Episode 236 – Smarter, Not Harder: How AI & Automation Are Revolutionizing Small Business

Ken

Hello everybody, this is Ken Tucker with Changescape Web. And today I am joined by Ian, Jeff and Paul. The crew is back together. We are the marketing guides and this is the marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast. Today we are going to be talking about something that I think is just incredibly important for every small business to take advantage of. I know AI in the world of automation can seem scary and intimidating, but it really is revolutionizing so many businesses, whether it's reinventing them or whether it's just helping them deliver faster, better, more consistent. And so today we're going to talk about that and we're really going to be focused on AI automations and CRMs. So before we get started, you know, just a couple of staggering statistics to me, and I got these from Perry Belcher, you know, very famous Internet marketing guru. And basically you're looking at 91% of small businesses say that AI and automation will help them grow faster and become more profitable. About half of them are intimidated by the technology to not even try it. And then when you look at using a CRM, a customer relationship management system, only 2.3% of American companies have a CRM. And so just think about that. If you're one of those companies that doesn't have a CRM, that may be a great way for you to start to get a real competitive edge against your competitors. So from writing emails to booking appointments, AI and automation is doing so many things to save time. You can train these to be very efficient and very effective for your organization or your business. And they also transform the way you operate your business and connect with customers. Really the big thing that I think a lot of people are asking is how can a small business with limited time and budget actually take advantage of some of these really cool tools that are available. So today our experts, Jeff, Ian and Paul are going to be sharing their ideas and wisdom with you to talk about how you can take advantage of AI, automations and CRMs for your business. So with that, Ian, I'm going to start with you. Let's talk about how AI is refining the way small businesses market to their audiences.

Ian

Yeah, I mean, there's some stats out there that say one in four small businesses are already using AI in some way, but primarily in marketing. Marketing is kind of this tip of the spear where it comes in, where AI comes into businesses. The other thing I would say is that most applications that we use as small businesses, and I'm just talking generally, AI is either now being embedded into it somehow or it's going to be like, it just makes sense. Like, you know, anybody that does accounting, we, we know that eventually QuickBooks, if they're smart, because somebody could displace them very easily if AI becomes integrated into that tool. Right. Because as businesses we want to be able to ask the, the tool that like, hey, you have all my information, you know, def, like help me understand my cash flow. What could I be doing better? What are the things that are upsetting my cash flow? So those types of things are coming down the road very quickly. We're starting to see it in more and more tools and AI itself is a tool. Like I want to make that really clear. There is no ubiquitous AI. AI is right now we're in the midst of an AI arms race, right? Where Google just made announcements last week where they've made massive leaps ahead as far as their AI goes, that's going to radically change how they serve up search results. In their presentation, they Talked about that ChatGPT Claude perplexity like there's a whole bunch out there that is very fragmented at the moment and a lot of us in the industry, we're using several of these to get the best results we can right now. The other thing I would say is bring, bringing it back to how small businesses, how AI is redefining how small businesses market themselves is. I would, I would say there's, I, I've mentioned this before, but there was this big shift with some businesses where they saw what AI could do. They might be in, you know, business groups, contractor groups, whatever it is, where they were being coached like, hey, you don't need your agency anymore, you can do your marketing yourself. And so I've actually seen we, we had two clients that went that and I tried to caution them against it because what they were trying to replace couldn't be replaced with AI. But some of the content generation could pretty easily be done that way. But here's the thing. If you don't have an expert driving your AI with the capability of knowing what's good and what's bad coming out of it, you're at a disadvantage for sure. And so with those two businesses, just as an example, we've watched as their search engine results are just collapsing over the Last year, year and a half because they don't know what they're doing. And the AI can't do what an expert with the help of AI can do. So we in, in the marketing world, we've been playing with AI for, for several years now, right. We, we were early adopters, we saw how it could help us create content. It's still getting better and better from a content creation standpoint. But it begs the question, what content should you be creating? The AI. But again, you're, you're putting a lot of faith into it, knowing the answer without you having any kind of knowledge about that predictive analytics. I mean that anything data related AI is, is and will continue to help us tremendously from a business standpoint. So what I mean by that is if AI is built into your CRM system like it's happening more and more now, you know, with things like go high level, some of the other bigger platforms out there, when AI is introduced into it, it helps you not only create the content, but it helps you understand the data. And that data part is going to become very important because it will help you understand like you could in the not very distant future. You're going to be able to ask it, you know, which emails had the best results and why and then how do I reproduce that? Right. And create a new email campaign. But yeah, there's lots going on. There's, there, we're still kind of in the wild west. I feel of, and I think you guys probably feel this as well that, you know, every week there's a new something related to AI. The dust has not settled, it's not introduced very well in some applications and tools and you know, but as far as, you know, helping you rewrite emails, as far as the integration with Google Suite, like all of those things are very immature, but they're starting to mature and they're starting to unlock some really great capabilities to help small businesses do things better. Right. If you're, if you're crafting, if you have a client that's not paying their bills, you can craft an email using AI, give it the information that's going to help you help it write an email that is more powerful than what you wrote, or you do a draft, then you ask the, you know, chat, GPT or Gemini or whatever tool you're using to rewrite it, to make it more powerful. So there's some really great, you know, easy wins for businesses. Yeah, yeah.

Ken

I mean, another good example to kind of follow along with that is, you know, if I've Got a client that owes me money for the last several months. You know, sometimes when you sit down and write those emails, you're not in the best frame of mind.

Ian

Yeah.

Ken

And so, you know, just having, you know, a tool like Chat GPT to kind of take the emotion out of it, but still make that, you know, powerful, compelling, conversion oriented language, you know, can be a really good thing.

Ian

So, yeah, if I can add one more thing there, what I've been using it for, and I think this is a pretty good case study for any business out there, especially small businesses, but I think large businesses too, is that when it comes to proposal writing, so if you're doing some pretty significant proposal writing, you can kind of feed all your information into the tools and ask it to, you know, hey, here's the scenario, here's what I want to propose to the client. I'm trying to figure out how best to do this. Ask it to give you a starting point and it will give you like, pretty good. Like I use Chat GPT all the time for stuff like that and it's helped me tremendously with proposals again once, once it's more integrated with the proposal software, even better, you know, and especially if it's in a protected environment.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Well, and I think one of the things, Ian, that you're, you didn't really come out and explicitly say it, but we've talked about this a little bit in past episodes. You can train AI to speak in your voice, you can set up projects and train it so that its responses are going to be consistent with your product offerings, your messaging, your branding, all of that kind of stuff. And you know, again, that all typically requires a trained AI expert to be able to get those set up properly, but then it becomes so efficient to.

Jeff

Be able to do that.

Ian

Yeah, and I would just say that the interesting thing that we're all learning, right, we're all on this big boat right now called the AI Journey Boat or the SS AI for Humanity, I don't know what it's called, but we're on this boat together and we're all sailing away on this thing right now. And the thing I would say is that we're learning the limitations of the current platform. So Jeff and I were in a presentation recently where we were being presented with an option for AI where it's far more powerful because it's trained in a way that AIs aren't right now. But it's also uniquely the term they were using was a brand bot. But it's far different than what you would find in a ChatGPT project. And what's unique about it too, is that it's all protected. So as protected as data can be, right? But chatgpt, when you feed it with information, it's not really protected, so you have to be careful about what you share with it. And then ChatGPT has. And all of them have very big limitations, especially of length of prompts, you know, your, your project, your chat sessions, all of that kind of stuff. Because I've certainly maxed out many chat sessions as I've trained it over time. And then you're like, crap, like, I have to start a new one now. So I think businesses are starting to realize, like, there's got to be a better way. And there are some really interesting sol coming down the pipe very quickly that they're not cheap, but they are going to, I think, raise the standard of what we can expect from an AI as a small business.

Jeff

Ian, I want to go back to what you said about only one in four small businesses are using AI in some form. 2. 2 thoughts on that. One is, I think that probably more small businesses use it than realize because it is creeping into so many things. I mean, you can't use Office 365 now without there being AI. Google, everything's got AI in it. But to use it effectively and as a business tool, I think that one in four is probably on the money, maybe even a little bit high. But here's the thing, for anyone that's listening, if you're sticking your head in the sand going, oh, I don't need AI. I just keep doing it the way I've been doing it forever. Well, people said in the 1980s, oh, what do I need a computer for? People said in 2000, what do I need a website for? We have a history of technology moving the goalposts, and we've got to keep up. And yeah, you're absolutely right. AI is a tool, A car is a tool, right? But you need to have your car maintained, you need to service it, you need oil changes, you need Spark plugs every 100,000 miles. Whatever you go through to keep your car running optimally, the same thing with your AI. And I don't profess to be a car mechanic. I don't go work on my own car. So having somebody that knows how to implement the AI in your business, I think is very important. But if you don't get on the AI train, you're going to get left behind.

Ian

It's a boat, Jeff. It's a boat.

Jeff

It's a boat now. Oh, I thought I'd move faster than that.

Ian

It's a fast boat.

Ken

It's a hydro boat.

Ian

Hey, I, I was just. Your words reminded me while I was working today on, on another project. I was actually listening to your guys interview a few weeks ago with Guy Kawasaki that I couldn't be a part of, unfortunately. But I was really enjoying the conversation and, and that whole topic of like, you know, if you don't start using AI as a tool, you're going to be left behind. Just like, you know, people who thought the Internet wouldn't last or, you know, computers wouldn't be a big thing. You know, there's been so many examples, but this one's coming so fast.

Jeff

Yeah. The message is don't be intimidated by it. Be a little, little intimidated by it, but don't tell it. Don't let that scare you away from it. You know, get some help and get on board because it's, it's what's going to carry into the future.

Ken

Yeah. There are also a group of people that are out there saying, no, no, no, no way. Humans only. Nothing substitute is a substitute for the human personal touch. And I mean, there's no doubt about that. But you really have to think more now than ever, where is the right time and place for that touch to occur? Because guess what? If you get 20 phone calls and you're only able to answer five because your requirement is you've got to have a human live answer the phone, well, guess what? You're going to be steamrolled because you're going to have competitors that are using AI to answer and respond to every call, get appointments booked so that then at that point in time, a human can meaningfully interact and use their time in the most effective way possible. So you got to get over this idea of, you know, that AI is completely replacing humans. It's not, it won't for a very long time. It may in certain sectors, in certain, you know, areas have a, have a bigger impact, but it's, you know, there's still absolutely the necessity for the human touch, regardless of what AI is doing, whether it's human vetting and analysis and confirmation that what was produced by the AI is correct and, or whether it's just, you know, changing the model to have just in time human contact, you know, and let the AI take up the 80, 90% of the rest of the production process to actually get to the point where you're having a conversation with somebody.

Jeff

My favorite analogy is House Builders, Right. A carpenter with a power nailer is going to frame a house up faster than a carpenter with a, you know, hammer. That's what AI is. It's a tool. You got to know how to use it. So you don't nail your foot to the floor deck. But it's a tool that can unlock all kinds of productivity.

Ken

Yeah, absolutely. So, Jeff, let's talk about some easy ways for small businesses to start to integrate AI in their marketing without a large budget. Because that's, I mean, there's fear of the technology or intimidation of the technology. And part of the problem right now is every time you turn around there's a new tool and it's saying, oh, I can write this blog post better or I can do this better or I can blah, blah, blah. And it's like, so right now, you know, the explosion of tools that are available is just insane. I mean, I've never seen it at this pace. But you know, there are some great low hanging fruit things I think small businesses can do.

Jeff

Yeah, yeah, sure. And as you said, it's, there are some very easy ways to get going on a very minimal budget. You know, part of me in the back of my head says at some point the other shoe is going to drop and because AI is expensive behind the scenes that some point prices are going to go up. But until they do, take advantage of it. Now, something like Chat, GPT, Gemini, you know, any of the chats Meta has.

Ian

Llama.

Jeff

Elon, Musk through X, AI has Grok, there's lots of the large language models just get in and start playing around with them, start interacting them. And remember that the chat in ChatGPT or any of these other models are chat based. The chat means interactive. If I have a chat with somebody, it's not just me telling them something and them giving me a response and saying, okay, thanks, iterate with it. You know, ChatGPT is free to get going. Perplexity Cloud, you can get on these things and just start seeing what they can do and play around with them. And if you want to be a little faster, have a little more capability, you may spend 20 bucks a month. And that's, that's certainly not a lot for the capability you get out of it and the learning you can get from it. In ChatGPT now, for instance, on the $20 level, it may even be down to the free level. I'm not sure I've got the, I've got the paid level. The deep research is just a phenomenal tool for understanding more about what's going on in your industry and your business. So just get an account and start playing around with it and then start paying attention to how to really use it. Because it is chat based and it is interactive. If you just give it a query and take the results and go, okay, thanks. It's going to be mediocre. That's one of my biggest concerns when AI started coming on board is it's trained on a huge body of knowledge, but it's going to drive everyone into what I call the mediocre middle. If you don't do more to differentiate, to rein in what you want, to specify, why you need it, how you need it, how you're going to use it, you're just going to get the same old average results. Everybody else asking the query is, so you got to get in the tools and start paying attention to the prompts and what you're giving it and what you're asking for. And the more specific you can be, the more detailed you can be in terms of where you want to go, the more lean you can be. Have a plan, have a conversation mapped out that you want to take it through, the better the results are going to be. If you just say, write a blog article about the three benefits of X, Y and Z, you're going to get a mediocre middle blog article. But if you tell it why you want it, who the target audience is, what the concerns are, how you want to approach it, basically how you would approach if you were writing it, and then when it gives you results, start interacting. Say, you know, paragraph one is good, I'd like to rework paragraph two. You'll be able to get to a point where you truly are using the AI as a tool and getting some more stuff done that still blends in your voice, your experience, your expertise. And remember, especially if you're using it for blog content, that's what Google wants. It wants your expertise, it wants your authority, it wants your trustworthiness. And vanilla AI can't do that. But get in and start playing with it. And then the next thing I would say is there are other features of tools. Like I said, Microsoft 365, if you're a 365 user, it's got copilot turn copilot on, start playing around with it, start seeing what its suggestions are. It doesn't mean you have to take them, but start seeing what it can do and take a little time to get oriented and see how it can become a productivity tool for you. And then some of the Tools like the emailers, mailchimp, constant contact. I know Active campaign has it. They're bringing in AI, of course, to help with content creation. So play around with it there. They're also using it for some of the things you mentioned earlier. In the predictive side, I've just started turning on predictive sending. So instead of sending out my newsletter at, you know, 10 o' clock every Thursday morning, I'll say, yeah, I want it to go out, you know, Thursday, but I want it to go out at a time for each individual recipient that is most conducive to them opening it. So once you start building history, this is where AI excels. Once you start building history, it can start recognizing patterns and then it can start taking actions based on that. So I might schedule a newsletter to go out on Tuesday and anytime between Tuesday and 24 hours later on Wednesday, it will go out at the optimal time for when each individual recipient will open it. That's huge, right? Your open rates can go up, your response rates can go up just from something as simple as saying, yeah, I'm going to try the predictive setting feature. So again, get in and play around with some of those features and see what you can do with them. Beyond that, there's a lot of low cost tools. A lot of them will have free versions. You'll probably quit quickly. Get to the point where you want to spend a little bit but not a ton of money to do things like extracting social media posts, you know, shorts, reels from a longer form, video they'll transcribe, they'll put the captions on. Even meetings, if you're taking a meeting, use a AI recorder, record the meeting, get the transcript, get the AI insights from it, and then, oh, by the way, you can take the transcripts of your meetings and feed it into one of the large language models for when you are working on the proposal. Like, you know, I think Ian, you mentioned you're using proposals, right? I've been playing around with that as well. And if you take in the emails you exchange with somebody, the transcripts of meetings you have with somebody and you put it in there, it's only going to help strengthen and make your proposal a lot better. So yeah, and all of this is stuff you can get going on for little or no money. And my advice is to play around with it, don't be afraid of it, and see what it can do for you.

Ken

Yeah, cool. Yeah, there's like you said.

Jeff

Whether you.

Ken

Realize it or not, AI is being built in to a lot of these solutions and it certainly is worth playing around with them and seeing the results. Paul, let's shift a little bit to talking about automation. How can automation save time and probably money, but also boost consistency across business operations?

Paul

Well, yeah, automation can save time and money because once you get these things in place, it just runs without you having to manually do these things. Reminders, invoicing, follow up emails, these can all be scheduled based on certain actions that have taken. You know you were talking about AI voice agents. That's probably going to be a real threat to call answering services because it's new version of voicemail and we talked about this in another podcast that people simply don't leave voicemails. If they get answering service or an answering machine to leave a voicemail, they'll usually just hang up and move on. So There's a statistic, 80% of small businesses say automation allows them to compete with larger businesses. And I'd like to see a breakdown of that statistic because I find it hard to believe that 88% of small businesses are actually using automation. Maybe they are, but it seems a little on the high side to me. But you have workflow tool, a lot of CRMs have workflows built into them. And then there's things like, like Zapier and make that can automate tasks. And it's, it's basically like a bridge between two software platforms. There's software platforms out there that are bringing a lot of these things in house, so to speak. So you don't have to use things like Zapier. But anything that, that you can automate, you know, it's, it's going to save you time. You can use AI to, to book appointments on calendars. People can self book. If you're using an AI voice solution or an AI chatbot solution on your website or wherever, it can ask them, it can guide them to book an appointment. It can, if they ask a question, it can say, well, here's the answer. Would you like to book an appointment? So it can keep prospects from going to your competitors, it can help you book appointments without them having to talk to a person. Because a lot of people, especially younger people, well, even me, and I'm not exactly 20, I don't want to talk to people, I just want to, I just want to book an appointment and be done with it. So yeah, I mean if you think of automation and Ken, I think you said it, that it, it's not going away and there's any time something new comes along, there's always People that say, oh, this isn't going to last. It's not going to be around. You know, not too long ago there were people that were saying that cars would never replace horses. Yeah, that, that worked out pretty good. Yeah. If, if you look at it as, look, it's not replacing your office administrator, receptionist, whatever you want to call it, it's allowing that person to be more productive with their time because time is finite. They work eight hours a day or five days a week, whatever it is. Well, these AI solutions work 24, 7 and they don't cost as much either, you know, so it, it can do a lot of things to increase productivity and profitability for, for any small business and any small business that thinks that they don't need something like this, or they, they're never going to need something like this, guess what? Your competitors or some of your competitors are going to look at this and say, you know what? This, I can see where this would really benefit my business. And if they take advantage of it and you don't, you're going to lose business to your competitors.

Ken

Yeah, you know, one of the things that I think I get a lot of pushback whenever I talk to businesses who have like in person receptionists and it's like, well, I don't, I want that receptionist to talk to a person. Okay, great. That's fantastic. That's what you should be focused on and let that person be your premier customer support representative while somebody is in your office. Right. Why let them be distracted trying to run and answer a phone call? Call and make a choice. Do I serve a customer who's in my office right here, right now, or do I have to go answer that phone because 80% of people won't leave a voicemail and maybe that's the next appointment that I need to get booked to keep revenue coming into my business. There's, you know, there are so many things that AI and automations will help to free up staff, you know, so you may replace your receptionist or your phone answering person, but chances are you could also free them up to do other important things that are important for your business. And look, the reality right now is booked appointments is the gold standard in how we're measuring activity for customers from a marketing perspective. It's not traffic to your website anymore, it's not the number of phone calls, because phone call, that's a false number. I mean, I get 20 phone calls a day that are pure spam phone calls that technically aren't illegal to do, but they're complete waste of time and complete distractions. We have AI voice answer that. And I haven't had to deal with any of those for a very long time now. So it allows me to stay focused and not get constantly interrupted just by dealing with that. But if you don't have your business set up to where you can't let people book automatically when they want to book, you're a dinosaur business that's in real jeopardy of being obsolete very quickly. It's the gold standard. And marketing automation is, is a fantastic way and AI is a fantastic way to get those booked appointments so well.

Paul

And you know, Ken. Yes. That was yesterday. You were talking about a, a chiropractor that it's just him and if he's with a patient and the phone rings, he's not going to answer that phone.

Ken

Right.

Paul

So AI would, would be a great solution for him.

Ken

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it alleviates his concern because his initial response is probably, oh, I need to go answer that phone. But it's like, oh wait, I'm in the middle of treating a patient, you know, so you don't have to even have those thoughts. I mean, all of that is just in it's energy. Vampirism, you know, just sucks the lifeblood out of you if you don't let it. And you know, these are, these are potentially liberating technologies that will allow us to transform so many aspects of the business. And so with that, Ian, let's talk about CRM transformation.

Jeff

Actually, before we jump to the next question, I just want to add that I think Paul hit on it some, but the combination of AI and automation is really where we're going. It's huge. So if anyone's thinking about automation, oh, it doesn't work. It just gives me routine. It doesn't fit all the cases I have. Even if you're thinking of telephone answering service where you get somebody who's answering the phone that they don't know my business, they're just answering the phone. When you bring AI into that mix, all of a sudden a lot of those problems go away. All of a sudden the AI voice assistant can have all the information about your business and can be having a conversation with somebody and answering a lot as it leads them along to booking the appointment. You know, the robotic, you know, emails, the hello first name, you know, because it was never. All that stuff can go away. It can be made more customized and more tailored, more personalized with AI. So I think when we talk about automation, we also need to really emphasize that we're bringing AI into the automation and that's where the real magic happens.

Ken

Yeah, that's a great point. And the other great thing is instead of just the knowledge of one person who may be on that phone answering the phone, you have your entire knowledge base from your team that you can capture and train the AI to be able to respond. So very powerful stuff.

Paul

Look here, you know, here's, here's one huge difference between an AI voice system and a call answering service. These call answering services, they work for multiple businesses, multiple industries. They don't know about your business and all they're doing is answering the phone and saying, hey, they're closed right now. Give me your information and somebody call you back tomorrow. So an AI answering system. Yeah, it's going to collect their information so someone can get back to them. But if they have questions, that AI voice answering system can answer a lot of those questions.

Ian

Yeah, all you, you hit it right. Like you guys are just knocking this out of the park. Because I, I've had some clients where we do call audits on their recorded calls. Right. Because we do call tracking for ads and that kind of stuff and SEO. And so we would audit their calls sometimes to see what are the quality of people that we're drawing in. And the ones that used to drive me crazy the most are the ones where the client has a call center, an after hours call center. And we would be auditing those calls and time and time again. I can't tell you how many times I heard business falling through my clients fingers because the call center was so horrible in, in things like, are you accepting new clients? I don't know. I'll have somebody call you tomorrow. What, like, what is wrong with you? Of course they're accepting new clients or patients and I'd like to book an appointment. Can I do that? I'll have somebody call you tomorrow. Right. Or they would answer the phone and they would pronounce the name wrong of the company, or they would mix up the names of their two companies or whatever they're managing and just horrible stuff like it's like, and, and if you're not a business, if you're a business that has a call center, you should be auditing the calls. My goodness. Like if you're not, better yet, it's just leaking through your fingers.

Jeff

Better yet, take those transcripts, pull them into AI Let AI do sentiment analysis. Let AI do look for gaps. Let AI look for repetitive common things and then let the AI. Is that to train your AI? Yes.

Ian

Yeah, because that's, that's Part of the problem is that most call centers, especially cheap ones, that, that smaller businesses tend to gravitate towards, right, which are cheap call centers, they are not super well trained, they're not always the, the best quality people. And then the continuity of who your business is, how to pronounce your business's name, the, the database of information, like they don't have access to it or they don't use that. Right? And right there you train your AI once and you continue to tweak it over time, man leaps and bounds ahead.

Ken

Chances are an AI phone system is going to be cheaper than your call service by far. And as you said, it's going to be better and more accurate at providing information and answering questions and it will be more effective at capturing contact information and getting people to book appointments. It's a, it's a win, win, win. I, I mean it's like, it's the biggest no brainer that I've ever come across in my 30 plus years of technology and marketing. I mean it's just, it's insane.

Ian

Plug those leaks people.

Ken

Yep. So Ian, when you plug the leaks, where do you put them?

Ian

You put them in a CRM system, Ken, a customer relationship management software. That's what CRM means in case some people don't know. But that's where they should be going into because if you have, you know, unless you're a sole proprietor, and I would argue even then you should be using a CRM system because we can't keep everything you know on track in our brains because we're, we're wearing too many hats. You know, if you're a sole proprietor, I think we've all been there before but then, and as soon as you start introducing team members, oh my goodness like you, you need a central place to track your clients or prospects and, or prospects keep track of everything that's going on with them, have, it's your knowledge base of that person and as you build a relationship you're including everything from hey, what was the original source of this person? Was it a referral? Was it it organic traffic? Was it ads, whatever, you know, what downloads have they done? You know what, you know, a lot of the CRM systems can even be integrated with billing platforms. And then when you combine your CRM with marketing automation, if you're not doing that now, you should be looking into that because just everything the guys have talked about, you know, with automation, AI, when you, when you combine the power of a CRM system, super powerful. So businesses like some of the Statistics, businesses using a CRM. See, sales like this is just CRM information or stats. If you use a CRM, you see sales increases by 29% on average and pro a productivity rise by 34%. And anybody that's gone from a team that writes things down on a pad of paper, you know, versus putting it into a CRM system and, and the human behavioral aspect of getting people trained on it and using it properly, so key to that. But it's, it's such a dramatic effect. And you've also institutionalized your people's knowledge. And I think that is priceless because if you have multiple salespeople and one of your salespeople walks away, like I, when I worked in the corporate world, I remember one of my B2B sales guys that I worked with, he kept everything in a pad like a notebook because he wanted to be able to walk away with his book of business, even though he had to keep some information in the CRM system. It was pretty early days of CRM systems in this particular business, but his book of business was in that notebook and he knew he could walk away at any moment. But as a business, you never want that. You want your institutional knowledge to stay with your business and not lose those clients for sure. So it's a central place. It's a, it's a place to keep all your information. It reduces information loss across your teams. It creates continuity. Right. So, you know, all of us have been on calls with a telecom, like, hey, you know, my bill's too high. I want to try to bring my bill down for my Internet phone and cell phone and TV and whatever, you know, because they keep creeping up. And then you've talked to people, you know, time after time and they say, oh, I'll update your records, Mr. Cantle. And you know, the next time you call, the records aren't updated. They're like, are you still at this address three addresses ago? Like, it just drives you crazy as a customer. So, you know, there is a better way. Use the CRM to help you again. It's, we're, we're talking about the power of tools and tools in the right hands and, and learn how to use it. And then because CRMs are now being integrated with marketing automation, being integrated with AI, they will help you tremendously. And just going back to something you guys talked about a minute ago, you know, it just made me think like some of the people that are slow to get in, into these tools, like a CRM platform, like marketing automation, like, like use leveraging AI appropriately. Like just stop for a second and think about who your, you know, your biggest competitor is. Doesn't have to be big in size, but they're your direct competitor. And think like, what's the impact going to be to my business if they jump on these tools? And I don't like, how will it affect my own business? And we all know like, if we stop to think about it, it's catastrophic to our business because they'll do a better job of customer service, they'll do a better job of making people feel valued. Communication will be better, their marketing will be better. Like it just keeps going and going and, and I think as business owners we need to contemplate that for sure. Yeah.

Jeff

And let's be very clear, an Excel spreadsheet is not a CRM. It's gotta be a system that you don't have to make it complicated, you don't have to use every bell and whistle it offers. But you want a growth path and you want to take advantage of the ones that matter to your business and to your clients. And that's going to be some level of automation, some level of personalization based on the CRM data and some level of AI to help you get things done more efficiently.

Paul

What about a Roller Choosy? Sorry, Paul, No, I said what about a Rolodex? Is that a CRM?

Jeff

Only if you can plug it into the computer.

Paul

Okay.

Ian

I was just going to say like do a needs analysis too. Like be super choosy about what CRM you choose because once you get in there, you don't want to have to reinvest all of the human capital that goes into putting it in place, getting it up to speed, getting all your data in there and then the behavioral change that happens within your business. That's why CRMs are pretty sticky software. Like once you decide on one, you're probably going to stick with it for years and years because it's just such an integral part of your business. I also wanted to just real quick mention like some of the, some of the tools that are, you'll want to know about are high level, which is through agencies like ourselves. Super amazing tool, CRM automation, social media, like AI integrated call stuff, call AI bots. Like it's cutting edge calendar scheduling. Yeah. Like you name it, it's, it's built by agencies for agencies. So it's exactly what we need to serve our clients well and for you to do well. Then there's other tools like HubSpot, Zoho, Keep is I, I'm not a big fan of Infusionsoft or Keep, but keep is is. I. I did look it up. They've got some AI integrated now. All of these tools do jobber. I was pretty impressed by some of the new integrations. They've done pipedrive. So those are just a few tools. You know, if you're familiar with them or if you have them, start looking at some of the AI integrations that can help you. And if you don't have one or you're ready to switch, talk to one of the marketing guides because we can help you tremendously for sure.

Jeff

This is also a good place to plug an episode we did a few weeks back, which is what does CRM mean to you? Because for different types of businesses, there are different CRMs that have different strengths or one of the more general purpose ones that we can build on the customizations to meet any business's needs. But you definitely want to plan that out and you know, know in advance how you want to use it, how it can add value to your business and to your clients. And yeah, look up that episode and ask us questions if you got questions.

Ken

Yeah, definitely. You know, there's been a term in the corporate world for a very long time, enterprise resource planning tools, erp. And so there are a lot of equivalents of that for smaller businesses that are really operational focused, but not necessarily marketing and customer relationship focused. And so, you know, you need to be very cautious of these because they're all. Everybody's going to claim that they are the best thing. They're the Swiss army knife, you know, for everything that you need for your business. That is absolutely not the case. There are tools that are far superior than others. You know, chances are you're going to need to have some tool that helps you with your operational needs. You know, if you're a building contractor, you're going to need to have something that can keep track of materials and labor and stuff like that, you know, and scheduling of, you know, of those different types of aspects of the work. But that doesn't mean that that's going to be the best software for you to market your business. So the key is if you do have to go with. So I would say try to get it down to two systems, kind of your marketing driven powerhouse kind of a system, and then your operational system. And then just make sure that they talk to each other because a lot of these systems design themselves where they try to trap you to where you have to live within their ecosystem and they don't want to talk to any other tools. They don't want to share any data. And so that's catastrophic when you get tied into that kind of a relationship.

Ian

I have to talk to dentists just for a minute. So this is true in any medical field, I think, but to you dentists, practice management software is just that type of trap that Ken's talking about. You need your practice management software to be excellent at the operational side. But even though they include five bullet points about how good it is at marketing, it stinks at marketing. I can tell you that all of the practice management software are horrible at marketing. So the very best thing you can do to serve yourself is when you're choosing practice management software or business operation software, look for one with open APIs. APIs allow the systems to talk to each other and then you get the best of both worlds. But if you, if you choose one, that's a closed ecosystem, like Ken said, you're stuck, you're stuck in that. Like now you have to manually export things to get them into the other system. It's horrible. So, you know, do yourself a favor, get an open system open.

Jeff

Yeah, it's not, it's not just Dennis. I've seen the exact same thing in the home services businesses where you've got the roofing production system or the window tinting production system. Literally those are two that I've had experience with and they're great at doing their production. They're great at telling you how many squares of shingles to order. They're great at telling you how many square feet of window film you can put out invoice. But they're terrible at asking for reviews or emailing the customer with updates. It's, you know, maybe two systems for a business makes sense as long as they can integrate. You're absolutely right in, you know, one of the systems that I was looking at had absolutely no, no web hooks or API integrations. And you know, good luck with it then. You know, it's.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. And that's really, that's really prevalent again when, if it's an operational focused system, they're going to be closed more often than not now, not always, but I mean, they're more likely to be closed, I should say. Marketing systems. Marketing systems typically know that they have to share and talk to data and use data across a variety of different sources. So, you know, my advice would be pick a really good case management system and focus on the case management features that has the open API as Ian talked about, or your job production software. Like, you know, the Window tinting or you know, painting estimating and things like that, how many buckets of paint are you going to need to have and all that kind of stuff. Focus on the features of that part of the business and then realize that you need to make an investment in the marketing side. And again, both have to have open APIs so they can share in fast data. You do not want to have to rely on downloading CSV files and upload the uploading them because you're going to forget you can't automate fully when you do stuff like that. It just becomes a major pain.

Ian

And ask your marketing consultant what the best marketing tool is to use because chances are you and your team probably won't even use the marketing automation system as much as your marketer will. So you know, I, I know for sure what I would tell people and you guys probably know, you know, right off the bat like if, if you can integrate with something, integrate with this because we can do our job better for you.

Ken

Yeah, yeah. Jeff, what are some of the most common mistakes that small businesses make with AI and automation?

Jeff

Yeah, yeah, I think we were just talking about some of them. But you know, jumping in too soon with not having a clear strategy is probably the first one or corollary to that is. Well, you know, my buddy in a networking group said I need xyz and your buddy's business is different from yours. Is it really what you need? It's very different cost structure for some of these tools. And just because it's right for, you know, a multi million dollar business doesn't mean it's right for, you know, a low to mid six figure business. So really, you know, understanding the options that are available, the trade offs that you're going to make because ultimately there's going to be trade offs especially as you start talking about integrating things back and forth. But when you're talking like you were just talking Ken, about you know, ERP systems versus CRM, CRM is usually a part of erp, but ERP gets into a lot more and everything's going to have strengths and weaknesses and you want to make sure you're picking the right set of tools and it probably is a set for your business and then you have the means to integrate them and that, that isn't just going off and signing up for a tool because somebody in a networking group said, oh I use this and it's great, you shall do it. So really understanding your business flows, your business case needs and then figuring out how to, to map out the path to get everything, you know, integrated together and working together to really what you want to do is make your business more efficient, more scalable and improve your customer experience. Right. So you've got to think about that in advance and just not rush into it willy nilly. We were talking earlier about AI generated content and I think this is a huge mistake that a lot of people make. Oh, I'm going to do everything in chat GPT. We know as marketers that it's not one tool for everything. Now chat GPT can do a lot, the large language models can do a lot. But even so, we're going to go to multiple different tools. Matter of fact, there are now as AI continues to evolve, we're moving into the world of agentic AI. And agentic AI is about building automation workflows and there are some AI specific tools that will allow you to do that. You mentioned make earlier. Zapier can do it. N8N is another one that's really strong at working with AI tools. You're building agents to do specific tasks and those agents may go out and use three or four different AI tools to get the job done. I think you've used Ken in the past, Julie McCoy as an example. She has got a really great workflow where she can use AI. She's a writer, so she's a really good writer. But even she will use AI to help her write a script. She'll then edit it and make it her own and polish it. She will then push it into an AI tool that has her avatar in it and it will build a video of her delivering the content that will then push it automatically over to YouTube that will then push out an email about, hey, I've got a new video on YouTube and she basically writes the script, you know, spends a couple hours on it and clicks the button. So that's what an agentec workflow is going through. And you can use the workflows, the automations to do that. But the starting point is still going to be the human experience and the context that you give the AI and the, you know, editing and the parameters around polishing it and making it your own. So that's kind of where I started. I went off into a bunch of tools in agentic. But I'll come back to you've got to know how to use the tools and you've got to know how to constrain them and not just routinely accept, oh, I want a blog article about the three benefits of marketing automation, right? And then blindly post it. I would never do that. I would put my experience, my voice, my expertise and so don't over rely on AI generated content. And then in this current era where we are looking at lots of systems that are integrated, if you don't move into the integrations that we're talking about and then the integrations facilitated by automations, you're going to wind up with data silos. You're going to wind up with bits and pieces of information that aren't useful to the other parts of your overall business process flow. You know, the old school example of that used to be, you know, the sales guys don't talk to the manufacturing guys. Right. The sales guys are promising things manufacturing guys can't build. You know, that's, that's been around forever. That was, that was siloing and now we can see it potentially even on a finer grand scale. If you have lots of different bits and pieces of things you're trying to use tools and automations for and they're not flowing well together, but yeah, monitor things. We talked about CRMs, we talked about making sure you're picking the right one for your business. And ultimately what it comes down to is understanding what you want to get done and what your options are to get there. Don't just blindly rush into it. Maybe enlist the help of a strategist. I'm actually going to print new business cards up. I'm doing a little bit of a shift in my business direction. I'm going to position myself as an AI marketing strategist. Somebody who can help you get these things done and build the system. We're still going to be building marketing systems. It's in our name, it's what we do, but it's just how we approach it and how we do it and how we guide people there. So don't be afraid to get some help and get the questions answered, whether it's with help or whether it's by self study. Because that's when you're really going to build the system that's right for you and get, and get the bang for the buck.

Ken

Yeah. You know, when it comes to implementing any kind of a system, I think, you know, as a business owner, you have to ask yourself a couple of really key questions before you make the selection of the tool set. One is great. I've got something that does some something already that I do, but I have to change my business to fit the way the tool wants me to do it. You're going to run into major headaches and nightmares now. There are definitely aspects of you know, tools that can be designed to share best practices from, you know, from within an industry. So in your example with dentists, I'm sure you've got, you know, automations that you've built because of your expertise above and beyond the tool set that deliver, you know, what 80% of dentists probably need. And then you just can have the ability because you've got the right tool set to go in and make the tweaks to make the 20% different so that it really is truly a different delivery system for your clients. Right. So the other thing I think you need to look at is can I easily customize my system and design it to really run the business the way I want to run it? So not only build in the operational improvements where you can, but give you the flexibility of where you can still design in that uniqueness of things that you do and the messaging that you might provide so that you really, truly stand out. Otherwise, if you buy a system off the shelf that does the same thing that everybody else has, really how tree are you going to be different? Again, all you're doing is you're going to be competing on price if you all implement the tool in this in the exact same way. And so there's, it really is probably a scenario where you need to get experts involved to help you make these right decisions. If you get the right tools, you may be able, if you have the right team, you may be able to run these tools and do a lot of the work yourself and not have to rely on, you know, some outsourced services. But again, you have to ask yourself, is that the best use of your time and your staff's time, you know, or, or, or does it make sense to just offload that to somebody who truly just does that all the time and knows how to, how to get that done? But those are things that I think, you know, businesses, they rarely stop and think about. They just, they get seduced. Look, do not get seduced by pretty dashboards. Do not get seduced by sexy presentations or really good looking salespeople. It happens all the time. People make decisions because they fall in love with the way a dashboard looks about how much traffic they're getting to their website. You know, we've had several guests recently, Rand Fishkin and Guy Kawasaki. They're both saying, who cares about traffic to your website? That is not a valuable statistic by and large.

Jeff

Yeah, Ian, still serve your customers.

Ken

So, you know, you've gotta, it's a shift in mindset and if you want to compete in this rapidly changing future, you've gotta embrace and adopt these types of tools and make sure that you're selecting the right tools, which means you probably need to get some expert opinion and advice. And also the great thing about that is it kind of takes the personality out of it. You know, you don't get that we all have our predispose, predisposed ideas about what we want to do or what we want to see. It kind of takes that out of the equation and gives you a more independent, objective viewpoint. And, and I think that that could be a very good thing as long as you hire an expert who really knows what they're doing.

Ian

So that's so good, guys. One, one of the mistakes that it kind of springboards off that, that I, I've watched businesses make mistakes on with AI right now is that they, they choose AI to replace expensive services like marketing agencies. And, and I'm totally biased in this, but I hate to see. So my theme this year is to help businesses thrive in 2025. Like I always come up with a theme that's my theme this year because I see businesses struggling right now. Right? There's some, some are flourishing, some are struggling because of the economy. But the thing I hate to see is good businesses make bad decisions related to marketing and they choose to try to cheap out. They try to use AI to do marketing cheaply, but not well. And, and that drives me nuts because AI is a tool that in the right hands, as we've talked about, Ken's on the other side now, when, when you use AI as a tool in the hands of an expert, the results are, are better for your business and you should be choosing quality of and, and doing marketing better versus doing it cheaper. That's just a caution to our listeners because if you choose the cheap route, you're going to get bad results because if you have a receptionist or a junior marketer without guidance from, from somebody that truly understands what you should be doing, but they have AI in their hands, they'll be able to pump out more stuff and pump it out better than they could without AI for the most part. But they won't have an expert guiding their, their hands, guiding their time, guiding what they should actually be focusing on. They'll just be doing more faster. And sometimes more faster means down the drain faster. Right. So just a caution.

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

One of, one of the things that I learned back in my high tech days in project management school was the scope schedule resources triangle and the colloquial expression of that is good, fast or cheap. Pick any two.

Ian

Yeah.

Jeff

Now, AI can let you get faster, can let you get better results faster. But if you think that it's going to be cheap and it's going to be super fast, it's probably not going to be good. You do have to go back and put the effort into understanding how to use it and how to employ it successfully in your business. And whether that's training or whether that's just hiring it out, it's no different from a business owner saying, oh, great, thanks for coming, explaining marketing to me. I understand it now. I don't have time to do it. Can you do it for me? If you don't understand AI and you don't know how to build systems on AI and you don't know how to get good results with AI, then you're, it's going to be the same thing. You're not, you're not going to get what you want out of it. So you really need to think it through and, and don't, don't expect it to be the be all end all to solve all problems. It can increase capabilities orders of magnitude, it can speed things up, but it's a balance, right?

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

And who, and who's going to get better results? A marketer with expertise that's leveraging the tools to the max or a junior person that doesn't have the expertise using the tools. Right. Like, it just makes common sense for sure.

Jeff

Well, that'd be like going back to my analogy early on. Be going back to somebody handing them a power nailer and say, go frame a house. It's an incredibly powerful tool. It'll speed your work up.

Ken

Go.

Jeff

Yeah, it's just not going to work.

Ken

Yeah. Paul, let's talk about how business, small businesses can use AI to provide more personalized experiences.

Paul

Well, you know one thing that you see, well, most consumers say they're more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers. Of course they are. But this comes down, this whole question really comes down to list segmentation and having data on your consumers and prospects. Because how are you going to have relevant offers if you don't know what your prospects or customers are looking for? So if you, I've used this as a gamble in the past, like with painters. If, if you have your list segmented that, okay, I've done interior painting for these, for this batch of clients, but I've never done cabinet painting. You can send them a targeted email just about cabinet painting or just about exterior painting or whatever you haven't done for them. And you see this on Amazon all the time. It's like AI driven recommendations. You look for something, you put it in your cart and what pops up, hey, people also bought or you might also be interested in things like that. Now that may not apply to a lot of small businesses, but it's something that AI can do. And personalization in emails. Back to what I just said about segmenting your list, because if you do, if you're a lawn care company and you have a customer that you already mow their lawn, but you don't do, say pest control or pest control for them, sending them an email about your lawn care services is probably just going to irritate them because they're, they're already paying you to do that. Dynamic content and websites, I'm not really going to get into that too much, but it, it's, it's uses AI to, it adapts to what the user's doing. You can bundle products and services, create different bundled services. We do this all the time for clients that they may need this, this and this, but they don't need something else. And we can build those bundles for them. And personalization, it's not just hey John, hey Julie, whatever, it's predicting what, what they might want or need next. And that goes back to list segmentation. So that's what I said earlier. This whole question goes back to list segmentation. And it, it helps build trust. And because they know that, they feel like you're talking just to them. And if you have a recurring service, whether it's lawn service or, or salon service, you can, you can send out messages encouraging them to book their, their next appointment. I mean there's people that, they get their haircut every three weeks whether they need it or not. I, but there's people that do that. So you can, if you know that about certain customers, if they don't schedule another appointment right there when they're in the, the salon or whatever, you can send them a text or an email like two days later, usually a text saying, hey, here you didn't book an appointment when you were in the salon. Here's a link to book your next appointment. So AI can help you do all these things and it creates a more personalized experience for your customers.

Ken

Yeah, it's really fascinating. I mean, I envision in the not too distant future that it's going to become fairly prevalent that based on the websites that I like to visit, the things that draw my eye, am I drawing the video? Do I like images? Do I want to just read text Based websites that, you know, you're going to go to a website and that website's going to say, ah, you've been here before. I know you like to see information presented in this way. You might, you know, I mean, maybe I need to see reviews, to check, to feel before I make a purchase. All of that stuff is being captured right now. It's just nobody has gotten really good, economical ways to deliver that and, and dynamically change websites. But that's going to be coming very fast and it's going to be really fascinating to see what's going to happen because the world of SEO is changing dramatically as well. And so you're going to have SEO focused content for your website, but the user experience may have nothing to do with the content that's on your website and they may actually start to be disconnected a little bit, which is going to be fascinating. We're running up our on time. I think we've already gone past time. The last thing I want to say is, before I turn it over to Ian, is, look, if you're, if you're stuck in this quagmire of competing on price and you're interested in learning about how to adapt AI to focus on your business, certainly reach out to any of us, we can, we can help guide you. We're happy to all provide free consultations to see if that makes sense. But think about this. If you don't really know how to differentiate your business, there are great tools out there using AI to help disrupt entire industries. So you might be able to start becoming the disruptor and changing radically, changing the way your industry is operating, all by picking and having conversations with and interacting with and being guided by really smart, disruptive, focused, you know, artificial intelligence that then will help give you all kinds of implementation ideas to take that disruptive idea and turn it into reality. It may take a little bit of time, a little bit of testing, but that's, that's so much out there right now and people aren't taking advantage of that yet either. And that's, you know, you could dramatically change your value proposition with your customers by adopting a disruptive approach to the way you deliver your products or services. So with that, guys, anything real quick that we need to add? I know we're well over time.

Ian

No, the only thing I'd say is don't ignore it.

Ken

Yeah, don't ignore it. Embrace it.

Ian

Go ahead, Paul.

Paul

Oh, so the only thing I'd say, Ken, you touched on is some of these things like the dynamic content and the AI driven recommendations that may not be economical for small business to implement now, but that I, that's going to change. I really think it is.

Ken

Yep, yep. Absolutely. So hopefully you guys all found some valuable information here. You know, this is an exploding, very fast changing world. It's easy to jump in and start using some of these technologies in a piecemeal fashion. We all encourage you to go in and play and experiment with that a little bit, but also seek out guidance and really work with people who are really becoming true expert and how to implement and deploy these things. You don't have to be a tech wizard to be able to get big results, but you need somebody to help you get the right system set up in place so that when you are interacting with these systems, whether it's your CRM or you know, various AI agents that you're, that you're launching, that they are really, truly beneficial for your business. With that answer, going to turn it over to you.

Ian

Sure. Well, hey dudes and dudettes, thanks for enjoying this episode with us. We hope you got a lot out of it. Share it with your fellow business owner, dudes and Dudettes, and leave us a review. Don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe button. Smash it, crush it, pound it. And until next week, folks, keep calm and mark it on.