272 | Win more business: Build Personalized, High-Impact Proposals with AI with Susan Frew

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 and advance your career. This is Isar Maitis, your host. And, you know, many people ask me, what is the best AI tool is today? I get that answer all the time. And the answer is, it's usually that, sadly, combining several tools is the best way to achieve something because each of those tools have advantages and disadvantages compared to some of the other tools. Now, in addition, the most important aspect of a business is getting money into the business.

0:37Without money, you don't have a business. You can have a volunteering opportunity, but not really a way to run a business. and to run a business, you need clients. And to need clients, unless you're in e-commerce, you need to be able to write solid proposals that actually win you business. In today's podcast, we are going to learn an incredibly valuable and fun process that's gonna show you how to combine multiple tools such as Notebook LM and HeyGen and Gamma and other tools in order to create really effective, well-selling personalized proposals in a very short amount of time. So in addition to the fact they're just better, unique and interesting and personalized, it's actually easier to create them than sitting for a few hours in front of a computer typing a proposal, even if you're using a template.

1:21So think about it instead of sending like a Word document or a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF document, think about a dynamic webpage with multiple sections, including infographics and videos of yourself and relevant information about the proposal and about the company. And all of that can be done in less than an hour. That is pretty impressive. And because it's so unique, and because it's customized, and because it brings all these things together, it just converts a lot better. Our guest today, Susan Fru, is a serial entrepreneur. She's a sought-after public speaker on AI and other topics.

1:57She's an AI ninja herself, and I've met her several times, including in person. She's been on the podcast before, and she's an absolute amazing person and a really, really successful entrepreneur because she's investing a lot of her time in learning how to do things better and more effective, even before AI. But since AI came out, definitely she's invested a lot in basically sprinkling AI magic on everything that she's doing. And because she's so good at this thing, because she's very successful with this very particular process, she writes proposals in this exact process that is winning her more business with less effort.

2:31I thought it's going to be amazing to have her on and have her show you exactly how she does it so you can do this as well. So I'm very excited to welcome my friend and the AI ninja, Susan Fru to the show. Susan, welcome back to Levertel.

2:48Susan Frew:Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm always so excited to come to meet with you and my fellow geek. We get to geek out on cool things. And to everyone who's listening who may be in Asia, I'd like to say happy new year. And it is the year of the fire horse. So I had to wear red today so we can embrace that energy. Because I think what they're talking about is this is going to be the AI boom this year. And that's where the 60-year cycle has landed. So something a little side note that's kind of fun. But thank you for having me. No, 100%. I'm really, really excited. Every time you and I meet, we can geek out for hours sometimes.

3:22And we always exchange really cool ideas and learn from each other. So writing proposals is a big deal. I have a mostly automated process. I know yours is as well. I think yours is just really, really cool because it doesn't end up with a document, which is really boring and what everybody else is doing, which by itself means you stand out compared to other people. So let's dive right in. For those of you who are in the live audience, those who are here with us on Zoom and or on LinkedIn, first of all, thank you for joining us. I'm sure you can do other things on Thursdays at noon. So I appreciate you guys being here.

3:51Please introduce yourself, say where you're from, what you're looking to get out of this episode, where you are in your AI journey. If you have any questions, I'm monitoring both chats, both on Zoom and on LinkedIn. So if you have any questions for Susan or for myself or any general comments, please write them in there. If you're not with us live, the question is why we do this every single Thursdays at noon with really cool people like Susan, who's going to share a lot of really great information, useful, practical information. And if you're here, A, you can hang out with the cool people and B, you can ask questions, which you cannot do if you're doing this afterwards, listening to the podcast or watching this on YouTube or wherever it is that you're consuming this.

4:26So come join us every week, Thursday, noon, If you don't know how to sign up in your show notes, there's a link on how to sign up and you can do it that way. And now, Susan, the stage is yours.

4:35Susan Frew:Great. Hello, everyone. So my name is Susan Frew and my vocation basically is I'm a professional keynote speaker on the topic of usable AI. So my audiences are usually entrepreneurs, construction groups, conventions, any kind of association. So that's who I write proposals for. And, you know, I was writing some decent proposals before. and, you know, okay, here's the great follow-up email and all that. But I started really sort of shaming myself, saying, look, you have all these AI tools and you're sending like an email and like a Word document or what have you. But it just wasn't aligning with my brand, if that makes sense.

5:12Susan Frew:And I use a lot of AI tools. And this is my response all the time. I heard you say early people ask you, what tools should I use? And I say, well, if you were going to build a house, what tool would you use? And they usually think for a second and go, a lot of them, right. Right. Because and that's the way you need to think about your AI tools, because it's not all created equal. They're all different. They all do different things, better or worse. I mean, if you had to only pick one, I know it's what I would pick. But, you know, that leaves it up to everyone else. But you don't have to pick one.

5:40Susan Frew:You get to use a lot of them to come up with really amazing things. And so that is what I'll show you. So so just want to tell you who my audience is mainly. So when I'm doing a conversation or a proposal, it's people who are considering bringing me in as their keynote speaker for their convention, big meeting. Sometimes it's for consulting because a lot of times after a keynote, I'll get people who want me to come on site and do training for their team and things like that. Just like SRV, it's the same thing. So that is my target market. And of course, it's like most of you or all of you, when you do a meeting, you always record it.

6:17Susan Frew:I don't have the actual transcription on Zoom anymore because I'm a Descript user, and I love taking my video and audio, putting it into Descript or Google AI Studio, because I get a lot of analytics out of that. I'm going to show you. I'm not going to keep talking. I'm going to actually do show and tell here. So what you are seeing right here is Gamma. So that's Gamma.app. If you've not heard of it before or not used it, there is a free and a paid version. The free version allows you to do up to eight slides in there or eight cards, as they call it. You can't customize it, though. So what you're seeing here with this red and this logo, this is my brand kit.

6:58So what I do, and this is really the end result.

7:02Susan Frew:So I'm going to show you the end result, and I will show you how I got there. So first things first is I take the transcription of the meeting that I had with the event planner, meeting planner, what have you. And as I said, I will put it into Descript to transcribe the text, or I will put it into Google AI Studio. The reason I make that decision, which where I'm going to put it, if I put it, if there's more than one person on the call, and sometimes there are, like it's a committee making this decision and they're all interviewing me, you're going to miss a lot of verbal cues. And you may also miss some words that people are saying.

7:37Susan Frew:So Google AI Studio has the ability to visually look at that video, and I'll put the whole video in there then, and I will have it analyze it, and I will tell it to analyze the body language, the tonality, all of that, because now I want to write an extremely customized presentation and proposal for them based on what they said. So now I am delivering exactly what they talked about in the meeting. I am not just saying, here's my proposal and shoving it down someone's throat. this proves that I care about them. I care about their brand. I care about their meeting. I understand their industry and their meetings because that is critically important.

8:14Susan Frew:Important. So I'm going to show you, this is, this is the gamma like, uh, that I would send and I send the link. I don't download this. I send the link. And the reason is, is because otherwise you're not going to get all these videos and lining it up is not going to work. So let me just show you how I do it. Before you do that, I want to add two cents. Number one is with regards to using a recording to create your proposals. I've been doing this for probably a year and a half, maybe two years now. And the biggest benefit is that it captures the voice and the words and the pain points, the way the target audience describes it.

8:51And it doesn't matter. Susan is doing this to get work as a speaker, but I do the same thing to do other stuff. And I've built similar systems for clients as well. It doesn't matter what it is. When you're doing a proposal, you're trying to solve a problem or accelerate something that the client wants to do. And if the proposal describes it in their words, the way exactly they described it, and the AI knows how to do it with no problem, way better than I can. A, it does it in 30 seconds when it takes me two hours. B, it just writes better proposals because it captures exactly what they were saying.

9:24Another small nuance of that, that Susan is saying that is important to know, most of these tools take the transcription and they will use the transcription, meaning they know what was said. They don't see body language. They don't see reactions. Google AI Studio actually knows how to, quote unquote, see the video frame by frame. So the depth that you can get as far as the understanding of what was actually happening in the meeting is deeper, especially if there are multiple people in the meeting and it can capture the reactions when you're mentioning something and so on. and that just brings more value to the thing.

9:56The last thing that I will say, because Susan is sharing a screen and some of you, many of you, thousands, well, tens of thousands of you are going to be listening to this after the fact, driving the car and not necessarily watching the screen. So what we're seeing is a webpage that is branded to Susan's brand that has a big, bold thing on top, then a infographics that I'm sure Susan will walk her through, then a video of Susan, which I don't know what it's going to say, but it's going to say. So this is kind of like the big structure of the page and maybe there's other parts, but this is what we're looking at.

10:24And now back to you, Susan.

10:26Susan Frew:Thank you. So this proposal is to a financial services company. I have done some presentations for Schwab. So Schwab investors sometimes will be in my audience, and then they will want to bring me in to their organizations to speak to their clients. So they bring their clients for a client event, and I do a presentation about AI, tell them how usable, all the things that I talk about. So what you're seeing here, and for those of you listening, I have an infographic from Notebook LM. So after the meeting, once I transcribe everything, I put everything into Notebook LM, everything, their website, all the data that I have.

11:02Susan Frew:And a lot of that I'll do even before the first meeting. I create a notebook for every single client, every one, because of all of the things that I could extrapolate from that notebook and be usable to customize my content for my client. That also will help me to customize the keynote right before I, you know, if I get the business, then I can customize the keynote. And then my next thing here. So this is an, a Hey Jen avatar that you're seeing. I took a selfie of myself at the Ritz Carlton in Charlotte. I was doing a speaking engagement there. It had a really cool background, but then this is actually a replaced background, but that is me.

11:37Susan Frew:I just took a selfie of myself and you'll see, you know, what this looks like. And this is what it says. So they get this link, they open it up, they see the proposal thing, they see the infographic about our conversation, and then my Hey Jen avatar says this. Hi, Steve and Matthew. Thank you so much for the meeting today. I really enjoyed our conversation, and I look forward to working with you on the East Coast, hopefully sometime this spring or in the summer. Attached, you will find a proposal. You will also find an infographic that I created for you, a explainer video and the entire proposal was based off our conversation.

12:12Susan Frew:So I made sure that I was able to transcribe and to capture every thought so we didn't miss anything. I look forward to hearing back from you. And in the interim, if you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out. Have an awesome day. So, hey, Jen has come a long way, have they not? Yes. No, I think they're avatars. So those of you who don't know, haven't played in the avatar video world. There are two leading companies. One is Heijen, which both Susan and I are using. The other one is Synthesia, also another great product. And they leapfrog themselves every few months when the new version comes out.

12:47But the avatars are very realistic. You can control the background, the speed, the language, what they're going to say. But the cool thing here is that, again, what Susan is, well, what Susan's avatar is saying is customized and personalized. And I'm sure she did not write the script, right? Like an AI wrote the script based on a standard template based on what was said in the actual conversation.

13:08Susan Frew:And something else to point out. So now the voice that you heard, of course, is mine. So 11 Labs, which is a voice cloning organization, which is, I know Isar's been using that since the very beginning, way back when, three years ago. So that is not an 11 Labs voice. I have an 11 Labs voice of mine in there, but sometimes I think it sounds better if you actually record the audio on your microphone and then drop it in. And then it also makes the mouth move better and that the motion seems to be better if you do it that way. I don't know if that's actually true. It just feels that way to me. All right.

13:40Susan Frew:So then the next thing that we do is we go. So these people are going to be able to scroll down here. Hold on a second. All right. There's an introduction here. So it talks about, you know, now it's going to get into the nuts and bolts of what we talked about on our meeting. And I'm trying to make this larger so you can see it. So I put the introduction in here. I understand their kind of industry. So I make an image here of their industry, and I talk about their industry, and I talk about what they said about their industry in this proposal. Then I go here to key engagement goals. And this is part of my template now that I've created.

14:20Susan Frew:So educate the audience, deliver a high-level AI overview, ensure dynamic and entertaining delivery. So to be a good keynote speaker, you have to have a good entertainment as well, because it's not all about the content, because the content can get really dry. They want a client experience. And so I made it a bespoke AI keynote experience, custom. I did not come up with that. Notebook LM did. And I think it's really cool that they did it. And then they put a picture of me on a stage. They just came up with that. Then a keynote built for your audience. So I talk about their perspective of who their audience is, custom-generated content, entertaining and asable tone.

15:01Susan Frew:And then you see this thing here called talk-a-dot. This is where, as professional speakers, we keep our reviews. So every single time that I speak in front of an audience, I have 3 ,000 reviews in here of people in the audience who have filled out the survey and they said something about me. So if I double-click on this now, it's going to take you out of the presentation. but it's then going to show the client all of what the audience members say. They can go all the way down. They can see every single speaking engagement that I've had for the last four years, and they can see what people said, and they can dig into every single one of them.

15:39Susan Frew:Totally live. I cannot fudge that. That's the way it is. And that also really helps because now you are delivering the social proof because you know your client's going to Google you or look you up anyway. Right. So why not just give them what they're looking for in a really good, positive presentation? It also makes you look more authentic. And if you put your your reviews out in front of them. So and then I just put a summary of what audience members say. And then here's my system for sustained learning. These are some of the things I've learned over the last couple of years doing these presentations of what I'm going to put it in present view for this, what people need and what I need in order to deliver the best content.

16:22Susan Frew:Number one, I do a pre-event survey of the audience. I make the meeting planner do this. So whenever someone registers for the conference or what have you, send them this link. And I want to know, how far along are you with AI? How do you feel about AI? And I'll tell you why that's important here in a minute. What are you using? What are your thoughts for the future? And these are a few questions. Now, for certain industries, we will customize it. Or if we know the audience is really beginners, we will also customize it that way. And it used to be, and ISAR can totally probably validate this, it used to be we would talk to the audience and everyone there was a beginner.

17:00Susan Frew:Well, now that's not true. Now we have beginners and we have people who are armchair AI enthusiasts and are going to have a podcast next week, which is great. I love talking to those people as well. However, in order to customize your keynote, when you've got 50 % of the room one way and 50 % of the room the other way, you're going to make it very different than if you had all beginners or you had all very highly educated folks in AI, high-end users, right? Yeah, I want to pause you for just one second for two different reasons. One, I want to generalize it for the audience. The same exact concepts apply in any proposal that you write, right?

17:37So think about the key things that Susan is talking about. She's talking about understanding your audience. Who are you building this for? Is your solution the right fit for the needs of whoever you're writing the proposal to? So all these things that she did the research for using Notebook.lm and using other tools, they all get translated into structured outputs. And that's the other important part in all of this. And then, Sudha, if you don't mind, since most of the audience are not public speakers, let's dive into how this gets created versus seeing the other parts of the proposal. I think people get it, that this is a much more interactive and engaging format than just sending a document.

18:17I think it will be interesting diving into, okay, I understand. I want to do this. I want to send these kind of proposals. What did the magician do behind the curtain in order to make this thing happen? I think will be very interesting. I think the bottom line is this is a good solution for any kind of proposal writing. And I'll say something extreme. I know people thinking, oh, this is good because it's more of that kind of universe. It's people who are speakers and they're looking for speakers. So they're looking for the hype and the cool and the different. And that's not true because people in general are looking for you to be unique and customized and solve their problems.

18:49And if you can show it in a more effective way, it is a part of standing out compared to other people who do similar things. And so whether they asked only you for a proposal, you will look better. And definitely if they ask for multiple people for a proposal, yours is going to stand out, both in means of uniqueness on the display, but also in the depth and personalization of the content inside the proposal because it is customized specifically to them.

19:14Susan Frew:Yeah, I mean, customization is king. Like, you have to understand your client. And now I'm going to go back here. Now I'm going to get out of this. And then I'm going to just start showing you. I'm going to go through this a little bit more. Here's some options. Here's the pricing. But here is, this is something interesting. So I created this for all of you because normally now I would take Notebook LM and make this explainer video about what they said. But I didn't want to disclose my client's name in the video. So I'm just going to hit this for you guys to hear and to see. All right, Steve and Matthew, it was great meeting you.

19:44So let's break down what makes a proposal a true winner. So how do you make that happen? Well, a great proposal isn't off the rack. It's a bespoke suit. And to tailor that perfect fit, you've got to start by taking the client's measurements. It's that simple. So we learn the investment firm's clients are sharp, curious crowd who want more than just market talk. Exactly. They hire you for the finances, right? So any event needs to offer something totally different. Once you have those measurements, you can tailor the solution. And this is where it gets really good. See, a generic pitch just won't cut it.

20:13A bespoke one shows you are actually listening. We're talking about tangible, custom-made stuff here. Things that are built just for them. The focus has to be on usable AI. You know, not some dry academic lecture. It has to be practical. call. Okay. So the suit fits perfectly, but what if you threw in something extra, something totally unexpected? And here it is a free ask me anything call after the event, a really powerful little idea. Why? Well, it helps with shy folks and lets people come.

20:40Susan Frew:Okay. So it shut me off on its own. So that was out of notebook LM. So now I'm going to click over to notebook LM, but that was pretty cool. So that explained how we did the proposal and why we did it the way we did it. So I'm now I notebook LM. So for me, this is always step one. If someone books a meeting with me and they want to talk about doing business with them, I start doing my research right now before I meet with them. I grab whatever I can get. Some people will have a lot of social proof or a lot of stuff on the website or what have you, but I always put in their website. I always put in their inquiry.