid it move?
Know · Step 1 of 10
It gets you. It gets your customers. It connects the dots.
Everything about your brand, your buyers and your rivals, sorted and connected.
Then it works out what to say, where, when and why. It’s the brain behind every step.
Builds: Customers · Offerings · Rivals · Proof
RocMode · BrandGraph · sample data
Following one momentCISO · Comparing · “Who’s the best managed security provider for a hospital group?”Moment found
Brand core3 found
Voice3 found
Visual identity3 found
Products and services3 found
Pricing3 found
Personas and markets3 found
Pains, gains, jobs3 found
Journeys and objections3 found
Proof and trust3 found
Content3 found
Competitors and partners3 found
Team2 found
Halvard Security35 facts
Two hospital case studies/partners
FactClaimProofAI-suggestedExample: Halvard Security, an invented managed security provider.
Reading halvardsecurity.com.au, socials, reviews and listings…
Halvard SecurityBrandGraph
12areas, all connected
3personas
15moments
6rivals
Sample data
Your customers
Customers
›
Personas
›
Journeys
›
Pains, jobs, objections
›
Moments
What you sell
Products and services
›
Offerings
›
Value proposition
›
Differentiation
Your rivals
Competitors
›
Industry
›
Expectations
›
Gaps to exploit
Moments + offerings
Opportunities
›
Campaigns
›
Ads
›
Sales
Content gaps
›
Content
›
Website
So it knows
What to say.Where. When. Why.
Moment foundCISO · Comparing · “Who’s the best managed security provider for a hospital group?”
Know · Step 2 of 10
Your strategy, from everything it knows.
Positioning built from your offerings and the gaps your rivals leave.
Claims you can’t back get cut before anyone sees them.
Seen isn’t selected. AI picks the brands it can tell apart.
Every era of marketing had its visibility number, and AI mentions are just the newest. Most AI tools still sell you visibility. But being mentioned isn’t being chosen, and for the first time you can measure the pick itself.
BroadcastAwareness
Media buyingReach
SearchRankings
SocialFollowers
AIMentions
What countsSelected
What AI made cheap
Making things.
Posts, pages, ads and reports in minutes
Anyone with a login can do it
Your competitors have the same tools
Sell on volume and you compete on price.
What AI made measurable
Being chosen.
Brand ABrand BYouBrand CBrand D
Buyers ask AI who to pick, and it names a few brands
You can ask the same questions and see who’s named
So you can see, moment by moment, where you win and lose
Compete on this and you compete on results.
See it on your brand
See how often AI picks you. Free.
We ask the AI assistants your buyers use the questions they really ask, many times each, at every step of their journey. Then we show where you’re picked, where you’re passed over, and who wins instead.
Your free Selectability Score asks the AI assistants the questions your buyers ask, without your name in them. You see who gets picked, at which moment, and the three gaps to fix first.
Cos Luccitti and I started CXA in December 2015. Not long after, I drafted a model of the customer journey in five stages: Discovery, Deliberation, Decision, Delivery and Devotion. Five Ds.
I took it to Cos and we worked it over together. We changed a few words, but mostly we just looked at it and liked what we saw. We both fell a little bit in love with it.
It made sense of everything we did as an agency, which until then had looked like a list of services. And it gave clients a reason to get excited about marketing and customer experience again. Customer experience in particular had shrunk to a satisfaction score and how well the service desk performed. We wanted it to cover the whole life of a customer, from the first time they heard of you to the day they decided to stay.
The sixth came later, once we'd started asking one question first: what problem is this solving? If every product and service is really a solution to a problem, then the natural way to grow with a client is to solve more of their problems. So we added Design, and put it at the front of the journey, ahead of Discovery.
We didn't get everything right. The irony is that we underplayed Delivery. The rest of the CX industry was so fixated on service delivery that we'd pushed hard the other way, and in doing it we gave too little weight to the stage where you actually keep your promise.
The model in this chapter is that one's descendant. Ten years on, I've rebuilt it around a single question: what has to be true for a buyer to choose you? And this time, Delivery has a stage of its own. It's called Kept.
A choice isn't one event. It's seven things a buyer comes to say about you, and being seen earns only the first two.
Seven statements
Stage
What the buyer can say
Known
"I've heard of you."
Found
"You show up when I look."
Answered
"You answered my question."
Believed
"I trust that it's true."
Preferred
"You're my first choice."
Bought
"I bought."
Kept
"I'd choose you again."
The seventh is the first six asked again, when a customer decides whether to stay.
Each one can fail on its own. A brand can be known and impossible to find. It can answer every question and not be believed. It can even be the favourite and still lose the sale to a clumsy checkout or a slow contract. Preferred isn't the same as Bought.
This is not a funnel
Marketing has drawn staged models for a century, from AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action) to Robert Lavidge and Gary Steiner's hierarchy of effects in 1961. They say buyers climb the steps in order. The evidence doesn't support that. Demetrios Vakratsas and Tim Ambler reviewed more than 250 articles and books on how advertising works. They found "little support for any hierarchy, in the sense of temporal sequence, of effects" (Vakratsas and Ambler).
So the seven stages aren't a sequence. They're conditions. Each has to hold at the moment of choice, in whatever order the buyer meets them. That's why each stage gets its own chapter and its own measure.
One buyer, seven stages
Take an operations director choosing scheduling software. She's an illustration, not a case.
Known. Four names come to mind before she looks anywhere.
Found. She searches and asks an assistant. Three of her four turn up, and one new name joins them.
Answered. Two suppliers publish prices and integration details. The others make her book a call to find out.
Believed. Reviews and a peer's word back up both of the two that answered.
Preferred. Her team favours one, for a reason she can repeat to the finance lead.
Bought. The favourite's contract takes six weeks of legal back-and-forth. The runner-up offers a 30-day pilot she can sign this month.
Kept. A year later, she asks the first six again at renewal.
The favourite won five stages and lost at Bought, and nothing on a visibility report would have shown it.
Seen is two of seven
Every visibility number measures the first two stages. Awareness is Known. Rankings, impressions and AI mentions are Found.
Seen: what visibility countsSelected: where the choice is won or lostKnownFoundAnsweredBelievedPreferredBoughtKept
Seen is two of seven
Both are necessary. But a supplier that makes the shortlist and loses has passed both. It lost somewhere in the other five.
Visibility is the door. The choice is made inside the house.
Three things around the stages
Three other things define the choice itself.
The chooser. It isn't always the end buyer. A retailer chooses what to stock, a broker what to recommend, a committee what to approve. An AI assistant is the newest name on that list.
The moment. Every choice starts with a need arising.
The offer. What you sell, what it costs and where it can be bought: the old marketing mix. No marketing makes a poor offer preferred for long.
A loop, not a line
Buyers don't walk the stages in order. A repeat customer goes straight from Kept to Bought. A happy one tells a colleague, and Kept becomes someone else's Known.
That's why the experience after the sale belongs in a model of selection. Whether you deliver what you promised decides whether you're kept. What your customers say decides whether the next buyer believes you.
What AI changes here
Each statement now has two audiences: the buyer, and the machine advising the buyer. A person remembers you or doesn't. An AI model has its own version of memory, built from what has been written about you.
So you can ask the adviser directly whether it knows the brand, what it says, and whether it recommends it. Several of the seven can now be inspected at any time, not inferred from surveys.
My reading of the evidence so far is that AI acts most on Found, Answered and Believed, and mostly in purchases that take real thought. For habitual and quick buying it's too early to know.
Every activity has a home
I mapped ninety marketing and sales activities against the model. Sixty-five sit inside one of the seven stages. The rest belong to the chooser, the moment, the offer, or the groundwork that serves them all. The full mapping is in the toolkit at rocmode.com/playbooks.
How the pieces fit
The ladder is what has to hold. The mode says which rungs carry the weight. The foundations are what every rung stands on.
Seven stages, then. The next question is when they happen, and the answer is earlier than most marketing assumes.
Whose evidence this is. There's no vendor data in this chapter. Peer-reviewed source: Vakratsas and Ambler, in the Journal of Marketing.
Try this
Take your last lost deal and mark the one stage where it was lost. The activity mapping is free at rocmode.com/playbooks.
