Every Lead Gets a Call in 60 Seconds: The Bots Running Eric's Agency

0:00Eric Siu:You know that feeling when the strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is you, and it's due tomorrow. Breeze Assistant can help. It works right inside HubSpot. Drafting campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice. All grounded in your actual customer data. So you don't just create content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Let's talk about how our marketing week has been so far. So what I mean is this.

0:39Eric Siu:You and I, you're busy doing your thing. And then there's obviously some interesting marketing things that has happened for you this week, also on the business side as well. So I figured we should talk about our weeks as well because those are some of the more interesting stories. All right, go for it. You started off. Well, I'll tell you what was interesting to me. We had, so I'm currently looking for like brand creative strategists on the long form and short form side, right? So there's this one person that came in and I think they're very smart and they have a lot of followers, right? They've clearly kind of been there, done that.

1:16Eric Siu:And I'm like, okay, this person clearly understands how the game is played. And so we started with like a test assignment. And so here's the thing. remember I talked about how agencies shouldn't work a few weeks ago. I'm going to give you this example and you tell me what you think. Okay, Neil, you ready? Yeah. So this person did four content briefs, right? So when you're doing like a content brief, it's like an outline for you to create content, right? And Neil, you've seen that with your content, right? So, Neil, assuming I do four content briefs for you, assuming you don't like them with this test assignment, what should be the order of operations next?

1:49Eric Siu:Should I be redoing it for you? Should I be charging you again to do it? Or what should I be doing?

1:53Neil Patel:If it was me and someone sent me four content briefs and I didn't like it, I would just fire them and move on. Yeah. But what should be the expectations with this test? That the briefs are actually good and the person likes them and you understand them and understand their business and take the time to figure out what kind of brief you're making. And then if they tell you they don't like them, you should explain why they're good for them. Assuming you did all your research on their ideal customer profile and their business. and if you have good data and reasoning behind it, someone may end up creating it.

2:29Eric Siu:So my take is I should be, let's say I didn't do enough research and you're giving me feedback on it because you like me, right? Because I do like that person. I should be revising it, right? I should be revising, at minimum, I should be revising it. Wait, they didn't revise it when you gave them feedback? I gave them the feedback and they said, so instead of revising it, so it was, keep in mind, it's a very small test, right? It's a very, very small test. It was like$250 for like four briefs, right? And this person was like, oh, okay, well, that's not included in this one. It's going to be$2 ,000 for 10 briefs.

3:02Eric Siu:I'm like, wait, what? And I'm like, hey, this is just not going to be a good fit, right? And I said, look, I wish you the best. I think you're a really smart person. But this person is going to learn eventually that this is not how you do business. Because you want to play for the long term. And not only that, there's so much that we can learn from each other, right? and so like again this is a situation where it's like agencies having a bad rap where it's like you're actually putting more on my plate and you're not making it easier for me so this is one of the things that that like this week this happened um and obviously there's more i'll share a cool thing with you and then i'm gonna flip it over to you all right neil here let me check this out so i've been working on this um this speed oh you know what here i'm gonna show you another one so neil i i made a grok bot that made a massage appointment for me tomorrow okay um okay and so So I also made another one.

3:51Eric Siu:Okay, check this out. So this shows that it made a phone call yesterday. So I was like, hey, so I was tweaking the bot. It's called a call bot over here, right? And I was using Twilio, all these things. And by the way, I was just telling it to set it up. And so it calls this massage place that I like called Tomoko. And it's like, okay, reach out to Jamie tomorrow at Tomoko Spa. Ask for Saturday, September 12, couples massage with two female therapists. What she said, you're already booked. Meaning they've had this conversation, right? I just wanted to call to see if it'll work and it worked. So imagine, Neil, all the things that you would be put on hold for, you can just run it through this bot, right?

4:25Eric Siu:All the things that you never want to deal with. By the way, a lot of people, just a pro tip for you, you can actually search how much money is owed to you by the state and you can have these bots kind of look and make the phone calls for you and just stay on hold. And then maybe it can transfer over to you, right?

4:40Neil Patel:That's cool. The state calls are such a pain when you call them. Oh, my God. I've never thought about that. That's such a great idea.

4:48Eric Siu:there you go. And by the way, Neil, you'll like this one too. I have a Hagglebot. The Hagglebot actually, it's been sending emails to all the softwares that we pay for. And the funny thing is everyone from all these softwares like Asana or our applicant tracking system, they're all responding, right? And it's like, hey, this rate's not going to work for us. What's the best that you could do? Blah, blah, blah. So instead of like, you can just have your finance person running the Hagglebot. So my whole thing with these things is I'm just making these Grokbots and I'm just the speed to lead bot. So anybody that fills out a lead form on the site gets a call within 60 seconds now.

5:24Eric Siu:And the voice sounds good. Like I had a few people on my team testing it. And they're like, dude, this sounds really good, right? And so I'm like, oh, well, like we can probably run this for deals that are stalled or deals that we need to revive. But the cool thing with GrokBot is it's fairly simple to spin these things up. You just need to spend some time with it. So that's another cool thing that I've been messing around with in my free time this week.

5:49Neil Patel:So when I look at this week, Eric mentioned something on speed to, what was it? Speed to follow up or something like that? Speed to lead? Speed to lead. Speed to lead. I've been actually focusing a lot this week on speed to learning. And what I mean speed to learning is, imagine this. You do work for your company. You see something that's working really well on Instagram. How often is that knowledge transferred to the other social profiles? Sometimes it's the same person, so it gets transferred pretty quickly and they actually go and execute on it. Sometimes that knowledge needs to be transferred to people who are running email because they're figuring out what copy is working well, or they need to send it to people who are on paid strategy or conversion optimization, whatever it may be.

6:39Neil Patel:And one of the biggest bottlenecks that I see in organizations is the speed to learning. And what I mean by that is something happens, you make a change on one of these platforms, and you get this result that is very advantageous for you. Sometimes you got that result deliberately because you intended to run that experiment and you knew something would happen. But a lot of times it actually happens by accident and it's just pure luck. But that's okay. That happens with all marketers in many cases. but you take what you got lucky on and you need to implement it on the rest of the organization. Now imagine this for an agency.

7:18Neil Patel:You have hundreds of clients, maybe even thousands of clients. You could have them in one country. You could have them globally. You may be running multiple channels. You're quickly, you're not only implementing what you already know what's working, hence companies hire agencies, but you should also be running a lot of tests and experiments to figure out how you can get even better and better results. But what I find in almost every organization, when people learn something that's working, that knowledge sometimes gets transferred over to people. But even when it does get transferred, people are very slow to execute on that.

7:53Neil Patel:And these are easy wins and low-hanging fruit. And that's one thing I'm trying to tackle more in marketing. And I believe a lot of organizations face this issue, especially once you start scaling above 100, 200 people, you start seeing more of these issues. The other thing that I've been working on this week is how do you find businesses or what's the best way to search for businesses that haven't adapted? So what's really cool about ChatGPT or even a lot of companies out there, forget ChatGPT, it could be any AI system. a lot of people post their revenue numbers and you can look at their headcount numbers over time.

8:38Neil Patel:So imagine you can end up finding players in your space, semi-competitors or competitors that may be specializing in an area that you're not as good at and they've been doing it for a very long time. Call it 10, 15 years, maybe even 20 years. And if you can see that their headcount's roughly flat, they're not growing. why are they not growing? So what we've been doing is, or what I've been doing, and I've been doing this for a bit now, but I've been spending a lot of this week doing calls around that, is talking to companies who haven't been growing and looking for the ones who are telling me we're losing clients, we're getting included in the right pitches, and ask them to prove it to me, because you can look at their leads, their CRM, and all that kind of stuff, especially after you sign NDAs and you're going through diligence.

9:28Neil Patel:You can see if they're getting the right type of accounts, hitting them up that you love as customers. But then you look to see why they're losing it. Are they terrible at pitching? All right, that's fixable. That's not the ideal thing I want to fix, but it's fixable. The thing I really look for is the people who are great at almost every aspect of the business, but they lose the revenue because the companies feel they're too big for the agency that they reach out to. And the reason I like that is if I can acquire those agencies, I instantly solve that problem due to our headcount and our scale.

10:08Neil Patel:So now they go from having a good product, good service, but losing business because A, they didn't expand their services over the years to enough that what people want. And B, they don't have the headcount to win those bigger deals, even though they're getting the inbound RFPs or requests. And I found that to be a potential goldmine. It's just hard to find those right ones. And then a lot of people may end up claiming some of those things, but you got to get them to prove it and really dig in and talk to some of their old customers or old pitches that didn't go through and figure out why they didn't actually choose that company.

10:46Neil Patel:And then And from there, if you can work out a deal, you can end up growing much faster.

10:52Eric Siu:If you're building an e-commerce brand, you should check out DTC Pod, hosted by Ramon Berrios and Blaine Bolas on the HubSpot Podcast Network. They speak with founders, marketers, creators, agencies, and platform experts about what it actually takes to grow a direct-to-consumer business, from paid ads and influencer marketing to conversion, email, brand building, and consumer trends. I particularly enjoyed their conversations around scaling a brand without losing what made customers care in the first place. Listen to DTC pod wherever you get your podcasts.

11:42Eric Siu:so i'm going to pull something up real quick that's kind of related to this um so basically okay here we go i'm gonna pull this up so i had put i made a two by two in relation to what neil's talking about i made a two by two chart because i was workshopping something with with someone on the team this week okay cool so what i have up on the screen right now those of you that can't see it is a two by two right this is how i'm thinking about agency services or marketing services of software in general. So right now we have, you think about it this way, if you have a two by two here, on the x-axis, you have your customer usefulness.

12:17Eric Siu:So left going to right, the more you go to the right, it's more useful. And then on the y-axis, you have the ongoing delivery effort of something. So you have low to high going up south to north, basically, on the x-axis. What I'm really calling out here is a lot of the stuff that we should be trying to build more of at least for me, is reusable workflows, right? So these are high usefulness, but over time, it's gonna be less work over time, right? You might need to customize it every now and then for a customer, right? Now, I think a lot of agencies right now, they do custom and premium work, which are, it's obviously useful to the client, but it's high ongoing delivery effort, right?

13:00Eric Siu:Which is why a lot of people that I'm talking to right now are trying to leave the agencies in droves, right? And I'm in some of these AI executive chats And these are not even agency, but tech companies, right? They're just like, dude, things are just too slow right now. And these companies aren't adapting quickly enough. And so they all want to move from this world where you're still doing maybe 10, 20 % of your work, maybe like this. Maybe 80 % is like this where it's reusable and scalable. And then anything that is like low effort, low usefulness, you probably deprioritize it. Not probably, definitely.

13:29Eric Siu:And then anything that's high effort, low usefulness, you probably need to think about stopping and then refocusing the company, right? Because in today's day and age, you can do anything. You just can't do everything, just more and more of. So that focus muscle is even more important today. So this is something like I'm constantly re-communicating the vision to the company in terms of like, hey, we have this three-layer cake. This is how things are gonna go. This is how everything connects. And I have to kind of be the chief repeater, the chief reminder officer over and over. And just so people know where we're going, right?

14:00Eric Siu:That's more important than ever. And then some of the things that Neil's talking about in terms of what we're doing is we're, again, thinking about reasonable workflows. Like how do we skillify things? What repos do we put them in? How do people, how do we continue to repeat that over and over? These, these, these, how do we make sure that these things are secure? How do we make sure that there's a gateway for it? So that way it becomes a lot more scalable. And then we can look at, similar to Neil, like what's out there that where we can, you know, acquire the great talent and the logos as well, and then figure out how to grow from there.

14:28Eric Siu:So anyway, that's, that's part of how we think about this from like more of a business angle, I'd say.

14:33Neil Patel:Yeah. What have you been changing up on your, or have you been doing any changes on your social media? We actually started doing some tests this week. Yeah, you go first. Yeah, so we've been trying to crank out more content, more longer form content. And we've been finding, and when I say more long form content, we've been trying a new format where I can be screen sharing. So it's recording me in my office, which is where I am right now. laptop tilted to the side, camera head on directly to me. And then it goes in between me talking and screen sharing. Technically, I'm not really screen sharing.

15:13Neil Patel:The team is doing the screen sharing. What's happening is there's a teleprompter with the script that I'm supposed to read. And then when I go to my computer, it's the same script on my screen so I can go back and forth and keep talking. And then on their end through post-production, they do all that stuff. That way we don't need a camera behind me recording the screen or anything like that. I don't always follow the script. Probably a large chunk of the time, I'm just ad-libbing and just talking away. Because then they'll tell me what they're trying to say. And then sometimes the script is just too wordy and long.

15:46Neil Patel:And I just want to freely speak. I would probably say I do that 60 % of the time. But, you know, those videos seem to be working out really well on all the social platforms. So in essence, not only am I recording more videos and more longer form videos, but I'm trying screen sharing formats, which people like. The whole thesis behind it is even though a lot of our customers or ideal customer profile is a large global company, they have a lot of people internally in marketing. And we want to give them a lot of the tips and the strategies so that way they can be more effective at their job. And then when they have a brief that they want to put out our RFP, hopefully some of those people think about us.

16:30Neil Patel:But the longer term play here is we're just getting our brand out there. And a lot of these junior people will eventually get promoted. They'll eventually be the ones pushing out RFPs and be more decision makers. And hopefully they keep thinking of us as well. The other strategy that I've been doing is we've been scraping all the people that have been engaging with our content on social. specifically LinkedIn, then looking at their job profiles, what's their position, what company they work at, we try to estimate the size. And then we craft really personalized emails to them based on their business.

17:07Neil Patel:And if we honestly think we can help, we do it. If we don't, then we don't waste our time crafting email. But we're putting them in buckets. So let's say Eric hypothetically worked at Microsoft and he was a CMO. Let's just go with this example now. If Eric interacted with five of my posts in the last six months, I would more likely reach out to Eric than if someone was a CMO of Apple and they only engaged with my content one time in the last six months. So I'm looking for people who continually engage roughly at least once a month for a consistent period of time and our period is usually three months because we're finding those people are more likely to engage in conversations and even if they don't give us any business, they know the next time they go out, they're much more likely to include us in a brief.

17:56Yep.

17:56Eric Siu:So a couple of things here. So what Neil was talking about, I don't know what tool you're using, but I do know that Goji Berry can help find the people that are engaging on X and LinkedIn at the same time. So if you're attacking both of those, it makes sense. I think Lead Shark is something that we use. So I'll go ahead and share my screen right now and talk about the two things that we've been doing. So if you can see my LinkedIn over here, so this is what we've been doing we've been creating these you know comment to get access on this guide type of thing we add them to the newsletter and then if you combine that with a goji berry and you see who's engaged with this so for example 900 comments on this one 115 you know likes so the idea should be okay they get an automatic dm and then you add them to your list but the other thing is to neil's point you should be looking at the people that are maybe engaged three to five times in the last 90 days or so.

18:46Eric Siu:And you should be hitting them up. And I think you should have a human loop there. And I watched a Gary Vee clip the other day. He's like, you know, I'm big on this one thing right now. 15, 85, five. I'm like, what's that? So 15 % of the time. So in the beginning of doing a new project, he's involved for the first 15%. So he can set the tone, right? And then you let the team work on the rest of it. And then he comes in for the last 5 % or so. And that's kind of how I'm thinking about tweaking a lot of these things right now. So I'll set the direction, look at how the team does it, come in and tweak it a little more, and then go from there, right?

19:18Eric Siu:So that Goji Berry lead shark thing is a thing that we've added recently. But the other thing I'll call out to you is looking at...

19:26Neil Patel:Go back really quickly to that image. When people comment CMO on LinkedIn, I'm assuming you manually message them. Nope, automatic. Automatic? What are you using for the automatic messaging? I think it's called lead shark. Lead shark.

19:39Eric Siu:Good to know. Look at this. See, screen sharing is good, man. Lead shark, goji berries. So the other thing, Neil, you kind of called this out, but like, I'm looking at my YouTube channel, and I'm starting to become more proud of it. Because if you look at the views recently, and there's a big thing with GPT-6 Oster. So last Saturday, I decided to record a video. Literally, I got the video out myself with the thumbnail and with the editing, right? I think it was, it might be one of this one. It might be either, yeah, I think it's this one. How I use GPT-6 Oster to run my business. Seven real examples, right?

20:15Eric Siu:So I'm attacking the latest marketing trend. Sorry, latest AI trend and then layering it on with marketing stuff, right? And so how I use GPT-6 to run my marketing for a day. How GraphBot runs the marketing. Like, I'm good with 3 ,000, 5 ,000. I'm good with 12 ,000 views, 13 ,000. Like, I don't need, you know, rich BFF. Like, I love Vivian, right? But I don't need 731 ,000 views because it ain't going to drive no leads, right? And sure, I can talk about dating over here, 480 8 ,485 over here, but that's not the most exciting piece. The most exciting piece is getting the relevant views.

20:47Neil Patel:Yes. And just be careful for the Vivian though. I know, I think with you, one of her most popular things was you should be quitting your job every few years. Or was that a clip out of your channel? Yeah.