#2282 Neil Patel’s insanely powerful AI sales machine

0:00Hey there, Freedom Fighters. I'm doing a series of interviews with entrepreneurs about how they are building AI based businesses. It's called The Next New Thing. In this, towards the end, you're going to hear that we're doing a demo. I think I did a pretty good job of describing what you're seeing on the screen. But if you want to actually see what's on the screen, go to thenextnewthing.ai. Let's get to it. You said the two things that will get AI for companies to pay for it and use it is save the money or make the money. If you pay an engineer at$100 ,000 a year and cursor says makes them 20 % more efficient, That's$20 ,000 that I'm saving per year.

0:37I don't know what I pay per cursor per user, but it's definitely not 20 grand a year. You gave me a search to put in, and so I'm putting it in right now on ChatGPT. It's best CRM for small business. The top result is HubSpot CRM. HubSpot, roughly 13 % of their signups come from LLM platforms, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc. Can you describe what it is that you're doing to get customers using this AI automation process that we're going to go through? Think about your ideal customers. Imagine scraping yellow pages and their website, gathering their email information and phone numbers, shooting them off an email with something that's value add.

1:18Neil Patel is the founder of NP Digital, the worldwide digital marketing agency that works with Intuit, Cartier, Canon, and so many startups that you know and love. Let's get to it.

1:33Neil, you give a lot of talks about AI and marketing in general. And you gave a talk at HubSpot recently where you asked the audience a question that had a shocking response. What was the question? When asked how many of them are using AI or chat GPT, almost everyone raised their hands. When asked how many of you guys are seeing an increase in revenue, literally no one raised their hand. Wait, Neil, when you say using these tools, you're saying they're using AI for marketing purposes, for business growth purposes, and they're still not seeing any growth in sales. That's what you mean? Correct.

2:07Oh, oh, okay. So they're actively trying to get revenue from it and not, and it's because they're getting into shiny object syndrome. What are they doing that's trying, but really not getting any revenue? you? Sure. So a lot of people are using it for content creation, which it just produces mediocre content. A lot of them use it for adjusting creatives for their advertising. But if you don't have strategy behind it, AI can create a thousand variations of a creative. But again, if there's no strategy behind it, it doesn't mean that the numbers are going to work for you from a ROI perspective, just because AI helped you create, you know, a thousand creatives, you have to give it direction and you have to tell it what you're looking for or another example of this is most organizations smb or large have data in different places you have data on facebook you have data in google analytics you have data in google data studios you have data on your own servers right you have data in your own crm or your cms and the list just goes on and on but the data is fragmented.

3:10So AI can help you gather the data, put it in one place and analyze it. But if you're not sure what to analyze, you don't tell it what you're looking for, you don't know what changes to make based on it, then what happens? Nothing. And what was if the data is not even accurate, which is a bigger issue? Because they're pulling them from all different places and different sources. Facebook will count a conversion differently than you may I see on your end. So when you start sending it multiple data points, like here's my Facebook conversions. Here's the Facebook conversions Google Analytics is telling me.

3:43What number do they go with? What do you tell them to do? How do you solve that problem for them? The first thing is, is they need to understand what actually moves the needle from a business from a revenue standpoint. So you take all the marketing things that you guys are doing. Is it pay-per-click advertising? Is it SEO? Is it GEO like ranking on chat GPT? Is it social media marketing? Is your ads? Is it your emails? The list goes on and on. Once you can figure out what's actually driving revenue, then you can figure out, all right, what out of that arsenal that we're using to drive revenue isn't doing well?

4:23And what do we think we can improve upon the most? And you have to look at both what isn't doing well and what you think you can improve upon the most. Because if something isn't doing well, like TikTok, and I'm Boeing, I'm just using a hypothetical here, and I'm selling airplanes. Well, no matter how good at TikTok marketing I get, I don't think TikTok is going to help me sell more 100 to$200 million airplanes, right? It's the wrong platform to sell something to very few people. LinkedIn may be better. Maybe trade shows will be better. Give me an example of someone who you'd worked with that was able to make a change and actually get real numbers out of AI.

5:06Sure. So we had med spas, right? Like Botox, facial skin injections, laser treatments, whatever they are. I should know them, but I don't know all the med spa related terms. I don't. I'm a naturally good looking guy. I can't relate, but I get it. But you're saying they have a series of these places. Uh-huh. Throughout the United States. Okay. They were getting a lot more traffic from SEO and they came to us and they were like, our SEO traffic's down. We're not generating as much revenue. It used to be a key driver for revenue for the organization. Okay. All right. Sounds good. So then we started pulling all their search console data, had AI analyze all the keywords.

5:54What are the pages that used to rank for those keywords? We're still kind of ranking, but you're not getting as much traffic. What are the pages that went down? and when we look at the terms, what were the terms that are doing well, but the ones that aren't doing well as more anymore, and what are those specific pages and where are their rankings currently? So we looked for the pages that were on page one, doesn't matter where, but they aren't doing as well and aren't generating as many clicks, but they're still on page one for those keywords. It was a long list of them. So we took AI. we took those main queries and we had AI summarize the answer based on the content on the page for that exact query.

6:44So I'm going to make up the answer here because I don't know much about med spas. Okay. All right. So here's a hypothetical. How do I reduce the wrinkles on my face? oh there's a blue light laser that you can use it's a 30 minute treatment uh or there's a blue light laser with very little downtime uh that can help reduce the wrinkles on your face okay okay so you're getting very specific yes the article goes in depth on this blue light and again just for a disclaimer here i'm making this up and we had ai summarized in in key points so think of like FAQs or key points like CNBC has at the top of their articles when we're reading their financial articles.

7:30And we ended up breaking them down in either FAQ sections for some pages, depending on how technical it was, or if it was a general question, some of them were key points at the top of the article. Within 24 to 48 hours, quite a few of those pages started popping up in the AI overviews on Google. Cause more traffic, cause more revenue. The revenue wasn't astronomical like 20, 30%. It was in the single digit percentiles from some of the changes we made, but it all adds up. That's the example of using AI to help you get better search results for the new way search engines work that a lot of businesses haven't adapted.

8:17And AI can do that really easy because it's summarizing already the content on your page and breaking it down in a really digestible sentence. Because if you look at AI overviews, the last thing that they want to do is answer the question with a three paragraph answer. It defeats the purpose of an AI overview, just giving you the answer as quick as possible. And so what you're saying is understand the queries that people are asking and then create those exact answers on your site and even have AI create those exact answers from your existing content. Did I nail that? You nailed it. But the key was we did this for pages that were already doing well, but they aren't doing well right now.

8:59So they used to do well in the past, but right now they're struggling. So we adapted them to the new way people are searching and the new way search engines are trying to display content. Interesting. The reason I'm saying interesting is because I thought you were saying that AI writing is mediocre. And I thought you were going to say have human beings sit and create those summaries. No, AI is good for that. AI is great for that. But on the flip side, if I wanted to write a whole new article on growing a business in an AI world, you can have AI help you with tone of voice. You can't really have it help you with originality.

9:37You can't have it include stuff from your own experience or as Google calls it, double E-A-T, expertise or experience expertise authority and trust right it's hard to showcase that with the ai written article and it's just like these interviews that you do someone i'm guessing this interview because you're asking me ai related questions you're trying to figure out for your audience hey how can you grow in this new ai world or use these ai tools to help you grow if you decided to have chat gpt you know or any one of those other ai tools help you create a podcast and there's a lot of tools out there and a lot of people are just creating quote-unquote ai podcasts i'm not talking about the subject of ai but they're having ai create the whole episode you're not really going to uncover from what i can tell and i've watched quite a few of these ai podcast, you're not going to really uncover anything that's revolutionary.

10:38Maybe some people haven't been keeping up with it for the past few years, so they're learning something revolutionary, but what AI is doing is it's scouring the web from their trillions of data points, and they're regurgitating information that they're finding out to you in a form of audio, if you had to create an audio podcast. But people want to hear what's new and what's working that their competition's not doing. That kind of stuff is hard to get from AI generated content. Okay, you gave me a search to put in. And so I'm putting it in right now on chat GPT. It's best CRM for small business.

11:14The top result is HubSpot CRM. Did you lead HubSpot CRM to be that top result? Or did you just know this? I didn't do anything. But when I was speaking at Inbound, the HubSpot event, I was with Kip. And Kip is the CMO of HubSpot. He ended up talking about how roughly 13 % of their signups come from these LLM platforms, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, et cetera, okay? And I know what HubSpot's been doing because they've talked about it publicly. We've been doing similar stuff for our customers. We've been doing similar stuff for ourselves. And when there's articles around the web that break you down in a structured way.

11:58Think of like a table format, breaking down the data between you versus a competitor. And that article, I believe it's what? Tech Radar, one of those websites. You're jumping ahead. The other thing that you sent me was, I said, how did this happen? And what you said was, they create these articles or it's because of these articles that will compare all CRMs for small businesses that are written exactly like that. chat GPT read that and use that to come up with the answer. And what you're saying is there's a tech tech radar article that you showed me that went into this. And it is actually cited by chat GPT.

12:33And the tech radar article is basically a review of all these different tools. That's correct. So that wouldn't be an article that they created. But there are articles and I believe they said they created around 300. Don't quote me on this. But I got that somewhere from the internet It was around 300. And let's say if you want to compare best CRM for construction companies and you write your own article for that on your own blog and you go super in-depth, that's a great way for you to drive more sign-ups, right? And you would do it in a table format. Pricing, features, features specifically for construction that you have that the competition doesn't have, summarizing it all, giving examples and case studies and reviews and going super in-depth like that.

13:16That helps you rank better on these LLMs to get cited more than the competition. Okay, so my question for you is going to be, this post that ChatGPT is citing is on TechRadar. Would HubSpot go to other sites, not just their own blog, and have them write these types of reviews and comparisons so that ChatGPT has a third-party resource to draw on? So I can't speak for them, but in general, if you're doing marketing as a company, you'd want to do outreach and give me if someone has an article on CRM, you would want to include you and break down why you're better and give them the pros and cons and show them the ratings and reviews.

13:57That's one way to get cited more. You would want to create your own articles. You can guest post and disclose that it is a guest post as well. right but those are some ways that you can end up encouraging or having more sites talk about you which then helps you keep in mind these platforms also scour the social web how good are they at really dissecting video it's yet to be seen per llm platform but i would also have comparison videos breaking down you versus the competition because you know like those srt files or transcriptions. A lot of it's done through AI and it's pretty accurate. You bet they can decipher a video and know exactly what it's about and show you that timeframe.

14:43Depending on the platform you're on, I've seen them when I ask the question, just pull up a video, but it starts at the time where it's talking about that versus showing me the whole thing, right? These are all examples of ways you can get your business more cited. How many AI software companies have you worked with? Roughly. A lot. Dozens. When you say AI, a lot of the software companies we work with are publicly traded. And you know this better than anyone else. When you look at the stock symbols and the earnings calls, what do they all talk about? Oh, look at this new AI feature. So even if they're 10, 20 years old, they all have AI.

15:23And so I would say the majority of the software companies we work with, which is way more than a dozen or even two dozen, We probably work with more than a dozen or two dozen just publicly traded software companies, right? They all have AI features. Okay. And you've also worked with smaller players in AI and you've advised a lot of companies. The thing I'm getting at is what's working? Because I see so many people vibe code software and then struggle once it's cool, once it's exciting to get people to use it. So give me some direction of what actually ends up getting usage and paid usage is more important.

16:01Yeah. So one of the big things, and I believe it's called Cluey. Was that the SF company that raised money? That's the tool you told me to install. It basically sits on top of every meeting that I have and it summarizes it for me. And it gives me a transcript and lets me ask questions and look up things. Like if you had mentioned a company here, Cluey would have made it easy for me to find out what that company was about without having to go to ChatGPT. Yes. So what they've been doing, and this is a great way, is in today's world, influencers really drive a lot of revenue. And when you look at Cluey, what they did is they recruited tons of influencers.

16:39They had them go and post short clips. And some of them go viral. Some of them don't. It's not about follower count. If Andrew has more followers than me, it doesn't mean his video is going to get more views than mine. Social media has been democratized. Just like, you know, you see that person back in the day. She said, I'm looking for a man in finance, 6 '5", and there was something else with the song. She didn't have tons of followers. She got tons of followers after. Or that person whose car or truck broke down was drinking cranberry juice and longboarded to work. You must have saw that. Yes, for sure.

17:17And it went viral. So the way social media works is if you have 100 followers or zero followers and you put something and they show it to a few people and they all engage, they keep showing it to more if your engagement ratio is extremely high because they know that other people on the platform will like it. Okay. So what you're saying is the thing that works for these businesses is to get influencers to create videos. In fact, we shouldn't even call them influencers. Just create anyone with a social media account and some creativity to create videos about them. and then that will feel though not anyone so really clearly is applicable to everyone so it's a little bit easier for them to do this i'm in b2b i would not have everyone do that i would have everyone who has more of a b2b account whether it's a thousand followers or a hundred thousand i'll try to convince them to create a video is there a platform you use to do that no we manually recruit and just manually recruit okay um but here's the thing that i'm getting at when we you were talking in private, you said, Andrew, the two things that really will get AI to not just be played with, but for companies to pay for it and use it and continue to use it is save the money or make the money.

18:28And you said of the two, I would pick which one? Actually, first, why those two? Okay, so let's go back actually a little bit. So if you have an AI software, no matter if you help people save money or make money, you still need to do things like influencer marketing, SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, the list goes on and on. If you're not leveraging the normal marketing channels, it's hard to reach people. Now when you go back to your software solution or whatever product you created with AI that you're now selling to everyone, if you can't help people save money, why should they pay you?

19:01If you can't help them make money, why should they pay you? Because what we see is if you can't help with those two things, you can still get signups, but your churn tends to be higher. So if you look at the softwares, we use a really popular one. I don't know why I'm blanking on this name. Our engineers use it to help us code. It's the most popular one out there. Cursor? Cursor, there you go. I think they had like a$5 billion plus valuation the last I checked. And everyone who's coding on our end, it doesn't matter if you're coding on WordPress and building themes and pages, everyone in our corporation uses Cursor.

19:37the people who refuse to use cursor and didn't adapt are no longer there just being really blunt right because they're not as efficient as the ones who are using it but cursor works really well because it saves us money the same engineer can get way more done per hour and then you don't need as many engineers plain and simple all right if you pay an engineer i don't know what an engineer costless, but let's just use basic math of$100 ,000 a year. And cursor says, makes them 20 % more efficient. That's$20 ,000 in income that I'm saving per year. I don't know what I pay per cursor per user, but it's definitely not 20 grand a year.

20:16All right. So I'm paying less than what I'm saving, which makes it easily worth it for me. I don't ever think about renewals or what it costs. It's just automatic done. That's an easy way to keep selling people. And if you look at the marketing, it's not that great. What's made cursor really amazing and go viral is it just saves people money. So everyone who has engineering teams just uses it because who doesn't want to save money? It's really that simple. The second one is making money. If you create something that helps people make more money, let's say we have a software solution called Ubersess.

20:50We're working on eventually making marketing more automated. We haven't cracked the nut yet, just being very transparent. If hypothetically our solution said, oh, you're now using our tool, it's hypothetically, you know, let's fast forward and assume this is reality. If it started ranking people better on Google and driving more conversions by 5%, their rankings went up, which means their traffic went up another 20%, you start seeing all the compounding, 20 % more traffic, all your conversions went up by 5%, your conversions on your paid ads, maybe go up another four or 5%. People would be like, oh, cool.

21:28In total, this helped us generate a million more dollars, hypothetical example, and it only costs us$3 ,000 a year. The word will spread like a wildfire and you don't have to do any marketing. After you get your few ideal customers on board, they'll share with everyone just because it is producing amazing results. This is, you said Uber Suggest is the tool that's not making money now? No, no, it's not. It's making money. It's a marketing tool. We have some AI features like we can track your rankings on chat GPT. But what I said is we're trying to go down the route where we try to automate marketing for SMBs.

22:06Okay. Right now, the tool does not automate marketing for SMBs, but that's our goal. It's a tough goal, but that's what we're trying to get to. A lot of other industries with AI are pretty black and white. As you know, with marketing, there's a lot of creativity and gray areas. So it's hard to automate everything because it's very subjective. Yeah, I hear you. And I can see the challenge with that. But are you saying this seems a little obvious then, isn't it? To either make companies money or save them money. Where are people missing the point on that? Okay, you have a community of people who have companies and they've released it.

22:50Tell me how many of them use that pitch within their homepage or within their demos or product pages and showcase studies of that. Show me which ones do it because I bet you the majority 90 plus percent don't. Okay, I think when you and I were doing the pre-interview for this, I showed you a consumer product which would basically help someone meal prep. That doesn't apply. Let's look at one of my listeners, Francisco. Yes, the meal prep one does. How? The meal prep, it can break down how to do all the recipes. You save time. B, if you look at, you can use stats and data talking about how much money people waste on food that they don't eat that they buy from a grocery store.

23:28Because there's a lot of wastage. Food goes bad after a while. If people use the meal prep product, and it shows not only how they're getting healthier, they're saving time. but they're saving money because they're buying the right amount and eating everything and how that's saving them money on a monthly basis that's a huge win for people grocery bills are super expensive i went to the grocery store the other day just for the sake of it because we needed some stuff wife had me go on the way back from dropping the kids off to school and i bought the stuff i was like 300 bucks i was like what the heck you know and i was at whole foods and i have a prime membership code and i gave it to him i got a little bit discount but it's still 300 something dollars i'm like this is how expensive groceries are and the person at the the the till was just like yeah they're expensive i'm like i don't understand how people could afford this i'm on the site right now it's safi.ai and on their home page it says save four hours every week let ai plan your meals and you're saying forget the hours no no hours is one you need to talk about hours and you can also talk about food costs okay right if you don't have those two things it's a harder pitch.

24:38Everyone talks about hours. It's still useful, but you need a breakdown hours. Like someone saying, Hey, I'm Andrew Warner. Look, I'm using this meal prep. Now I'm healthier. I have amazing hair. Look at my skin is glowing. I got a six pack. And also check out my food bill. We were spending, look at my credit card bill. We were spending on average$1 ,200 a month at Ralph's. now we're spending$832. I'm more fit. I'm more full. We're actually getting more food. We have less wastage. Okay. I have another listener who is, um, who's creating a dashboard with AI. It's pretty cool. What it'll do is it will connect into your QuickBooks, into your Stripe, into, um, it's centralizing all the data in one place for all the important metrics for you.

25:27And you just ask a chat, and then get the results, and then you also have a dashboard. How could he lean into this? Yeah, sure. So the biggest problem with that tool is it's a dashboard, shows you all the data in one place, which is cool, but most businesses don't know what to do with it. So the solution of asking a chat questions is helpful because it hopes to uncover things that they can change or improve within their business. But most people don't know what to ask or what to do. So what you need to start doing is, based on the data that they're plugging in, come up with predefined prompts or questions people should ask to help them cover insights and then tell them what to do with that data.

26:12So yes, you can still have it where they can ask whatever they want, but you should have some pre-configured prompts that you know they should ask based on the data sources they passed in and even suggesting what they should do with that data based on the results that it's showing. Okay. And I'm looking now at his homepage. It's zero Z E R R O dot biz. And it says all your business data in one place. And to me, that is scary because you're right. I don't want more data and I don't necessarily need it in one place. It's nice to have. What is more important for me is if he on the site said all your data in one place, so you can find cost savings.

26:49So you can see immediately where you can earn more. Something along those lines is what you're saying. A little bit different.

27:01We gather all your data in one place to figure out where the weaknesses are in your, or the opportunities are in your business and uncover them for you and tell you what to do with them. Okay. So some of those could be cost savings. And then you would give examples. So-and-so had all of this. We uncovered$6 ,732 a month in cost saving. So-and-so had this. And we uncovered how they're doing X, Y, and Z inefficiently. Our platform recommended how to change it and how they can do it or who they can hire to even do it if they didn't have it. They implemented it themselves. They saw a revenue growth of$32 ,162 per month.