169 | AI-Powered Lead Gen: Automate Hyper-Personalized Content That Grows Sales with Lanny Heiz

0:00Hello, and welcome to another live episode of the Leveraging AI podcast, the podcast that shares practical ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host, and we have a really exciting session for you today. Every business needs sales. Without sales, you don't have a business. You can have a business without a lot of other stuff, but without sales, there's no business. So every business needs sales. In order to have sales, you need leads. In order to drive leads, you need content that will resonate with those people, with the relevant target audience, and address their pain points.

0:34In order to do that, you need to understand your target audience, know who they are, and have a deep understanding of what their pain points are and what makes them tick. And the question is, and that's exactly what we're going to answer today, is how do you do all of those things in the most efficient and effective way using AI and other tools? So I guess today, Lani Heights has a significant experience in sales, corporate partnerships, but he's also a systems and processes ninja. And in the past two years, he's been running an agency called Enablement that helps businesses drive sales calls and booking exactly the best qualified leads possible at scale.

1:17Now, today he's going to share with us exactly the process and the tools that he's using to generate dozens of calls of qualified leads to his clients every single month. So if you want more sales in your business, and if you're not, you probably shouldn't be in business, no offense to anyone, but everybody wants more sales in the business. If you want more sales in your business while doing less work, take something to take notes with, whether a pen and paper or your tablet or your laptop, whatever it is you take notes with. If you're driving, don't worry about this. You listen to us right now.

1:49You'll probably want to listen again when you can take notes, but you can at least listen in right now. And since this is really a critical aspect of every business today, and there's really magical capabilities with AI right now, I'm really excited about this session. Lani, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically. Whether you are a business executive trying to catapult your business forward, or just somebody who refuses to be left behind and want to advance your career, this is the show for you. I'm your host, Isar Maitis, a serial entrepreneur and an AI enthusiast.

2:29You'll hear invaluable practical tips from innovative business leaders, AI practitioners, and some of the brightest AI minds in our world today on how you can leverage AI in ethical ways to advance your career and grow your business.

2:47Perfect. Thank you very much for the warm welcome. Very, very excited for the show today. Yeah, I'm excited about this as well. You and I spoke, I don't know, in December last time. Pre-Christmas, I think. Yeah, so about a month and a half ago. And we both think the same way. And we both like the same kind of outcomes and we have the similar processes. So I'm sure this is going to be A, fun and B, really valuable to people. Yes, I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah. So should we give some context in the background maybe? Yeah, absolutely. To get started. Two minutes on context and then the rest of the time on practical use case.

3:24Perfect. Yeah. Perfect. I mean, you said a lot before around what we do and this is exactly accurate. What we focus on is where we mostly work with, obviously, B2B companies that need sales. Because if you're in B2C, you just need to have an online store, essentially. But in B2B, it's a bit more complicated and a bit more complex. That's where we usually come in, where we help companies build these systems. So we are usually an implementation partner and an enabler. That means we consult people, help them build these systems, what we're essentially going to talk about today. Now, over the last two years, we essentially built enablement from zero to now over a million dollars in revenue a year.

3:59and we built and we essentially are two full-time employees that did that and the way we did that is literally on the backbone of ai every little thing we do we ask ourselves hey how can we automate this how can we use ai to do that and even if it sometimes takes a bit longer to build the system we know exactly on the backbone we can scale on top of that and i basically just want to show everyone today because this is literally the system we use to go from two 3 ,000 followers on LinkedIn to now over 20 ,000 followers on LinkedIn. And we just book calls, like around 20 to 25 calls a month using the just no cold outreach, nothing, just literally content production and then following up with people that engage with us.

4:39So I think this is what we are going to talk about today and what I want to dive into. Awesome. Perfect. Given that we have some people on LinkedIn and Zoom, so we can basically share screen. I think I can do some stuff pretty visually that I want to show you first, just to set the context before we jump into the tools. Let me just share my screen here. By the way, for those of you who are listening to this as the podcast, we will explain everything that's on the screen like we always do. So don't worry about it. I will try my best. Yeah, I will be fine. Perfect. If you look at every high level, how I think about like demand generation and for your business and ultimately sales, there is a couple of steps with people that That could be a blog post, that could be webinars, that could be podcasts like today.

5:25But people ultimately need to know and trust you. Secondly, you need to identify prospects that are already hard of you, ideally. And then you obviously need to engage those prospects.

5:40Engage these leads. And then you can close them. Ultimately, as a final step, right? Like when they're interested, et cetera. Now, along that very admittedly very high level journey, there is a couple of steps that we need to go through. And then we can basically, so I want to, what I want to do now is quickly show you the process that we use ourselves. And then we can see, okay, where do we use AI specifically within that process? So if I mentioned trust and you mentioned that in the intro, content production and LinkedIn specifically is super crucial for us. So any type of content on LinkedIn, obviously, you could also use it for YouTube videos, blog posts, etc.

6:20But for us, what's important is LinkedIn, because our target audience are salespeople, sales manager, VP of sales, founders of B2B companies, etc. So that's why we focus on LinkedIn, because they're there. And once we have people on LinkedIn that viewed my profile or my co-founder's profile, that liked my post, commented on my post, etc. And they've done that not just once, but multiple times, then I know, okay, they're interested. interested so what i then need to figure out is do they fit my icp are they a good fit for my company do they have a problem that i potentially can solve and yeah is it is it a very very small company then it's not good fit or is it a big company it's not a good fit or is it a b2c company like these type of things so i need to figure out if it's a match if they are indeed a match then i obviously need to find out a bit more about the lead what's the job title what do they do what's their past experience, et cetera, before I can actually reach out to them.

7:13Obviously, you also get the contact details, the email address, the phone number if I want to call them. And based on all of these information, all the contacts that I have, the previous customers they had, the case studies they have on the website, et cetera, we do a really highly personalized outreach to them. So reach out to them. And because they've heard my name before, they've read my post, they downloaded the lead magnet or commented to get a lead magnet, they're very receptive to our messages. Like when we email people, we get around 20, 30 % reply rate. And the vast majority of it is actually positive, i.e.

7:45one wants to talk to us in a book's meeting. So they're receptive to these messages. And obviously, if you compare that to like ice call outreach, it's not a comparison here. So that's ultimately what we do. And then lastly, yeah, if we talk to them and then if we see, hey, this is a good fit, we can help, they have a problem we can solve. Yeah, then we make an offer. One thing for me about this, just a quick kind of like recap. I think the biggest difference that people need to understand is that cold outreach may not be dead, but it should be dead. Meaning the ability today to do a warm outreach to people based on two things.

8:19A, you, them knowing you. Like right now, there's a few people here in the chat that already said, people that I don't know, both on LinkedIn and on the chat on Zoom said, hey, we love your podcast. We've been following you for a while. It's our first time joining you. like awesome. So I already have credibility with these people without ever meeting with them. Why? Because they've been following my content. Why have they been following my content? Going back to what Lani said is because my content provides value to them where they are right now in the journey. And to do that, you have to know that.

8:50So there's all these steps of understanding your target audience, creating trust, and only following up with the people that fit a specific box. So the biggest difference between cold outreach and this is that instead of spraying and praying, it's a very targeted approach to people. You're only investing time, money, and resources in people that are likely to do business with you because they A, follow and consume and engage with the content that you're putting out there and B, they fit your ICP. They're a decision maker in the company, in the right size, in the right industry, in the right place around the world, in the right status, in the right niche, whatever information you want to dissect in order to define your ICP.

9:33And only then you go and try to engage with them, which makes it a lot more likely for them to respond. So great intro. Let's dive into the practical stuff. Perfect. Yeah, perfect, perfect. Yeah, because, yeah, like as you said. Now, if I explain that to people, and like everyone's great, that makes so much sense. I love that because the problem I see usually with the traditional content marketing, right? Like your white papers, webinars, et cetera. there is no systematic qualification of the leads and no systematic follow-up if you're lucky you just have like the marketing generates the mqls and then throws it basically over the fence to reach the lead that signed up for a webinar that reaches out so there's a bit of a disconnect and usually that's not really system systematized in any meaningful way when i talk to companies so inbound is just like well i hope they sign up for a demo kind of situation or on the other hand you have like the called outbound that that you mentioned which is like i've called without without context that can work we also help companies do that but it's like an uphill battle and like you just obviously play on a field where the odds are stacked a bit big against you because obviously competition is very very high so which is why we actually started combining that and we like one of our customers called it like oh you're not doing outbound you're doing allbound and i was like i like that that's the name we ran with ultimately and that's what we named that playbook and all bound playbook.

10:53And so now we're obviously within that journey here that I mapped out is obviously AI really crucial. So we use it essentially at every step, right? Like from a content perspective to evaluating IITP fit, enrich the prospect, write, copy, reach out. And basically everything up until the sales call and even in the sales call, we use a lot of AI actually. This is where AI comes into play. Now, if I tell that to people, as I said, everyone's out this brilliant i want this now if i don't tell them like post on linkedin usually what i hear from founders is three quote-unquote objections they don't know what to post like ideas lenny what should i post about it makes sense but i just don't know what to post the second thing is i do have some ideas but if i post something then nobody reads it nobody cares so it's like i don't know how to post like i don't know how to write because copyright like not everyone's born a copywriter um and just because you are good at writing let's say blog posts doesn't mean you're good at writing LinkedIn content.

11:52So there's a specific way you need to write for LinkedIn. And then even if you had these two things, you know how to write and you know what to write, like you don't have time. This was also me for a long time where I just didn't know what to write. And back in 2018, I actually went back and searched for that post. I proclaimed, Instagram is dying. You should go, sorry, Instagram is dying. You should go on LinkedIn. And I basically made that, the argument was that the monthly active users and the amount of posts on LinkedIn, like that ratio, is not as good as on LinkedIn. LinkedIn has like a lot of active users, I think like half a billion roughly, monthly active users, but only 1 % that produces content.

12:29So there's a huge wide space for content production. So I said that in 2019, but I didn't really take action because I didn't know what to post, how to post, and even if I knew I didn't have time. So a year ago, I said to myself, hey Lani, this is probably the last time you have really a window of opportunity here because with AI, content is going to be inflated. So you need to take this seriously and learn how to do this. And so, yeah, we sat down pretty much 11 months ago where we said, okay, we're going to take this like super, super seriously. And grew from, as I said before, from 3 ,000 followers company-wide to now with the individual profiles to now like over 20 ,000 followers.

13:05And around 50 % of our revenue comes just from directly from LinkedIn here. And the way we did that, and this went through multiple iterations. And I will give you today both versions, the current version that we use, which is a bit more sophisticated. and the simplified version that everyone can essentially set up at home within five minutes. So I think it makes sense to start with the easier one and then we go fancy and show what's possible. Or Isard, do you want to do the other way around? No, I think that makes sense. I think let people figure out what they can do tomorrow and then those who are like, okay, I get it a little more, then we dive into that.

13:42Yeah, crawl before you walk type of situation. So when you think about creating content on LinkedIn, what usually people do is they go to Taplio or SuperGrow, like one of these content production tools that essentially you can give some information about yourself and it produces content. However, I haven't really seen it work and I've tried it and it wasn't the hack that I hoped it would be. and the problem was it could write reasonably well but it didn't have the context about me so it didn't know my icp who i'm writing for and it didn't know anything about me like the personal side of the personal branding like any type stories custom success stuff etc so i would always have to provide that i wasn't really satisfied with that so i figured okay technically what these tools are really good at they took a bunch of linkedin posts and trained in llm like fine-tuned essentially gpt on creating linkedin posts but they lacked the context about me so i was like okay why don't i just scrape a bunch of or collect essentially a bunch of linkedin posts create an extra spreadsheet if you want a tool for that clio that's really good for finding if you have a content creator you can see that post and you can manually collect them or we've ourselves built an agent to just do that but essentially you collect posts in an extra spreadsheet and what we then did is essentially we looked at the post and said okay what's the template like how is it structured how is the hook structured how is the first line of the hook structured and then we categorize these posts into different categories in a sense like we call it post styles so essentially like you could have a case study post or could you have a listicle or you could have a how-to post or you could have a contrast post like where say hey this is the old way this is the new way good versus bad etc so we classify that i can actually quickly quickly show that template for the ones watching what that essentially looks like what we did and obviously we collected posts that uh with with us and all like similar to our target audience so we have the templates here right that's okay here's how it's structured and here is like an exemplary posts that we found and then we basically gave it a style and this is around 100 posts i think roughly yeah around that and based on that so this was the training material let's read a few examples for the people who are listening and not watching so on the first column there's like a template and then there's an example so the example would be i'm just picked a random one life hacks i knew at 43 i know at 43 i wish i knew at 23 number three will surprise you let's get into it number one experience are worth more than material goods one thousand dollar iphone will become outdated in a year or two.

16:28Instead, spend that money on a trip to Thailand with your friends. Memories will stick with you forever. Two, you're going to be by one day. Thinking about your mortality is a great way to become motivated, full-time distractions, open yourself up to experience. So let me pause you for just one second. So what you're seeing is an example post from a successful type of template that is successful on LinkedIn, right? So the process is and you can do this manually. And again, you can use tools like Clio, but you can just do this manually. just people you follow that are successful say, oh, this post got whatever, a gazillion likes and 500 comments, then I want to be able to replicate that.

17:04So copy that. You can use that as a template. You give it to an AI, say, okay, quote unquote, templatize this. And I don't know if that's a word in English, but I'm going to use it anyway. You templatize that post and now you give it an example of the post itself. And I have both. You have an example of the post and you have a template of the post that then you can use afterwards for new content that you're going to generate. And the AI is actually really good when you have an idea, whether the idea comes from you or from the AI, to take your idea and find the right templates out of all of those to actually make it a useful post.

17:37So that's what we're looking at right now. And there's 20 or 30 on this page. Maybe more. Yeah, I think I have 100. 100. Because I noticed if you go like to 200, 300, like the AI gets confused, like you can give it too much. It's also like when you, then you're like, you can choose confused AI, which is why we kept it rather simple with a hundred. So that takes care of the training material on how to post. Yeah. And then the other thing that there is here, there's that he has a dropdown menu of different styles. So the styles are things like case study, listicle, story, X versus Y. So there's different styles of posts.

18:15And then the final column has where is, what does that address in the funnel? Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel or bottom of the funnel, where top of the funnel is more general content and educational stuff. Middle of the funnel will usually be building rapport to you and your brand and your capabilities and bottom of the funnel, which is the least amount of stuff you want to post is more transactional. We have this campaign right now, come join us for whatever, or we have a sales for the end of the year or whatever it is. So these are more transactional posts that you can post. So this kind of what he has in the table.

18:47Yeah, yeah, exactly. But like the first three, one, the template itself, the examples and the style are the ones that really matter for what we do here. So as I said, like this case takes care of the template material. The second element that you need that I mentioned was the document about your ICP. So what we did actually to produce that, this is like a 17-page document about our ideal customers. And the way I created it, I didn't just sit down and start typing. What I did is I recorded and transcribed 20 sales calls, 20 odd sales calls, and fed these transcripts into ChatGPT. And essentially then had a conversation with ChatGPT.

19:26Hey, here are the transcripts of my 20 last sales calls of people that ultimately also became customer. And I asked a bunch of questions like, hey, what was the problem that they're trying to solve? how did they currently solve it? Why were they not happy with that solution? What was the ideal solution that they were trying to achieve? What would actually achieving that mean to them? What was the benefit and the impact of that? And based on that, I could get like a super detailed insight about my target audience. I know exactly what kind of use cases they have. I also asked AI to then give me the actual quotes.

19:58Hey, we are currently evaluating these and these tools. We don't want to figure it out ourselves. There's a big knowledge gap. So basically automating outbound, but getting the education around it was like one of the reasons why they actually talked to us. And so I did this with a couple of different use cases. And I said, ultimately, the output is a 17 page document. That's it's completely voice of the customers to 100%. It's nothing I wrote. It's all what customers said. And I just like repackaged that essentially. So I think it's one of the most powerful documents you can ever create for your marketing and your sales period and your product team essentially as well.

20:30The sales calls are, in my opinion, probably the best calls because there people really talk about their pains and the problems. And they're like, yeah, they're just a honeypot of wisdom, basically, if you want to try to understand your customers. Quick question about this. First of all, I think this is absolutely brilliant. A little thing that I do that is a step in between that can help, but then I want to ask a specific question about this document. So something that I do is I go to my ideal clients, so people are my clients and or my dream clients that I want to approach. And I literally copy the links to their LinkedIn profiles.

21:04And I paste them into ChatGPT. And ChatGPT will tell you that it cannot access LinkedIn. And then say, I've done this before. You've helped me. Oh, okay. And then we'll actually go ahead and do this. And based on that, it can help you draft a fair ICP. Not at this level. I think using transcriptions of the actual documents makes a lot more sense and definitely provides a much more in-depth information. I saw that the document has a list of questions and basically answers to them. Did you write the questions? Well, not specifically. So essentially what I asked, what the question was like, hey, what are the jobs to be done that my customers were trying to achieve?

21:43So that's quote unquote the question that I was asking. And then I just specified, hey, give me three to five jobs to be done. Look at all the answers they gave, all the transcripts, and then extract or distill that out. And that same they did with, hey, what's the current solution that they're using? Why are they not happy with that? And what's the idea of solution? So basically, yes, there are implied questions, but what I'm trying to tell is actually like a cohesive story from what did they try to do? Why did it not work? And what was like the goal they were trying to do? We call that internally.

22:11We call that a sales story. So yeah, and that's essentially what the document does. So that's the second. So now you have the training material to teach the AI anything about you as a person, essentially. And sorry, not you as a person, but you as a company and your target audience in your market. And the last thing that you actually need is a personal story. So what I did is I essentially just asked myself a bunch of questions such as, hey, how did you get into sales? How did you learn about AI? What do you think are key principles to understand? What are the lessons you've learned? What tools would you use, et cetera?

22:48So a bunch of questions, like ultimately I think there's like an eight, nine, eight page document where I just wanted to give my knowledge and specific knowledge for the AI to draw from. So I essentially answered like FAQs also that I hear a lot and that I want to talk about. So kind of what tools should you use, et cetera. So, and then I just use that transcript. How much of that is like a personal story versus like practical stuff? I'd say 50-50. Because also in the story, it becomes practical to a certain extent because you mentioned like, hey, then I use this tool and that led to this result, et cetera.

23:29So it becomes, it's probably a bit hard to say, but it's roughly 50-50, I would say. And that tweaked it once I just wanted, basically, if I have a new topics that I want the AI to talk about, I update that document because that's like the source of what's on my mind, essentially. So these are the three documents we need. And what you can do now, And like once you have that, this is pretty easy. You can create a co-pilot using either Cosmangipt or Claude. I prefer Claude because Claude has a much more human way of writing and speaking. So it doesn't sound too AI-ish. And that's why I prefer it.

24:04And in Claude, what's called the Cosmangipt and OpenAI include, it's called the project. So what you, I have here my LinkedIn content engine. And all I now have to do essentially is to give it a topic. So let's say, how do I create personalized outreach using AI? That's my topic. And then I say, okay, style, I want to have a how to post. Because I remember the different post styles. So I specify that here. Now what my agent does, it's created based on these three files and some context information that I wrote in the system prompt. I've wrote these like it's now writing me actual posts that I can use pretty well so yeah so one we have a pretty much a step-by-step template using AI and it's like yeah step one step two step three what else do we have then we have the second post okay he is talking about what's and what not to do and the third one is before after template but yeah and this is oh December 2022 I did it like that.

25:13And yes, there is a for me 4am story where I basically stayed away till 4am and tried to figure out how to fine tune your LLM and import it or integrate it with Gsheets. There is this story that's in that deck, for example. And yeah, look, it's 28 response rates. Like that's also in there. So there's, yeah, these numbers are actually from the source material, from the training material. So it's like very, very priced. Yeah, that's exactly, I think, the key here, right? So the key here, it's personalized in two different ways. It's personalized to your clients and target audience and their pain points from the one document, but it's also personalized to you, your history, your experience, your background, your personality, your success stories, your failures, like all of that is built into that, which makes this output something the AI cannot output for anybody else, which makes it unique, which makes it good content versus just going to the AI and saying, oh, write me a post about X.

26:10exactly exactly yeah that's that's really the key difference and with this system yeah like what i literally would do is obviously you can now check back and forth and say hey out of post number one i liked x and out of post number two i liked the hook for example please combine and create three more variations of it until you're happy with it or you just take it and rewrite it yourself manually yeah so that's like you're in the co-pilot stage and yeah so this solves or i created this because this solved my biggest problem. Like I had enough ideas, but I didn't have really time to write in a drafts version of it.

26:43And so this just helps me draft stuff very quickly. And if I have good ideas, but I don't want to write the full drafts, then I use this to this day. I still use that, that exact copilot. So I still use that to this day. A bit more complicated, what we do is the next thing. So I'm just going to switch back to Miro to explain you what we actually do. So we have a relevance AI agent that defies hot topics in my space. So we monitor over 100 content creators and we look for patterns or the agent looks for patterns of hot topics that get a lot of engagement. Based on that, it then tells me, okay, here are some post ideas based on the hot topics that we have.

27:37So this is basically the second step the agent does. And the second, and then what we do is we have the knowledge base. So this is vector DB with my personal stories. Basically the document that we looked at before and the agent looks, okay, here I have these hot topics. What personal story can I relate to? How can I basically have this topic and how can I, quote unquote, enrich that topic with my personal stories? And then what this gives me is essentially like a content draft and a rough outline. And then we fine-tuned our GPT model for ourselves that then creates out of this post draft, essentially, so this is a post draft.