2249 - Top Strategies for Leveraging AI in Sales and Marketing with Ursula Inc's Ursula Mentjes

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1:05With us right now, it's Ursula Menches. Ursula, you are the founder of Ursula Inc. You're found on the web at UrsulaInc.co. Ursula, it's great to have you. Josh, thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this conversation. Love what you're up to. Thank you, as have I. Well, Ursula, before we kind of start talking about your superpowers and what you do in the world and kind of how you work with your clients, outside of work, what have you been been to lately? What are you geeking out on? Yeah. Scootering. Scootering? What? Yeah. So a couple, like, I don't know, about a year ago, we got our son who's 11 years old, a really cool scooter, age appropriate, his size, all the things.

1:46Right. And then my husband's like, why don't we have scooters? And I said, I don't know. Why did we not have scooters? So he got us scooters, adult size scooters, Segway scooters, actually, which is a cool, fun brand, but they're scooters. They're not the Segways, right? They're actual scooters. And so we scooter all over as a family now. And And it is so fun. In fact, over Christmas break, we drove to Texas because we live in Minnesota. It's cold here in the winter, right? We can't scooter. Drove to Texas so we could scooter. And then over spring break, we did a 4 ,000 mile track, which we also love to do across the United States, all the way to Washington and back.

2:18And we didn't scooter, but we took our scooters along and we scootered in warm states wherever we could. And it's just a fun way, Josh, to be on the ground and see things you wouldn't normally see. Like we scootered by the ocean in Washington. How cool is that? What, so for someone who's like, wants to look this up and see some examples, like what are the brands or like, what would they search for? I don't even know. Like, I think Lucas might even, my son might be the small kids Segway scooter, but ours is the adult scooter. And, um, it goes pretty fast. It can go pretty fast, but, um, and of course, just side note, we all wear helmets.

2:54We're big on safety, like be careful. Cause you can definitely get hurt hitting some bumps and things like that. But yeah, scootering as a family, like, uh, just has been incredibly fun. We live on a small lake in Minnesota and we scooter around the lake all the time too. It's just, and we see our neighbors, we see friends. It's like a fun way to be out and about together. So, so roughly do they go, are you talking about scooters that go maybe about 20 miles an hour or faster? I think we top out about 25 and Luca tops out at about 13 miles an hour. Do you do stand scooters or sit scooters? They're standing.

3:29You stand up on them. They're just a little, um, you know, yeah. Electric scooters. Yeah, so these are going to be the kind of scooters that you can rent in, you know, most downtowns. And, okay, they'd end up being thrown all over the place. That drives me crazy. I want to go pick them up and put them where they're supposed to be. Exactly, yeah. No, you know, we did that in Washington, D.C. So the whole family just, oh, so fun. I mean, that's like a perfect city to scooter around in. Because there's just so many things that normally you're going to spend all day walking. so you know you can just kind of bebop from from place to place really super easy and i'll tell you if uh back and that was back in the day when uh we were really into pokemon go too so it was like yeah oh boy could you rack up the the pokemon i bet i bet you're the third person who's telling me washington dc is like a scooter capital because not every city is big on scootering let me tell you we've had to like kind of sort through but we want to go to that's one of that's on our list Yeah.

4:27Yeah. Highly recommended. Well, so Ursula, let's talk about the work you do. And by the way, I want to mention that you are a renowned podcaster. Your podcast is called Quantum Revenue Expansion. Ursula, you know, maybe kind of evoke your podcast, if you will, but tell us about what your next up level is and the work that you do with folks. Yeah. I mean, right now, everything for us is AI. Like how do we help our clients use AI for quantum revenue expansion? So we're talking about it on the podcast. We're doing classes on it. Like we've integrated AI into everything because we just don't want our clients to be left behind.

5:04And I was anti AI like a year ago. I'm like, Ooh, it's creepy. The robots are taking over, you know, all the things. And now it's, I'm super geeking out on it. I can, I can write my custom GPTs. We're creating agents now. Next up is agent swarms, which I didn't know up until a week ago, exactly what that was. So just riding that right now to really help our clients, because I don't want them to be left behind. And it's not to scare people. It's just that world is going to change so fast. I've had some think tank experts on my podcast, and they're like, get ready. You know, not that much is going to change probably in six months, other than your chat GPT is going to get smarter.

5:38But five years from now, it'll be interesting to see which companies have survived. And I do think it's the ones who have embraced, really embraced AI. die. Yeah. And yeah, I like that. Listen, you could be scared if you want. It's irrelevant. Like it's, you could listen, how, how many years, how many days, weeks, months, years would you like to be scared? Because it's your, your fear is not going to change a thing. So it's, you know, like it or not, this is the reality. So you can either lead, adapt, die. I mean, it's kind of up to you, like what you want to do with the reality of the situation, but I'm sorry, we now have, you know, motorized vehicles on the road.

6:17Now it's not going to just be horse and buggy anymore. So it's that level of revolution. And even more than that, right? It's not like, so it's the internet. No, this is something we've never seen before in terms of how quickly it's going to revolutionize the world. I don't think we have any idea what's coming, but to your point, the more we can embrace it and I believe have fun and be playful with AI, the more it's going to benefit your business, your community, your clients. You'd mentioned a couple of terms. Do you mind maybe just talking about agents and what agentic AI is, agent swarm? Help us with some terminology there.

6:55Sure, sure. So I started out just at the bottom of AI, like everybody else, and learning using chat GPT. That's kind of my favorite. And then I started building custom GPTs, right? Which literally can do some of the heavy lifting for you. We have positioned it. So our clients use build GPTs to bring in more revenue to their company, like coming at it from that perspective. From there, we started to build agents and we built sales agents. And what I mean by that, it's literally like a bot, right? That interacts with clients through our emails and through our sales process. AI swarms, we're not there yet.

7:31I haven't built an AI swarm yet. I anticipate in the next couple of months, we're going to do that though, but that'll be like a team. We're going to create a bot team that's going to be interacting probably on the sales and marketing front and helping clients understand what we do so we can help them. So that's the next level. And I'm sure there's much more coming after that, but that's kind of what we're looking at right now. So the way I understand that, right? So an agent is going to be, uh, is going to be designed to, to do work, gather data, do outreach, write content, like do things like, and each agent has generally a specific task, which you don't want to do.

8:11Usually today is give one agent 20 different roles. Like you say, no, no, no, no. Your job is just to create social media con. Like I there, I've seen some good YouTube videos. So like for social media, this, this would be a great use case of, of using agendic swarms, right? So you're going to, um, you know, have one person do all of the research, have one agent do all of the, you know, the, the, the, the alignment with your thought leadership and make sure that everything is, you know, so it's like a more of an editorial guide and then kind of coming up with those, um, that the actual, the actual content, then you have someone that's responsible for, you know, kind of a final check or whatever, one agent that's responsible for scheduling it then, you know, or, and then one agent that's responsible for monitoring feedback or whatever.

9:00I mean, I'm so bad. That was just off the top of my head. They're handing off to them. It's just one job at a time right now. Exactly. Yeah. And then you get them. And the important thing is you get them working with each other and also against each other, right? So this is what this agent says, I want you to push back on this and make sure that it meets your standards for what your role is, just like you would hope a well-functional, a highly functioning team would do. You know, we're all here to make each other better. Does that sound kind of... That's not... I mean, listen, Josh, we're all figuring this out, right?

9:36I think what you just said is a beautiful description of how that's going to work. And I think the key is like, they would each do one they. It's so interesting. Are they theys? I don't know. But they would each do one task, kind of do handoffs and be like a team focused on getting, you know, one project done at a time. Over time, that will continue to expand. So when you, or so I was good, a different way, like one thing that I think someone could do right now, and I highly recommend this, is if you're not doing this, just in ChatGPT, ChatGPT is probably my go-to, it's my number one. I also use Google.

10:14I use Perplexity quite a bit. And then, of course, all of the AI-enabled tools that are out there. But one thing you could do right now, like on this idea of, you know, having multiple kind of chat entities kind of working with or against each other, you know, is you could set up a project in ChatGPT. I do this. So I have one for our SaaS platform that we're launching in a few weeks in beta. And so what I designed is basically a C-suite in a project. And so I'm looking at it right now. I've got a CMO. I've got a UX specialist. I've got my own personal CEO coach. I've got a sales strategist. I've got a CFO, I've got a CTO, and I've got a handful of other ones, ancillaries and other technical things of validation and double checking and stuff like that.

11:11Yeah. But now in the project, they all have visibility to each other, but again, separate roles. So then they can see each other. So again, you want to like, hey, this is what the CMO is saying. You're the UX person. What do you think about this? And then again, you get them working against each other. don't try to do it all in one conversation. It just gets way too muddy. Well, and that's really pretty advanced. I think a lot of our clients are using projects right now on a sales with a sales focus, right? So they're running things through there to understand what is my client asking for? What's this conversation saying?

11:47And they're training it from a sales perspective to understand what the conversation is. So if they're having a back and forth conversation, what does my client really want? What's their real pain point? And it's been amazing because they've been able to identify it much faster and then continue to have that conversation with the client. So that's kind of taking projects. And for me, I like simplifying AI because you can get like what you're talking about, that would blow some of my clients' minds. Like, you know, in our community, we're maybe not quite ready for that piece, but using it from a sales perspective, yes, they can get that.

12:16And then I think what you're doing next level, then they can understand how to use it that way. Yeah, well, listen, for a launch, there's, I could not imagine, Like we had, as of when we're recording this, we had a Chachapi outage for half of a day. I heard about that. I wasn't using it at the time, but we heard about it. I only needed it a little bit during that time. And I'm like, ooh, wow, this is really showing me, you know, kind of how, you know, I was able to do some stuff, but otherwise I'm like, I'm just going to wait, man. I don't want to, are you kidding? I don't want to write all this copy from scratch.

12:48I want to be able to work with, yeah, work with AI and be able to. And by the way, you know, in terms of like, I think one of the very first use cases that people will have with AI tools is creating copy because it's so easy to do that. However, there are absolute best practices on that. And you can absolutely see when an amateur just got their hands on AI based on kind of what they sound like or what their copy looks like. There are better processes. I don't know if you want to talk about that at all. Yeah, I agree with you. And it all kind of starts to sound and look the same out there in email.

13:29So you got to be careful about that. We created a how to write juicy emails, GPT pretty early on and built a knowledge base around it. It was just super simple, super easy, but then it could be molded for our clients. So it actually worked for them. But that was one of the things that, you know, in the instructions that we built in is don't make this look like everybody's AI. Because sometimes in the AI, it's like, you'll see if this, then this. but you want this instead of this. So then this and this, and it's just very formulaic. So you do have to be careful that, but you can train it. That's, what's great about AI.

13:59You can build a knowledge base. And so we took all of our years of emails that we've had professionally written that we've written, um, and built that into the knowledge database just to help our clients. And even from there though, I told our clients like, listen, from there, then it's still about you teaching your AI, how you want it to sound. So when you get the first email, you're like, this is exactly what I want, or this is terrible. This doesn't sound like me. Here's what I would change. Right. And then continuing to massage that to your point for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, Ursula, tell me about the work that you do with your clients.

14:31Like what, what, how do you, how do you serve them? Are you coaching? Um, I mean, obviously I see you've got, you've got courses, you've got products, um, and, and you're a speaker. Um, all right. How do you engage with folks? Yeah. So we have a program called the CEO table where there's two coaches. I'm one of the coaches, our other coach, Rebecca Hall. We coach together and we love the power of the two coach model because our clients get the real great 360 of business. Rebecca loves finance. She loves systems. She loves operations. She loves team building. A lot of things that I like, but I'm not, you know, I don't get super jazzed at.

15:07You and me both. I love mindset, sales, marketing. You can hear it in my voice, right? So we really balance each other out with our clients and we're able to move them even faster because of it. So we have a program called the CEO table and that's for clients who are around, you know, early, like six figures, multi six figures want to go to seven figures. That's, that's the sweet spot where they get to play mostly service-based businesses. Yeah. And listen, we just have a couple of minutes left. I know you've got a ton of resources. Like it is really easy to get to know you and build a relationship with you on, on social and beyond.

15:43Do you mind, Ursula, maybe talking about, you know, for our friend that's been listening to our conversation right now. Yeah. Let's come spend some time with me here. Here's how that looks. Where do they go from this podcast? Yeah. So we have a resource page that I'm hoping you can just put in the show notes. That's probably easiest. Okay. We have to our friend listening, just click around in your podcast app, click the little information button. Can you just keep clicking on stuff? You'll find it. And, and there'll be a a link. It should be hyperlinked for you. Just click that so you can follow along.

16:11I'm sorry, Ursula, go ahead. Yeah, no, I want to say, Josh, I want to thank you because you inspired us to expand what we were offering. So you get to go to the page. You don't have to give us your email address. Thanks, Josh. I love that. Yeah, please. Listen to our friends who hide everything behind gates and all that. What are you worried about? Treat your friends like adults and they will treat you with trust and like a fellow adult. Anyway, thank you. I agree with you. Paradigm shift for people because we get into habits and we just think there's one way and we forget, right? We don't think about it.

16:46So it was a good reminder. So on the resource page, we have a couple of gifts for all of our listeners, your listeners. My book, One Great Goal, which is really about clarifying what you want because so often I think we can get stuck in like, I want all these things, but what's my one great goal that's going to drive everything? And then I've also included our multi six and seven figure scaling roadmap. So for those clients who were like, really do you want to go to seven figures? It's broken down on how we've helped other clients break the seven figure mark. And then my other book, my USA Today bestselling book, Uplevel Now, giving that away as well, all eBooks so you can download that immediately.

17:21If you want to come and hang out at our next AI class, that does require an email address because you have to register and tell us that you're coming. But we have a class coming up called Double Your Monthly Revenue Now using AI. It's been super popular and we dig into the nitty gritty. Like if you haven't been playing with it a lot, but you're like curious, or I know I was like kind of embarrassed because there were certain things I didn't know about. No shame in the game. Come and play. We're going to show you how to set it up, how to build custom GPTs, how to do some of those things. It's a free offer and you can secure your seat on that page as well.

17:51All right. Ursulainc.co, the podcast to our friend listening right now. Just search for Quantum Revenue Expansion with Ursula Menches. You can find that in your podcast app. And then, of course, the resource page, which we've got all linked up. Ursula Menches, again, founder of Ursula Inc. Ursula, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for joining us. You're so much fun. Thanks for having me.

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