This episode is brought to you by ChiefAIOfficer.com. Most companies know AI can slash costs and free up teams, but they get stuck on the first step. ChiefAIOfficer.com can identify your highest value use cases, train your people, and build the workflows that do the work for you. Book your free private 15-minute executive briefing by going to ChiefaiOfficer.com and scheduling a call. You'll leave with a clear, no-jargon roadmap for your goals. Now, enjoy the show. And a quick note before we start this episode. Starting August 29th through October 29th, we're actually taking our AI executive immersion on the road. This is a free, half-day, in-person, no-fluff workshop for executives of lower middle market and above-sized companies. You'll leave with a 90-day plan, a simple AI policy and guardrails, and a personal AI stack that gives you hours back every week. If you'd like to bring your executive team at no cost, go to chiefaiofficer.com forward slash roadshow to see the dates and locations where we'll be. Seats are limited to keep it hands-on. Hopefully, this is an opportunity for us to meet in person and for you to learn exactly how we're teaching busy executives to take advantage of AI and their role and across their companies. Now, let's start the episode. Welcome to Using AI at Work. I'm your host, Chris Daigle. Each week we'll be learning how today's business owners, entrepreneurs, and ambitious professionals are getting more done with smart use of tomorrow's tech. Let's get started. We had the chance to um have a group discussion with the chief AI officer community, uh, and listeners get free access to that community. Check the show notes, by the way. Um, and it was a huge hit. Uh the way that Jay is, I don't know, it's almost like using AI to cheat when it comes to generating interest in your business and generating leads, uh, the right leads coming into your sales team is pretty incredible. So today we're going to talk about not only generation of uh lead strategies, but also the application of AI in that. So, Jay, uh say hello and introduce yourself.
SPEAKER_01What's up, everybody? Chris, thank you for having me. I'm pumped to talk to you and your audience about AI today. I always think about changing my name from like lead genj to AIJ.
SPEAKER_02Bigger valuation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think so. I think so, especially where the world is going. It is all AI. And we were just chatting. Like finding a lane that's going to really like be revolutionary for AI and sticking to it, mastering that is critical. And for me, being able to automate getting clients. I mean, really, what is more revenue generating than that? So that's what I specialize in, and I'm excited to chat with you a little bit more.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. So um, let's talk a little bit about your background. Uh, I know that you you were successfully doing pre-AI, but now that AI's come into it, um, things are accelerating. So tell us a little bit about how you arrived at this moniker of Lead Gen J.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, SparkNotes background. I don't want to spend too much time boring everybody. I actually went to medical school, graduated medical school, uh, did a year of training as a family medicine doctor before leaving and doing business full time. Started my first marketing agency about halfway through medical school, well before AI. We had Zapier back in the day, but that was about it. We were sending cold emails through tools like ClickSend, you know, tens of thousands of them a day, uh, all to the inbox. It was super easy. And I feel like it was a growth hack. It scaled our agency to $600,000 a month within a couple of years. And I ended up leaving medicine to do that full time because the gravy train was running. Uh, and then cold email got a little bit harder. And we really had to learn how to master some of these new tools in order to stand out, uh, scale deliverability, automate the entire process when you couldn't just send 10,000 emails at once. So when that kind of the gravy train turned off and I had to figure out how to replicate that success that we were having with tools like click send, now that the the rules had changed, I kind of had to learn how to learn this stuff to keep the company alive. We had 50 staff, a full sales team, and I was responsible for keeping them busy. Yeah. So what I realized was I could do a lot of the same stuff we were doing with mass sending tools like click send, but we just had to figure out how to automate it. So I mastered make.com and then obviously now N8N, learned how to use the large language models as soon as they sh started to show up to write first sentences for the cold emails, hyperpersonalize the cold emails. And since then it's come a really long way. We're leveraging signals, uh, lots of different databases, tools like Clay, tools like N8N to do really incredible things. So now I run my PR agency, which is 60 people, two companies, and lead genj, obviously, which is now 15 people on its own. And we do, and we we teach the same stuff how to build these automated lead generation systems.
SPEAKER_02So for the listeners who may not be familiar with a marketing lexicon, explain cold email.
SPEAKER_01Cold email is emailing someone who doesn't know who you are to tell them about your thing. It's top-of-funnel marketing, just like you're running Facebook ads or Google ads to people who haven't heard about you yet to present them with your offer. Cold email is essentially that. Uh the difference in cold email compared to other forms of top-of-funnel marketing is you're really able to zero in on your target. If I'm trying to sell to AI consultants, I'm going to be able to find you through a B2B contact database, some list, and hit you in your inbox where you're spending all your time every day for pennies on the dollar compared to something like Facebook advertising. And I'm able to do that fully automated with full control of those systems. So Zuckerberg can't turn me off. Nobody can turn me off. Nice. Email's not going anywhere. And I can pretty much guarantee I can get you to open, read, and reply to one of my called emails using all of the fancy personalization tools and enrichment tools we have access to.
SPEAKER_02Some of you listening may have actually received an email from Jay.
SPEAKER_01You may have. Me or my PR firm, I guarantee. Yeah. If you're a business owner, B2B, I guarantee it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So um I don't know if this is a sensitive question, but some people hearing this that might not be familiar with the concept might say, well, that sounds a lot like spam.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And if done done poorly, it is spam. No one likes bad advertising. Bad advertising in general is spam. You probably open your mailbox every day and have a whole bunch of stuff that goes straight to the trash can. You probably see ads on Facebook and Instagram that look like spam and are spam. Done well, you're hitting people that actually are interested and in need of your thing. And you're hitting them with a message that resonates. So good advertising in general, people enjoy. I mean, I love getting cold emails that are relevant and personalized to me. The bad ones are spam. I'd say just like any other form of advertising.
SPEAKER_02That's a great response, and I hadn't considered that. So the conversation that we had the other day was specific to, I think we had a lot of AI consultants from our community that were on that call. And we didn't just talk about email, you actually talked about omnichannel and some of the stuff that you guys are doing that where the email is supported by different channels also targeting that individual. Can you talk about, and and that's I mean, that's ideal marketing right there, where I'm getting people on multiple channels. Can you talk about like what that omnichannel looks like?
SPEAKER_01I think the goal of every marketer should be omnipresent, right? You can't just market to somebody on a single channel anymore. Those days are have long passed. You need to be everywhere that they are. Because the truth is, people spend time and value different platforms. Not everyone's on the not everyone's on Facebook, not everyone's on Reddit, not everyone's on email. So omni, omnipresent marketing, being everywhere, relies on you advertising on multiple channels. So we're able to automate a lot of that through a lot of the stuff that you teach. N8N combined with a lot of different softwares that deliver that form of marketing. There's some examples that I think we chatted about that might be relevant here. Direct mail. Most people don't use direct mail for advertising. Now, done at scale, this can be spam, this can be a lot of wasted money. But using signals like somebody opens my cold email. Now that's a good, a good signal for, oh, you know, I got them to open it. Maybe they're interested in it. I or that maybe even they're they they even replied to it. Then I pull their address through that same list really easy and send them a direct mail through a third-party tool or software. I prefer a tool called handwritten because it actually handwrites handwrites the letter and the envelope, has a really good open rate compared to just like a postcard that you would send. Uh, or if you're selling high ticket and your TAM is really small, there's not a lot of clients that you can sell to. You can even automate gifts. Uh, they reply to an email. They're still far from buying from you. Why not send them a $10, $20 gift that's relevant to them? You can automate all of that and really enhance your marketing. Some other good channels that you can help to make all your cold outreach efforts a little bit better. Uh, you can do voicemail drops, you can do SMS, you can move it over to LinkedIn and send them a connection request. And all of these things you can automate. The more channels that you're able to contact somebody on, the more they feel like they know you. They're they have like this uh innate feeling that they can trust you because they've seen you here, here, and here. And all of that should be paired with retargeting ads that are paid.
SPEAKER_02So with this omnichannel F or omnipresent F, and I like I like that word a lot better, the comparison between people might be listening to say, well, we have a marketing team. Yes. Right? I doubt that marketing team, I know marketing, I know technology. I doubt that marketing team is doing what you showed me the other day.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02What is the uh, I guess, equivalent output with these AI-powered automations that you're building on this omnipresent versus, oh, I'll just have my team start focusing on that. The humans. Like, am I getting 10 to 1 from automations versus what I needed uh, you know, 10 marketers on my team to be able to replicate what you're able to do through um high-scale automations?
SPEAKER_01That's a good question. And I'd I'd say that historically, doing what I do was done with humans. I mean, Salesforce built their empire with a team of SDRs, sales development reps sitting in the office doing one-to-one outreach, cold calling people, cold emailing people. Uh, yeah, we're able to do that at scale at numbers that were not previously possible. So, what what is the impact? I mean, massive. We don't have SDRs anymore. Uh, we don't we don't use them anymore. I don't think there's a reason to. Uh and I guess the power of automation is gives one doctor the power of a hundred. It scales the capabilities of a single person. So instead of one person sitting there outbound dialing all day, you're expecting like 200, 300 outbound dials, 90% of which don't answer. Now we can send voicemail drops at scale with the offer. People listen to the voicemail and give a call back. Now that one person is just intaking calls of people who are returning that voicemail drop, and it's a much more effective use of that person's time. Instead of one person sending out a thousand cold emails a day and hoping that, you know, five of them respond, we're able to automate that. So when those five do respond, now that one person is just focused on converting that interest of lead into a call, which is a much more effective use of that person's time. I would say a hundred times more effective.
SPEAKER_02I'd rather take an inbound than an outbound any day.
SPEAKER_01Every day, all day.
SPEAKER_02So talk, let's talk about the the scale or the contribution to scale that AI has allowed for this when it comes to things like personalization and list selection. And you've mentioned the outreach on LinkedIn and things like that.
SPEAKER_01Man, AI has made a huge impact. And I almost want to segment automation has also separately made a massive impact. So through AI, when this first started to come out, it was like scraping somebody's LinkedIn account and saying something nice about their college. And that was kind of cool because nobody had seen it before. Now it is indistinguishable from a from a US-based SDR. It will go and do research on all of your businesses, your personal information online. It'll scrape your LinkedIn, your website, your posts on Twitter, and be able to really get a full picture of you and everything going on in your business and your life. And with the right prompt engineering, be able to write one-to-one outreach that is indistinguishable or better than a human. And these it doesn't quit, it gets better with time, and it can do it at a scale that humans just can't. So it's hard to even state the impact. It's it's transformative.
SPEAKER_02So I know that one of the things that you do in uh you have is you have a very large community of people who are following your frameworks and and methods and that sort of thing. Um the individuals who are in the group, generally speaking, what would you say their level of AI savvy was?
SPEAKER_01Our group is about 25,000 right now from all over the world. And it it ranges a lot. Some people are extremely AI savvy, and uh a lot of people are just trying to figure out how to get leads for their business and an ever-changing landscape. Uh what I've realized is that the a lot of the younger people who are consuming content and trying to learn how to do online marketing right now are all in on AI.
SPEAKER_02Nice. Okay.
SPEAKER_01But not everyone's good at taking the AI knowledge, AI automation, and learning how to make money from it. It's really easy to build automations in NA, and it's really hard to be able to put all the pieces together and actually build a business around it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So have you noticed um how long have you had the community?
SPEAKER_01About two years now.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Have you noticed that the the sophistication level of um AI users is growing in your community? And I'll give you some reference for this. We launched uh chiefaiofficer.com in 2023, and I thought we were late already. Right. Um 2024, same thing happened. I was like, okay, this is gonna be a huge year. People at this point, they've had a chance to play with the tools, like they get it, they're gonna be ready. Didn't happen. Now, 2025, it's been crazy. The the increase in interest. Um, and also uh as we talk to people and we ask them, like, you know, what's your comfort level with AI? We hear a lot of like threes and fours. And then when we ask those business people, but what are you using it for? And they say two things writing emails, summarizing documents. And anybody that that uses AI regularly knows that that's that's it's good, but that's probably like a one.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02But have you noticed kind of that same trajectory as far as capabilities or belief and capabilities in your community as it's grown over the past two years?
SPEAKER_01You know, I'll probably have a much better answer for you for that question in about six months because we're launching our AI community. Most of the stuff that we talk about inside of our lead gen community, there's a lot of AI in there, but it's mostly following my AI automation blueprints to get to a certain result. Like, here's the template to like scrape this list on Apify, enrich it, uh, qualify them with AI, write the one-to-one email using AI. So I'd say about 10% of the people in my in my higher ticket paid community are doing that.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01So most of them aren't able to get to that point. And I I preface that in a lot of my trainings. It's like, this is advanced. Don't reach for this until you have an offer that works, you know the targeting that works, like people are interested, you've got copy that works. And then you use the AI automation to like get the next 10% out of those results. But I mean, no fancy automation in the world is going to fix a bad offer or bad target. Absolutely. We'll just get it in front of a lot more people.
SPEAKER_02Yes. So I know that you guys work with a lot of businesses. Um, and in in that capacity, businesses just basically turn it over to you as a black box. You guys handle everything?
SPEAKER_01We've got a range of offers. Um you'll you've probably noticed this as well. You talk to several different types of leads. Some are at the beginning parts of their journey and they really want to learn this stuff for themselves. Obviously, the more successful businesses, the more established ones that we speak to, just need a system to get automated leads uh installed into their company that works and they're willing to pay up front for that. So we've got a range of offers for people who are just dipping their toes in, people who really want to learn and master this stuff for themselves. And then for the more established companies where we set it all up, but not just set it up, actually stick with them and test and do A B A B testing and test different lists and targeting methods until we find something that actually works. Just like any other form of advertising, you could launch a Facebook ads campaign in two seconds. Doing one that actually converts, tracking your ROAS, making sure that it's uh profitable for you. A lot of work. That's a whole different story. Yeah. That takes expertise, that takes time, that takes testing, that takes money. Um, so if you want to create a money printer, whether it be Facebook ads or Google Ads or called email, uh you the expertise does help a lot.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So we we talked about the uh, you know, you answered my question about the the growth in your community as far as AI interest. With the B2B clients that your team is talking to on both the PR and the lead gen side, is AI coming up in the conversation more?
SPEAKER_01All the time. And the most painful thing for me as a business owner is telling someone that we we can't, we I know we can do it for them, but we won't do it for them. Uh and I think this has been a big problem with the AI consultants that I've talked to as well. Not being able to productize your AI offers. So they're coming in with all of these crazy things that they want to build, and I could build it for them, but it would be me sitting there building it for them. Right. Which is not what I want to do. So, you know, part of our, I think we talked about this uh briefly before, where I really want to take this thing is being able to productize these one at a time. Here's here's this thing that I'm doing for my companies that's working really well. I'll teach you how to do it. But if you want me to implement it for you, um like here's the the system where we implement it.
SPEAKER_02And I guess now with the platforms that you're using, like Make Zapier and N8N, once it's built, tested, and and in production, it's like easy to deploy it. Like if you're using it well, it's easy to deploy it into other businesses because it's almost a copy. There's config and and API keys or whatever that need to be plugged in, but the architecture of it just gets copied over uh once it's built, I guess, pretty much.
SPEAKER_01Pretty much with a few nuances, as there always is. The prompts may change based on that company's needs. The tools that they're using may change. I built a uh AI sales director for Lead Gen J and for Otter PR, my two companies, but they work on very different softwares. So, for example, we're using Fathom inside of Lead Gen J. Like my sales team is using Fathom to record all their calls. Getting those calls from Fathom to a Google Drive to trigger that AI sales director is a different structure than Otter PR, which uses Meat Geek, where I have to do a little bit more fine-tuning with the API. One uses Pandadoc for the proposals, and one uses GoHigh Level for proposals. So you can't just copy and paste these templates for every one of these automations. But with a little fine tuning, yeah, it's uh it's simple enough to figure out.
SPEAKER_02Does it typically require a company to uh invest in a new stack, new tool stack?
SPEAKER_01It can be recommended at times. Uh, there's definitely some old softwares that don't have very good APIs that make the job of automating something very hard, as I'm sure you know.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So there's always stuff that I'd recommend to use. And it's much easier if you're coming at the beginning stages of some company and they haven't fully adopted a software yet. Once they've fully adopted something, it can be really tough to move off. I don't know if you've ever tried to change CRMs. It's a freaking nightmare.
SPEAKER_02I used to do SAP consulting and there was multi-year efforts.
SPEAKER_01What is your tech stack out of curiosity? What are you using for project management, automation, CRM, email marketing?
SPEAKER_02Um, I have a uh a human that drives it all. Yeah. And she is uh her disposition is uh she's strict, right? Um, however, she leverages the heck out of it. We've got some automations that take our Fathom call recordings and then run them through some filters that she's created with either custom GPTs or some automations that evaluate the the calls, um spin up the action items and things like that. Uh GPT is the primary engine that we use for a lot of our LLM work. Um we were on a call this morning, and how we would describe that would be chat GPT for I guess knowledge work, clawed at this point today, for any type of like coding or coding support, um and for any uh video advertising that we might do, uh most likely would be Gemini's VO3 or Google's VO3. Um outside of that, uh you know, we keep it kind of lean. I mean, we've got we've got more expenses than that, but I would say that those were are the tools that we touch the most.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um R CRM is go high level, uh, which we like because it integrates well with a lot of um AI tools, easy to work with, API and things like that. Um so the thing that I like about, and the reason I was asking about that tool stack is where I wanted to go with that was if they do need to invest in some of these tools. Again, I came from you know my early in my career doing SAP, I think the implementation I worked on was, you know, $70 million or something crazy like that, right? Jesus.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02For the companies that are listening and they like this idea of because here's the truth, folks your marketing team's probably doing a good job, your sales team's probably doing a good job, but they're not crushing it the way they could if they were uh AI supported, um, they were leveraging, you know, these these. Types of automations that could do a lot of heavy lifting. Right. Um so anybody listening to this should be uh should be considering uh what that tech requirement would look like. And the point I was get I was uh going to get to because I don't know the answer was I know on the AI side, I don't have to spend a lot of money to get incredible power and incredible tools, right? Like our we might spend less than two grand for our whole company for all the tools that we use. In setting up, because you you mentioned a few tools like the lead enrichment environments and things like that. If somebody was going to set this up themselves or they were gonna hire you guys to come in and advise on tool stack configuration and that sort of thing, what kind of expense should they expect to absorb to get this thing spun up? Just on the tech side, not on services.
SPEAKER_01I'd say it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. So there's, I mean, pretty general tools that every company needs. Something for project management, uh, something for like data warehousing. So if you're looking to build like a social media idea automation, scraping, you know, transcripts and stuff into a table so that you can work on it, Airtable's a great choice. And all these things run you 20 bucks a month. Yeah. You don't need to add whole teams to them. It's unbelievably affordable nowadays.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh I would say Airtable is a is a popular one for CRM, Go High Level. It's great for proposals. It's great for invoicing. You can connect to the API and do lots of fun stuff. I know high level is unbelievably affordable. I think for 99 bucks a month with them, I give my insiders a sub account. So 49 bucks a month. Uh unbelievably affordable. A lot of the LLMs, also very affordable. I use GPT a lot, Claude, Perplexity. Uh there's some even cheaper ones now. Uh yeah. Use Deep Sea Groc. I'd say it depends a lot on what you're trying to accomplish, but usually with a pretty basic and a lot of times free tech stack, you can get a lot done.
SPEAKER_02I hope you're enjoying the episode. Did you know that while you're listening to this, competitors are already boosting EBITDA with generative AI? If you're still stuck in pilot mode, margin and market share are leaking every quarter. CheapAIOfficer.com guides executive teams to the three moves they need to be doing. Identifying the top AI plays that will lift revenue or slash cost within 90 days, de-risk adoption with team training, airtight governance, and change management best practice, and then building and deploying production grade AI-powered tools. No extra headcount, full ROI tracking. The results? Operators at Scale Generative AI cut process costs 22% last year. Let's talk. Claim your free, private, 15-minute executive briefing by going to chiefaiofficer.com and walk away with a board-ready roadmap. Slots fill fast, so lock yours in. Now, enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah, I think I think most businesses would be surprised. I think if you came in saying it was 20 to 50 grand, they would say, okay, that's what I was expecting. But we're talking about, you know, I mean, obviously some of these are based on uh scale of usage and there's, you know, tiers and things like that. But getting this type of tech stack spun up in your marketing and sales environment might cost less than $1,000.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And amazingly, I don't still don't know how N8N does it. The community version is essentially free. You just pay for server cost. I pay $50 a month for an unbelievably powerful server that hosts my N8N, and I'm able to execute essentially unlimited operations for myself. Now, granted, that's not like enterprise level. Yeah. But in terms of cost, like I it still shocks me how affordable all of this is. Yeah. The AI sales director I just explained. Yeah. The software that powers all of those things is under a hundred bucks a month.
SPEAKER_02So I let's go back to that because these types of, you know, I think people listening to this have probably heard the term agents and that sort of thing. And there's some uh it's kind of a loose definition at this point. But when I hear that, I think about it it's doing the role of a human. And to me, I kind of equate if it can do the role of a human, then I would kind of call that an agent, right? So what does this AI sales director like, what function does it perform in your business?
SPEAKER_01So if you've ever run a sales team or had a sales team, one of the core functions of a sales director is to review all of the calls and give feedback to find like who's weak and how they can improve. That's just really hard to scale and relies on a single person doing a lot of work. Yep. If anyone is listening to this and has a sales team, this is one of the first things you should install. It's unbelievably powerful and the sales team loves it. Uh, so what it does is it watches a drive folder for new transcripts. You can figure out whatever tech stack you're using, how to get all your transcripts into this drive folder. I won't go into that. Uh so it reads the transcript, works off of a prompt that you know we we designed, we the exact output that we want, um, any knowledge about our company, what to look for. And my actual sales director worked with me for about a month to refine this based on what we're trying to sell, things that he actually looks for when he's screening calls. We didn't just tell it to like act as a sales director and give me an output. Yeah. We were very, very specific with the questions that we're asking, the points that we're looking for in actual sales calls. So the AI agent, you know, powered by Claude, it's got a big context window and is great with output and copywriting, uh, reads this entire transcript, uses our prompt to go through line by line, minute by minute, and create uh a full report card for the sales call. It grades on like six different metrics and gives specific feedback, calls out specific timestamps. Uh so the first thing it does is it sends the salesperson a copy of their report card with their score and their grade. The other really important thing it does is it puts those scores into our air table. So I'm able to actually run reports and sh and visualize how that salesperson is doing over time. Nice. Yeah, it makes it a really powerful tool to see how people are doing, flag people who have really like F-grade sales calls. Yep. So the sales director can actually go watch that one. Or if there's an A, like what did they do that was awesome? So now instead of you know going through 50 sales calls a week, they're just going through five, the five really important ones.
SPEAKER_02You know, I I at one point I had a call center and the the QA and all that required to for hundreds of hours a day or a thousand hours a day of calls was impossible. We took a sample and that was the best we could hope for. Yeah. Right? Plenty of things probably slipped through on that. So uh your sales director, did he feel threatened about the introduction of this technology? Because it it does, you know, the one thing I would want a sales director to do is like evaluate performance of the team.
SPEAKER_01This this one specifically, not at all. And maybe it's because he came on later on. He's been with us for about three, three, three, four months now. He knew what he was signing up for. We are an AI forward company and we are implementing it at every junction that we possibly can. But this one specifically makes his job so much easier and so much more enjoyable and frees him up to do really impactful actions outside of reviewing sales calls. It's like the tedious thing that they don't want to do.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_01Now, take that over to my PR company. We've got you know six full-time writers on staff trying to get them to really implement and use AI. They're a little bit older. We introduced this to them after they've been working with us for several years. Yeah. The response to that was was much different. So it's definitely something you have to think about based on who you're introducing this to, when and how, but they don't feel threatened. Definitely something that we've talked about with the leadership of our company before rolling.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So this is great because you've got experience doing something that a lot of people are concerned about. We we talk to clients and um security and and and risk, that's certainly a topic. But also, what about my people? How do I let them know that like if we don't do this, we can't be competitive. Um, what advice would you, or it doesn't even have to be like specific tactical stuff, but how should a business owner or an executive be thinking about that that topic of change management based on your own personal experiences?
SPEAKER_01I'll say it's gonna be a tough one, especially if you're trying to jam new technology down someone's throat who is not a technology person, like a lot of our writers were not. See, I think you really need to think about how to frame it in a way that makes it feel like their job is not at risk and that it's gonna make their life a lot easier and more scalable and hopefully to make them more money. Like, hey, we're now we're able to scale and not hire any more writers. Your job is fine. You're gonna use these tools to hopefully be able to produce a little bit more without having to do the tedious work. And if we don't do this, like the alternative's not good because we're not gonna be able to keep up with these other writing and PR firms who are leveraging this technology and they understand that. And people aren't stupid. It's yeah, if uh everyone's using it, if you don't adopt it, how are you gonna compete? So you need to just hire more people where they're able to spend that money on advertising, acquiring new clients, giving more to their clients. So it's a it's a it's a tough and it's a scary world for for people out there trying to get a job. Yeah, that's that's a whole other conversation, I'm sure.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um, you know, it's interesting. We're we're talking about specific roles within the company, but my thought was that applies to business. Like just replace employee with business. Any business that is hesitant to adopt this or I mean, I get the hesitancy, but doesn't move forward with the adoption. Economic viability is is mitigated significantly compared to your competitor who says, hey, let's do it, let's do it safely, let's, you know, we don't have to go uh crazy, we don't have to whatever, but let's start to use it. Over time, that gap that gets created between their ability to produce and your ability to produce will continue to grow. And even if you, as a business owner who says, okay, finally, I'm ready to do it, you you can't, at that point, you can't catch up to that person because once these things get introduced into your business, it's not like, oh, we saved a few hours. Companies are using those few hours to do more builds, to do more learning, so that they end up saving more hours that they reinvest into automations and AI and saving more hours. So any any company, uh and Jay and I aren't aren't fear-mongering by any stretch, but any company, like we see it, we know the impact. If you guys are like, oh yeah, we're gonna talk about it in Q1 or whatever, um, great, you know, talk about it as soon as you can. But I would not, I think even then, six months from now is gonna be um it'll be tough to catch up with competition who's taking action now.
SPEAKER_01So I'll fear monger for you if you don't want to fearmonger.
SPEAKER_02All right, you do it.
SPEAKER_01No, I'm terrified. Not not just about us not implementing AI fast enough, but if my business model is even gonna be viable a year from now. Interesting. So, like the entire way that you operate, the offer that you deliver could could not be. I mean, if you're not on top of this stuff, deploying cold email systems is not gonna look the way that it does right now, a year from now. Yeah. I'm already talking to companies who are deploying fully autonomous SDRs. Yeah. Like right now, we have to do three things for our clients technical infrastructure of the systems, lead list building, scraping, verifying, and then offer and copywriting. There's autonomous SDRs. They're not very good yet. They take all they do all of that. Yeah. Yet. I've tried three of them so far. As they come out, the companies contact me. I'll test them. So far, they're not nearly as good as I am, but I mean, we said we were saying that about ChatGPT and copywriting a year ago. Yeah. Now it's writing better copy than me or any of my staff members. So that's that it's coming, it's coming fast. And it's not just about implementing AI in your company, but using AI to potentially change what your company offers and does and functions before that's too late.
SPEAKER_02So, what are you doing to kind of uh, I guess, evaluate the potential directions of the company should that occur?
SPEAKER_01I think the one thing that's gonna insulate me personally uh and my companies from becoming obsolete is teaching and implementing AI. I think if you're doing that at it in the top 10%, you're gonna be fine.
SPEAKER_02Nice. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Uh, because that's going to be one of the most needed and in-demand and high-ticket services over the next decade. Uh, but for my specific offers, the PR offer, for example, the cold email build-out offer, I'm staring very finger on the pulse of what's going on in the industry, some of the tools that are out there. There's tools that do autonomous PR pitching now, too. They build build the list of journalists, they'll write the press release, they'll send it autonomously, they'll interact with the journalist. Uh, so how can we get in on that game? How can we build our own systems that do the same thing and do it better because we have the industry expertise and know-how? Same thing with cold email. Um, I'm at the forefront of the cold email automation landscape, thank God. So I'm working with a lot of these companies and we're building out a lot of that stuff uh for ourselves. I have a $97 offer where we can basically set up and deploy your cold email system in like 24 hours. Wow. With almost no human capital. That's all is like a built-in automated offer. Getting that to actually perform well is a totally different story. But we we can get it up and running. Uh so the closer you can get to spinning something like that up and getting it to perform well, that's the key.
SPEAKER_02That's interesting as well, because you know, again, if somebody's trying to look at it AI and their business, using it at work through the lens of what their career experiences have been, there's there's like they're looking at longer, much longer timelines or cycles to get this going. That's what they're thinking at least, than what's actually required. You said that some version of what we've discussed already is $97.24 hours, at least the like the being ready to do the thing. Yes. That's not a you know six-figure project budget mapped out over the next, you know, 90 days. It's like, hey, we're getting started on Monday kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01That's fantastic. And that's what the competitors are generally selling. Some kind of you know, 10K, um, just just to like do the basics and get it set up for you. Those people are not going to be able to compete if they're not leveraging some of this stuff because we're able to do the same thing that these companies are charging tens of thousands of dollars for with almost no human human capital. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_02So you mentioned earlier how how challenging it is and how important it is for you as a uh the business owner to keep your finger on the pulse. The number one thing we hear from um, you know, companies that we work with and clients that are in our certification programs is it's hard, like, oh my, I feel overwhelmed. I mean, I think the last uh measurement we took was there was 11 new major updates on a weekly basis. Like it's impossible, right? It's impossible. How are you as because you've got obviously other obligations to run the business, you've got, you know, all of that stuff that comes with it. What's your shortcut to staying on top of what is happening and what you should be paying attention to?
SPEAKER_01I mean, the first thing is I consume a lot of this content online. So follow the YouTube channels, follow the Instagram accounts so that when you are scrolling, it's typically you're you're consuming the most recent knowledge because that's what everybody is now pushing out, especially in the AI space. Some of these AI creators are just blowing up because it's so much news every day. Some crazy, exciting new tool that just blows your mind, some new video creation tool, photo tool. It's unreal. So stay on top of it through through content. But for me to actually take my own time and go investigate a new tool, a new large language model, switching from make to N8N, I need to hear it from a few people first. I need to hear the excitement. I need to hear that it's worth my time. So if I usually hear it three times, different people talking about the same tool, I'll take the time to go and investigate it and learn it. And then if I deem like I had that holy crap moment, like this is going to be worth learning and switching and adding into my tech stack, then I'll usually spend, you know, three or four days with with an expert from my community actually mastering that thing. And I think that's that's really what helps me stay ahead.
SPEAKER_02Do you have any? I mean, there's a there's obviously a lot of data consumption that would be required to consider yourself like up to date on AI. Right. Do you have any hacks for those um executives that are listening? Like how can they leverage AI or smarter ways of being able to stay on top of things?
SPEAKER_01I think the best way is just to use it and to really keep your finger on the pulse of communities like yours, where they're actively talking about AI and implementation because it it changes so fast. There's new LLMs that are better at this, and the we the next week it's that, the next week it's that. And if you're not even updating your models enough, like in my N8N automations, I have to go in like once a week, once every two weeks, and just tell it to use the most up-to-date model across all of these automations. There's an opportunity for somebody to fix that. Just be like, pick the best one for this thing. Uh, but really, I think it's community, it's content and community. Be around people who are talking about this stuff non-top non-stop and you won't fall behind.
SPEAKER_02You know, I I guess now that you mention it, the way that I've described it to others is that if you get in the right community, there's a lot of noise in the marketplace. Yes. If you get in the right community, you you have collective knowledge that's filtering out that noise and just bringing in signal to that community. And maybe you're more interested in this side of AI or this role and AI's impact on it. Well, when you have a community of people, like, well, maybe 8% of them are also interested in that. So that even the subcategories within AI, you've got this collective knowledge that you're able to benefit from. So that's fantastic advice.
SPEAKER_01That's a great point. I'll just, I guess, add to that. There's a lot of different subcategories and niches within the AI space. I'm not so interested in the content creation AI models. A lot of people are. If I was a video editor or a graphic designer, I would be all over those communities. I'm also a medical doctor. I'm in a community right now where all they talk about is these medical AI applications. And for the business world, you don't even think about what they're doing over there and like radiology AI. But it it all exists. So getting into those segmented communities where they're hyper focused on a specific use case, I think that's the key. So that that that's a great insight.
SPEAKER_02In the um, in the the medical uh community, are you a lurker or are you actually contributing?
SPEAKER_01I'm definitely a a contributor. Yeah. I would I would say it's not my field of expertise and it's a much different landscape than the design AI communities. Uh but I'm very interested in it, just like personal interest. Yeah. And not gonna lie, since I'm not practicing medicine anymore, I get a little kick out of being like, oh, you know, those radiologists who are making 500 grand a year sitting there reading diagnostics. That's changing fast. Uh, it it all is. Any diagnosticians, like the whole world of medicine and the whole world of everything that most people aren't tuned into is changing fast. So whatever whatever community you're a part of, I'm sure AI is having a massive impact.
SPEAKER_02But you don't think about those communities if you're not in so and and honestly, anybody that's listening to this, just the fact that you're listening to an AI podcast probably puts you ahead of a good portion of your peers and co-workers and that sort of thing. And and being recognized as somebody that has AI skills or at least can you know have the conversation, but also somebody who has vendor recommendations and resources that are AI providers or AI supported, that makes you a uh you're a more valuable contributor to your company by being a resource. Because if you were to look you know to your left, to your to your right, the people working next to you and ask yourself like, do I hear them talking about AI? The answer is probably no. Or it's you know, it's hey, look at this TikTok AI video of the Yeti with the you know the handy camera or whatever. Um so just a bit of like side note advertise that you're doing that you're like upskilling yourself, people, and uh like oper doors will open up for you to join conversations. Hey, we're having a meeting on this. Can you know a thing about AI? Like, come and join us and that sort of thing. Um and I know that in in your community, you've got everything from uh obviously B2B to uh solopreneurs and intrapreneurs, people who are entrepreneurial but still within a company. Um are you seeing uh the chatter in the community indicating that because they know are understanding automations, because they're uh being recognized for knowing a thing or two about AI, that it's it's presenting them with opportunities at this point?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Uh and I think people are worried about jobs. And yes, there's a huge opportunity for people who are already with a company to really move up and up level through this skill that most people are slow to adopt. I was shocked. I'm in a lot of different masterminds. They're not all business masterminds. This was like an adventure mastermind. And I came in and I taught a lecture on AI automation. Nobody was doing it. There was one other guy in there that was even like dabbling with this stuff. And they're all successful. Usually they're working at another company, but the awareness level is just so low. So it, I mean, right now is still a huge opportunity where there's a gap in the people who are in the know and people who are still lagging behind. So huge opportunity. If you're already with a company, the value that you can deliver by by learning some of this stuff and even engaging in conversation, introducing some. tools introducing some possibilities that they could they could implement.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It doesn't hurt to be known as the AI guy.
SPEAKER_01Not at all, especially right now.
SPEAKER_02So J Jay, we started the conversation on this this uh what could be a a new concept as far as a marketing channel for a lot of the listeners, which is cold email. Then we moved into this um what I think you guys after you training our our community uh last week what I didn't uh really grasp was the impact of the omnipresent marketing by hitting them through all those different channels. So if a listener is intrigued and wants to explore this further, I mean I know you've got resources in the community of course, um but what would that what would that that path look like for them? What would the what would they need to start thinking about or start exploring or doing it so the first thing is validating your offer.
SPEAKER_01I mean none of this works if you don't have something good to sell. Let's say if you want to get into the weeds with some of the more advanced stuff like omnichannel marketing, like running retargeting ads based on based off of cold emails. That's really what I reserve for like my my my paid community I have a lead gen insiders and that's the community and resources that you need to deploy all this stuff successfully. Especially when you start talking about on omnichannel when you start talking about hyper personalization and like automated scraping at scale all that stuff requires some support. You're gonna hit roadblocks it's nuanced and it does require you to have an offer, a proven offer with a proven audience that already works. Okay. So I would say get in get into that community let's launch and deploy an offer get it to work and then you add these things one at a time. So we add the hyperpersonalization we add the AI qualification. Maybe we add direct mail based on the size of your TAM or we add a voicemail drop based on who we're trying to reach and do we have their mobile numbers. So there's a lot of nuance there, all of which really does take uh a setting like a like a paid community with people talking about this stuff to really iron out. But once you do and you're able to install them one at a time now you've got an automated client getting system that most people have never dreamed of. And when you implement this thing people are shocked. The leads are shocked like yo I just got a just got a mail from you got your voicemail like yeah let's let's go it it it works so unbelievably well it's not easy to set up I don't want to make it seem like you know 24 hours 97 bucks you've got a system that works. Yeah it takes fine tuning there's nuance involved yeah uh but once you do it's the there's nothing like it across any other form of advertising and we do it all I run paid ads top of funnel ads we do lots of retargeting we do you know Reddit growth hacking cold email by far for the past 10 years has been our moneymaker.
SPEAKER_02So I I can I can tell you from my personal like what we're going through right now. So um with our company we're doing uh a road show essentially we're going to do about uh 14 live events uh hosting some one day trainings in different markets around the U.S. It's gonna be very busy and one of the efforts that we're doing is uh call up kind of following the the concept of Chet Holmes Dream 100 right like like getting a very targeted list and doing multiple follow-ups omni channel yes we're doing we don't we're not set up like the way you're talking and the impact gonna be undoubtable the effort to do it a lot like the keeping up with it preparing the mail pieces uh tracking like what stage are they on and all those types of things so um uh we should talk about and I'll I'll say this it's just about automation in general if it's a dream 100 and there's a hundred people on your list is it really worth building out and testing all of these complex automations that's something that I ask that I ask myself every day. Yeah for if it was just 100 I would say like I just want like my vibration touching the the mail like I like I want there to I want truly authentic.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_02Um however we're targeting a dream 100 in in each of those markets. So it's um it's it's intelligently designed multi-step for about a thousand targeted leads who aren't gonna like pick up the phone on a uh like I've got to get through the gatekeeper. So there's there's a little effort there for sure a lot of effort compared to hey let's run some targeted Facebook ads and that's not who I you know I'm not looking for the Facebook crowd. I'm looking for the LinkedIn crowd but even so um if even and even if the direct mail pieces were still like handwritten notes from me or whatever the case might be, there's a lot of it that I don't I shouldn't be pushing the email send button. I shouldn't be like looking at a spreadsheet to say oh today's the day that I follow up with them via a you know a cold call or whatever. Right. So um yeah as a uh personal interest uh let's continue the discussion offline.
SPEAKER_01Yeah would love to and you just gave me a good idea for uh an automation to build like a Dream 100 all in upload your list and it's gonna do everything that we just talked about.
SPEAKER_02I like that idea that have a huge impact on the right businesses huge impact. That's fantastic I think so too. Hey so before we wrap up um you know one of the things that you uh mentioned on the training that you did for the chief AI officer community uh I guess it was maybe last week was uh the different type you already talked about you've got everything from DIY to DWY to DFY right as far as like getting these results. Um and if I'm kind of putting you on the spot here, but you had um uh made a very compelling offer to the people who were in our community it was a very generous offer for them to uh find out more or even go ahead and start participating in not only the community but perhaps some of the services you've got um would you be willing to extend that to the listeners of the the using AI org podcast if that's okay with you yeah I'd be happy to to give some more information on that.
SPEAKER_01And by the way, a lot of your students had signed up I think we had a close like 20% and they are loving the new community and I'm I'm loving to see them inside. Everyone's participating they're making money they're implementing.
SPEAKER_02This is awesome.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for that was super successful. Uh it's leadgenj.com slash C A Io is gonna take you to the link and then the code C A I O is going to give you the discount and redeem the bonuses. So what are the bonuses? What's the offer? I believe it's 20% off our our full full price program. Yeah and the program that I push everybody into to start is generally my flagship offer. It's the insider's program. It's done with you and it's a lot of done for you components but mostly it's got all of those trainings that we just mentioned. Okay. So a couple of things that you're gonna need to be successful here. The community to get through all of the roadblocks and the coaching like you're gonna hit roadblocks there's nuance you need somebody to review your copy review your offer if something's not working you need people to tell you why. So in in there we give you all of the resources the community and the coaching to get you through those roadblocks all of the templates the plug and play the clay templates a lot of the N8N automations that we talked about. If you are interested in learning this from scratch like cold email theory deliverability uh what caused an email to go to spam versus to the inbox all the stuff that you're gonna need to know is in there. Now the on the more advanced end we we write your copy there's an AI copy we do infrastructure setups setting up all of your mailboxes uh we're working on deploying a full implementation uh so actually like putting it all in there for you so you press play lead databases it's all included in that program it's it's not me building it for you until it works. If you're interested in that just go to our site and schedule a call. Uh but for most people that insiders program gives you everything it's the fast track to success. So leadgenj.com slash C A I O.
SPEAKER_02So for the business owners listening here who are like I'm I don't even know what N8N means this is the type of thing that they could go like get their marketing director in there and say hey listen to this podcast right do the thing okay perfect. So for those of you that aren't necessarily uh interested in in DIY or diving that deep into because what what Jay mentioned several times was the word nuance. You can I mean I I'm on Twitter people are offering hey download my free N8N thing it's just like it was if everybody remembers uh on LinkedIn everywhere it used to be prompts download my prompts right and you download this list of a hundred prompts and they're crap right probably the same thing with these kind of like oh you can get that automation for free. Yeah it's gonna be crap. Right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah and it's especially if you don't know how to use it, how to manipulate it. It's all of the nuance that you need not only the honestly I don't even advise using templates. I would much rather you watch my video where it goes through like my thinking and building this thing. Yeah. Because you're gonna want to customize it for yourself almost every time a lot of times it means scratching the whole thing and starting over. Uh so yes that the the nuance is huge. Downloading a hundred best prompts or a hundred JSON templates it it never gets you anywhere. It's gonna sit in the folder on your desk I I have thousands of them I'm I fall fall victim to these these uh lead magnets all the time do I ever use them? No.
SPEAKER_02Jay uh uh thank you so much for taking the time um this convert the conversation that we had with our community was what really you know encouraged me to say more people need to hear about this approach because a lot of business owners are probably maybe they've heard about cold email and maybe some you know bro code or vibe coder has reached out to them or whatever. This is not that and and I as a business owner had been solicited by those I mean I'm certainly intrigued by what's possible but I can't trust my business to um like I I need vetted vendors I need people who are I mean this is how I feed my family right like I I can't take any risks here. And I I knew it was going to be a good conversation that we had with the community last week um but I like I couldn't believe how much I learned from the theory from the best practice everything that you shared on that. So um again thank you for taking time out to come on this but I want to let everybody know that uh if if you're looking um I I personally based on my experience with what happened last week what we've discussed today I would encourage uh consideration of of what Jay's doing it's it's the best that I've seen out there. So um you're doing great work man.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much Chris it is the number one skill you can learn right now if you're interested in AI automation. It's how to get clients using these using these tools. No brainer this is the fast track to doing that. It's a no-brainer. So Chris I've had a blast talking to you twice now. Yeah uh hopefully we hopefully much more and thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. Hey real quick before we wrap up um what's the best way for people to kind of plug in I know you create a lot of killer content. I've seen your your YouTube videos and stuff like that. Where should they go to plug in with what you're up to?
SPEAKER_01So if you go to leadgenj.com it's got all my links I'm leadgenj on YouTube on Instagram it's leadgen. That was a very expensive username but we got it. Uh so I'm I'm all over you won't you won't have to hunt too hard to find me. But please check out my recent masterclass on YouTube. Seven hours 20 minutes of me teaching everything I know about lead generation.
SPEAKER_02Wow it was released this this week took months to create I hope some people can uh go check that out that's a lot of content awesome thanks everybody we'll see you on the next episode thanks again Jay thanks for tuning in to using AI at work don't forget to subscribe for more conversations about how to use AI at work and a special thank you to our sponsor Chief AI Officer for empowering businesses with AI education and training. Visit their website for free AI readiness assessment and AI strategy guide to help you get started using AI at work. That's www.chieofficer com. Well thanks to our producer Evan Despalnier for making this episode possible. Follow us on Twitter at the handle usingai at work and visit www.usingai at work.com for free resources to help you harness AI in your role