AI, Disruption, Sales, and the Path to Success as a Small Business

0:00Because we do. I mean, just for context, if you're listening to this for the first time, I mean, we have the privilege and I do consider it a privilege to get to work with hundreds of small business owners of small business owners of small business business.

0:30see? Does this match what we see? Or yeah, is it basically just a marketing piece of like, oh, this is really hard, but if you buy our software, it'd be easier.

0:41Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Business Launch Podcast with your host, Ryan Dice. Ryan, how are you today? So good. So ready for summer to be over and to get back to a regular cadence of life, which sounds stupid because when summer is getting here, I'm ready for it to begin. But man, oh man, I'm ready for everybody to get done with vacations. I hear you. I hear you. And I am Roland Frazier. Just didn't want to say that. Yeah, I'm excited for it to go because sales always kind of stink for us in the summer, right? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So I enjoyed the vacation. I enjoyed the break.

1:22Now it's time for everybody to get back to work and to start buying crap again. I agree. I agree. So if you're out there, start buying crap again. Yeah. Nice. Ours in particular. One thing that I thought would be fun to talk about today, I just saw it come out this morning, was the small and medium business trends report by Salesforce.com. And one of the things in it, they have the SMB, small, medium-sized business leaders that talk about what is challenging them. And so it'll be fun. I haven't really gone through it yet. So I thought it'd be fun to kind of just do together and see, do we agree?

2:02Do we disagree? And is it just a bunch of stuff that's designed to sell Salesforce or is it actually useful and helpful? That would be interesting because we do, I mean, just for context, if you're listening to this for the first time, I mean, And we have the privilege, and I do consider it a privilege, to get to work with hundreds of small business owners on a fairly close basis. I mean, dozens of portfolio companies where we're really close, intimate with. And then the clients that we get to work with as well. And so I think we get to observe a fair number of trends, maybe not directly like data.

2:41So it'd be interesting to see, does this match what we see? Yeah. Is it basically just a marketing piece of like, oh, this is really hard, but if you buy our software, it'd be easier. Yeah, they did. Let me see if I can get back to that first part. They did start like what I saw was a report that they did on it that was basically the six, the seven, sorry, solving the seven biggest challenges that businesses are experiencing. and interestingly enough, they are not in order. When I look at the back of the trend report that lists how many people responded to each one and what percentage of people said this was a problem, they aren't ranked the same.

3:24And interestingly enough, Salesforce has the ability to solve the seven big challenges that are listed in the report that they sent out. So yeah, This is a coincidence, I'm sure. But their number one on their kind of what I'll call the marketing report now was building resilience during economic shifts, which I would say doesn't even come on to the list of things that I hear businesses talking about being concerned with. You? That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. I've never once in my entire life heard a small business owner use the word resilience.

4:08I think it's interesting. Like this is when as marketers, there's like, so there's a, there's a marketing lesson here. And, and, you know, so to the marketers at Salesforce, oh my God, use the words and the language that your prospects are actually using. And I don't think that there's a small business owner alive who wakes up in the middle of the night and thought, oh, I'm just struggling with the resiliency of my marketing. I'm not buying it. I am betting that resilience is not a word that's used by almost any of them ever. Yeah, actually, I'm going to read through these and you tell me like initial thoughts and then we'll go to the data where they actually list the percentage of people that said that something was a problem and it'll be fun to see, you know, where these things fall there.

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6:52No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now. I'll see you there. Challenge number two, meeting rising customer expectations.

7:08I haven't heard it. Okay, me neither. Number three, adopting AI without losing the human touch. So you got rid of adopting AI. I haven't heard many that are super concerned about the human touch aspect of it. Small business owners are definitely worried about adopting AI and not getting behind the competition. No, it's really, you misunderstood. Those people are really talking about Rick. Rick, what was it? The guy with the human touch song back in the eighties. Yeah, I can only get Rick James in my mind, but it's not Rick James. Rick Astley? No, no, no, daggone it. Anyway, and I probably have it wrong.

7:51He did the Jesse was a friend. I can't even think of his name. Anyway. Oh yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I just got to have Rick James in my mind and I can't get rid of him. So the other, of course, and this one I know you're going to agree with, maintaining customer trust and data security? No. If you guys are watching, like if you're listening, if you could just see Ryan's expressions to each of these. Okay. Number five. Rick Springfield. Springfield. Thank you. Five. Managing growth with lean teams. I'll give that one a 6.8 out of 10. Okay. Okay. I mean, definitely people want to manage growth and they don't want to expand their teams anymore.

8:40So I'll give that an ish, a mostly right. The funny thing to me is it's such a buzzword. It's lean teams, you know, with its specific connotations and definitions. Right. Six, standing out in a crowded digital market.

8:58Okay. Okay. Seven, and this is their last chance, scaling customer engagement across channels. I mean, fine. Yeah. I mean, fine. Like, so yes, it has gotten harder to communicate with our customers and clients across channels, especially as Apple, for example, has made cross platform pixel tracking more difficult. I don't know that that is necessarily a top seven challenge or concern. Just so we're clear, inflation, interest rates increase, none of these things. You heard the top seven. You got the top seven. So now you're good. Okay. So now I went to the back of the report. And this is the, um, in the appendix where, uh, it gives the percentage of people that said what the top challenges are.

10:00And, um, I'm actually going to scan through here real quickly. I don't see resilience in any of them. So, okay. These actually do make sense to me. Um, they're, they're not particularly in my mind insightful, but I'd love to chat about them. So So 72 % of the respondents said, and this was, I think like 30, 3 ,000 odd businesses was the sample across, you know, a bunch of countries and everything. Increasing sales revenue, number one at 72%. Tied, by the way, with acquiring new customers at number one. So increasing sales revenue and acquiring new customers, 72%. That makes sense. That's, I hear that.

10:42Perfect. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Only everybody wishes they had more sales and leads and sales. Yeah. And so do you want to go through them or talk about them each as we go or kind of run through them and then talk about them? Yeah. Hit me with what the actual stuff is. Okay. Number two, at 68%, keeping pace with changing technology. And I do get that because they're all freaked out about AI, right? It's like even to the point of doing too many AI things as initiatives without a plan and just like, must AI. guy. Totally. 67%. This is the number three competition from other businesses. Retaining existing customers is number four.

11:26Number five, hiring or retaining talent. These sound a lot more like the things I actually hear. Then keeping up with demand. So being able to service the customers they've got, which is a scale issue. Understanding customers' needs. Affording business costs. So basically things just cost too much, which would be inflation, I think, as much as anything. Providing a consistent experience and providing quality products and services. Those are all more than 60 % of the respondents. And then the last couple, personalizing customer engagements, accessing capital, complying with government regulations and industry standards, engaging customers where they prefer, which sounds like the only one that I've heard on the report that they did of seven things, finding sufficient time to manage the business, going back to scaling, and then responding to inquiries quickly.

12:16And these are all 55 % or more of the people. So more than half of the respondents had those as issues, which I, and those, that sounds like, I'm trying to think if there's anything that the only one that I don't see that we get, I think more is, um, how do I, um, how do I sell this or how do I increase the valuation of the business? Cause we, we do talk to people about that. So, so our, our world of business people probably are thinking about that more, you know, or is thinking about that more than, uh, than the average bear. So, so the first couple increasing sales revenue, acquiring customers, keeping pace with technology, competition from other businesses and retaining existing customers, all fairly related to how do I make more money?

13:07Thoughts, feelings, emotions on how they might address that? Well, I mean, what I can say is that over the past really three months, every business owner that I've talked to has struggled. Like they've all said like, wow, this has been really, really, really hard. And pretty much everybody is flat or down. And the ones that are up are either up because they have just, you know, been killing themselves to get up or they were in the kind of business where their customers pre-bought a bunch of inventory out of tariff fears. Right. So they essentially were front and loading tariff type things. And so they know that they're going to get hammered for that in the latter half of this year.

13:53And I think the reason that's happened is just kind of the chaos of the macroeconomic stuff that's been going along. So, I mean, you had you had April 2nd when all the tariff stuff was announced. There's been wars left and right. But what we have seen over the past 30 days is things calming down. And I know what we've seen in our businesses and what I've been hearing from more and more business owners is things seem to be kind of coming back a little bit. And it makes sense because frankly, when the market is up, people buy. And when the market is going in, when the market's down, people do still buy then too.

14:34They just don't spread their money around as much as they do when it's up. But they'll still buy. You just have to make sure that you're the one they buy from. It's an allocation issue. So you have to keep some consolidation. But when there's confusion, when there's chaos, everybody freezes. And I think that's where we've been. And so the advice, I guess, that I've been giving and what I've been saying to people is make sure that you don't go and change a bunch of the stuff that used to work before this period and throw it away and replace it with something that potentially works not as well, simply because there was an external factor that caused it not to work.

15:10Because we've done that a bunch of times. We've thrown out stuff that worked, replaced it with things that didn't work as well. you always get a little bit of a bump in the beginning because it's new. And that little bump in the beginning gives you that kind of false positive that can cause you to think, oh, we figured it out. But no, you didn't. And so just I would say if it's been tough, keep doing what you're doing. If it was working before, I'd say give it another 30 to 60 days if you can possibly stand it and see if it doesn't come back on its own. And I think that's good advice. I think it depends.

15:48To me, it's an allocation issue that when things get tight for the macro economy and people have fewer dollars to spend, they're going to be more careful on how they allocate them. So you have to be somehow in the list of important things that causes them to make a decision to make the allocation. And I thought it was interesting. And to me, this goes to three of the top five. It goes to increasing sales revenue, acquiring new customers, and competition from other businesses, that things have changed pretty dramatically over the last couple of years. And a lot of that has to do with AI in terms of getting customers.

16:34The things I think, it depends on the business. Like if you were selling cars before and you have your media worked out and you're competing with the three other dealerships that are the same as you for the people that are buying in your geographic area or any other business like that, I agree with what you're saying. Don't change. Do what you did. you know, it's going to come back. It's just people aren't buying as much because things are tighter. They don't have as many dollars to work with. So, you know, you're vying for them. Your best probably bet is promotions, bundles, you know, those kinds of things, customer stories to get engagement so that you can stand out and be top of mind when they do decide to make that decision or prompt them to decide to reallocate other dollars to your thing by making it an irresistible offer, right?

17:28Yeah. And that's one thing I was going to say, be the simplest offer. Like that's one change that we have made instead of trying to come up with the best, most amazing over the top offer that gets a little bit confusing and complex. We've actually been stripping things away from offers just to make them really, really, really simple to say yes to. Yeah. Because right now when everybody's kind of confused, when things are a little bit chaotic, if your offer is confusing, if it's complicated. And where I do see this a lot, frankly, is with companies like Salesforce. Like if you've ever bought enterprise software, it's confusing as crap.

18:04I mean, there's all these different features and levels and pricing options and this seat for that and this one for that. Just going to a very, very, very simple flat rate or if you have a higher ticket program, maybe switching it to a monthly flat. Just simplify and make it super easy to say yes, and then see if you can't do a land and expand or an ascension on the backend after they're already a client. That is one shift that we have made right now, not necessarily to our marketing, but to our offer structure that is getting a lot more yeses than it was before. Yeah. The other thing I would say that I've watched, try to say all my things at the same time.

18:46Um, one thing that, uh, that I thought was really interesting for us was recently we did a promotion at digital marketer and had the best month that we'd had in a few years. And, um, and so what was interesting about that was we didn't get a bunch of new people in. We just gave all the people we already had that had seen the same offers over and over and over a new thing that they could do. And there were two parts of that. One was your announcement of I'm retiring from marketing. And the second was technology related with AI. How do we take that lesson, do you think, and make that? I think if you tell the story briefly of those two things and the results, And then in terms of how does somebody use that in the current environment to accomplish, to overcome some of these challenges that we've mentioned?

19:47Sure. So for the first one, I did, I announced that, hey, I'm no longer going to be teaching marketing. And frankly, because I haven't, because I don't do marketing anymore. Like all I've ever done is talk about what I was doing and I don't do in the trenches day-to-day marketing anymore. That's what I used to do. And so that's what I talked about. Now, Roland, as you all know, we're, you know, we're running companies and we're helping business owners scale and exit. We're not really involved in the day to day in the trenches marketing. So it's not appropriate for me to teach marketing. So I basically came out and said, I'm no longer teaching marketing anymore.

20:22and what that created for our audience who kind of knows me as Ryan Dice, the marketer was a happening and a happening is simply something happened. It really is that simple. And, and the whole idea is it starts a conversation and it re-engages people. And if you have proof of this, just walk up to somebody and go, Hey, did you hear what happened? I promise you to go, no, what? And if you're like, ah, nothing, I'm just messing with you. But like you will get their attention if something happened. So the first way that you can create some sort of attention is just to create a happening. And a happening can be a new discovery, right?

21:04A happening can be a big change. You can incorporate a happening if something happened out there in the world. You can talk about how this thing that happened actually does matter to your business or to your audience, but just to bring something new and novel into your community, that's the first thing that you can do to get people's attention. And that's what we did there. So we leveraged the happening of my retirement, which doesn't really matter that much to people. No, not really. Not really. I mean, does the fact that I've decided I'm not teaching marketing, I mean, I guess it matters to some people, but does it really?

21:38No, it doesn't actually matter, but it was something that happened. And so it was a resetting and a recapturing of attention. The second piece, really, I think is just as simple as the, you know, we could talk about shifting and taking something that was old and making it new. But I think right now today, it really is as simple as AI-ifying things. I mean, right now there are a lot of businesses that are being rendered obsolete because of AI. And that was certainly the case for digital marketers training products, their training products. People don't want to learn digital marketing. They don't need to learn digital marketing anymore because AI will just do it for them.

22:20And so what we needed to do was to pivot and to restructure that entire product line instead of saying, we'll teach you marketing to, we will just give you our trained AI bots, agents, GPTs, pre-trained bots, agents, you know, and GPTs. Now all of a sudden people went from, I don't need this. I don't want this to, oh my gosh, I absolutely need this and want this. So the second thing that you can do is just say, if frankly, you're kind of getting disrupted because of AI, which is the single biggest disruptive event that any of us have ever experienced in our life, more disruptive than the internet, more disruptive than social.

22:57Then I do think asking the question of how can I AI-ify my business is a very, very important question to ask. So we incorporated happening and we AI-ified. And those two things combined, yeah, gave us the best month we'd had in years. Yeah. And so if we kind of try to expand that, let's say that you've got a service business, let's start there because I feel like that's the easiest. Then what's the happening that you could talk about? It could be related to the AI. It could be, you could play off of what Ryan did. you could retire from accounting because now you're in the business of strategic planning or something like that.

23:41If you're an accountant or if you're an attorney, you could say, we will no longer be doing, it's no longer business as usual. I guess that would be the, like, how can you come up with an angle that we're not doing this anymore because we've evolved and that separates you from the competition into the, the now, uh, that, that to me, you know, like into what's going on and what's in people's mind. So I like looking at these things that, that come out, especially when they're not marketingified and they're the actual results from, you know, these are the things that 3000 plus business owners say are challenging and then say, okay, how can we help people increase sales and acquire new customers?

24:20And we could basically say we're retiring from lead gen as you know it. It could be as you know it might be a good way to tag onto whatever you do. I'm retiring from accounting as you know it. We're no longer going to be accounting the same way. We now use AI to analyze all of your expenses and data that you give us. And we upload your last year's tax return and create a strategic plan for you that's optimized by 10 billion hours of internet knowledge. Something like that. I like that as as you know it, I'm retiring from this as you know it is easy because if you were an accountant and you said, I'm retiring from accounting, your people might go find another accountant, which would be bad.

25:00Yeah. And that's why the framework of the happening is something happened, which means, and therefore. So something happened because of the emergence of AI, we're retiring retiring from accounting as we know it, which means we're able to deliver a higher degree of service. And therefore, we can now do the following things for you at even better rates. Yeah. Yeah. Let's have a follow-up meeting. Right. And so now there's a call to action. So think about that. It's not just this thing happened. All right. See you later. Right. It It needs to be something happened, you know, which, which means this change is occurring and this is how we're adapting.

25:48And therefore, in the end, therefore, this is how it applies to you. So just remember that, that basic structure and framework. Yeah. And then like, as far as acquiring new customers and increasing sales revenue, which were the two that were tied for number one, I just got off a meeting. That's a weekly meeting that one of our, our port codes has. And we were looking at day over day sales. And I'm looking at sales are hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, five days a week, and then fall to almost nothing on two days a week. Well, the two days a week that they fall to almost nothing are weak ends when we don't have people in the office.

26:25And I ask, why don't we have people in the office? Because our customers are the type of customer. They're not business customers. They're customers that are available and interested in talking during the weekends and might be working other jobs because we're helping them start new businesses. So maybe they're working a job nine to five during the week, which is the only time they can talk to our people. It's not nine to five, but basic business hours or business days anyway. And now we don't, but we don't make any effort or availability to talk to them during those other eight days a month, eight days a month.