Agency Tools on the Bleeding Edge

0:28All right, so we have a little treat for you. found any like new tools or anything exciting that you wanted to share with the group this week? Ooh, I have one. I'm about to start up with it. Not a whole lot of knowledge, but it's called closely.io. It's another.io and it's a fusion. Anybody heard of closely? It's a fusion of LinkedIn and cold email. Okay. So Kevin, just really quick. It's like, instead of using what, what's that? I'm going to forget what the, the cold email one, it's, it's really popular. Instead of just doing cold email on its own, you can do cold LinkedIn, large quantity, like not whatever, maybe it's 20, 30 direct emails a day and you can have the automatic nurtures and the cold email like together under one roof.

1:16So it's like a hundred, 150 bucks a month. seems interesting. I'm going to try it out. Kevin, any, any perspective? Yeah. I started using that about a year ago. You know, I think they're like all, a lot of them are all the same. Like I got about five of those things. I think the key is the automations and the messaging and how you're connecting with your audience. I think you need, I just think you need to add value. I'll be honest. What we found really works is is really targeting well who we want to talk to and creating some lead magnets for that space specifically and just really connecting with them like me going in and hey man uh i'd love to connect with you love to you know expand my network um i see you do this i have a ebook or a guide that i think would be very you'd be very interested in and sometimes i'll do it on the fly using ai i'll write something up because i know what they need and i'll just kind of make it look pretty and send it over and that gets the conversation going so what i find is i need about five to seven touches before they know like and trust me yeah and um the ai is just kind of one way if you will it's kind of um trying you know it's all about me you know kind of thing what I want from them.

2:43So I'm starting to do it more manually and I'm finding it's funner, to be honest. And, uh, I've made some friends along the way. They, they're not ready to buy per se, but they're, they trust, they, they come to me now for advice. And, um, I kind of throw out fractional CMO, ask AMA stuff, ask me anything. Um, it's, you know, I say I normally charge 250 bucks for an ama um i'll send them my my link and it says pay and but i give them a coupon code for free basically so they feel like they're getting a free that's pretty interesting yeah hour of my time um that's worked really well it's not volume though it's like very strategic you know kind of thing but i think if you do stuff for free people don't i did that for years and i it got leads definitely because i'm i got a lot to say but um i think the 250 kind of they feel respectful of my time and i record it like this we record it like on a zoom call i send them the transcript the zoom call and i say i'll give you your money like or if i do charge i give so i give your money back if you're not completely satisfied but that's kind of all built into my Calendly and I just give them the coupon code so they don't have to pay when they first come in kind of thing.

4:01Sometimes people pay me afterwards, you know, kind of thing. They go, oh man, that was great. Here's 250. No problem. But anyways, I've reverted back to really being hands-on right now. I found that the mass LinkedIn outreach is everybody's picked up on it, you know, kind of thing. And I don't feel good about it for me. You know, I feel like it kind of feels kind of scummy a little bit, you know? So anyways, that's just me. I'm not doing that. I'm not looking for a hundred clients a month either. You know, if I get three to five clients a month, I'm killing it, you know, kind of thing. Right. So you got to look at the perspective of like, those are really built for volume and sales reps and things like that.

4:47As an owner, You might just spend the time looking at your ideal client persona. And I can help you with that. I can share what I'm doing offline if you want. Yeah, we haven't connected in a while, Kevin. I always appreciate how you're like, oh, yeah, closely. I did that a year ago. It's like probably a day before you beta tested it or whatever. Cool. Yeah, let's stay in touch. Good perspective. I five to seven touches, but you actually tried the spray and pray approach and you're kind of pulling it back to more manual. Yeah. I've tried a lot of stuff, man. I've tried clay, um, with email, uh, clay.com is it's fabulous for clients.

5:28I, whatever I give to my clients, I tried it on me first kind of thing. And so clay, clay is like the best, but it's like 300 bucks a month, to$350 a month, something like that. But it's kind of, it'll write the customized, it'll scrape, write the AI, AI write the conversation for you. And it's a lot more realistic than some of, even though it's AI for the spray and pray stuff, it's just still, you can, everybody's been hit with it, I think, you know, on LinkedIn. I know I get 50 a week, you know, I'm like, I've got AI to respond to it now. with funny jokes. I'm like, yeah, I come up with funny responses.

6:13And I'm not trying to piss people off, but I'm like, dude, you're like the millionth person who's emailed me the exact same thing, you know, kind of thing. You've got to be more credible. So instead of just being pissed and archiving them, I've got it automated responding to these people. Interesting. Thanks. There's a great AI tool. I won't go into it right now, but it's called CIDR. s-i-d-e-r um if the pro version uh 20 bucks a month just like chat to bt pro or whatever but you get access to all the llm pro stuff and um it's got built in like response uh caught like i use it for linkedin responses it'll say that their message and then my response so i'll paste in their message and then i'll just start like no thank you and it'll write a real and then you choose the tone you want you know like funny uh professional whatever and it'll write a a nice short you can do short medium large kind of length of the response and that just saves me so much time from thinking um and not being rude on because i get so many you know inquiries on linkedin and it's honestly it's turned people around people like okay i'm not going to sell anything but i really like to connect with you and get to know you better can we just talk, you know, collaborate.

7:33Cause I just hate how people just come in and, you know, just, you know, I want to sell you this, you know, kind of thing. And, um, it it's, I can demo it for you when we meet Adam and show you, but cider is a great, or if anybody wants me to show it today, I can show you how I use it with, since we're talking tools, but I'll let other people chime in. I don't want to dominate here. They're asking for marriage on the first date. Is that right? Yeah. Marriage on the first date, you know, it's kind of like, seriously, man you know like let's let's talk i want to point out um john asked how do we get the apollo discount i put the link in there so if you guys haven't checked it out yet school under the under the classroom setting you can go to like the discounts and deals section and there's probably six or eight maybe um discounts and those are coming more and more all the time uh as eric and neil make more partnerships they they bring in tools and discounts that are exclusive to aoa members.

8:27So make sure you're taking advantage of that. Shameless plug for the group. But Cider AI, Rebecca said. Okay, nice. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, He says the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds.

9:01Great experience members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Well, while we're on the topic, if anybody else wants to share a tool that's been helpful for them or something new that they found this week.

9:32Because I went to an AI meeting yesterday, and they were just showing all the updates that came out literally this week, and I was just blown away. So I'd love to hear if there's anything else that you guys are using that's helpful or interesting. I'm not using it yet, but I was at HubSpot's Inbound all last week, and it was all AI. and what they're baking into the platform. So they're trying to activate it and trying to make it put in the platform so people aren't wandering around to CIDR and all this other stuff. And so my big personal goal is to get in there, do some demos, figure this out, figure out what they've got going on, figure out which piece of it's real, which is roadmap.

10:19But it was a lot of interesting announcements. Their stock went up. The market liked it. So they're trying to actualize AI to help people rather than just, you know, AI. So anyways, that's kind of it in summary. So just all the updates in HubSpot is what you're talking about, Rebecca? Yeah, but having putting data inside of HubSpot to let people, you know, all the stuff you buy from Zoom Info and Apollo and all that, sticking that into HubSpot, automating tasks inside of HubSpot with agents, and then, you know, more predictive capabilities, all kind of agent-driven and AI-driven. and just, you know, there's the basic marketing stuff that's easy.

11:09You can see the use case with AI really easy, but it's customer services use case. And we're very familiar with the sales prospecting use case. So they're trying to put it all inside so people don't have to go other places. And they're using it to sell, obviously. It's not upsells, but it's just to sell certain basic subscriptions. So they're deep in. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started.

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13:27Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house. That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. That's awesome. Yeah, thanks for sharing. Eric and Neil were at the HubSpot Inbound Conference too, no? They were. They were definitely there. Yeah. Did you get a chance to see them? They're super popular and I'm there for a different reason. And so, no. So certain stages that have to do with guys like that, and also Jay Schwedeldson, if that's how you say his name, he's an email guy.

14:05Certain stages like that are swamped, and they're hard to get around, or the rooms are hard to get in, and I'm doing something else. And so, no, I did not. I'm there doing other things. Right, right. Make the most of your time there. Well, thanks for sharing that, Rebecca. Scott, I noticed you put a couple tools in the chat. One was Clay, and one was Agent.ai. What's going on with those? Yeah, I just see Dharmesh's posts on LinkedIn. And as Rebecca was talking about HubSpot, he keeps talking about the agent that I think small marketplace that he's building. So he's got some cool agents there, I guess.

14:41You want to upload data, train your own agents. Seems like a cool tool to play around with. Yeah, that's... And Daniel, you were talking... Sorry, go ahead. To what your point is, one of the founders of HubSpot is Dharmesh. that's his url and that's his little playground where he's messing around with stuff way ahead of it hitting hubspot so that scott that's a great tip yeah yeah he's uh he talked about it on something against the grain marketing against the grain or whatever podcast is yeah he was uh he was in a lot on his personal post but the other one is also you were talking about quizzes um Daniel Priestley, I've been following him for a few years now.

15:22He has a score app, which is a quiz builder. So it is a quiz. You take it and then it kind of helps you with sales actually on the back end. So it leads to a sale at the end and provides you with enough information. So played around with it, did a trial, did a paid for a couple of months, but we just couldn't figure out how to fit it just yet into our business. but I think it's pretty cool too. If any of your customers, ICPs might be into doing Quaze and then you using that information to close them, that could be helpful. Thanks for sharing, Scott. Yeah. What else we got going on? I want to jump in.

16:04So check it out, notebooklm.google. It's less on the sales and prospecting side, but it's on kind of internal. I can see internal use cases or for learning something new. The coolest feature about this is you can upload all kinds of documents to it, internal documents, something that you're trying to learn that's like long and technical. And there's an option where it creates like an 8 to 12 minute podcast, which is two people speaking American English to each other about the documents that you uploaded. So for me, someone who loves to listen to podcasts, I played around with it last night and found it super valuable.

16:42I even uploaded some of my own personal goals and objectives that I'm looking to achieve and listened to two people talk about my goals and actually what was in the data. Super interesting. So I'm curious to see how that would play out maybe in uploading SOPs and onboarding new people to get them up to speed very quickly.