The 24-Hour Rule That Will Save Your Company

0:00Eric Siu:Did you know that most businesses only use 20 % of their data? That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out. Or paying for coffee that's one-fifth full. Point is, you miss a lot. Unless you use HubSpot. Their customer platform gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights trapped in emails, call logs, and transcripts. All that unstructured data that makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow more. And when you get a full cup of coffee, you can do more too. But I digress. Visit HubSpot.com today.

0:35Eric Siu:Using only 20 % of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying. And second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20 % of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more at HubSpot.com.

1:07Eric Siu:Being a know-it-all used to be considered a bad thing, but in business, it's everything. Because right now, most businesses only use 20 % of their data unless you have HubSpot, where data that's buried in emails, call logs, and meeting notes become insights that help you grow your business. because when you know more, you grow more. See, being a know-it-all isn't so bad. Visit HubSpot.com today to learn more.

1:34Eric Siu:Nobody likes a spoiler unless it's your customers telling you exactly what they need. But too bad most businesses miss out on these signals. The hits dropped in emails, the messages hidden in call logs and chats, all of it trapped in the digital ether. But with HubSpot, you get all this data in one place. Their customer platform brings together are the insights you need to grow your business. And spoiler alert, the more you know, the more you grow. Visit hubspot.com to find out how today.

2:07Eric Siu:Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty impossible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools, to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click-through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. You know what Satya Nadella said? We've talked about this, but I want to reinforce this. The CEO of Microsoft, he said that, look, the future designers that you're going to have or developers, they're really going to be a product manager, a designer, and a developer all in one, right?

2:45Eric Siu:Because, Neil, like you and I, even eight weeks ago, like I really didn't have developer or designer superpowers. I kind of do now. And so like, but you and I both have, I would say we have taste because we're all, we're always learning. We're talking to people, things like that. So that's, as long as you're constantly curious, you will learn these things, no doubt. I think that's what's missing with people. It's like curiosity and resilience. And this brings me to the article. And then I want to end this one with maybe a little bit of a, we had a crypto debate yesterday at dinner. And then we can talk about that too, because I think it's interesting to share our philosophies, which is not financial advice, but more so how to think about these things.

3:17Eric Siu:Because Neil and I, even we have different thoughts on how these things are. So let me go through the article first. Let me make sure I hit the right screen here.

3:24Neil Patel:Well, and as Eric's pulling it up, I think he's spot on. I do believe AI is going to impact marketing. I actually believe AI is going to impact development and product and design more than even marketing. That's just my personal opinion. And a great example of this is I'll use tools like Lovable to mock stuff up for changes I want to my app really quickly. and I just go send it to my team, not for them to use that, but for me to explain the changes I want. And I remember maybe three, four months ago, Eric was just like, dude, how do you make your changes? And I would tell him that, yeah, I just get on the phone with my team and I'll go into telling them to make changes.

4:10Neil Patel:Lovables improved a lot over the last year. It's now at a point because my team's in so many different time zones and I have people working while I'm sleeping that instead of waiting to get on the phone with them, I'll spend 20, 30 minutes cranking stuff out and sending it to them. I'm like, create something like this, run an A-B test. And they know to not just use my version, but to modify it, make it better. The copy that I set in there is typically the copy that I want used. So they use my copy, but it just makes life easier. And that's the power of AI, right? Even in a marketer, I'm using it to adjust my flows and improve my conversion rates at a much faster efficiency rate.

4:52Eric Siu:Cool. All right. Can you see my screen? You can see my screen, right?

4:57Neil Patel:Yeah. You've been kicked out of the arena title. You just don't know it yet.

5:00Eric Siu:Yep. So this article is from Claire Vo. I love the stuff that she puts out. Sometimes I listen to her podcast. So the title of this article is You've been kicked out of the arena. You just don't know it yet. So let me cover some of the key points here, right? So if AI adoption had seven stages of grief, almost all of you would be in denial. No matter how many AI memos your CEO sends, the amount of clod that's being coded, the chatbots and app and evals and data, I'm here to tell you, you're not competing. In fact, you probably can't anymore. And you won't notice until it's too late. So the going concern is the walking dead, right?

5:34Eric Siu:So she's like, I look around and I see a lot of businesses that would have three years ago been pretty enviable, 100 million plus in revenue, solid customer base, mature executives and a good enough team. So on the surface, a few of them are trying to meet the moment, whether by choice or by force. It has worked its way into little parts of the business and the product. They have some internal power users. They're slapping on chatbots and MCPs to their product suite. They have a natural language interface for their product named after a girl or a gem or a spaceship. They start to say things internally like we need to be cursor for X or cloud code for Y or perhaps worse.

6:05Eric Siu:We have a proprietary data note that they'll all need. And in the meantime, the pot keeps boiling, right? So where she's going with this is like, look, your peers aren't your competition anymore. So the reason it's so easy to convince yourself and an entire company that you're totally in the game is you think your competition is who they've always been and will act the same way they always have. Because guess what? You're who you've always been and you'll act the same way you always have. You'll be in the same deals, have the same marketing tactics, you'll ship the same equal proportions of new product and make noise about them in the same way.

6:34Eric Siu:You call on and hire the same class of VPs, the engineers with the same YOE backgrounds. I don't know what that means. The same PMs with domain expertise. You'll listen to the same podcast and forward the same tweets. You have the same ideas for how AI is going to transform your business and you'll pitch the same mini pivots to the board. So let me wrap this up here. So your competition, that's not your competition anymore. It's really the startups are doing everything you claim to be doing with AI, but without thinking about it or working too hard. They naturally reach for the right tools and have no processes that they need to circumvent to get access to them.

7:05Eric Siu:While you are debating what percent of R &D you should be allocating the AI initiatives. They built the right product idea you have sitting on a slide, called on your customers, established their wedge, and you probably won't know it until renewal time. You probably won't appreciate it until the best talent starts to leave, best talent starts to leave and work for them. You won't know it until you're coached. So this is the main point here. Everything that takes longer than a day, so everything greater than a day, NGMI. NGMI means what? Not gonna make it, okay? And I've been talking to one of our mutual friends here at this event, our little retreat here.

7:38Eric Siu:So she's like, look, I have a simple heuristic for identifying who has been kicked out of the arena and it's this. And Neil, this is something we could debate on. They can't do anything the same day. It doesn't matter what it is, but I'll give you a list of things I've seen companies be unable to do in a day. Fix bugs, launch landing pages, upgrade to a new model, get a PM on a call with a customer, get access to a new AI tool, turn around negotiations on executive comp. Before AI, this was a less useful heuristic because many of these took scarce expertise like engineering and therefore time.

8:08Eric Siu:But now we have the clarifying light of AI. And if you can move fast and yet you don't, it's a problem. It's a you problem, babe. Okay, so let me get the last part here. Let me see if there's anything else there. So here's what she's calling out here. So she's like, look, I can't blame you for wanting to try. So if I were at one of these companies, this is what I would do. Get everyone upskilled immediately. Stop the presses. Show up in two weeks and show me how you've automated 80 % of your job. If you've done this, congrats. You have a new, exciting job. Number two, get legal, security, and finance to stop being annoying about trying new tools, right?

8:41Eric Siu:That's a problem at bigger companies. Number three, let your engineers loose on making your repo agent friendly. Four, resistant executives are out the door. Five, resistant engineers are out the door faster. Six, more aggressive than comfortable M &A. You probably can't build what you want. You might be able to buy it. And then there's a lot more here, but we'll just leave it at that. like hire executives sparingly and carefully. So Neil, what do you think about this?

9:04Neil Patel:I think it works for some things like the simplest example there, she says, if you can't do this in a day, it doesn't make sense. And one of them is turning around executive comp negotiation within a day. I disagree with that. Some things just in business, you do not want to turn around in a day. And the example of this and Eric shaking his head agreeing. And we've both been through this. When someone asks you for a raise, you don't always want to get back right away. Sometimes you want to make them sweat and think. Because Eric and I have both been in this game long enough where there's some people who will want to raise every two to three months.

9:43Neil Patel:And it's just like you don't have the experience, the expertise. You don't deserve it. It doesn't make sense. I can hire better people than you for cheaper than what you're expecting for. Dude, they don't have the double EAT. That's what they don't have. That's right. So double E-A-T, we're joking around and you guys all know this. Experience, expertise, authority, and trust as Google likes calling it. But yeah, sometimes you just want to make people sweat. I agree though. I think things can move a lot faster. I don't think 80 % of everyone's job in an organization can be replaced by AI. I think in some roles, 100 % can be replaced.

10:23Neil Patel:I think in some roles, it's only going to be 10, 15, 20%. it really varies on what you're doing. And the way I see the world moving, at least in the marketing realm, I can't speak for every single division out there. There's certain things, like if someone was doing keyword research manually, they say, okay, you don't need to do keyword research manually. We can have AI just go through this and do it for you. You should still review it and you should just double check. And over time, AI will be good enough where you don't need to actually review the keyword research. So that'll just save you time.

11:00Neil Patel:Like there's basic, mundane, boring stuff that should and could be done in an automatic way. And it's going to be at least in marketing. And here's the kicker. A lot of people have been asking me over the last three months, how do we go and automate all this stuff in our organization when it comes to marketing? You know what I tell them, Eric? You don't need to. And I'm like, there's enough marketing software tools out there that are already building and doing all of this stuff. And I'm like, instead of you trying to figure all this out, just use one of these tech sacks that eventually you'll be able to spend$100 a month per seat

11:35Eric Siu:and they'll just do it all for you. So my take on this one is, I think there's obviously nuance to Neil's point. I do think in a lot of situations, if you're working with people on your team where it's like, oh, it's going to take me a week to do a landing page mock-up. I'm like, you're basically, I'm sorry, you're probably out. If you tell me, like, if I see you responding slowly or it's going to take you forever to, for example, like if, let's say if, you know, you're leading sales or something like that, if a big lead comes in and you haven't, if you're the sales leader and you haven't figured out how to automate that piece yet, where it's like, send them a text message immediately that's more personalized or even make a phone call quickly, like maybe not a phone call immediately yet because it's not that good yet.

12:14Eric Siu:But my point is you should be able to figure out a lot of these things to make your life easier. Like, yeah, Those things should take less than a day, right? When you're telling me like it's still old timelines, you're still working the same way. Like don't like, I'm telling you guys, those of you listening, like if you're a founder, you can probably see this already. But if you're working for someone and if maybe you're working with people on the team, like you either have to confront them or do something about it because these people are unfortunately holding the company back.

12:39Neil Patel:Yeah, and the landing page example, Eric gave is perfect because if someone, if I want a landing page, either A, I'm going to do it myself, at least tell people what I want created and show them inspiration and be if someone's in charge of it if they took a week it's not gonna fly even if they took a day I would kind of be irritated I want something especially if they have time turned around within an hour yeah like straight up an hour two hours max like and I want it deployed within the same day maybe the next day at the latest, right? But if you're taking a week to deploy something, I'm just already pissing, irritated.

13:18Neil Patel:And I'm like, this isn't going to work out for me.

13:20Eric Siu:Or Neil, like, I don't need like a full budget projection, but if I wanted a data dump of finances and some analysis around it, that should be a lot faster now. And so, you know, it's interesting. Syed told me this. Syed's like, dude, and you've kind of said this yourself. He's like, Syed's like, Eric, you believe in people too much. He's like, you believe in people too much because you like giving them chances. You like to let them learn. Right. But you like not everybody's like us at the end of the day. Right. But I'm like, I can't like I just I just want to like strangle people to like wake them up and say, hey, like this is available now.

13:55Eric Siu:Like I want to help people, but some people just don't want to help themselves. Right. And that's unfortunate because we truly do want the best for people. That's all I have to say.

14:04Neil Patel:So we're out of time but before we end i want to clarify what eric just said eric and i and and it came out the wrong way and i'm not trying to uh uh talk to eric or anything that eric and i both believe in people we do see the value of humans and we think people are extremely valuable what he's actually saying is from his experience there's some people in an organization that he's trying to help and educate and bring forward and teach them all this new stuff, but they don't want to adapt and they don't want to learn and they're stuck in their ways. And what he's getting at is, and most businesses believe this, you got to be careful who you hire.

14:47Neil Patel:As we both stated earlier on, on this podcast, we believe talent is the most important element, AKA people, but you got to pick the right people and be careful and make sure either A, they know everything that you're looking to and B, if they don't know everything, that's okay. They have to be open culturally to shifting, learning and adapting instead of being closed-minded because when someone's closed-minded, it's very hard for them to adapt.

15:17Eric Siu:Yeah, and the final thing I'll close on this one is inertia is a very real thing, right? People are, when it comes to physics, for example, things tend to go back to their resting state. But if you're more entrepreneurial, which most people aren't, right? But you want to increase the temperature all the time and you you cannot like i know for neil i know for myself like we can't i'd be very unsettled if i was in a resting state all the time right i i need to keep um we want to keep pushing and so all that to say is like yes you know very much focus on talent focus on on getting good at hiring talent but even if you get really good at it you're maybe only right maybe 50 of the time if you're if you're good right um maybe a little higher than that if you're like world class at it but just keep that in mind so um that's all we have for today we can leave the crypto debate for another time and we will see you we'll see you next week goodbye