264 | AI That Sells: How to Automate Lead Gen, Sales Calls & Newsletters Without Losing Your Voice with Sabahudin Murtic

0:00Hello and welcome to 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. and we have an absolutely awesome episode for you today. When I talk to people and I ask them what they're trying to do with AI, it usually falls into one of three categories. One is saving time, so getting efficiencies. The other is making money. And the third one is being able to get focus or get a specific goal in the most effective way. These are usually the three big categories of why people want to use AI.

0:35And in today's episode, we're going to show you an example for each of those things. So how to make more money, how to save time, and how to get more focused on specific tasks, including showing you exactly how to develop agents, including the prompting, the data that goes behind them, and all the flow that has to happen in order for you to replicate similar workflows so you can do the same thing, either make money or save time or get more focus on a specific goal you're trying to achieve. Now, to guide us through this process, we have an amazing guest, Sabahuddin Murtik, who is the co-founder of Nomad Visionaries Group.

1:10And it's an agency that helps founders connect with the right audiences on LinkedIn in order to drive business. And they do, as you can imagine, a lot of work with AI across everything that he's doing. Now, in addition, he is a certified partner of Relay, which is one of the leading apps to create automations and agents. and he's going to show us today exactly how to use this platform to do really magical stuff. He's going to share with us specific use cases that he's actually using in his agency. So this is not like a made up kind of like use case. This is the real deal. And he has been gracious enough to actually show us behind the scenes.

1:46So everything that he's doing, you'll be able to see and you'll be able to copy and paste and do it yourself. and that's why this is very, very exciting because this is actual blueprints for actual use cases that you can then use on your own to do similar things in your business. In addition, it will be a lot of great best practices, even if you're not using Relay, but using other solutions. You can learn a lot from this episode. And so I'm sure you're as excited as I am to welcome Sabahuddin to the show. Sabahuddin, welcome to Leveraging AI. In the next few years, AI technology will change our world dramatically.

2:24Whether 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. You'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.

3:00AI, sir, thank you for having me, and I'm super excited to show my process. And with that said, let's kick off. Yeah, let's dive right in. Yeah, let me share the screen. Just a second. Yeah, no worries. For those of you, by the way, who are driving or doing something in which you cannot look at the screen, we will explain everything that's on the screen and walk you through what's happening. But if you do want to watch what we're doing, then you can definitely go ahead and watch this on YouTube or on Spotify or whatever it is that you can watch videos. You can consume the same thing. Okay. Do you see my screen?

3:36Yes. Okay. I make some additional effort here. Do you see yourself? help. Okay, I wanted to make it custom made, so yeah, let's kick off. Those of you who can't see it, there's both of us with an overlay of funny low pixel sunglasses. Yeah. Okay, I try to be unique. I think it's the first impression that really matters. It does. I love it. Okay, so three things the audience can walk away after this podcast is how to approach AI implementation from three different perspectives, which will give you clarity on how to build, how to price your service, or maybe when you are paying for automation services as well.

4:20Practical knowledge, how to implement three workflows I will share with you, including the old templates from the Relay app, all the prompts, and all the documentation I will share with you after this podcast, as we can share to the audience. And yeah, so for every workflow that we will discuss today. fantastic so you said at the beginning of this podcast is how we're going to measure the AI value and the way how I measure AI value is through three things time, money and focus so when I start building something when it comes to the time I ask my few questions you know if this is going to save me a time how much time I'm spending to one particular thing every day and combining that, I realized the true value of AI implementation once I started building.

5:12At the same time, for example, when I'm selling the AI services to the specific person, I don't charge per hour. I charge per project. And then if we implement something, then when it comes to the saving time, so we do the simple math. So, for example, let's say you are wasting two hours, three hours per day on how to generate a proposal. If you multiply that with 365 days, then you get exact amount, how much time you are losing, right? At the same time, you can start asking yourself, imagine if you have that time, how you can invest in something that matters, right? So that's where the value show up on surface.

5:58And then it makes more sense to that person to buy my services. So it's a reasonable decision. It's the same thing with the money. So when I'm approaching to build something that can generate me more money, I start realizing and going back and ask myself simple questions like, where am I losing currently the money? How do I improve my cash flow? Is there anything that I should improve to reach my target audience, etc.? If that is the answer, I start building from there. is the same ad for somebody again who is buying the services is basically you know we ask again simple question like how much is costing you right now right and then imagine how much you're going to earn for next year if you solve this problem then i take 10 of that so for example if you are losing 10 000 per year for this specific task i will charge you 1 000 which is totally reasonable price.

6:58If I don't mention that, then I'm going to have handle objection, or it's going to be too expensive, et cetera. If I set clear expectations to the person, it would make more sense to buy the product. Focus. So both of these matters into the terms of focus. So if you have more time, if you have more money, you're going to get more focus, right? So in today's session, I tried to cover one workflow that's saving our time, one workflow that's trying to increase some money and the one workflow that combines all of these three together, money, time, and focus. So that was my main idea of this. Yeah, I will say something about this.

7:38Like even for the people who work in companies and do not do this as an agency and not trying to make money from doing this, it works exactly the same thing inside your business, right? You can save time and then use that time for other things. You can use... more money. So you can drive additional business by building different AI solutions. You'll see in a minute, a great example, or you can free yourself to have more focus on specific other things you're trying to achieve for bigger goals, strategies, whatever it is you want to do for the company. And so all of this applies, even if you're not in an agency selling this and you're just doing this internally inside your company.

8:18Cool. I agree with that. So when it comes to the time I'm going to show how I write my newsletter using newsletter repurposing system this is just quick snapshot of the workflow and what I get so we're going to go deeper into that when it comes to the increasing more money I'm going to share with you intent-based prospecting how we can find the leads from your competitors or from something you post right and then qualify them according your ICP criteria when it comes to the all three together money focus and time I'm going to share lead qualification and research for somebody who could call with us.

8:58And I'm going to share the full funnel. With that said, after this episode, I'm going to share all of these resources, as you can see here, for each of these workflows. So the first system we're going to cover today is VDOT newsletter repurposing system. In this system, I use Tela video recording tool, which is something similar to Loom, which is a bit more better features. And I use the transcript to repurpose it into the newsletter. Now, how I lose a lot of money is basically the way how I write a newsletter is basically I wanted to try to connect my own story from my own life with something that is related to the business in that current moment.

9:42So it was really hard for me to combine together and find a bridge. So the main idea of this workflow is to take my story from my story doc, which is real, something from my childhood, high school, doesn't matter, and take the transcript from the video I'm recording, which is related to the business, and find a bridge that makes sense. because every newsletter edition I start, I open with a story because storytelling is something that connects with the people and it creates way more conversion through my newsletter. So the workflow goes super simple. It grabs my transcript from specific playlists.

10:23Now, here's the really good thing with the Tela. They have specific playlists, and whenever I record a video, it's not triggering immediately. It's triggered when I put that to the playlist. That way I have way more control, you know, to start creating different angles. I can even change the trigger here, but that is the main idea. Just to pause for a second, for those of you who are not familiar with all these automation platforms, and it doesn't matter whether using Relay or Zapier or Make or N8N or any of these or Relevance, the way it works is a trigger, something that launches the process, the automation to work.

11:01In this particular case is when a specific recording is dropped into a specific playlist on a video recording platform, right? So you can record as many videos as you want. Nothing happens. But when you place the video inside a specific playlist, that triggers the automation and it basically tells it, OK, there's a new video. Go and run the automation on it. That's basically what the first step is doing. Yeah, great, great explanation. By the way, this is valuable because you have control of how you're going to spend your credits or whatever it is, whatever your platform you use. Imagine if you trigger for each video.

11:39So this makes more sense. Huge waste of money. Yes. And a lot of video is going to be recorded for one or two or five times. So, yeah. Cool. Now, once we have the trigger, the next step is to find the story into my story doc. So as you can see, this is the run preview here, what we are watching. So it goes and finds the primary recommendation and backup options for my three stories he finds. And then he gives me the reasoning explanation why he used that story because in the prompt itself, if I come back to the editor, in the prompt itself, it is always important to first analyze the context file and the transcript itself.

12:24So the idea here is basically I record a video about the business and then AI goes, take the context of that transcript and go and move to the story doc to see which story is the perfect match with this current topic I'm recording. I want to pause for a second. The story doc is basically you sit down and I assume transcribed and told stories from your life, like personal experiences. What I do is to have more focus. I have normal diary. And every day I write one story. Once I finish, I do the screen recording snapshot with camera and move it to the AI and then just take that text and move it to the story doc.

13:07The story doc is just a document in like a Google Drive, right? Exactly. Google Doc. Yeah. Awesome. So this way, I try to move all the distractions when I'm writing the stories because those stories need to be real because I want to be real online. That was my always, well, I don't want to fake it. And my stories are the best way how I can keep it real. So if we go through the prompt, the role is basically to, in this case, for the new story angle is to be the newsletter angle architect for Sabahuddin Systems, which is the name of my newsletter. and analyze the video transcript and find the perfect story angle in my story doc, transform technical content into the emotional, engaging newsletter.

13:51Because at the end of the day, if I'm going to talk about only technical stuff, I'm going to be boring. If I talk about myself, how that reflects to my life, it makes more sense to somebody to read my newsletter. We have story doc, we have newsletter framework, we have tone of voice as well. and then it takes the transcript and then it goes and find the best story match and now I put in some matching criteria here emotional resonance, does the story feel like the lesson thematic alignment, do they share a core principle, unexpected connection, can you bridge them this is really important, can you bridge them in surprising way, authenticity would Sabahuddin naturally tell this story here and freshness avoiding overuse the same three four stories so i don't want to always share the same stories of course sometimes i'm not consistent to write everyday new story but again i have 10 if i haven't 10 in story dog that's enough for me because i record one or two videos per per week and publish one newsletter edition now these are now generate angle etc etc now the main idea here is basically once they want to apply this to their self, they should write their own story back.

15:10They should use that writing to take the tone of voice file and then just take my prompt and put it inside of the AI and tell AI, okay, here's my story doc. Here's how I write. I wanted to change this prompt to be adjusted to myself. So that was the main idea. And I came up with this prompt by talking to AI a lot with a lot of context back and forth, telling him who I am. The good thing is that I have the memory. In this case, I use Claude. So Claude knows a lot of things about me. I previously shared all the stories and then we came up together with this prompt. Of course, the best prompt engineer is AI.

15:49I never even came up with this to be real in all of us. So for those of you, again, who haven't done this, if you want AI to write great prompts for you, you need to give it great context. In this particular case, Sabahuddin is talking about his personal experiences. So he taught Claude his personal experiences, basically give it the context in this particular case about him as a person, and then explain, okay, this is what I want to do. I want to be able to connect my personal stories to specific business processes that I'm sharing. I need you to help me write a prompt that will enable me to do this in an effective and authentic way.

16:28and then you go back and forth a few times and then you get a really long, very detailed prompt that as Sabahuddin said, you cannot write on your own. This is like a four-page prompt that is very, very detailed that actually does the work and it's usually not on the first shot. Like on the first shot, it's going to be okay and then you go back and forth and give it a little bit of feedback and run it a few times and you learn what's not working and you give it additional information and slowly you develop it to the point that it is working consistently every single time. Awesome. So what's the next step?

16:57So this just finds the right story and makes the right connection. Exactly. Exactly. By the way, this is the hardest part in this workflow. When you are building the things, it's good to connect the steps to know what's your end outcome. But to engineer the AI outputs, you just need to put a lot of efforts with the quality prompt and quality context. Now, the next step is to write a newsletter edition. Now we have here, you know, newsletter examples and narrative. We have tone of voice and writing style, newsletter framework. We have the transcript, and we have the story. So here's all the knowledge he's using it.

17:35And then we have the brain prompt that connects all of these files into the one newsletter edition. It came up with the output, which is the subject line and the newsletter content. In this case, I used model cloud summit 4.5, which I highly recommend for anyone when it comes to writing. And I connected directly with my API key, so I don't need to spend relay up credits. so I can have more control. So again, a few explanations of what Sabahuddin just said. One is for every one of these steps, and basically in any agent that you build, you're going to have a prompt, you're going to have a goal.

18:09In this particular case is I want you to come up with a subject line and the newsletter content, and you're going to have the supporting documents or knowledge or context, which in this case is all the stuff that Sabahuddin mentioned previously, with the most important one being the examples and the narrative, so it knows what the structure is, how it looks like, what are the different components that go into it so all the newsletters look and feel from the same brand, from the same source. So this is one thing I want to add. The other thing that I want to add is what Sabahuddin just mentioned in the end, which in most of these platforms, you have two options.

18:43You can run on their own credits, meaning they're going to charge you their credits, which means they're going to use whatever AI tool they want in the backend, and they're going to take an arbitrage on top of it. So let's say instead of paying 20 cents for a million tokens, you're going to pay 30 cents because that's how they make more money. But in most of these tools, and Relay is one of them, you can connect your own API key. You can go to Cloud, you can go to ChatGPT, you can go to Gemini, you can go to whatever you want, get an API key, put your API key there, and then you're paying the raw value that you would have paid for the actual model based on the tokens they charge, which means you're spending less money every time you're running this compared to just running it under the regular relay tokens.

19:27And the same thing is true in most of these platforms. They work in a very similar way. Yeah. I mean, you need to, in case you're going to use this automation every week, I think you need to consider that reduced cost. A hundred percent. So one thing I'm going to mention, which is interesting in this prompt, which I didn't see a lot is basically I put philosophy. So I tell AI the transcript is already human. This is the way how I talk. So you don't need to reinvent new tone of voice, style, etc. You just need to preserve it while. No one add to personality because this is the way I speak. And that's the reason why I use the transcript to repurpose into the content because I believe that transcript is the most valuable asset in the age of AI.

20:13Yeah. So I'm not going to bother too much with the prompt that you're going to have to access and read, et cetera. But that was the main goal here, to write a newsletter edition by combining all of these inputs here. The next step is basically just want to be sure that it doesn't have AI fluff. I use this prompt to humanize it as much as possible and avoid any cliches, any generalization, any hashtags, markdown, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So those of you who don't see the screen, there's basically do's and don'ts. You should do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and you should avoid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

20:47Like a lot of stuff that AI does that you don't want it to do, you can prevent it from doing just by asking. Yeah. I mean, look, in most of the cases, because the prompt is really good and the knowledge base is really good, it has 80%. But why not to reduce that reviewing time with this prompt as well? So I put additional step. The next step is to generate simple infographic that explain this whole newsletter edition and move that to my newsletter system in my Notion. and so in the notion explain to people the image part of it or the infographics this is just sending a prompt that I'm sure is auto-generated based on the actual newsletter that then sends it to Gemini Nano Banana that generates it through again an API so you can then go and grab a and the way it works you send it to the API and you get back a link of where the graphics is going to be and then in whatever automation tool you're using you can go and grab the graphics from the link to place it wherever you want to place it.

21:49And so, again, the same process works in all these tools. You can send a prompt for an image generation tool, whichever one you like. Nano Banana is a great option because it's cheap and it generates great results. You get a link and then you can grab the image and put it wherever you want to put it. Yeah, so this is one of the examples. It's on the branding, on my colors. It explained exact addition what I'm doing here. And the topic was how to use Nano Banana for infographics. and why it's important. Yeah, the funny thing, that was the topic. And why it's important, you know, to visualize what you write.

22:25So this is like, and this is also a funny thing he captured because I go into high school as architectural. So the story was like, if I show you the final output here, the story was about me in high school, how I charge for architectural projects, my classmates. And they ask me always, can you draw this architectural project for me? I'm not thinking about design. I'm thinking about make it clean, make it clear, make it fast. I sketch it quickly. He pays me word spread. More classmates show up with the project, same process every time. And now I take a bridge here. That's the reason how I write.

23:07Now that's not about the talent. Your best content is already written, LinkedIn posts, the end conversation, which is related to my topic. But if people can't skim it, it's either 0.3 seconds and you lose them. So that was the main idea, how I can count my story. And then I go with the main topic. I want to show you my favorite so far is this one's so crazy when I was testing up. Yeah, so look at this. I use a story from my raving period when I was young. and the story was about how DJ doesn't feel the audience and play bad music if you see that audience don't like that music bro you need to change something you need to communicate with the audience so that was the same thing with the dms so like the subject line was like the DJ trick that fixed my dms like what the fuck so people will look like you know what I mean so it's a good hook exactly so here's the quick intro like we're throwing the parties trying to make night pop, learn something fast, you can't force the vibe.

24:10If the crowd is tired, you don't play hard techno. If they are bouncing, you don't slow it down. You watch, you listen, then you move. That's the reading move. And now here's the bridge. Most people treat LinkedIn DMs like a bad DJ. And now it goes to the main topic. That's awesome. So, you know, that was the whole story of this newsletter. And by the way, what you see here, you see how good AI is at doing these things, on taking two things and one of the things make an interesting unexpected connection. This is an unexpected connection, right? You get from being a DJ when you're in your teens to writing LinkedIn direct messages.

24:48And yet the AI finds a way to make this interesting and it makes a very good post. Exactly. My biggest problem here where I was losing a lot of time is connecting my real story with the business. First thing first, to give you some context, I'm only two years in business, maybe two and a half. like I'm running my own business. Previously, I was in corporate life, and I didn't have enough experience. Now, once I get the output from the AI that connects with my transcript, I can get relaxed. I can write my story, whatever it is, go random. I know the AI will find the bridge with the current topic.

25:22Fantastic. Cool. So this was the first workflow that we covered today. Now, the next workflow is intent-based prospecting. Now, we are talking about how you can make additional money. Here, the main idea is it's not to really go on AI and think that AI is going to find the leads. You need to understand the intent of people who make some things on social media. Let's take LinkedIn, for example. So, if your competitor posting about the topic that is a core part of your offer, right? For example, if they are talking about outreach, for example, you should go scrape those leads, right? Because those leads already show the intent about that topic.

26:10They are problem aware or solution aware, or they are too desperate, which means once you qualify them through this workflow, for you, it's way more easier to reach out because you know they had the problem. You just need to stand up. So that was the main idea of this. Basically, you should go find your best post from yourself that talk about your offer. We are promoting, let's say, bottom of the funnel. You're talking about main offer, how you're solving that. Boom, take that post, scrape the leads, qualify them, reach out. You can go with the competitors. You can go with LinkedIn events. You can do from the company's page, et cetera, et cetera.

26:48You just follow the intent. That's the main idea. The workflow is pretty simple. You implement the LinkedIn post here. then you put your ICP definition here then you find 50 comments or I don't know you can put 100 with the relayer that's the limitation then you can remove the duplicates people this is the step where people commenting and liking at the same time you don't want to have them both then it goes and do the 50 times loops qualify lead checking so for example for each person goes and check if this person is the fit or not. An explanation of that fit. And again, just to give a little more context on how that works, right?

27:32So when you define the ICP, you say they're in roles of either CEO, COO, or VP of sales, doesn't matter. You define whatever you want. And then which industries do you want them to be in that will be relevant to your target audience? And then where are they in the world? Like I, when I do this process for my company, I only look for people in North America and Europe. Why? Because of time zone and language. Like if they're in South America, the time zone works, but I can't speak Spanish. And if they are in Southeast Asia, well, the time zone is going to be a problem even if they do speak English.