Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: AI is also search.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: So hang on, so you. So you're getting leads from ChatGPT and perplexity?
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: How does that. What. What the what the what, how does that work?
[00:00:09] Speaker A: For example, if someone was to type in top web design agencies in Melbourne into Chat GPT, we will appear.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Really?
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:19] Speaker B: Wow.
Welcome to the Agency our podcast, where we help digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams and their communities. This week on the podcast, we're hanging out with Simon Kelly, CEO and Head of Growth at sgd. Simon's not just another agency owner. He's one of the many legends who came up through our program, starting with the WP elevation blueprint way back in 1904, I think it was. I published that course and then later coaching inside the Mavericks Club. I love chatting with Simon because he's deep in the trenches, testing, refining and scaling what actually works for agencies in today's market. His agency is crushing it with WordPress, Google Ads and SEO. Every time we talk, I walk away with new insights that are immediately actionable and I usually end up signing up for more bloody software. This week we're diving into what AI means for the digital agency business model. The most valuable ways to leverage prompts, how to balance AI tools with team empowerment and the talent in your agency, why your agency should be selling AI roadmaps right now, and why Simon spends his spare time naked in the forest, and a whole lot more. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Agency Hour podcast. And I'm here with my good friend and colleague and very good looking unit, Simon Kelly from sgd. How are you, brother?
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Doing good, mate. How's yourself?
[00:01:48] Speaker B: You get better looking every time I see you. What the fuck's going on?
[00:01:50] Speaker A: That's good. I mean, your eyesight must just be getting worse, slowly degrading.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: That is true. It's because you're running marathons. That's why. All that blood carrying all that oxygen around your head and your body is just. You're glowing. You're glowing, my friend.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Good lighting. Cheers, mate.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Good lighting in marathons.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Good lighting and marathons is a simple formula.
[00:02:09] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go.
Now, today, apart from talking about your matinee idol, good looks, we're going to be talking about AI, artificial intelligence.
And we're going to be talking specifically about what it means for the agency business model, what it means for agencies, what it means for your clients, what it means for the world at large.
So let's just start with. I'm going to Throw a couple of curveballs at you. What is your. First of all, I'm going to make an assumption that you guys are using AI in the agency. Not. Not talking about client work right now, but using AI within the agency. Is that correct?
[00:02:46] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. What do you mean? Like separating between client work. Just. Sorry.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Well, so are you using AI to, you know, are you using. So for example, if you're using AI in Zapier to help you create zaps, or are you using AI to write copy for your own email marketing or your own blog posts versus using AI for client projects?
[00:03:06] Speaker A: Like. Yeah, like client delivery or fulfillment. Yeah, like across. Across a lot of the agency. Like, my, my main use case is within, like the marketing and sales side of things. Like, specifically the sales side of things. To go from. To go from lead to closed faster or disqualified. Just to like speed up that entire process.
Yeah. Which, which we've done significantly.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Cool. So I want to unpack that for a second. But before I do that, I want you to think about the AI that you're using within the agency for internal use. What is your favorite AI tool right now that you find yourself using a lot?
[00:03:41] Speaker A: It's. It may not be sexy or exciting, but it's. ChatGPT is my favorite. The one that I like the look of and how that works is Reloom It. Just every time it's building a sitemap and a page, I'm just like, wow, this is just a pleasure to watch.
But the application of ChatGPT itself is just. The impact has been huge for us. Okay.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: And so let's do. Let's do some use cases. So you're talking about the sales process, but let's break that down because there's a few steps in the sales process. First of all, give us the overarching, too long, didn't read version of your sales process for. You know, I spoke to an agency owner yesterday who is like, I'm so bad at sales. I just do free shit for people all the time because I'm so bad at sales right now. I mean, we've all been there, so no judgment, but there is a better way. What is. And I'm not saying mine is a better way. What is your sales process at a high level? What are the bullet points? How does it work? I've come into the agency, I'm going to do sales. I'm like, all right, Simon, what do we do? What's the sales process here?
[00:04:44] Speaker A: Yeah, so incoming leads, you'll be notified in Slack, and then we'll do a triage call in order to quickly qualify them on the triage call. We'll identify if they're a good fit and book them in for a digital strategy workshop. From there we'll put together a roadmap and that'll be a 12 month plan in order to help them achieve their goals.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Great. And where are the leads coming from?
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Yeah, like typically it's, it's organic through SEO and we're seeing more coming through Chat GPT and Perplexity as well. So it's like search optimization, not just like search engine optimization. So like AI is also search. So coming through that.
[00:05:27] Speaker B: So you're getting leads from ChatGPT and perplexity or how does that. What? What the what the what?
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Yeah. So for example, if someone was to type in top web design agencies in Melbourne into Chat GPT, we will.
Yeah. And then we use attributor IO to know that they came from there.
[00:05:52] Speaker B: Wow, really?
[00:05:56] Speaker A: He's doing it. Go on. No, no, no, actually I don't know the exact query, but.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to, I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask if that's the agent, best word for an agency coach and see what it suggests.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah, nice.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: And if it doesn't suggest us, I'm not going to tell you the results.
Hang on, how are you? Have you, have you intentionally optimized your.
Hang on a second. ChatGPT and perplexity, are they just searching Google or are they, do they, are they, do they have their own crawlers that are crawling the web?
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean someone else might be better qualified to answer that, but from my understanding is that ChatGPT is leveraging Bing and some old Google page rank algorithm in order to put it together. But I'm sure that's evolving incredibly rapidly and changing all the time. But the way that we're doing is we're just experimenting with what we're seeing online and testing to see what works. One of them that we're seeing is obviously AIs, the large language models, specifically trying to get the answer as quickly as possible and not have to wade through things. You know, like you look up a recipe and you've got to scroll 14 pages of who knows what before you actually get to the recipe. So it's prioritizing the answer straight away. So we're putting the answer further up the page and that seems to be helping a lot. Like the TLDR at the beginning of an article or a page or just getting the answer up the top.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: So okay, so stop.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: What have you got? What have you got?
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Stop it.
[00:07:29] Speaker A: Stop it. If you're not watching a YouTube, you gotta.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: So here we go. I have. I. This is. I think I need to share my screen here.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: Go on, let's have a look.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: This is. Can I do that? Can I share my screen? Because this is not now, maybe it's because I'm logged in, I don't know. But you know what? I'm just going to share my screen because this is interesting and this is complete accident. This is not scripted, kids. All right? I just open ChatGPT. I'm logged in with my Google email, right? Which is agencymavericks.com and I've just gone to ChatGPT. I'm not using one of my custom agents here, right? I've just gone to chatgpt4o and I've said, I run a digital agency and I need a coach.
And chatgpt said, that's great. Since you run a digital agency, a coach can be a game changer. Yeah, thanks very much. Here are a few things to consider when looking for a coach. And then it's given me. So this is not an agent that I've trained on our business. This is just straight up chatgpt, right? It then says, this is what you need to look for in a coach. You know, what type of coaching do you need, what to look for in a great coach. Proven track record, niche expertise, frameworks and tools, accountability and support, blah, blah, blah. If you're looking for recommendations, would you like me to suggest specific coaches that are well known in the digital agency space? And I said yes, make some recommendations. Great. Here's a curated list of highly regarded coaching programs and individuals who specialize in helping digital agencies grow. I've grouped them by focus area so you can pick based on your current priorities. Number one, growth and sales. Coaching Agency Mavericks. Troy Dean.
Look at that. What am I missing here? Like, I'm not gaming the system here, right? Like I didn't. This is.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Did you tell it? Words of affirmation are your love language.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Best for agencies wanting to scale with recurring revenue. Better clients and streamline delivery. Focus paid discovery, productized services, pricing automation Team building highlights digital roadmaps, Method for qualifying clients and increasing project value. Weekly coaching calls. SOP library Private community built specifically for digital agencies and with a link with.
[00:09:35] Speaker A: An actual clickable URL to go in. That's fantastic.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: Full disclosure, if you're Troy Dean or part of Agency Mavericks, this may be your own business. Let me know if you're seeking something complimentary instead. Wow. And then there's someone else. Scale time. I've never heard of another agency coach. Carl Sakas. I've never heard of up level Chris Rudolph win without pitching. Blair Enns. He's a good operator. Masterminds in peer groups. Wow. None of the usual competitors that I would expect the Jason Swanks. I mean, you gurus have been shut down now, so who cares? None of the other usual agency coach. None of the other usual competitors that I would expect are in here now. How would I attribute Simon that this. If someone clicks this link, how would I attribute that they've come from ChatGPT.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: So we actually use Attributor to check. To check that. So it'll come through as referral Source from.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: From chatgpt.com It'll say the referral is chatgpt.com.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Wow, that's unbelievable. That's. I'm, I'm, I'm having a great day right now and that's a beautiful thing that I have not done. We. I didn't even know that was a thing. I mean, I have not optimized any of our content for ChatGPT.
That was a complete accident. So I'm doing a happy dance right now. That's great.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: That's content marketing still relevant in the age of AI.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Of course. I mean, dude, this is all. I mean, I have spoke with an agency before. He's like, well, you know, like, what's the number one way that you're bringing in leads and clients? I'm like, mate, why are you. Why are we on a call, right? Oh. Cause I see your content everywhere. I'm like, well, fucking, there's some clues there, isn't there? You know what I mean? What do you reckon, dude, I got one of your emails. Well, there's a clue. When was the last time you emailed your database? Never. Well, we got some work to do, haven't we?
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: You know what I mean? It's like I've been listening to your podcast. Oh yeah? Have you made any YouTube videos or LinkedIn videos? No. Well, we've got some work to do, haven't we?
[00:11:35] Speaker A: I tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas.
I tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: That joke loses nothing with age, does it? So I've said this. In 2016, I was in a room in New York City running a mastermind. There was about 45 people in this room. It was about 108 degrees Celsius outside and fucking hot. And There was no air conditioning. We had the windows open. There were sirens and horns going down Fifth Avenue. And we're upstairs in this little room. We had this amazing day of masterminding. And then the following day, we went to WordCamp New York, which was in the United nations building, and my wife and I were in the States for a couple of weeks having. Attending a friend's wedding and having a general good time. We Both spoke at WordCamp Boston the week after that. We had a great time. And at the end of that Mastermind, I sat everyone down and I said, listen, I'm gonna give you the answer to most of your problems in your agency. The reason that you are all in this room with this idiot that flew out here from Australia is because I hit the publish button. I just publish shit that I know and stuff that I learn, and I don't care if anyone reads it or not, but it turns out they do. And you're all. There's 45 of you in this room here that you've flown in from all over the. In fact, Stephanie Campanella flew in from Australia to be with me in that room. Right? And people had flown in from New Zealand. Right. Just because I hit the publish button. I made a podcast, I run some ads, I put up some blog posts, I make some videos, I flap my gums about what I know. And here we are now. So my point is content. I don't believe content is ever going to run out as a strategy for bringing people into your world and helping convert them and build trust and convert them into clients.
So you're using AI to.
So the fact that AI exists is generating leads for you from ChatGPT and from perplexity. Right? Brilliant.
[00:13:39] Speaker A: Exactly. And without content, there would be no content for AI to put into itself to respond. It's not just going to make this stuff up.
[00:13:47] Speaker B: Great. So the leads come in, they get on a triage call, you pitch them paid discovery, the genius model, by the way. I don't know who taught you that, but well done. And so how are you using AI When a lead comes in the triage call, how are you using AI to help that process? And what's it doing for you? How is it improving that process or the results?
[00:14:09] Speaker A: Yeah, so like a quantifiable result is that it was taking about four hours to. If I tally up the time between, like, writing response emails, putting together a roadmap, it was taking about four hours, and now it takes an hour, powered by AI, and it's getting the result that I Want as well. So what we're doing is client lead books in. We use high level for calendar bookings and then we use Google Meet to have the call and we use Fathom to record the call. Within Fathom, there's a transcription that's available straight away. There's also an Ask Fathom feature so you can ask different questions. We use a call recap template and then we combine that with AI. So I'll put into ChatGPT.
There's a framework that I use that I learned from the AI Driven Leader book. Have you checked that one out? Oh, I know of it, yeah.
It was nice to get the framework into an acronym. So C, R I T, crit. So context, role, interview, task. So the. The what I've been saying, context wise is the transcript of the conversation.
The role is be as if you're a specialist salesperson for my digital agency.
Now interview me one question at a time to get all of the questions out that you need to put together a recap email for this prospect in order to move them towards the page discovery workshop.
And so that's. And then also up to a maximum of five. So three to five questions, no more than that because it'll just keep interviewing forever. And the task is ending up with the recap email to book them into the workshop. So it will use the word said and that's the prompt done, and then my work is done. So putting in the template for the recap, it'll use the words they said. Now, I was doing this manually before and it was fine, but there's extra cognitive load. You know, I can't do so many of those per day. But it's now freeing me up and that's just like one step. So that happens immediately after the call and it takes about a minute to get that done, which is great.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Got it. I love the. Because I love the. Interview me one question at a time. Because what I've been doing is saying, ask me any clarifying questions you have before you proceed and ask me 15 questions. And I'm like, well, now I have to go have lunch. Like, I can't sit here and answer 15 questions. You know what I mean? Like, I'm bored already. So interview one question at a time. That's exactly. That's great. I love it.
Okay. And so then we. You. So this is. This is before the triage call or. No, this is after the triage call.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, after the trash call.
[00:16:52] Speaker B: What if they don't? What if they don't? Is this if they. If they don't. If they do buy.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: If they do buy. Yeah, right. What if they recap?
[00:16:59] Speaker B: What if they don't? What if they're like, nah, piss off, Simon, you're an idiot.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Like, why did you call me? If they said, did you just call me to tell me that?
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Oh, great, my ex girlfriend's on the line again, thanks very much.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: How did you get this number? Yeah, if they tell me to puzzle off on the call, then fair enough, we're going to politely decline and move on. But if it's not a, if it's not a guaranteed yes, if it's the, the classic, you know, send me something and I'll have a, I'll have a think about it, that'd be, that'd be great. I'll, I'll be securing the next call on that first call and I'll still send them the recap. It just won't be. Here's the link to booking. Looking forward to getting started. It'll be as discussed on the call. My recommendation is the digital strategy workshop. We cover 1, 2 and 3.
Looking forward to chatting with you next week.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: Got it.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: So very similar.
[00:17:45] Speaker B: Got it.
Right, so now they book in a. For a digital roadmap.
What do you do before the digital roadmap workshop? Now I know the answer to these questions, so I'm kind of teeing you up to hit it out of the park here. But what do you do before the digital roadmap session? How do you use AI before the digital roadmap session so that you, to, you know, to help you run a successful workshop with a client?
[00:18:13] Speaker A: So we have, I think it's about 15 prompts that we use to prepare information about the business, about their competitors, research the URL, put together a one page marketing plan, put together an example Persona so that we're ready ahead of the call to unpack these things. They may already have the answers to a lot of those. They could be horrible answers that aren't relevant or they could have absolutely nothing. So I want to be empowered before the call and I was doing this previously, which was saving me time, but now Sophia on our team is the one who's putting this together using our prompts and then she's, she's feeding it back to me so I can just have a quick scan of these and, and I'm good to go ahead of the call.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: Great. These prompt packs, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, are available in the paid discovery method training that we have.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: As a bonus, we created those like a year ago. Still Working, still relevant. There was one thing like the ChatGPT had. I think we had this ChatGPT splitter or something because you couldn't put massive prompts like transcripts in there, but you can now, so that's irrelevant. But other than that, same prompts and they're still working great.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Some entrepreneur somewhere who started a whole startup called the chatgptsplitter.com and he's never had a business because it's no longer required. It's great.
And so now here's. Let's get a little bit messy here for a second, right? Because the problem the most people have a chatgpt is I don't know how to prompt it. Now, I know what you've done is you use ChatGPT to help you write better prompts to get better output. Correct?
[00:19:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's been a while since I've done that actually. But yeah, to put together that prompt template list, after writing these prompts and getting the result, I was like, what did I even say? There's just this huge chat with all of these different things. So give me a summary of all the prompts that I used and improve them so I can get a result with less prompts next time.
It's like, here you go. Like, oh, wow, that's great. Do you.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Do you have a. Because one thing I've thought about and I love the CRIT acronym now, right? So the Context Role interview task. Do you have a custom agent? One thing I've considered doing just because I'm bored is, is creating a custom GPT and training it as a prompt engineer. And so that when I want to go and prompt anything else, I just, you know, go to ChatGPT and it writes a prompt for me that is going to be better than just I'm lazy. Right? Is that a thing? Is that something that.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: It's totally a thing, but I'm just not seeing that.
Maybe I don't have the right application for it, but I'm not seeing that. Add massive value. Right? Where we're seeing it is like at the most value is having projects in ChatGPT. So like a folder and it would be sales, let's say. And I'll put in my recap template as a PDF, the proposal template as a PDF, a roadmap as a. As a PDF accepted roadmaps that we've won in the past and proposals and emails that have worked well. So they're loaded into the brain, the. The project brain, and then it has context and custom instructions specifically for that for sales, and then I can have multiple chats within there, and it uses that as context. So I've found that to be the most valuable because, like, I really think that there'd be a lot of value in, like, having a prompt engineer create things for you. But it's like saving, going from four hours to one hour with this. I now want consistency. I think I've done such a massive improvement, like optimization by leveraging AI. Now I want to step out of the process as much as I can and empower my team to execute what is working really well, rather than try to get some little incremental gains at this point. So I think early on, some kind of prompt engineer would be great, but once you've got that, it's about. I don't know, I can get into, like, optimization recurring forever, where it's like little tiny gains that aren't really mattering too much. I think it's like, prioritizing that stuff.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: Projects are fairly new, and I play a lot of guitar, so I'm not across the projects are fairly new. The question, in fact, I've just seen it in my sidebar. Oh, wow.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Very new indeed.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: I'm not using projects in ChatGPT because, as I said, I'm playing guitar.
I'm not joking. So in a project, can you create a, like, can you create a custom, like. So the way I'm using GPT is I have, like, a custom GPT that I train on a thing, right? Like, say, for example, I've got one called Harriet, who's my human resources GPT. And Harriet helps me with my org chart, helps me with job descriptions, helps me. You know, the other day I had to write a whole bunch of questions because we're interviewing salespeople at the moment. And I was like, I want to interview these people and kind of put them on the spot and see how they respond. Harriet was amazing. Not only did Harriet give me the questions that I should ask, but also gave me the things to look for in the answers. And why those questions? Why we're asking those questions, right? It was just.
It spat it out in like two minutes. I'm like, holy shit. So do. Can you create a custom GPT in a project or create the projects, kind of replace the custom GPT and. And the project and all the chats in that project just learn from each other. Is that like, how does a project work as opposed to a custom GPT?
[00:23:46] Speaker A: I mean, whatever we say now could be irrelevant by the time this podcast is published. But still, at this Very moment. The way that it works is you've got projects that have the context of what you upload to the project. But as far as I'm aware, you can run GPTs within a project as well, so they. They can work together. But that's not. We're. We're not doing that at this point.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Right. Wow. So you give. So in. I'm just on the help.OpenAI.com website right now, and I'm seeing that you add instructions to a project and that tailors the way ChatGPT responds in that project. Right. So you can say respond in Spanish, keep answers short and focused. That's interesting.
And you can add files to your project, which is what you've spoken about, your project. Please note that your projects will reference your memories.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: Which I think is fantastic, because I want it to feed into other parts of ChatGPT. I don't want it to be a silo. I want it to take into consideration other chats, other things that have happened. Because we're. We. We have a.
We have a. Not a team account, as ChatGPT call it, but like a. An account that our team use. And then I've got my own account separately. So the account that the team use, we're talking about sales, we're talking about projects, we're talking about things related to sgd. I don't want that to be a walled garden. I want ChatGPT to take that into account and get smarter and smarter and smarter, rather than have the project only reference the project itself.
[00:25:20] Speaker B: Wow. So you've got a. You've got a workspace account with ChatGPT, right?
[00:25:26] Speaker A: Yeah, something like that, I think.
[00:25:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's. Yeah, we've got a. We've got a teams account and whatever it's called a workspace account with ChatGPT. Now, I don't have my own personal account, though. I just have, like, private chats within the work, you know, like, is that. Is that wrong?
[00:25:46] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. You're doing it wrong, mate. So I. I like.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: And again, this could change by the time this podcast goes live.
[00:25:53] Speaker A: Yeah, something's AIs are old by the time this comes out. So. So we've got the. We've got. Hello, at SGD that we use the team log into that and a whole bunch of team, different team members use that exact same account.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Oh, gotcha. Oh, you cheap bastard. Right, I get it.
[00:26:08] Speaker A: And then I have.
Which is my total separate space.
[00:26:13] Speaker B: Got it?
[00:26:13] Speaker A: Now, I'm saying things like, given what you already know about me, and then I'll. I'll prompt from there. So I'm giving context of everything I've ever talked to it about, and it's giving some pretty epic answers.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: Got it.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Well, we've actually got a proper teams account because we're not a bunch of tight asses here. And so we. In a. In a teams account with ChatGPT, you can add team members who can. And so what I've done is I have GPTs that I've created and I've trained those GPTs. So, for example, Harriet, who's our HR GPT. And yes, I do give all of my GPTs names of usually females, because I think females are more organized than men. I'm going to get flamed for this.
[00:26:57] Speaker A: I know.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: I'm sorry.
And I give them little pictures, and the pictures, they look like female SWAT team members. Right. That's what I do. There you go. I've just outed myself playing guitar and.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: Doing avatars for correctionary art.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: That's how I spend my time. And so I train the GPT, but then what I do is I share the GPT with team members. So Jane has access to Harriet because Jane helps me recruit. And so Jane will have a conversation with Harriet. Jane can't train Harriet, though. If Jane says, hey, listen, Harriet needs to understand more about this, I need to go and retrain Jane and Harriet and update the GPT with new information. Right. But. But Jane can have conversations with Harriet, and we can collaborate on those conversations with Harriet. Of course, I don't give Max access to Harriet, because when I ask Harriet, you know, what's the best way to fire Max, it's a bit awkward if he's involved in that conversation. So I try and keep that a little bit separate.
And so I've got. I've also got. Max does have access to our copywriting GPT, Dharma, because he helps me.
Dharma. D A M A Daily Marketer. Daily Daily Marketing.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Not D A H, M E R. No, Jeffrey. Okay, good.
[00:28:18] Speaker B: No, Daima. Call her Dama. Daily Marketer.
I've also got.
I've also got Eva, who's my executive assistant. And in fact, my old executive assistant used to be called Eva, but Eva. Executive Assistant. So I name my GPT so that I know exactly who they are when I look at them and when I see their name. Oh, I need to go and talk to Harriet about this. Right. But I'm not having these projects yet, so we're going to spin up projects and see what happens there. Okay. So now we, so we go and do the workshop and then we, by the way, stick with me, stick with us for a second because I'm going to talk about, in a moment I'm going to talk about how you should be selling AI to your clients. If you're an agency owner and you want to add revenue fast to your agency, selling AI to your agencies is probably, you know, the lowest hanging fruit you've got at the moment. However, I'm going to give you some clues on how I think you should do that in a second. You've done. So you do the paid discovery workshop with your client, your digital roadmap, you've got your AI prompts and so you kind of already have some answers pre filled. If they get stuck and then you get all the data you need from them, you come back to the office and you are going to build a 12 month roadmap for them. How is AI helping you do that?
[00:29:33] Speaker A: Again, we've got prompts ready to go. So I really think it's the combination of AI plus talent plus templates. That combination is what works. Completely abdicating it to AI doesn't seem to work. Some of our clients try that and it just, it just produces more noise and it doesn't really add value at all. Not a good result. So we have, we've got pre made templates for the roadmap that is also shared within the, within the course and prompts in order to build that. Because the challenge that we had was like, oh, first of all amazing, AI can produce this roadmap for us. Awesome. But then it ends up with HFC which is hand effing crafted because each roadmap would become different because the business is different and the goals are different. So it would come up with some new roadmap. Definitely don't want that because then that creates delivery debt and problems for the team because like what's this new thing? Like why are we doing social media ads for this particular client? Well, we've never done that before. So the template that we've got is what we actually deliver. Like it's our growth plan that we've pre made. So feeding that in and using that as context with the prompt helps to make sure it's not creating things that, that we don't do. So templates plus the prompts plus the talent, the person who can actually look at that at the end and be like, yep, gold standard, this is great, this is good to go.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Got it.
Okay, so then this is all using AI for internal purposes. How Are you now using AI? Let's pivot a little bit before we talk about selling AI, which we'll talk. We will talk about how are you using AI to deliver stuff for clients.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: So one of the. The tools we're using is Reloom. So. Yep. That would be putting together the site map that's structuring the pages. So putting together wireframes and then that's able to be reviewed, approved by a client before handing over to our design team. I'm not sure if they're using AI. I think there's a little bit of AI generation, AI image generation going on with some of our designs in order to put that forward for the client.
And then from there, our copywriter leverages AI to create content plans, to create brand messaging guidelines as well. So again, that's. And we've got a series of prompts for that. So that's the talent. Our copywriter templates the prompts and what success looks like. What that we've produced previous versions of this and then AI to accelerate the process, but it's still reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing.
[00:32:05] Speaker B: Yes. So I've heard this phrase recently. I used AI to help me. Blah, blah, blah. We've been saying that for the last 18 months or two years. But what I've heard recently is I helped AI do this thing. Instead of I used AI to help me put together a wireframe for a client.
I used. I helped AI.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: Max, just pop in there. What's going on?
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Max?
[00:32:34] Speaker A: You watch. Hey, hey.
[00:32:36] Speaker B: Max said it. Sorry, Max wants credit for this. So. So Max, our producer. Max, our producer wants credit for this.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Is.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Okay. Happy to give him credit for this. So Max said recently that he helped AI figure out a script for me to fire Max. That's. Isn't that. It's great, isn't it? That's a well done.
[00:32:56] Speaker A: Harry can take a day off. Nice.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: So instead of I use AI to help me develop a wireframe for a client, I helped AI develop a wireframe for a client. I think it's an important mindset shift. Totally not giving me credit for this. But anyway, I think it's an important mindset shift because I think people who think that AI is helping them kind of get into a lazy mindset where, as you said before, I'll just abdicate it to AI. Right. But it still needs to be reviewed by the talent who knows what they're doing. It just allows you to do it a lot faster.
[00:33:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I. One of my first examples of like poor copywriting with AI was actually a prospect that got on the phone and they wanted to look at SEO, SEO strategies and they wanted a bit of a website review. And actually I copied what they have on their contact page because they clearly used AI to write this. So this is, this is the message. It's just really trying to say, contact us. It says, please write and send your message through the online form. We will contact you very soon if needed. As a family orientated company, we prioritize integrity and professional customer service. We truly promise assiduousness, diligence, punctuality and dutifulness in all deliveries. Our sole focus is creating lasting experiences for all our clients. Like, who is, who is even going to read that? That's insane. Like, contact us to start the process. Get a quote.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: Like, what's assiduous? I don't even know what that word is. What the hell is it? Like, I know what deciduous is. Deciduous is a type of plant, isn't it? What?
[00:34:24] Speaker A: I know the opposite of evergr. What is going on? So it's where AI is going wrong. That's when you're abdicating responsibility. I can guarantee that that's getting in the way of getting a result. Like, I was thinking about this before this podcast, like, leveraging AI is about knowing what the outcome is. Like, what is the outcome you're trying to achieve? What people are doing now is achieving the outcome, that is their suffering now of completing the task. So someone has been assigned, write the copy to this page, not get us more leads on this page. Make sure more people fill this in. So they're like, oh, I don't know what to do. Quick prompt. Ah, I feel better now because it's done, but it's not done, it's not complete. You did not get the result. You just feel better now because you're not able to do the work. Yeah, you don't have to do the work anymore, but no result achieved.
[00:35:16] Speaker B: So instead of rowing the boat across the river and getting from one side to the other, you abdicate that responsibility to someone else to row the boat and they go in the opposite direction. But it doesn't matter because at least you're not rowing the boat anymore.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah. Thank God.
[00:35:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. It's like sending him. It's like, you know, the old, the cliche of like sending. It's like, you know, in the old days we would say, you know, we're an agency, but we didn't want to run social media for clients. We wanted to work with them so that they could run their social media. The analogy we used to use was, well, it's kind of like lining up a date with someone and then sending your mate into the pub to have that first date for you. Right? It's just fucking weird. And you can probably get arrested for it. And so using AI to abdicate your responsibility and your workload is, you know, now I want to talk about selling AI because I think, in fact I know that most people are trying to sell AI to clients and struggling and the reason. And I'm going to go back to paid discovery here, right? A digital roadmap. I think no one has a plan for AI. No one has an AI roadmap. No one has an AI strategy. They're doing exactly what you said. They're just trying to lighten their workload by delegating shift to AI. So I think selling an AI roadmap, this is my belief, if I was selling AI to a client right now, I would put, I would. The first thing I would do is I would do a paid discovery workshop. I'd call it an AI roadmap. And I would figure out all of the parts of their business and all of the things that they wanted to use AI for and all of the potential upside and all of the risks that we need to mitigate all of the knowledge gaps and skills gap that their team have about using AI. And I would put together an AI roadmap which would be a combination of, you know, we talked in the, in the. Before we hit record, the AI plus agency model. Right? So let's use AI to increase our productivity and do things faster. Let's also teach our clients how to use AI responsibly and effectively and not just throw tasks at it and accept whatever it gives us the first time round. Right? Let's train our team, let's train our clients. Team, let's train our clients, let's collaborate on this and have an AI roadmap over the next 12 months that, hey, over the next 12 months. And yeah, AI is going to change a lot. But we think we can use AI to do X, Y and Z, right. And put together a plan that you can then work to rather than just randomly trying to use AI to do.
[00:37:42] Speaker A: So. Agencies wanting to, yeah. Offer this as a service to clients is like starting with a roadmap would be the way to go.
[00:37:49] Speaker B: 100%.
[00:37:50] Speaker A: How skilled in AI do you think the agency would need to be in order to put that together? Like, because things are changing quite rapidly. Is it about. They're amazing at it, they're like, you know, top 1% or it doesn't quite.
[00:38:03] Speaker B: I think they need to know what's possible with AI. Right? It's like you need, like if you're, you know, I go back to 15 years ago when I was helping WordPress freelancers write better proposals. And one of the things I would say all the time is the first question you should ask a client who comes in and says, hey Simon, we've got $15,000 and we need to build a new website. Most agencies go, no worries, great, give us your money, let's go. Right. The first question you should ask is why do you need a new website?
Right? And so the first question, and also as a, you know, as a traditional web designer, you need to understand and you need to educate your clients that the website is just one part of this ecosystem. Where's the traffic coming from? Where are they going to after they visited the website? Are we capturing their information, doing an email database? What's the conversion point look like? What happens offline? Are we booking people into a call that they have on Zoom? Do we want them to walk into the practice? Do we want them to buy the hoodie? Do we want them to sign up to an affiliate program? What's the con? Right? You need to understand how it fits in. And so I think. And you also need to understand what's possible. There's no point building websites in a silo if you don't understand email marketing because you're missing out on a massive opportunity where you can at least educate your clients to help them. It doesn't mean you have to be an email marketing expert, but you need to know what's possible. We can install a pop up on your website to capture leads and put them into an email database and then we can send them emails and make more money. I know that's possible, therefore I can have a conversation with my clients about it. So you need to know what's possible with AI and then you also need to understand kind of the full spectrum, the business model of your clients and what they're trying to achieve. And for example, if you're in the business of helping your clients book more appointments for their physio practice or their coaching or, you know, their dental practice or, you know, Visalign or whatever it is, or removalists. If you're in the business of selling leads to removal companies or whatever it is, you need to understand how does, how can AI help me augment, speed up, improve automate, be more efficient, be more productive so that Ultimately, as an agency, the whole agency model is based on, and any sort of B2B service business model is based on the premise that we can deliver value to a client and optimize our processes internally so that we can maximize the profit that we make as a company so that we can continue to deliver that value to more and more clients and stay profitable. And that's where I think AI, you need to understand that about your business, but you also need to understand that about your client's business. How can you help? How can you leverage AI and the talent in your agency to help your clients deliver more value and become more profitable? And so one very practical example is using AI to qualify appointments before someone turns up to a health practice, an allied health professional, right? Like get the receptionist off the phone answering the same questions 40 times a day and just have an AI SMS bot do that for you. So by the time the person is booked in the calendar they know where you are, your opening hours, you're parking, where the local, the nearest train station is. Like what's, you know, how much it's going to be, how much is covered on Medicare. Let's just get an AI bot to fucking do that so that the humans can do more about what they do better, which is be human and actually build relationships. So if you, you need to understand what's possible and then you need to understand your clients business goals and objectives and what they're trying to achieve and then you need to help them figure out how to use AI to plug those gaps. Right? Well you can't do that unless you sit down with a client for a couple of hours and figure out what they're trying to achieve. And that's why I think you should be selling AI roadmaps rather than just randomly using AI to you know, plug in tactical stuff.
[00:41:46] Speaker A: Yeah, write me a better email.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: Right, Exactly.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: Come on.
There's so like, there's so much more leverage and high impact things that you could be doing. So just considering like the, you mentioned a bit about like the client's business model but just thinking about the business model for an agency with this, is it like, what would that look like? Is it like a done for you service?
[00:42:07] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's, it's a D like so in 2021, the second year of lockdown here in Australia, where we pretty much couldn't leave the house, we ran an online event, MAVCON. February 2021 it was, we ran an online event called MAVCON and I did a presentation called the Agency of the future. And I still stand by this. Now, the agency of the future is a combination of done for you plus information, right? So let's just use this example. There's two agencies and they both serve cosmetic dentists. And they, you know, this is just. This is just one example, right? There's two agencies here, and they both serve cosmetic dentists. Cosmetic dentists make a lot of money out of Invisalign patients and cosmetic dentistry, they don't really want to fucking look at your teeth and tell you you need a filling, right? That's. They're not interested in that. So cosmetic dentistry is a very highly profitable business. And these two agencies serve cosmetic dentists. And one, all they do is they run ads. They go, there you go, we got you, you know, 75 leads last month pay us our five grand a month retainer. And the other one runs ads. But they also have an AI bot that qualifies those leads that come in. And they also have a script for what the receptionist should say when anyone picks up the phone and calls the practice to maximize the chances of them getting booked in for a free assessment or whatever the conversion event is for that dental practice. Right. Well, which agency do you think is going to win in the long run? It's the agency that actually has become such a specialist in what they do that even if they, like, I can't coach, I can't answer the phone for you, and I'm not going to coach your receptionist. But here's a playbook, which, by the way, is very easy to produce these playbooks. Now, with AI back in 2021, when I did this presentation, AI wasn't even really a thing. Right. Way easier now to ask ChatGPT to put together a playbook for a script framework so that when a receptionist at a cosmetic dental practice answers the phone, what should they say in order to maximize the chances of the patient coming in for a free assessment? I had eye surgery a couple of years ago, right? And I called a couple of places and, you know, filled in a couple of forms online. The one that got my business was the one that the customer experience, for me, the user experience was so seamless, they removed all the risk. They said, look, we can't tell you how much this is because we don't even know if you are a good fit. We don't even know if we can do it on your eyes, one or both. And we don't know what kind of laser surgery we can do on your eyes because we haven't looked at your eyes. Right. Their process from me, making an inquiry to post surgery care was outstanding. World class, right? There are other eye surgery clinics who, you know, they can't even answer the fucking phone. Do you know what I mean? Like, you ring them five times and leave a message and no one gets back to you. Well, who do you think gets the business? And so if you're an agency and you specialize in a particular type of client, your job is to become so good at understanding their business model that you can help them even if you can't do it for them. You can help them with prompts, scripts, frameworks, ideas, playbooks, little coaching playbooks to help them improve every part of their business. That client is never going to tune. Right? And so that's where I think AI can really help you as an agency become what I was referring to as the agency of the Future back in 2021. And here we are, you know, four years, four and a half years later, still having the conversation. Because most agencies, you know, are just selling commodities and wondering why they're getting, you know, crunched on price and wondering why their clients are churning.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: Exactly. When you mentioned about the, like, you know, someone calls five times and they don't get back to them, that just reminded me of a lot of agencies as well. They're like, well, I wanted to have this business where I don't really have to work that hard and technology does all of this and I don't want to talk to people. You can stand out quite easily, I think, in the agency space just by being what I would say, like a normal business. Just by, like picking up the phone and providing good service, you can just stand out massively doing what you say you'll do. It's like not. It's not rocket appliances. It's, it's, it's relatively strong.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: That's a good one. I'm going to use it. It's not rocket appliances, you know, it's doing the, it's doing the fundamentals well. It's doing the basics.
[00:46:34] Speaker A: Well, doing the basics, picking up the phone, providing. We had, like, one of our best deals this year. They were so happy with the sales process that they're like, your marketing and sales is so good that the way you deliver sites must be also amazing. Yeah, they're like, we want. That's your sales process. Like, what, what was that about? I can't wait for you guys to build our website because I can't wait to pick your brains about how you did all of this and got me on board.
[00:47:03] Speaker B: Right and the fact is you've got a process and most agencies don't have a process for sales. Like, it's all referrals, it's all word of mouth, it's all very, you know, high level and woo, woo. And I'm not in the high level software. I mean, it's like, it's very like based on my personal network. And there is no sales process.
So by the way, ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like the sales process, go and grab the paid discovery method course on our website because everything we're talking about here is in that program and this is not an ad for it. It just so turns out that everything we're talking about is in that program. And this is the program that Simon has been through and how they've renovated and revolutionized their agency. It's the paid discovery method. Check it out on our website or just jump on a call and chat with our team and we'll see if we're a good fit to work together. By the way, we now have funding partners available in Australia and the US which means if you're an agency owner, this is probably going to upset a few people who are our current clients. Sorry. But if you're an agency owner, it means that you can start working with us for as little as $100 a week with a guaranteed return on investment. If you want to know more information, just jump on a call with our team. We'll put a link in near this episode and we can have a chat about how it works. So we're very excited to be able to roll these funding options out to make our mentoring and our coaching more available to and more accessible to more agencies in Australia and the US Those funding options are available.
All right.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: Dude.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: What?
[00:48:29] Speaker A: For like a hundred years now?
[00:48:31] Speaker B: I know you have, mate. You're part of the furniture. Og. Yeah, yeah.
Thanks for joining us on the Agency Hour again. Appreciate you turning up here and doing this and sharing your knowledge and value.
What are you most excited about over the next seven days?
[00:48:47] Speaker A: In the next seven. What's going on? We've got another long weekend, so we're gonna hit the trails, go for a trail run, do some forest bathing. That's gonna be nice.
[00:48:57] Speaker B: Forest. That's. Hang on a second, hang on a second. Let me. This is code for I run into the woods and take my clothes off and run around naked in the forest.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: Not quite. Close off first. And. Oh, yeah, that's step one.
[00:49:10] Speaker B: Wow. Close off, run naked into the forest. Wow. And we call it forest bathing. That's lovely, isn't it?
Excellent. Well, send me some video. It is my daughter's fifth birthday tomorrow. It's Anzac Day here in Australia, which is my as Oscar, my seven year old said to me this morning, dad, do you know what Anzac stands for? I'm like, yeah, of course I do. He says, what is it? I said, it's Australia and New Zealand.
And I got stuck. And he said, army Corp. I said, yes, that's right, Australia and New Zealand Army Corp. It's our war Memorial Day tomorrow here in Australia. It's also Goldie, my daughter. It's her fifth birthday tomorrow. So we're very excited. We'll be going to bounce and having which is a basically a shed full of trampolines and they have birthday parties for kids and we'll be going there with a bunch of her friends tomorrow and a bunch of the other grownups. And the kids will be bouncing around and then eating chocolate. They should eat the chocolate first and then bounce around.
[00:50:05] Speaker A: But they don't.
[00:50:05] Speaker B: They bounce around, then have a shitload of sweets and then come home and we try and get them into bed at a reasonable hour. Jesus. A recipe for disaster. So that's what I'm doing tomorrow.
[00:50:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:14] Speaker B: And we'll see you next week on the Agency Hour.
[00:50:18] Speaker A: Sounds good. I think there's. Yeah, see you next week, mate. It's a pleasure talking and looking forward to seeing what other things will change in AI and this conversation may be irrelevant. 10 minutes. So it's been fun.
[00:50:28] Speaker B: I'm sure it will be. Thanks, brother. Talk soon.
Hey, thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast and a massive thanks to Simon for joining us. Hey, if you're enjoying these conversations and want to go deeper, surround yourself with other successful agencies and build a business you actually enjoy while traveling the world, too bad Mabcon in Bali has officially sold out. If you haven't booked your ticket, it's too late. You can't come. Sorry about that. Next week we have a very special guest, founder of Mule Town Digital and agency Mavericks coach Adam Silverman, to discuss his agency acquisition model. So keep an eye and your ears out for that. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone who you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, your fingernails grow faster on your dominant hand.
