Cool S**t We're Doing In AI This Quarter, How This Weird Economy Is Affecting Marketing, How We're Generating Pipeline In A Weird Economy

0:29I want to talk about it. that I have it go into our Slack. And then every day it's like, if you say your daily report, the highest leverage thing you're working on today is creating a report. This thing will coach you. And it'll actually rate how high leverage your activity was, how consistent you are with filling it out. And it actually coaches people up. I think I mentioned this already and I'll go into some more examples, but after doing this for a week or two, everyone instantly shaped up. They instantly leveled up. Right. And so what I started doing was like, Oh, okay. I'm going to have this sit in as like a, like I work with chat GPT on the prompts.

1:05Right. So I was like, Oh, I want to have a sales coach. I want to have an EOS coach. Cause we still run on EOS, right? And you guys don't do that anymore, but EOS is like a L10 meeting, attraction meeting, right? You talk about your rocks, you talk about your goals and all that. But a lot of people on the team, they don't know how to run that effectively. So I just say, I want you to be the best EOS coach ever make a prompt and makes a prompt. And then I bring it over from ChatGPD to Grok. I'm like, hey, ChatGPD said this. I thought you're the best prompt. And they start fighting each other, right?

1:32And I take the Grok prompt. I bring the ChatGPD. Grok said this. I thought you're the best model. And then it makes the perfect prompt, right? And I dump it in there. And then every Thursday, it will scan through all the EOS calls. It'll do like a coaching thing. And I'll put them into a spreadsheet. And I'll send a Slack. I'll send those people a message too, right? And then it also does it for sales calls too. Oh, it also does it for client calls too, right? So you have a coach in there. And this is, to me, this is like level one. There's like multiple levels to it. I was working with chat. This is on one of my walks with chat GPT.

2:03I was like, hey, I'm doing this right now, but this is like level one. I want you to give me levels two, like all the way up. It went all the way to level seven. It's like, this is the highest tier that you can do. You got to incentivize people. And then it'll come up with like new things that you can build, all this stuff, right? And I'm like, how much time am I wasting with this? Right? And it's like, you're not wasting time at all. It's like, this is like a top 0.1 thing percent that people aren't doing right now. I'm like, but this will become really common. It's like, yes, this will become uncommon.

2:27I was like, but also what's the downside to this too? The downside is Eric, if you put too much surveillance, right? It's, it's, it's also not a good thing. Right. But right now, um, this is the type of new work that you and I couldn't have done before. And I think this is just the very beginning because it instantly lifts the bar across everyone. And it's not costing me that much money. I'm paying Lindy 300 bucks a month for 30 ,000 credits. I've almost exhausted them but this is the type of stuff that I think is interesting now here's the flip side to this I think you can over optimize for sure I think there's a lot of people on YouTube right now talking about oh this NAN workflow that I built it's like these Zapier workflows that's a lot of time I like the Lindy one where I could just prompt it and like make these like random things but it's cool I copied I copied this from Neil by the way this I stole from you so what I really like about how Neil goes about his recruiting and I'm sure he stole this from someone on his team is they look for people that not only have one promotion, but ideally two promotions at two separate companies, correct?

3:27Yeah. So I have a Lindy that does that. It will find people with two promotions from two separate companies for specific roles. It instantly lists them. For whatever reason, the recruiters that we work with, not saying they're bad, but they just can't, somehow they can't nail this, but this thing just nails it. But that's one of the easiest things to nail. But it does it. it lists it for you very quickly instead of having to scan through LinkedIn. And then it'll make a sequence to just add them and then message them. You can just also dump them to like chat GPT operator or Manus or whatever. My point is earlier this conversation on this podcast, we're just like, we're asking six times more questions, 15 times more questions.

4:07We're also gonna do things six to 15 times faster. Yes. One thing that we're doing this quarter is we're buying a lot of data from different sources that showcases not only all the search patterns on all these AI platforms, but also breaks down who is showing up. And we're then looking at the queries, the volume of the queries, and then doing research on the internet for those queries. When are those companies mentioned? So we're trying to look at the type of articles, what sources they're coming from, where they're pulling from and then we're going out there and creating variations of those pieces of content around the web uh not for links or anything like that but more so for the mentions so then that way we can influence when people start asking ai questions related to our business we stay top of mind and then it drives revenue indirectly on you know for our services this is real llmo real geo um well i think because this is such the wild wild west right now there's going to be so many people that are figuring out how to play the game yeah and then eventually they'll patch it up and then there'll be a new way to play the game right but it's um it's good to stay ahead of this like by the way what do you think about these these other tools like uh profound that will show you how you stack up with the llms and all that like people talk about these but i'm like are these are you paying for that we're testing all of them yeah and one thing that we're doing too is when you look at the llms and you ask questions a lot of them will cite sources and you can end up seeing okay if they said this is the best marketing firm it's from this source so when we go to that website or some of those websites that are mentioning it and we hit them up just like you would normally do link building we try to convince people to swap out corporate names and agencies and to ours and we tell them why we're better whether it's awards or case studies and why this is a better fit the offer some money sometimes uh no we just organically do it and we do it in mass quantity yeah um it's a low hit rate similar to link building but it works really well and we're slowly starting to see it helping because then we track some of the queries uh and then when we start typing them in later on we're noticing slowly very very slowly though uh that they are starting to mention us more when you use ai mode um it's funny because it lists the sources in like a three-pack on the on the right and when i ask about the the best marketing for whatever it's always like clutch or like these lists right yeah so your move which people a lot of seos have been doing this already they'll reach out to you because you and i have these list pages on our site yeah so we see it it's basically that but more of it yeah so in my mind right now llmo is still very much traditional seo but that will change over time so i agree i think their algorithms are going to adapt.

6:56But it is very similar to very traditional SEO. And I don't think you need to do pay for play. I think you just need to do cold outreach and convince people. Because if you can't convince people, what's going to happen is new companies and people are going to create articles around the web and they're not going to mention you. So you got to figure out why they're mentioning other people and not you and how you can fix that with your core product or service or your business or your branding. So that way you get mentioned more. And that's the real long-term solution in my mind this goes back to having these agents that can reach out and then whenever you have a new offer to input it just inputs that offer in there and it dynamically shifts it because like what you can't do is when you reach out you send the same reach out for 12 emails 14 emails just following up just following up just it's like maybe you try a sequence of seven with one offer and then that fails and then maybe two months later you reach out with a new offer and then the same thing again um but that's how you adapt so we got time for two more episodes here So I kind of want to talk about this weird economy.

7:56One, how we're generating pipeline in this weird economy. And then two, how this weird economy is affecting marketing. You can pick one. Let's talk about how the weird economy is affecting marketing. Actually, you want to do both? Yeah, we're going to do both. So let's start with how it's affecting marketing, and then we can go into the pipeline. Okay. Well, the way we see it is just there's a lot more uncertainty. companies even if they're doing well financially are afraid to spend and invest and this is creating opportunities where we're seeing some things cheaper where you can just go and get more market share but overall even though the economy is where technology is changing at a rapid point we're not really seeing companies stop marketing or really take their foot too much off the pedal.

8:46We're seeing it slightly in some cases, but not too much. And the reason I say this is you can just see the Google earnings in the Facebook earnings or meta earnings because they break down how much money they generate from ads. It's still growing and we're still seeing companies spend. And if they don't spend, their numbers get even worse. So they have no choice but to figure out how to keep spending to maintain their numbers. Yeah. What I'm seeing is right after that China-US deal happened or that temporary pause in tariffs for 98 days, our leads instantly picked up a lot. Yes. I would say that people are cautiously optimistic, I would say.

9:25It's not like they're starting, at least with us, on the more kind of, call it SMB mid-market side. These deals, they're not saying, hey, we're ready to spend a lot out the gate. It's like, hey, we need to keep moving, to your point. And I will say the way this weird economy is affecting marketing too is there's a lot more interest in YouTube. There's a lot more interest in Reddit marketing as well. So it does kind of go with this search everywhere thing. I will say with some clients that we have right now, so one is in semiconductors and we do SEO for them. And they're like, dude, where's all this LLMO stuff doing?

10:02They're like, we use ChatGP, whatever. So you have to be prepared. So we've been talking about search everywhere a lot. So you have to adapt your marketing because marketing is changing. all the stuff we talked about, AI mode and how search behavior is changing. That's what I would say. So this weird economy, I would say it was a pause. And then now I think we're back. I think once interest rates start to come down, if they even come down this year, if they start to come down, then people will start to more aggressively spend. But I don't know if that's going to happen or not because my base case has been stagflation.

10:34But my base case has been like that for five years. So eventually I'll be right. So going back to your pipeline, when you said it's increased right after, what did it drop down percentage wise if you had to guess during all the tariff stuff? It had to a lot. I'm going to say like 50%. Got it. And then what did it increase by? Did you recuperate everything? I would say we're back to maybe 80, 85 % of what we were at before. 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.

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13:05That's framer.com, promo code MS. Framer.com, promo code MS. Rules and restrictions may apply. Yeah, so I know our lead numbers pretty well. We dropped roughly 20%. It was a little bit less than 20%, but it was more than 19 % right when all the tariff stuff hit. and we this organically is not rfps um and then i would say coming out of it we went up 13 percent over the prior month so if you look at april uh to may on may we're on track for growing 13 percent so that doesn't make up for the loss you know around 20 percent because even if we went up 20 percent you're going up 20 percent from a lower base so you're not fully making up the number you would have to climb more than that but we're seeing it uh recover and we're starting to see it pick up more and more but it is slow yeah it's slow you know but with business i think the the one thing with that we've learned doing this for a while you've done it 14 years longer than i have is you just got to keep going yes that's just what business is well we also see it in which the new cycles are really impacting marketing and we can't control it a example of this is today Trump says starting in June, we should tariff EU, I think it was 20%, 25%.

14:20I can actually pull it up right now. He says, where is it? Trump calls for 50 % tariff on European unions starting June 1. And then Trump says 25 % tariffs must be paid by Apple and iPhones, not made in the United States. So that kind of stuff just keeps affecting it. It creates uncertainty. what we're really seeing when we talk to companies when it relates to marketing they want a lot of this tariff stuff to be behind them and the deals to work out they announce that they're figuring things out with china they're figuring things out was it with the uk was the first announcement the uk they got a deal done before china yeah but we don't know the details of it still and we don't know the details of the china deal no and what people are saying is at least the companies and executives we're talking to, it's cool that you're getting these deals done.

15:11We want to see the deals done with pretty much all the countries. And we actually want to see what the deals entail. Well, right now, when they talk about it on TV, it's a good deal for the United States. We got a deal done. It's great, but there's no color when it comes to the detail. I do think my hope is that things will work up because you look at this$2 trillion investment from the Middle East, you look at this pause, it feels like things are moving in the right direction. And what we both had called before was that he's going to lead hard with these tariffs to get them to come to the table.

15:41And it seems like that's playing out right now. I just hope this gets done sooner than later. But is it really a$2 trillion investment from the Middle East? It's like saying Apple is now investing$500 billion into the US economy. They've been investing for many years. They're slowly increasing the numbers. What is the net increase? If you look at the Middle East funds, look at how much Saudi Arabia has in their sovereign wealth fund. It's not a trillion dollars. It's under that the last time I checked. Norway has the biggest sovereign wealth fund. These guys take their money and they allocate it to different projects and investments to make money.

16:14If you look at what they've been doing over the years, they've been investing already in the US economy because US, Europe has tons of potential revenue. We have the population and the GDP. They've already been investing money. Are they investing more? Sure. But are they really investing two trillion new dollars it's like a capital call it's like when you're investing a fund like when do you call it right exactly but to your point the economy needs more certainty and i'm i think my point is i think it feels like we're trending in that direction i hope it continues in that direction and i do think that we're we're trying to do deals with everybody um and i i hope it works out sooner than later and i hope we start to drop interest rates at some point but we'll see what happens i hope that you know this 38 trillion that we have in debt and this two trillion dollar deficit like we start to clean some stuff up but um that's that's that's where we're at with this this weird economy and we call it weird by the way because it on one end it seems like at least for me it seems like it's it's hopeful but on the other end it's also a lot of uncertainty right now right so yeah how do you balance it but go ahead you're gonna say something yeah so check this out i think the real thing that's affecting marketing more than anything else is interest rates because when i look at internal data from our own company and other agencies March 2022 is when the Fed started increasing rates.

17:35It was pretty much zero to the end of the year. It ended up becoming around 4.25 to 4.5, I believe it was. 4.25. But March 2022, they started increasing rates and it started going at a rapid pace. We started seeing a slowdown in marketing mid-2022. When I talk to other agencies, client spend and all that kind of stuff, they say the same thing, mid-2022. 2024 they dropped the rates down by one uh 2023 they increased the rates by another percent 2024 they dropped the rates by another uh uh or they dropped it by one percent and in 2023 things were still getting really bad 2024 they started getting better but what did they do they dropped it a percent for the fed rates if they eventually dropped the rates in 2024 hopefully uh 2025 sorry And if they can do that again in 2026, I think that's what's really going to push marketing more because it makes borrowing cheaper.

18:30And borrowing is not just businesses borrowing money to spend it on ads or inventory or for real estate or building factories or warehouses. It affects everything. Credit card payments. When interest rates are higher, the government, when they increase rates, that means the rates on your Visa card and MasterCard and American Express, when you have a balance and you're continually paying interest, it starts going up. Yeah. Look, it affects spending directly, right? Because just keep in mind, and this is not an economics lesson, but if the risk-free rate right now, if the 10-year treasury is, I think, approaching 5 % or so, you don't need to take a risk for that because you're loaning to the US government.

19:06And for the most part, very likely they'll pay you back, right? So there's no incentive to go out further on the risk curve. But if interest rates are zero, if you're not going to get paid much on treasuries, then you should take more risks with stocks. And then people start going into private equity and crypto and all these things. Right. And then that affects, oh, they're going to invest in businesses. Oh, if they're going to invest in businesses, these businesses need to invest in marketing. So it's like a downward effect for everything. The last thing we should cover before we go here is in this weird economy, how are we generating pipeline?

19:35Right. So it's the traditional stuff. Email marketing still works. Webinars still work. Okay. SEO still works. Right. YouTube. We're still putting that time and effort into YouTube. Conferences. We both speak at conferences, even hosting that event as well. you do dinners yep doing dinners there's a lot of um personal relationship stuff that we do that's uh hand-to-hand combat like this is a form of hand-to-hand combat right yeah dinners hand-to-hand combat speaking at events hand-to-hand combat we do a lot of partnerships yeah you guys do uh-huh where we sell other people's products and services and they sell our products and services yeah that helps too yep and so by the way a lot of these things that we're talking about are relationship based like if i didn't if i wasn't friends with neil he would have kept coming to speak at my event in fact in fact all those people would have come came to speak at the event if we weren't friends right yeah and we all did it for free yeah almost the one person charged yeah um but that's my point it's it's if you continue to do good work people will become attracted to you you're going to build good relationships and then you continue to do it for a long time that's how you're going to continue to generate not just pipeline but relationships for the long term and it doesn't matter if it's a weird economy a good good economy a bad economy um but that's how we do it and it's a lot of the stuff is um you know the standard traditional blocking and tackling stuff and it works anything else nope that's it all right we will see you tomorrow please don't forget to rate view subscribe