Maximize AI Adoption and Upskilling with Proven AI Training with John Munsell

In this engaging episode, we explore the transformative potential of artificial intelligence in the world of marketing. With John Munsell, a leading expert in implementing AI-first strategies, we dive deep into the essentials of integrating AI into business practices.  

• Importance of adopting an AI-first mindset 

• Strategies for implementing AI across different departments 

• Understanding the gap between perceived and actual AI adoption 

• Key roles in AI governance and operations 

• Elevating productivity through AI integration 

• The critical role of training in cultivating an AI culture 

• Encouraging innovation and collaboration within organizations 

• Examples of companies successfully leveraging AI 

• How to articulate customer problems effectively 

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Guest Contact Information: 

https://ingrain.ai/ 

https://www.bizzuka.com/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwmunsell/ 

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/  

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Chapters

• 11:13 Getting Started with AI Marketing
• 29:49 Navigating Business Changes
• 49:02 Discovering an AI Culture First Approach
• 1:37:32 The Importance of Adopting AI
• 2:37:11 Effective AI Integration Strategies
• 4:25:33 Challenges and Opportunities with AI
• 4:51:14 Training Your Team for AI Success
• 5:25:54 Joining the InGrain Community
• 6:11:12 Secrets to Articulating Customer Problems

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2: 0:17

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. A couple of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. A couple of quick housekeeping. We may be rebranding the podcast again.

Speaker 2: 0:29

I brought on a new project manager and you know, based upon what y'all have said, we are going to make some more changes, so just be looking out for that. Thank you for being patient. As Chris left, we're kind of moving in a new direction and to continue our series. I know something that's very hot for everyone is AI and what's going to happen with that, and as we're doing this series, I'm bringing in all kinds of movers and shakers and experts in the industry.

Speaker 2: 1:02

I ran across John Munsell with InGrain AI, who is teaching people how to be an AI culture first, or in your business and your company, how to have an AI culture first. I think it's really important, based on kind of a case-shaped approach of either you're going to adopt AI and you're going to rise and you're going to take more market share, and you're going to adopt AI and you're going to rise and you're going to take more market share and you're going to grow, or you're going to keep doing exactly what you're doing, and those other people are going to pass you by and it's going to become increasingly more difficult. So I would encourage you all to listen up to John. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I think everybody will listen attentively to what you have to say as they're trying to figure out what to do with this new thing called AI. That hasn't actually been new, but it's new to the public since ChatGVT.

Speaker 3: 1:58

Right, no good to be on. I appreciate you having me on, Matt. I spent 25 years in digital marketing, so I've been doing this a while myself.

Speaker 2: 2:07

Yeah, it's constantly evolving. It's a moving target. Certainly, there's a lot going on with large language models and really all the search engines are AI. That's essentially what you're doing is you're training the model to understand who you are and what you do and what your expertise, authority and trust is, to rank you higher, to be the right answer for a number of different questions. And I really call SEO the language of AI in a lot of ways, with schema and the things that you're doing, you're just you're just trying to better communicate with the large language model and and it creates a feedback loop.

Speaker 2: 2:53

And you know, what we're seeing with a lot of businesses is they're really starting to get serious and say, hey, we, we need an AI program. How are we gonna do this? We don't want you using, maybe, public language models, we don't want you to add to the database proprietary data, and so people are getting more sophisticated in what they're doing. I'm actually seeing a number of companies start to roll out AI initiatives and I think it's really gonna start to roll out AI initiatives and I think it's really going to start to impact the bottom line. I think also, even with some publicly traded companies as they start to harness AI, you're going to see some real growth.

Speaker 2: 3:37

So Salesforce for example is one example that I'm following pretty closely.

Speaker 3: 3:42

Yeah Well, if you followed Salesforce then you may or may not know that they just bought gosh Respell Respellai. So big fan of Respell. Respell does AI automations and AI agents and when they acquired them I was like oh good for them, because we had the uh, the founder of Respell, on our our uh, we have a mastermind. We had him speak to our mastermind last year, so I was happy for him. But on the other end I was like God, I hope they didn't one of those deals where they bought them to just trash them because they were in their way, because it was a really good product. But I got a good point.

Speaker 2: 4:26

I think the agents is. I mean, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing. I mean I am spending a bit of my free time playing around with agents, because I think anybody that's doing knowledge work or computer work. I mean there's even tools where I can if there's anything somewhat repetitive that I'm doing, I can teach an agent how to do what it is that I'm doing and then give it a little autonomy and eventually that could be a little employee right there, right.

Speaker 2: 4:59

And so what I see people doing and I haven't dug into it enough, but they're building out full teams right With different specialties doing different things. And I think the VA space, you know, the customer service space, like even with Salesforce, the sales space I mean I've seen some sales agents that are blowing my mind on what they can do and then you're able to link all this stuff together. And then even ChatGVT just came out for 200 bucks a month with their agent program and I'm just going, man, this is moving really, really fast.

Speaker 3: 5:42

Yeah, yeah, it's moving really fast, but I think it's like anything else. You got to crawl, walk, run right. Running is the agent side, all right. You got to figure out how to walk before you get to doing agents, and then you got to figure out how to crawl first. So a lot of people are still. They haven't even addressed the crawl stage. So what they do is what I would call untethered AI. So, in other words, they just ask AI to write them a blog post and they get something that sounds like AI, and if you just let that go into an agent now, you're going to have a crappy sounding copy at scale you know, which is going to really screw with your SEO as well. So that's where you need to back down and figure out how do you actually prompt the AI to? How do you structure a prompt so that the AI not only sounds like you but actually shares your thought leadership inside of whatever you produce and has the intellect to know how to optimize that right?

Speaker 2: 6:48

well, I think that's where you you're. You're uploading uh data files right?

Speaker 3: 6:54

um, yes and no right. So so if step one is just learning how to get the ai, uh prompting down so fair enough, okay.

Speaker 2: 7:05

So if we're, if we're, if we're breaking it down, it's about you know.

Speaker 3: 7:08

So step one is that. But in order to do that, you need to know what goes into a good prompt in order to get the output down. And what we teach is a framework that we call the AI strategy canvas, and it teaches you and you can download it for free on our website but it teaches you what blocks of information are necessary in order to get the best output out of AI. Once you understand that, then you move into the next stage, which would be what I would call the walk fast stage. And the walk fast stage is building like a custom GPT or a Gemini Gem or a Claude project, because now you've got repetitive stuff that you need to do, but in those GPTs you can upload the documents that you need so that the AI has stuff to pull on, but you still need to have the right framework for what that prompt looks like. All right, so now you've got a machine that's built. Let's say to you know, I'm going to stick with blog posts for a while, so you've got a machine that's going to do the blog posts. Once you've got it to build the blog posts, you could also have it write LinkedIn posts and other social media posts based on your blog post. Right, you can have it SEO, et cetera. But then what happens next is you might want to do it a little better and a little faster. And then you can start linking these GPTs together. Right? So, inside of one context pane, inside of chat GPT, you know you can call another GPT.

Speaker 3: 8:46

Right, so you can start with one that maybe analyzes the topic that you're trying to do, pulls in current research on it, and then the next one you're calling in your blog post writer, and so now it writes the blog post, but in it, as part of your GPT, what you want it to do is ask you for your thoughts on the subject.

Speaker 3: 9:08

So the first one analyzes it, brings in a lot of data, summarizes it, and you look over that and now you can inject your thoughts. But the next GPT writes like you, knows how to write a post, knows how to structure a post, knows how to do everything, and then it starts to write it. But if you create the gpt the right way, it does it in sections. So you don't want it to try to write it in one fell swoop. You want it to write it first, create an outline and then create the sections. That way you can get a bigger blog post, otherwise you're going to end up with a 500 word blog post that doesn't go anywhere, right? So now, once you've done all that, now you've got a really solid blog post, you call in another GPT, which then SEOs the post or gives you tips for SEOing it, right so?

Speaker 2: 9:53

you can do all this. You're breaking apart the tokens in a way that that you're you're having one action that you're optimizing for, or one thing that you're doing, so it becomes more of a, a refinement process or a sequencing that that builds out, and then, and then, I guess, after you do that right you, you automate it.

Speaker 3: 10:18

Yeah, exactly, you know what I'm doing is I'm operating it from the front end. At this point I'm just creating custom GPTs. I'm operating it from the front end. I got my process down, I've got my outputs down. Now, once I get all that, then I can turn around and basically duplicate that on the playground and run APIs and create automations to where it does all that every morning. For me, let's say, I could literally have it every morning go scour the web for current information, come back, give me all that stuff. So then I just look at it, approve it, hit another button and then it rolls and then eventually it populates a Google Doc that I would then look over and figure out how to go pop it into a WordPress blog or something like that Makes sense.

Speaker 2: 11:04

Yeah, no, that that that's what I'm working on is is is taking that workflow and then being able to to be able to push it where you're, you're loading in, maybe topics or you're approving topics, and it's pulling one, and then, and then the output is it, it gets published, Right, and then you know, I I do believe there's other agents, which I haven't quite figured out yet, that can make sure that it's optimized with inside, maybe WordPress or something like that. I've figured stuff out that if you're not building it inside a builder, right, you're building it in that kind of word text on the backend or like visual composer. There's a lot you can do with that, with API calls and things, and so, yeah, I just, I guess you know, certainly I see the opportunity in this and I think a lot of people listening see it as well, and a lot of people are building this. But at the same time, I'm terrified on the other end of it, right, I'm terrified that I'm not moving fast enough, that other people are moving faster, um, that, um, you know, can this get away from me? Because I, I, I constantly um read and do webinars and go to conferences to stay on top of it, cause there's been.

Speaker 2: 12:25

And if we just stick with SEO for a minute, you know, in the last, let's say, 36 months, there's been more changes in the last 15, 20 years, and so actually tomorrow I'm having Bruce Clay on my podcast. So I'm, you know, father of SEO, and you know I mean things are just moving so, so rapidly to keep up. And then you know, once these agents start to, let's say, 12 months from now, are kind of fully launched and people are, are, are operating that space, like, are operating that space, like I'm like that's got to be me, right, and if it's not me, you know who is doing it. And and they're going to be so far ahead, right, they're going to be so far ahead. And so you know, you got to constantly.

Speaker 2: 13:19

It's a moving target, but it's moving a lot faster now and it's like how do you stay on on top of this? In a way that, like you know, seo, seo is dead. You know SEO, you know long live the king, kind of thing, like. But this is like, no, this is moving exponentially in a direction that's going to fundamentally change how things are done. It's not just, like you know, further on the plot line in that general direction. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3: 13:53

I don't know.

Speaker 2: 13:53

That's at least how I'm viewing it. And so that's where a lot of my time is going is to, you know, really figure this out. So we're operating at the highest level internally at our agency.

Speaker 3: 14:08

Well, I think that's really where specialization is going to be even more important. If you try to be a generalist, it's going to be very hard to succeed, but if you become a specialist, that's where you're going to have some domination. So I mean, like, for instance, I had a friend of mine say I just don't, man, there's so much happening. You know, he's on our mastermind group and he was like there's so much going on, I don't know what to do. Do I need to do this? Do I need to do this, this, this, this? You know, and I was like dude, you're going to be a master of none. We need to drill down to what it is that you do every day in your job to make you more effective and then turn around and focus on the AI tools around that and then become the specialist in that for your audience. That's the only way you become a master at something is by solving your own problem first right, and you've got to do that over and over again.

Speaker 3: 15:06

So if I were going to be so backing up, I've had an agency for the last 25 years and we became a.

Speaker 3: 15:15

We start off as a software company and then became a digital marketing agency and I sold the agency part of that off three years ago to just teach people how to use AI, because I knew that was the new direction. But I have a lane that I want to stay in, for that I could be really broad and then my head would explode because, I mean God, every hour a new AI tool is launched, so you just can't keep up with that. A new AI tool is launched, so you just can't keep up with that. But what you do have to do is figure out how to master you know a handful of them and be really effective at executing a certain lane of things, and that's where you can provide more value. But you know, SEO I think it's going to change. Its name is really what I think is going to happen. I'd love to be the guy that coins it, but it ain't going to be SEO anymore. It's going to be AIEO.

Speaker 2: 16:11

Yeah yeah, no, I've heard that and I you know, over the years, certainly, like I actually started on the paid side of things and then really fell in love with SEO side of things and then really fell in love with SEO. But also one of the biggest things is that, you know, I would say we really focus on lead generation. Right, and lead generation is even broader than SEO, and SEO that definition has expanded as well. Right, Because you're talking to the social media, large language models and algorithms, and really it's like how that orchestra gets put together.

Speaker 2: 16:51

And so there's, you know, people say it takes a village to do SEO, right, and certainly, you know, building out different agents that have different specialties and we have quite a large seo team, but but we offer really kind of full, full marketing, like outsourced marketing for companies. So there's, there's a lot of things that we're doing that are ticking the box in in different areas and and so you know, there's not one thing right if, if you look at attribution, it's not, it's not the. You know, a lot of times AdWords gets, gets the attribution, but there's many other touch points that happen right and they're all across the funnel. You have, you know, people finding the brand in different ways, whether it be on social media, whether it be through SEO, whether it be through Reddit. We're seeing a lot of opportunity in Reddit, certainly, right now. We're actually internally. One of the big specialties that we've been developing is only 4% of all searches are AI right now, but we think people, we think that's going to grow.

Speaker 3: 18:07

I got a different stat just this morning. I got a different stat than that literally just this morning. It's up to 57% now. Now I don't know where that came from. Okay, wow, but it's frightening. Now I think what they're saying.

Speaker 2: 18:24

That's all searches though. So that's like hey, I think what they're saying, that's all searches, though. So that's like hey, how's the weather? Like those are not commercialized searches, I don't think.

Speaker 3: 18:31

I don't know, because, if you think about it, google has inserted Gemini, the.

Speaker 3: 18:38

AI overviews is that Right, yeah, I go to perplexity now before I go to anything, I also use ChatGPT's web search now, which is trying to go head to head with perplexity. It's changing way faster than 4%. I mean way, way more than that, and I think the behavior is changing as well. So, instead of people searching for keywords or maybe a little bit of long tail, they're getting paragraphical, if that's even a word. I mean people are describing in detail what they want, and that's where the new game is to really step up your content production to answer the questions that your customers ask in a sales process, and that is one of the GPTs that we've created. Also, I want to know what our customers ask, and then I want to create content around that, and I want that content to be deep enough to where I can publish it across every internet channel there is. Now, all of a sudden, I've got a fighting chance for an LLM to pick me up when somebody says how do I do X, y, z Like, for instance, one of the top producing pages that we have on our website right now is how much does AI training for a business cost? That's the blog post, right, that's a pretty damn long tail, but it's a pretty focused one as well. So those are the kinds of things that you need to be learning how to produce, and AI will let you do that faster. But, again, given that all the content now is really becoming I don't know, the majority of it's getting produced by AI and a lot of it's being produced by AI without a human in the loop, and the majority of the stuff that AI LLMs are trained on is the the massive content that was written, say, prior to 2022.

Speaker 3: 20:43

Right, the thing that it doesn't know is what excellence looks like. It just knows what quantity looks like. So, consequently, what it writes by default is average or below average, right? Sometimes it's repetitive garbage that it just keeps hearing, and so, if you tell it to write a sales page, it's going to sound like a crappy infomercial from the 90s. A sales page it's going to sound like a crappy infomercial from the 90s. So we want to be able to know ourselves, as SEO experts or copywriters, what excellence looks like, so that we can drive it out of AI, because the real race is going to be AI versus AI. Right, you've got AI detectors out there detecting AI written content and they're kicking it out, right? And so now you've got to have AI that beats that AI. It's a radar detector, radar to gun war, you know.

Speaker 2: 21:31

Yeah, no, I. I mean I think that when, when you, when you look at how Google's changed so, so one is Google said I felt like they waved the white flag Right and they were kind of it was kind of like no AI content. So one is Google said I felt like they waved the white flag right and it was kind of like no AI content and it's like okay, ai content, but it's got to add value right. And then they also changed it where it's parsing the entire page right for the answer. It's not just saying this answer, and so it's going to kind of the zero search result and you're seeing the AI overview.

Speaker 2: 22:04

Here's the interesting thing Google's losing money per search. Okay, they're actually spending electricity and energy and that's why I think they're going after the nuclear power plants and stuff like that, because it's costing them money to produce those AI overviews. So even a search that they don't make money on is costing them to offer a better answer, because they don't want people well, leaving search, because those ads is what makes all their money. And I think to your point, what I'm, what I'm seeing is Well, one is if you're qualifying for the core keyword, okay, and how strong that is in the rankings, you qualify for the long tail keywords and there's hundreds searches, like you said.

Speaker 2: 22:51

Now, if you hit on something that's a little honey hole, you want to build some content around it. Certainly, but really 25% of all searches today are still brand new searches that Google's never seen before, so then it's pulling from all the existing content. It has to better answer the question, but I do think you hit it head on in the sense that you know what each page is trying to do is answer that sales process as best as possible, and so you're trying to figure that out. Now to shift gears a little bit, because I really thought what you're doing is interesting. I want to switch gears from kind of content and SEO to more kind of okay, businesses that are developing an AI-first culture and kind of where do they get started? What does that look like? What is the definition, right, of an AI-first culture and maybe some examples of that? I would love to kind of transition into that if we could.

Speaker 3: 23:57

Yeah, yeah, absolutely so. If you read online, you'll see all these stats that 86% or 87% whatever companies have adopted AI. But then if you get in front of an audience of, say, small to medium sized businesses and you ask for a show of hands of who's using AI, that number drops to about 30%. So don't believe what you read. The adoption curve is going on the way up, but what they're all the news I think they're reporting is what's the Fortune 100 doing? I don't know about you. I'm not in the Fortune 100. And the vast majority of our clients aren't either. So they're all small to medium-sized businesses or small to medium-sized enterprises, and their adoption rate is think of it this way everybody's essentially self-taught if they're using it at all.

Speaker 2: 24:59

Right, pardon me, sorry sorry, sorry, there's a little delay here. So like I mean I would say, if you're in a Fortune 100 company and they're using Copilot, right or whatever Microsoft Copilot, I mean they're using AI in there which certainly is a great use.

Speaker 2: 25:16

So making sure your grammar and your writing, your writing, your emails are, are very polished. But I would say that, depending on the survey, like I would say, oh, yeah, they've totally implemented AI, right. And then I would say the small businesses hey, I asked chat GBT for whatever, and it's like you know, have you used AI this week? Okay, yeah, I used AI this week. So I agree with you from an adoption curve standpoint. You know, I I don't know my mom.

Speaker 2: 25:47

This is a funny story. My mom was one of the first employees of Microsoft and when those kinds of red boxes came out, before red box kind of dominated the market, there was a bunch of these coming out and I was going to buy some of them. I was out in Florida and I was like, hey, I think that these are going to be good, and my mom was like no way, no way, waste of money, shouldn't do that. Everything's going to be streaming, right, netflix kind of this is pre Netflix. Yeah, and and she was right, the majority of it is. But there's still red boxes at at pharmacies and and and grocery stores today, because that that tail is is so long right and yeah now.

Speaker 2: 26:32

So I think this adoption curve is going to take a lot longer. But I'm telling you right now is if you're at the front end of that thing, I mean you know you're gonna get massive, massive advantage, massive boost and I agree, yeah, and then it might just get away from us like who knows? Like I think, like I, I don't know where digital agencies are going to go in 36 months you know yeah I mean I don't need it, but I know.

Speaker 3: 26:59

I mean, you know, to kind of go to your question of what's an AI first company look like it's beyond co-pilot. Ok, an AI first company is where every employee is thinking, how do I get AI to help me do this faster? And it could be just ideation, right, like I have. I have GPTs that I've created to help me think through problems. I have gpts that I've created for our organization that inside the gpt is just about. You know, every document they would need that was describe our products, our services, our processes or whatever. So they can use it to either create content on one side or they can use it to ask the AI a question instead of me. You know those are the kinds of uses Like I was on a live stream this morning and that we do by default is all of our well, virtually all of our sales conversations are held over Zoom because you know we I think we have two employees in Lafayette.

Speaker 3: 28:14

Everybody else is all over the country or the world, so we record all those on Zoom, but we always have a note taker present. If I'm in front of somebody, I use this little device. If you've ever seen that before, it's called a plowed note P-L-A-U-D. Go get one. They're great. They also have this goofy little wearable version here, all right. So you can take that into any conference room and record the thing.

Speaker 3: 28:40

It will give you a transcript. You can create your own customization for analyzing the transcript. Those things are invaluable. So we take the transcript the minute. You know, we usually use Fathom, but there are others, meetgeek, you know there's a ton of them but we take that transcript even though Fathom has its own summary. That transcript, even though Fathom has its own summary, we don't use its summary. We've created our own. We analyze it so that we understand how well we did in the sales presentation, because the GPT we created knows all of our products and services and so it's going to analyze that call and say where did we miss an opportunity? It's also going to analyze that call and help us understand where the prospect was coming on. What were the what were are coming from, what were some of the subtle signals that we may have missed in the conversation? It'll bring that all out to us and let us understand that sales call better.

Speaker 3: 29:33

And then we take that same thing, we roll it into a different GPT and that GPT generates a sales proposal all right, based on everything it knows about that conversation, then we take that one and we roll it into a different GPT. And that GPT generates a sales proposal all right, based on everything it knows about that conversation. Then we take that one and we roll it into a different GPT. And that GPT now analyzes the prospect and guess what it does? It makes that prospect a persona. So we make it generate a disk profile and an enneagram Look, there goes my thumb again. And so now it then knows how our well, theoretically it knows how our prospect is thinking and reacting. And so then we tell the GPT to become that persona.

Speaker 3: 30:14

Instead of the theoretical persona we started with in marketing, now we have the actual persona. And so then we have that persona. We have GPT assume that personality and read our proposal, and then we have it come up with the objections that the persona would come up with and the questions it had. And then we have it rewrite the proposal to address that. And we go through that cycle three times until now we have a proposal that's refined to hopefully beat every objection that our prospect would potentially have, and then we move into another one that then generates an email that also refines it based on the persona that we can send to the prospect and say, hey, we got a proposal ready. You had all these issues, we've addressed them. When can we meet, right?

Speaker 3: 30:56

So all of that stuff is done by AI, and that's thinking AI first. Right, that stuff is done by AI and that's thinking AI first right. That's. That's not just saying, hey, how can I make this a really fast copywriter and stuff a bunch of boilerplate in there. I've now got a proposal that is so customized and personalized it's. You know, you, you don't get that old school agency world that I used to have. I used to have a whole lot of boilerplate and I would just have a summary of what they wanted. And here's what we're going to sell you.

Speaker 2: 31:23

Yeah, no, I really like that in that getting in the mind of the prospect and figuring out what those questions might be based upon the available data, and if you're bringing actual information in from from the meeting with them, uh, you're putting in really quality data, so you're not even guessing and and then and then answering those objections prior to the case. Cause I, I think you know, when I'm training my sales guys, um, or consultants, I guess, is that I think a lot of times they, you know you got to get on the call with the client and you got to you got to understand and see what those objections are. Because you know, if they walk away and you don't know what their objections are and they've got all the information on the proposal you know they're off making their own decision of you know if you're the right fit for them or not, or there's questions that they have that they might not have answered or solved, and so I would say that the success rate would go up dramatically utilizing that process you just described.

Speaker 3: 32:36

Well, I mean, I always tell people marketing is the new sales right. They're intertwined now to a degree you've never seen before. So with AI, we have the ability to research our market and create a persona that we actually use in marketing, as opposed to, as an agency, charging somebody for a persona that we don't ever look at again. We can force AI to use that persona, but before a sales call, in order to get on the call with somebody, you can use AI to really analyze that prospect. So you can do account-based marketing to a whole new level.

Speaker 2: 33:16

Yeah, you can use social media analysis to build a profile based upon all that information.

Speaker 3: 33:20

Yeah, I can look at their Twitter feed. I can look at their LinkedIn profile. I can do a whole lot of other stuff. I can look at their bio. That's on the website. I can look at their website itself. And then I can turn around and if my AI knows all the products and services that I sell, I can say what problems do they have that I can potentially solve and then build a profile around that. And now I've got a whole better way to make that phone call I've had. You know, every now and then a spammer gets through to me and wants to sell me something, and then they go what do you do? And I'm like you don't know. You called me and you don't know what I do.

Speaker 2: 33:57

They're just going down down the list or the phone's ringing.

Speaker 3: 34:01

There's no excuse for that now, right, there's no excuse, right. And so it gives you an opener that like you've never had before in terms of an advantage you know exactly what their business does and you can get that research within 45 seconds of the phone call and brief yourself really quickly with some really powerful stuff. Really quickly with some really powerful stuff. But imagine starting your day as a sales rep and you've already got the 50 or 100 people you're supposed to call today and you've got a solid briefing on them before you make any dial and it tells you exactly what pains, problems and frustrations they may have that you can solve. That's powerful.

Speaker 2: 34:39

Yeah, I mean I used to do cold call selling and we were calling 60 to 80 people a day and when LinkedIn came out that was kind of like the first iteration of it, of actually knowing some kind of information. Many times it was like calling people in a directory, right, and you just had a name and a title and you had to actually build out who that was and their background and and all the persona so you have to hope they're still alive and they still work for the company yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, is that information even correct?

Speaker 2: 35:10

like, right, and so they're, you know, uh, and and then you know, and I, I think everything's reversing right. So I was certainly of like, hey, you want to buy a chicken, you want to buy a chicken, you want to buy a chicken, you want to buy a chicken, you want to buy a chicken. You're going to find someone that wants to buy a chicken and you're trying to reach as many people as possible. So I started using digital marketing from a leverage standpoint to, you know, customize a one to many message and get that same message that had a high response rate out to as many people as possible. Now we're going to the opposite of this spectrum. That well, I think it's expected, and certainly I get annoyed, uh, even getting phone calls or emails when it's not personalized, right, and you can do personalization at scale. Now, and, um, you know, I, I, I think that, um, that's where everything's going to go, cause it's not. If you're getting sold to something you actually need and it's personalized and it's solving a problem for you, you welcome it, but when it's just random kind of spaghetti on the wall, that's when I think it gets annoying. So I want to transition, if we have time here, to. We've talked about maybe the front front end marketing on top of the funnel content SEO. We touched on that. Then we touched on the sales component, which I think is what's going to really make waves, right, and, like some of these AIs, too, that are doing the outreach and that are like so there's human checks and balances in your process and I think it's phenomenal. I've seen these AIs that do the outreach and can go back and forth and have a conversation and it absolutely blows my mind. If you don't have a complicated sell, I think you're more talking B2B and I think that there's so many industries that are B2B that haven't taken advantage of marketing like B2C companies had.

Speaker 2: 37:07

I actually have another podcast that I do in the oil and gas space and I do it with the person that founded the agency.

Speaker 2: 37:16

He's got the largest oil and gas podcast.

Speaker 2: 37:18

It's called the Oil and Gas Sales and marketing podcast, because you know everybody's original and oil and gas um, and and we actually talk about how to integrate, uh, you know, marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads, because a lot of people think marketing is just, you know, uh, graphic design and and uh, uh, promo stuff right and and and how far it's become and and how you can land hundred million dollar contracts through Inbound Right, and I think that for the CMOs that are open, it's starting to absolutely change the game and I think that there's so much opportunity in that area to address.

Speaker 2: 37:58

I would love to break this podcast into a third here and talk about those AI first cultures of maybe some use cases of a company that's integrated in AI into what they're doing and how it can exponentially help them solve a problem or add more value or do something in the whole business case of like a kind of a full stack integration into the core DNA of what they're doing. Because I think that you know sales is one thing and I think there's probably right now, like you said, people saying that they do it maybe a little bit more lip service than you know. Hey, we are. This is integrated into our workflow and I would love to hear some case studies and examples about businesses that have adapted that and kind of transformed their business.

Speaker 3: 38:57

Yeah, I can tell you about the people that have gone through our training and how it's shifted the way they do, and actually I've given a lot of examples of those in the book that I just released, pre-released to the public. It'll go on sale on Amazon sometime in March, but I released it and the book's called In-Grain AI Strategy Through Execution.

Speaker 2: 39:20

Is that right?

Speaker 3: 39:21

Yeah, yeah, and you can go to ingrainai and get a copy of it for a while. And I'm giving people pre-release copies, digital copies, for free. So if anybody hears this, they can go grab that at ingrainai. But what's happening is, as you know, you've been playing around with it, matthew, for a while, right? So you've been playing around with ChatGPT for a couple of years. You probably played around prior to that with Copyai, or Jarvis as it was called before. It's Jasper, yeah, oh, yeah, right, so you've been around the block, but you're like every other marketer. They're like oh wow, this is going to speed up my job.

Speaker 3: 40:02

So the majority of businesses got their first taste of AI through the marketing department, which is way different from normal. So now what you have to have is you have to have other people in the organization going. Hmm, how can I use this? Right? Sales is a logical one, but there are so many sales teams that are far behind that they don't realize they can use it. Hr is another one. Customer service is another one. Finance is another one. Legal is another one. I could go on and on. We teach skills tracks in each of those disciplines, by the way. But go ahead. You had a question, Matt.

Speaker 2: 40:44

So the biggest challenge I've seen, depending on the size of the company, is real buying from the top. Right, you're bringing something new in, right, and you want to get it integrated. Like I can tell you, I know some companies that are acquiring other companies. I can tell you, I know some companies that are acquiring other companies and, like you said, I think they're just kind of acquiring them to take out the competition because they can. And I haven't seen a lot of companies fully integrate those teams and so a lot of times they operate kind of independently and even their CRMs are not really talking to each other kind of independently and even their CRMs are not really talking to each other.

Speaker 2: 41:23

So I think that from a, when I say lip service, I kind of mean yeah, you know, yeah, we're going to do ai, yeah, like ai is going to change the game, but but it's got to come from the executive team down and saying we're, we're, you know what we need to do, a whiteboarding session and we need to, you know, completely rethink how, how we do this and and what are the steps and where can we add ai to this to help increase that efficiency, because if you have some champion right, that's trying to pull everybody else along right and everybody's not bought in and it's not being kind of forced from the top down. I think the success rate is going to be mixed.

Speaker 3: 42:11

Yeah, yeah. So here's what we're seeing. Um, okay, not to totally age myself, but, um, I'm, um, I'm in that age where the the people my age are the ones that are now running the company. Okay, give or take 10 years, let's say all I'm stunned at how many of them are like I don't know what this AI thing is. And all of the younger people are like we need to use this. So what we get is this influx of C-suiters coming to our training and saying I need to get my head around this so that I can filter this through the organization and manage it. So that's basically.

Speaker 3: 42:56

Step one is getting the leadership team together and helping them understand. You can go anywhere and get these little trainings that teach you why it's important and what it is that's useless. You got to move beyond that. You need to know how it can apply and how to do it and how to speak about it at a consistent level across the organization. And that's what we try to teach. We try to just go okay, look, I'm not going to teach you the history of LLMs. I'm not going to teach you the history of machine learning. I'm not going to teach you about robotics. What I am going to teach you to do is use AI tonight and do something, okay, and and then, by the time you're finished with our course, you will have built an AI automation. Well, not necessarily an automation, you would have built a GPT or a series of them.

Speaker 3: 43:49

So that's the capstone project, right? I want them, I want the C-sweeter, to know what it feels like to have an AI do something that took some task of theirs, that would take a week to do, and then all of a sudden have it done in an hour, or something that would take three hours to do and have it done in about a minute and a half. When they see that happen, their heads explode and they go okay, now I got to get everybody using this. But how do I get them to use it so that we have shareable, scalable knowledge? Well, that becomes a process. Right, it's like in any other organization.

Speaker 3: 44:26

The way you scale is by developing SOPs, standard operating procedures that are documented. Everybody if somebody leaves, somebody else can come in, know the process, get onboarded and execute with excellence. Right, you have to do the same thing with AI. And again, you know, once they understand that framework and that foundation, then it starts to really scale and then you get. If you develop it right, then you get HR going to marketing and going hey, you know how you wrote that job description over here. Can I take that prompt? Because now I want to write a job description that meets the legal requirements for our documentation inside, right, and then you get somebody in legal like this is a whack incident you were talking about.

Speaker 3: 45:10

You're in the oil and gas space. One of the guys that went through our training is a chemical engineer or a chemist, I can't remember which. He works for some of the largest oil companies in the world. He develops chemicals for them to use in various rigs and other things. He applies for somewhere between 15 and 20 patents a year and he's got a software application that costs $15,000 a year to help him create these these patents. And then he hands it off to an attorney who does a patent search to determine whether or not there are conflicts with his patent, and so they employ a team of legal big business in our training Okay, no-transcript, there are no conflicts.

Speaker 3: 46:27

And then he just hands it to his attorney. So he terminated a $15,000 software application and instead of spending $3,000 to $5,000 per patent in legal fees, he's paying now about $800 to $1,000 in legal fees. And when he hands off the brief to the attorney, they're like whoa, no, I can absolutely see that we built something like that for content gap analysis.

Speaker 2: 46:52

Absolutely, we built something like that for content gap analysis. But I think solving a bigger problem with more zeros associated with it, more value I can absolutely see that kind of scenario happen over and over again. So not just more productivity, but a cost savings based on the current process of what they're currently doing. Okay, so we're kind of getting to the end here.

Speaker 2: 47:20

I want to just understand a little bit more and I think for the audience as well of kind of you know the service offering you have from a corporate training standpoint. I want to understand a little bit more about maybe you know you find a business that needs it, they probably hire you, and how do you kind of graft your organization to that company? Because you know a lot of this stuff can't be implemented or solved overnight, and so you know there's a real process to change mindset to get some of these workflows and SOPs implemented. So I'm curious, kind of okay, you have a great community, it looks like you're doing corporate training, you're getting people into workshops, you have office hours. I totally get all that. I want to know a little bit more about the direct engagement right, they're like they want it done with you, right, they want it done with you to get it implemented, kind of?

Speaker 3: 48:22

how are you approaching that? Yeah, good question. So what we typically do is we want one or more of the executive team to go through our business leader skills track. So we have a business leader skills track. So we have a business leader skills track, one for sale, one for marketing, one for legal, blah, blah, blah. We got 10 different skills tracks that they go through, but everybody goes through the same foundational training and then they go into their unique sales track.

Speaker 3: 48:44

I want a business leader to go through the business leader sales track first and then they would engage us to help them come up with a plan to push it throughout the organization and what they'll understand as they go through that because it's recorded. They can kind of go at their own leisure, so they don't have to go suck out three days of their time and get to a power webinar or a workshop. They can go through it at their own pace and now they have a really good understanding. And then they say, okay, now we need your help to establish AI governance. Depending on how big they are, if it's a small company, it's a different, different deal. Then they want to get leadership Um, maybe the management team, um, trained up on it. You you have to have internal champions, and the you know, know this from being an SEO.

Speaker 3: 49:37

When we started our company, the one thing that we noticed is that every business that wanted a website, the IT department handled the website initially, and you're like just because it's software doesn't mean it needs to be in IT Right and gradually, it loosened up and said OK, well, we'll let marketing do it, because now there's WordPress, now there's a UI, but we're still going to control the engine. We'll let you play around with the UI.

Speaker 2: 50:09

It's a security thing, right, and that's security first. And so we've developed workarounds to help get a better action. Yeah, everybody kind of does, and that's what's happening now right In these organizations.

Speaker 3: 50:20

The workaround is the worker goes in and logs into their own personal account and now you have security risks. So we want to. What we want to try to do is create AI governance that has some rules but a lot of guidelines, and we want to have oversight that's not handcuffing but empowering. So I don't really want IT overseeing AI governance. I want them having a voice in it. But what I do want in AI governance is somebody who is an innovator and a power user who really gets the impact, because it has to move fast. So you have to have the right person overseeing it, and so we teach people what that looks like. I go with that in great detail in the book. All right. So now, once we got AI oversight in the right hands, with the right mindset, now I can get all the people on board and they actually get excited when they go oh, this is going to make my job easier. This is so amazing, right. And so now what they've seen is people really get excited about learning it, about executing it, and, if you structure it the right way, they share amongst themselves instead of compete with themselves. They share that knowledge and that expertise. And that's when you start to get this AI first thinking. And again, AI first thinking is not just how do I get it to write a blog post, it is how do I get it to do? How do I think about going to AI first to get my idea or my question answered, instead of bugging my boss or instead of doing my old school research, how do I just ask ChatGPT a better question?

Speaker 3: 52:07

And then, if you're in sales, the stuff that you can do now with multimodal AI is also insane. You know you were talking about outbound sales calls. You could like salesai. You can, for I think it's $2,500 a month. You can get an outbound calling AI agent that will replace three outbound appointment setters and you could use it for setting appointments or you could use it for just discovering who the decision maker is.

Speaker 3: 52:36

You could use it for a lot of things. You could build your own also, but the reporting tools inside of salesai are pretty, pretty slick. We had him come talk to our mastermind. It's cool stuff. But imagine in your own organization when you create that, that GPT. You can just do this with a GPT. You don't even have to go out and build an agent for this. But if you build a GPT that understands all your sales materials and all that stuff, you can now use your phone and have an oral conversation with that GPT as a role-playing agent. I mean, you can't quite clone that guy's voice and put it in the GPT yet If you wanted to spend some money, you could build an agent.

Speaker 2: 53:22

You could do a lot of that. Yeah, yeah, I mean, anything's possible.

Speaker 3: 53:26

Yeah, a cheap way is to just do a chat, GPT. But yeah, you can do that. It's amazing.

Speaker 2: 53:32

Well, I mean, when I went into sales role. It's amazing. Well, I mean, that's when I went into sales role. Playing was a huge part of it, right, and AI could analyze what you're saying, how your response rates are, what you should use in response. I mean, I can see so many applications as an adjunct, not just a replacement, with AI. So, completely, this has just been great. This has been really fascinating. John InGrainai, how do people get in touch with you if they want to learn more? Join the community? Get a copy of the book.

Speaker 3: 54:06

Sure, yeah, I mean you can go to InGrainai and you can join the community. I think all you have to do to really join the community is just request a copy of the book. For now you can. You can join our mastermind group. You can catch me on LinkedIn I think I'm JW Munsell on LinkedIn or or go to the other corporate website, which is bazooka B I Z Z U K acom. That's where we do all the corporate training and stuff.

Speaker 2: 54:32

So Well, I don't know about this one, what is called bazooka?

Speaker 3: 54:36

yeah, b-i-z-z-u-k-a dot com. Yeah, that's the company that we've had for 20 plus years now very cool, all right.

Speaker 2: 54:48

Well, um, I think this was an absolutely fascinating conversation. Um, I usually ask people what's one unknown secret of internet marketing that you want to leave the audience with?

Speaker 3: 55:03

An unknown secret man. I don't have an unknown secret because I haven't figured it out yet. I don't have an unknown secret because I haven't figured it out yet. The unknown secret to me is going to be figuring out what's the new SEO. To get me at the top of perplexity, you know, without going through all kinds of gymnastics, you know, I've seen other trainers go and illustrate how they can key in all this stuff and all of a sudden their website comes up and I'm like, yeah, that's because you wrote seven paragraphs. You know, I want to know how to really build the fly trap, you know, for the new SEO, which is going to be all LLM based. But I don't have that unlocked yet.

Speaker 2: 55:53

I'm working on it. Yeah, no, so we can talk a little bit more offline. I actually that's been where our focus has been right. So certainly, ai agents are a little bit newer, but over the last 18 months, that was one of the first things that clients started asking and we were curious ourself is things that clients started asking and we were curious ourself is okay, there's going to be one answer typically Now Perplexity. Their model's a little bit different. Right, they're pushing out their own affiliate links, which is pretty amazing from a revenue standpoint and there's definitely some balancing act issues with it that I think people have. But they're monetizing these links, um, and it's quite dramatic based on the number of searches they have, on how many affiliate links they can push out. But uh, I had a client.

Speaker 2: 56:42

Uh, we've, we've. We get about probably two leads a week that are coming through. They found us through chat GBT or one of the other language models, and one of our biggest clients actually this was this was probably about a year ago um and uh, you know, we were, we were working on chat gbt and we were working on ranking in chat gbt and and a lot of the things that we were doing are really just going back to the fundamentals and doing really good SEO. And they called in and they said and they wanted to get me on the call, and so the salesperson brought me in. He said hey, the only reason I am talking to y'all is I was searching for the top AI SEO company in Perplexity, and this was at the time. I'm not sure right now and they said y'all came up and my first question at the time was like, what is Perplexity?

Speaker 3: 57:49

Unconscious competence is what we call that you don't even know how good, you are.

Speaker 2: 57:54

And so you know that you know I was being honest, like I I'm pretty uh, transparent as far as what, what, what I know, what I don't know, and what we can do, and uh, and so we started that conversation and at a certain point he goes, I feel like I know you or heard your voice before, whatever. And and then I was like, well, maybe you listen to the podcast, you know, I'll just kind of throw it out there. And he goes, what's it called? And he's searching. He says, oh my gosh, I know you. He's like you know, and he's like, yeah, I've listened to the podcast, and so that.

Speaker 2: 58:27

And then we close that deal um you know, so there's kind of that expertise, authority, trust and, and certainly ai got us in the game right, but the human element pulled it all the way through to close the deal and I think there's going to be a lot of that kind of augmented user that's going to be able to be superhuman and be, able to leverage a lot of these skill sets and I think the biggest thing that's going to slow people back is what you're talking about is the corporate governance of really adopting it and getting it implemented.

Speaker 2: 59:13

That's what I've seen. The fastest thing to kill a great new idea in a in a big in a big company is it's it's just not getting to buy it. You know.

Speaker 3: 59:19

Yeah, true, oh, I will give you one secret. Okay, now that I think about it. So this is this is actually the question that I ask all of our prospects at the beginning of the call, of the discovery call, and it's and I even tell them this is a trick question. So I want you to pay attention to how I ask the question and I said 90% of the people get the answer wrong. So let's see how you do.

Speaker 3: 59:45

And the question is this what are the top three problems you solve for your customer? Okay, so I'll repeat it one more time what are the top three problems you solve for your customer? And what they typically come back with is the top three products they sell to their customer. The key is knowing what problem you solve and being able to articulate it as a problem. And when you know how to articulate the problem in your prospect's mind that you solve, that unlocks your marketing. That's the secret. If you don't know how to articulate the problem, then you're selling a product or you're selling benefits, or you're selling features. The minute you understand how to articulate the problem and what's going on in your prospect's mind in terms of pains and frustrations, now, all of a sudden, you've got a shot at a lot of other things, right, that's. That's my, my top secret for the day.

Speaker 2: 1:00:43

I love it. I think that that is what I'm seeing too, and this is a good place to end. It is the AI is only good as good as the operator and the knowledge in the operator's head on how to get to the right answer and what good looks like based on what you're saying. Until you train those very customized agents that know you've inputted all that information, that will give you the right answer. Right, but to just take the general AI to ask it, unless you know what you're trying to get to and what that good copywriting or whatever it is looks like, you're only as good as the operator you're.

Speaker 3: 1:01:36

You're only as good as the operator, right? Yeah, so yeah. And then the key is to clone your knowledge into the ai, and that's where you really are going to crush it. Right, because when ai can recall your ideas faster than you can, you're dominating yeah, no, I love it.

Speaker 2: 1:01:49

I love john. All right, um, everyone. Uh, hopefully you enjoyed this as well. That's why we do this to connect with people and bring in great minds that are addressing problems in the industry from a different approach. I don't have all the answers. I'm constantly learning and everyone's going on this journey with me, and this was great. If you are looking to grow your business, currently right with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, which is the internet, and then we can augment AI to that, reach out to EWR for more revenue in your business. We built a proven marketing system that generates you leads online. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye, bye for now.