Using AI to Convert More Leads and Save Time

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0:32Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantz. My guest today is Joe Gagnon. He is the co-founder and CEO of Rainmaker, where he's building the first AI-native sales platform for small business, combining his interest in technology, leadership, and human connection. Today, we're going to talk about how AI is reinventing sales as we know it for small business. So welcome to the show, Joe. John, thanks for having me on. Love this show that you have. Well, thank you. Thank you. So I guess let's start with what needs to be reinvented. Why are we reinventing sales?

1:08I'm not sure that particularly when we're reinventing sales, but how we actually make sales happen. And I've been selling since I was 16 years old. So I think I learned the essence of the conversation. But more than anything, you know, why is someone looking to buy something? How do we make that? And so what happened, you know, as I got inspired over the past year about the Rainmaker idea was, well, business owners don't start businesses with the idea that they want to sell people. They want to deliver their service. Home services, mow the lawn, clean the house, I don't know, walk the dog, whatever it might be.

1:44and then they start this business and they sell usually this early adopter but already want their service in their local community and then they have to find like oh my god I gotta buy some leads and I gotta talk to these people then I gotta convert them then I gotta turn them into customers they're doing this while they're maybe driving in their pickup truck to the next customer and it just gets harder and harder for them to actually have a life when they stepped into this idea of like the American my own business make this work and now they're stuck stuck and they're stuck at the hardest part, which is the part that we wanted to focus on, which is, so we're reinventing in the context of how a small business owner operates their business.

2:24Yeah, it's funny. I talked to many business owners of all, every industry you can imagine. And if they've been in business for a couple of years, at least they realize now that 50 % of the job is selling or getting sales. And as you said, a lot of them just want to swing a hammer. so it really does make it tough we used the phrase and I think this is straight out of your bio AI native sales platform what does that mean I guess and maybe describe it in the context of Rainmaker oh man, it's like a good question hasn't AI sort of been around for 30 years I mean, you know, MIT and Marvin Minsky and the rest of the boys things like that people don't realize have been very powered by AI we've been using that for a decade Right.

3:07So the models that underlie the idea have been around for a long time. We've evolved to this thing called a large language model, which is giving more access to sort of regular people in terms of, you know, this token based conversational creation in real time. So AI native for us is the parts of the workflow where we want to leverage AI algorithms and technology. But the whole system itself, I mean, we probably use 30 % is this AI part. 70 % is a workflow. It's a sales workflow. It's a data integration problem. But in the part of the conversational dialogue, yeah, there's native AI where we're going back and forth between our own LLM, as everyone would call it, or what an open AI might look like.

4:01But we're also using the broader context of AI to mean machine learning as well. So the ability to leverage mathematical models to look for insights, to be able to bring out derivative perspectives that you wouldn't have been able to do with just a normal database. So that's the AI native part of what we're doing. So a lot of small business owners don't have the budget or just don't really have the wherewithal to put together an operations team, BDRs, closers, whatever all the roles would be. But in a lot of ways, is this leveling the playing field a little bit for that smaller company? That's the hope.

4:40You know, there's a language that everyone started using, which is like democratize capability, access to systems and all of that. And I think that the fundamental thesis that we took to this was actually literally to say, what would a small business owner need and what could they invest to make this kind of transformation happen? Because actually, if this works, I think we give them their life back. They're not sitting at the soccer game with their phone connected to their ear. They're not driving and texting in their pickup truck or whatever vehicle they might have. Our price point, you know, on the low end, it's$500 a month.

5:12On the high end, it's$1 ,000 a month. This is less than hiring a person to answer the phone. We can cover you 24 by 7 by 365. Learning off of your dialogue, your brand, your voice, and leveraging our sales expertise, our workflow, our database. and the combination of which should allow that business owner to grow as much as they want. They don't have to. Look, I mean, some business owners have told me in the past, look, I don't want more business than I have today, but I just want it to be predictable. I don't want the ups and downs. I'm spending so much money on leads, I don't even know what I'm buying.

5:50And so we're trying to get this to where that American dream is not so daunting. And actually that, I mean, look at John. I can't believe how many people want to start their own business. What are they thinking? But maybe we could actually make that emotional journey better and turn it into something that doesn't dominate their life. One of the, I think, fastest ways to erode trust in marketing is when things feel very automated, very inauthentic. We all get the AI spam now. How do you kind of balance that? automation's great when it reduces friction. It's bad when it kills relationships. I think that's a good question.

6:35And there's a balancing act that we're going to have to play over the next year. I think if we were a year from now, we'd be really hard pressed on the difference between a voice generated by AI or a person's voice. So we're not far away from that. Our thesis is this. The consumer is making a phone call because they want more information. Yep. because the website didn't provide it, the product didn't provide it, or they just have some emotional support that they want. And so to the degree that we can give them better, even if it is a little bit robotic or you can notice it's an AI, but if it can give you what you need, like this example, you know, we have a lot of pest control customers.

7:16Someone's going to spray for mosquitoes in the backyard and the parents, and gosh, I got kids and a dog. I'm wondering, is this safe? They just want to ask that question. They would probably love to get the owner. It's unlikely. So what if someone sounds enough like the owner and knows it enough to be relatable and answer the question effectively? Not just in a marketing way, the depth of, hey, this is organic. Here's how to think about it. Here's what we've heard from other customers. Here's things to consider. And so I keep believing that what the consumer is looking for is just more better information when they need it.

7:54and that this is the starting point. Now, probably everyone won't adopt this within a year because they will be skeptical. And as they experience it more and more, it'll get better. Look, I've run call center businesses in the past. What I've heard more than anything is I don't want to talk to people who, well, I can't even talk to them because you have an IVR. Number two, when I talk to them, they don't know anything. Number three, I can barely understand them, right? That's the experience to date. We think we can leapfrog over that by bringing this brand context and a voice that we can understand that's available whenever we want.

8:29Because imagine midnight on a Saturday, you just want to ask that question like you can't do that today. I would totally agree with you. I don't think we care what the technology is as long as we get what we want. And I have interacted, I'm sure we all have, with customer support bots now that are there in every software. and when they're just maddening, it really, it's a terrible experience. But I've also got a couple of software platforms I interact with a lot and I get the answers I want. And to me, then I'm like, I don't need to talk to somebody in support because I got what I want. Yeah. You know what's interesting also?

9:09We see the integration of sales and support coming together. The customer doesn't think about those differently and often they call the sales line because they'll answer. And they ask, you might spend money with us. Of course, we're going to answer. Yeah. So we want to like say, hey, it doesn't matter. Call the same phone number and bring your sales opportunity or your complaint. I mean, think about this. Even in the non-small business area, we've been talking to some pizza chains. Like you order your pizza. It's great. Hey, it came with no pepperoni. I want to call back the same number and get it resolved rather than send an email or try to call the store.

9:45We can get that resolved. I think the integration from, John, I've been working on customer stuff for 30 years. I think this is the first time we might be able to, for the first time, really delight a customer because we're going to work and live the way they do, not the way my business says, I can't answer the phone now. It's too expensive to do this. I'm going to put technology in the way because it's just too expensive. We're going to try and normalize the expense of this and the experience so that it becomes magical. Now, we're going to, you'll see on our website soon, we're going to put up numbers people can call and try and see what it sounds like.

10:23And they'll experience it and they'll be like, well, maybe this is what the future could be like. Because imagine if it is. Hey, you want to keep up on all things duct tape marketing, the stuff I read, the books, the people I interview. Check out the duct tape marketing newsletter. Every week we're going to send you out. We're going to keep you up to date on what's going on in the world of marketing. And just for subscribing, you're going to get our free chat GPT prompts that will allow you or assist you in the creation of marketing strategies and plans. So check it out. It's at dtm.world slash news.

11:03That's dtm.world slash news. I'll tell you a couple of markets I'd like you to target. Credit card companies and airlines. Could you get them on board? Oh my God, I fly a lot. And I sort of wonder, you know, but you know this, like it's the same as your cable company. I call them up and try and get something like you can't, you can't even figure it out. I think this is one of the areas where AI will advance the ball. Yeah. And because this is under the owner control, It doesn't have to turn into a marketing vehicle. They don't really care about that. They just want predictability and they want their life back.

11:47And if we can deliver that for them, you know, this one feels like probably one of the most sort of beneficial systems I could have worked on. Yeah, well, and you're absolutely right. Those IVR systems from the past, I mean, they basically had a tree of options. If you didn't fit into one of those options, you were kind of out of luck. Whereas AI can essentially have infinite options for what you're asking. Yeah. And I think the other thing is that we learn as we go. So you get all these transcripts. You start to see a pattern. So imagine someone had 50 locations. Well, they never saw the data pattern across all of that.

12:25In the future, we can run this into our large language model and ask questions like, what worked? What didn't work? What are the objections? How do we handle objections in the future? How could we nurture this customer better? Or even more, like in this part of town, they care about this. In this part of town, they care about that. And it's like personalized to the store level. Yeah. We have found one thing that we thought people would like personalized. And then they changed their mind. Like, so regional accents, for example. So we had a customer who said, we would love a Southern accent. And we put it in there like, no, we actually didn't really want that.

13:00You know, that was too much. So they said, how about that Midwestern one? you know, email versus mail. But we can regionalize and we can make it feel to the brand more than you could. Look, we know this. We would love to be able to hire people and have them be experts day one and have them get better all the time. Sadly, that doesn't happen, but we can do that actually with AI. So talk about some very specific use cases that a small business owner. I mean, are people using this for outbound or is this all really kind of inbound customer service support? Yeah, so this is a good question because we're going to reframe this idea of outbound.

13:43Like, why does outbound happen? Outbound is typically a sales process, right? Yep. But that's because the customer can't talk to you when they want to talk to you. So we're going to redefine outbound in the following way. If you come and fill out a form, you should be able to talk to someone at that point. You should be able to schedule when you want to hear from someone. You should not be throwing your name out into the ether, hoping that someday someone actually gets back to you. When they inbound or this outbound, you never answer. Who wants to answer from a call might even look like spam. So one, we want to make it work to the prospect or this potential customer's time frame and interest level.

14:24This is starting first as a sales platform, which is someone has demonstrated some interest, Maybe they got a Google lead or they got a web form filled out or something to that effect. And they want to reach out to us. When they call the company phone number, it would ring into our AI. And the AI would have that dialogue with the person. They'd go through the conversation, hopefully overcome any objections. And then they'd say, would you like to go forward with the sale? If they say yes, then we do auto scheduling into a calendar. We take payment, and then we summarize that data for the owner and update the CRM system.

15:04So that's the first use case really is sales inbound. So do you think that one of the things we've really witnessed over the last few years is people are going, because they can, farther down the journey before they ever pick up a phone or contact a business. So much research we can do. A lot of people are putting pricing or at least calculators on it so that somebody can actually almost be ready to buy before they raise their hand. Do you see, and I think a lot of that has to do with you starting to talk about. People don't want to talk to a salesman. They don't want to be sold. It's a hassle to schedule an appointment and then meet it.

15:41So do you see this actually becoming a tool that people will say, oh, I'll talk to the AI bot before a human because I can get the information and I don't feel like the AI bot's not going to pressure me to do something. Yeah, you know, so that's a great question, John. So when we started the company, first thing I did was write our manifesto, you know, what do we believe in? But the second thing that I wrote was our Rainmaker constitution. And that constitution is a set of responsibilities we want to uphold, which is we are here to inform the customer on behalf of the owner. We're not here to manipulate.

16:16We want to make them make a better decision. We believe that when they do, they'll buy more. And so we actually want the AI to be more about informing. And if it gets the person to the place where they want to buy, then they should be able to do that easily. But it's okay if they use it as a place to get knowledge and to learn about the brand and about the products. It is not meant to manipulate and try all of those sales tactics that a person would do. And we can actually program it that way. That's why we wrote the Constitution. Yeah. Well, what I'm getting at is, I mean, imagine doing like a webinar or something.

16:50and then typically the CTA is like schedule with one of our advisors, right? Well, now imagine if you say schedule with our AI. It'll answer all your questions. You won't have to know anything or do anything. It's not going to try to sell you anything. It'll just answer your questions. And then if you want to move forward, you can schedule as a human. Do you see a day where that exists? I think the first part for sure, but I don't know that you'll ever need to talk to the human because this should be as good, but we can do that in a two-step process. and look, I think it's up to the owner. If they want to provide information, then we want to provide information on their behalf.

17:25The reason why they might not do it now is they're like, well, every time I talk to you, I should close you. It costs me more to talk to you another time. But the way we sell our platform, it doesn't matter if we talk to you one, three, or five times. We're there to help that person make a decision. And this comes back to my sales experience. My most effective selling has always been when I have a more informed consumer or buyer. they buy better and this way price goes down the list a lot of things yeah that's right when a salesperson tries to manipulate you often don't get to the outcomes you want so we're really rethinking this entire buying relationship with this process yeah interesting so if a small business owners listen to this and they're like this is all overwhelming i don't know i know i need to get into this but like how what are some of the first steps that they need and some of them are going to be mindset right technology maybe yeah i i wouldn't like this is like a funny way to say but you know we have three versions of our platform the first is the anytime agent that'll just actually do the answering for you 24 by 7 or off hours or weekend just take the call call and summarize it for you.

18:41It's a way to say, I wonder how my customers interact. Then we can move into scheduling or payment and then on the full way to the full-blown solution with integration and so on. So part of it is maybe you need to explore what it would be like. The second is, you know, to listen in and share what calls are like and get an experience and say, wow, maybe that's not so bad. I think the third thing is to start to look at, you know, what the constraints are that you're going to have into your growth plan? Do you want to make a commitment to hiring people? Do you want to spend that additional capital?

19:16Or would you like to put in a learning system? So I do think that it's a bit of a step back to say, how do I want to run the business going forward? You know, do I have the capability? Or do I want to get back to the reason why I started this? So yeah, it is a bit of soul searching. But at the end of the day, I think you go back to why you start a small business it's because you want to get the product that you believe in in the hands of a lot of people and the sales part gets in the way and i've never met a small business owner says the reason i want to start the business is because i want to sell and so i think that it'll become more normal and you know we've been going to a lot of trade shows we do presentations we have a booth people are just like on the not are going beyond just curious now they're like yeah i really could to be considering this, should not.

20:05Now, in every technology adoption curve, you've got early adopters, early majority, late majority laggards. There's some people who will never do this. And amen, that's fine. But if you want this to work the way you want, then it's probably worth looking. Yeah. I mean, I've been doing this long enough that there were people that swore they would never, ever have a website. Nice. Exactly. Right? Well, we've come a long way. So, Joe, I appreciate you stopping by and introducing us to a tool. Where would you invite people to find out more, connect with you? Yeah, you know, Rainmaker with a Y, R-A-Y-N-M-A-K-E-R dot A-I.

20:45That's our website. Now I'm on LinkedIn, Joe Gagnon. You can always check me out there. I have some fun things that I've done in my life that'll tell you a little bit why I started this and what I believe in. And, you know, appreciate John, you having us on. We really are committed to sort of democratizing this capability at a price point that makes it easy for a small business owner so that they can sort of lean into this American dream and perform maybe better than they ever thought was possible. That's what the idea behind technology is, right? This isn't supposed to make it hard or scary, just make it better, and we're going to hold ourselves to that.

21:25Yeah, and I'm 100 % on board with technology that removes friction, that allows me to do something the way I want to do, I'm all for it. I think it freezes up to do then the human parts that technology will hopefully never be able to do. Yeah, I, yeah, well, boy, I'm sure we could have a whole nother podcast on this, but, you know, I don't believe that there's some big bad AI in the future. You know, we are going to use this to our productive benefit. We're early, right? We're still early in this journey. there's a lot of noise around it but as we bring out applications like we're working on i think people are going to start to say oh wow this actually can be very productive for us so you're excited about that yeah and i think also just like all technologies the more people experience it have a good experience there'll be less resistance because they're like oh okay that change wasn't so hard that's right so we've lived through many of them right john i mean that's right that's right everyone always goes back and says that you know we weren't going to leave the horse and buggy and came to a car and now we can't live without it.

22:31I do think this one is really fascinating because it extends us maybe another order of magnitude than we could have otherwise. And we're so committed on this price point because, you know, in small business, we understand that these are tight margins and, you know, we want to make this very accessible to people. And, you know, there's 30 million small businesses in the U.S., probably 10 million who could be in our target profile. We could get hundreds of thousands doing this, then wow, we'd all do better because it's the lifeblood of the economy, really, at the end of the day. Yep. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Ductate Marketing Podcast and hopefully we'll run into you on these days out there on the road, Joe.

23:13Thanks, John. Appreciate it.