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Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And Gini, I think we can agree, we are not artificially intelligent.

Gini Dietrich: No, no, we’re not.

Chip Griffin: I mean, some would argue we’re not even intelligent.

Gini Dietrich: That’s where I was going, but filter, filter, filter. Took me a few seconds to filter.

Chip Griffin: You know, it is what it is.

Gini Dietrich: That’s not true. We’re intelligent most of the time.

Chip Griffin: And artificial some of the time. But. You know, I think it is fair to say that, that AI is, is a topic that is discussed just a little bit.

Gini Dietrich: Just a tad. Just a tad. People are, yes, yes.

Chip Griffin: And we’ve talked about it on the show before.

Gini Dietrich: We have.

Chip Griffin: But we’re going to come at it from a slightly different angle today, which is the use of AI for agency lead generation and business development, because there are a lot of people out there peddling all sorts of things that you can do with AI to help grow your agency.

Yes.

A lot of it is horse hooey at best.

Gini Dietrich: Horse hooey is a great term. Yes.

Chip Griffin: However, there are ways that you can leverage AI

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: To help you on the lead gen side, just as you can use AI for client service and other things.

So let’s start with some of the bad uses of AI, and then we’ll talk about what we think are good uses of AI for agency business development.

Gini Dietrich: Wow. How many emails do you receive in a week that says, Dear Chip, I’m really excited about what you’re doing at the Small Agency Growth Alliance. I think we can generate 12 to 15 meetings for you per week and help you close 50 percent of those.

I mean, I probably get a handful, if not more, of those emails every day. Every single day. Yes. And they all say the same thing, which means they’re all generated by AI. And all the AI did was go in to see what the business name is and maybe it pulls from something you recently wrote or recorded and it says really like how what you’re talking about or, you know, mine always say really like what you’ve done with the PESO model.

Well, thanks.

Chip Griffin: Right.

Gini Dietrich: Right. And then it offers to

Chip Griffin: At least they know the PESO model is yours. That’s fair. That’s helpful. So

Gini Dietrich: we’re getting there. It’s like pushing a boulder up a mountain, but we’re getting there. The, actually the AI, the AI is really great at that because it checks the right sources where human beings don’t check at all.

So the AI is great at that. But, you know, you have the, the emails are being written by AI and it’s offering. They all say the exact same thing. I just delete them, but like, first of all, I can’t handle 12 to 15 meetings a week. If you, if you close six new clients for me every week, we would die. We would die.

It’s just not, it’s not, I don’t even think the big agencies can do that kind of volume.

Chip Griffin: No, I mean, it’s insane. I mean that the AI helps them bring in, you know usually there’s some sort of a reference that tries to make it look like they actually did something. So we reference some piece

Gini Dietrich: Yep

Chip Griffin: that you wrote. Oftentimes not really even a meaningful piece like sometimes I see it, you know saw what you wrote about I’m like That’s the piece you picked, like You might as well just roll the dice and randomly brought up a page.

I also love the ones that, that managed to refer to my business as the original name of the business, Agency Leadership Advisors, which I haven’t used in five years when I rebranded. So clearly it’s, it’s accessing some archive of information in order to auto write the content. It makes no sense.

None whatsoever. None. And, and I think that, you know, when people, when I hear people talking about using AI for lead generation in the agency environment, it always is, seems to be around how can we do more volume, more quickly.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: And we’ve said it before. We’ll say it again, right here. Business development in the agency world is not about volume.

It’s about quality. Yes. And AI can help you in some ways to move the ball forward. But it shouldn’t be used as a tool to help you spray and pray even broader. It really needs to be a tool that helps you as a human, not something that tries to replace you as a human.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think if you think about it from this per, from, from the perspective of when you receive those emails, it feels kind of myecchh.

So if your prospects receive those emails from you because you’ve hired one of these agencies to, to generate, use AI to generate the leads for you, how does that make your prospects feel? Like, myecchh. And, and maybe there’s an agency business model or a world where that might work because it is about quantity and not quality.

But for most of us, our businesses are built on relationships and on long term client contracts and year over year over year growth with those clients, organic growth and all those kinds of things. So having AI send you, send an email to a mass number to, like, to your point to spray and pray and spray and pray.

It’s, it’s icky. It just doesn’t feel right. And so if you feel like those don’t feel right, imagine how your prospect feels receiving one from you.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think the worst these days are the folks who are using some of these services or tools or those kinds of things to use AI to try to figure out who you should reach out to on LinkedIn.

And so every day I’m just getting bombarded with LinkedIn requests and inevitably as soon as you click accept, even though it looks like it’s something legit, you just get whacked in the face with some sales pitch. And it’s just ridiculous. That is not how you build relationships and find the right people to work with as an agency.

And so instead of using AI as quick fix, a magic elixir, those kinds of things, you need to think about how can AI help you to be more efficient or more effective in what you’re already doing.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: And so let’s talk about some of the ways that you might leverage AI so that it actually is a benefit to your business development and doesn’t just look make you look like a smarmy used car salesman.

Gini Dietrich: I think there are a few ways. Number one, it can help you with your brand personas. And Andy Crestodina, maybe a year and a half ago or so, wrote a really good article on how to use AI to help you create your brand personas based on the information you have. On orbitmedia.com, so you can go search for that. It’s really good. There’s a new company called YouBots that you upload all of your information, your business information. So who your customer is, who your, who your prospects are, who your client, current clients are, all of this sort of demographic and psychographic information about your, your current clients.

And then it’ll help you determine who you might be adding. So it can help with your brand personas. It can help with your ideal client profile. It can help you figure out how, what, what pain you solve for your clients. It can help you figure out if you have a process that’s worth looking at copywriting.

So there are all these things that it can help you do. It can help you draft messaging. It can help you say, okay, if, if you’re, if you’re approaching a Fortune 10 company and at the chief marketing officer, and these are the pains that you solve for them, then here’s an outline of what you might discuss with them.

But that’s as far as it should go. Like, you still have to add the human element. You still have to, to create the relationship. You still have to find ways to sort of get in amongst all the noise, versus just adding to the noise.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I mean, I think that those are all great examples. We’ve also talked about how on the client service side, you can use AI to help with content development, either outlines or proofreading.

Do those with your own content too, as an agency. There’s no reason why you can’t use it to help refine the content that you’re creating or produce outlines that you can look and make sure that you’re not missing anything. Sometimes I’ll just send a draft article, you know, to chat GPT and say, Hey, what, what did I leave out?

What else should I add here? Sometimes I’ll take, you know, a couple of different articles, throw it in there and say, Hey, can you consolidate this into one piece? And it gives you a starting point to work off of. There’s a lot of things you can do like that. If you’re putting together a proposal for a client, for example, which now I don’t like proposals, but if you’re going to do a proposal, you can certainly throw it in there and it can help you organize it better or point out things maybe that you’re missing.

Chat GPT and the like are all great for asking to do brainstorming with.

Gini Dietrich: Absolutely.

Chip Griffin: And you can say, Hey, I’m doing these three or four tactics. What else should I be thinking of? Or, you know, I’ve had success with this. What else should, you know, should I be considering? And sometimes it serves as that, that extra advisor who can, you know, put out some ideas for you to think about.

It’s not that it should run with it automatically. It’s that it gives you things to think about further.

Gini Dietrich: We have a client, that their, most of their business is government work. And so they are, they spend a lot of time responding to RFPs. And so we took two years of RFP responses and uploaded them into chat, chat GPT, created a custom GPT for them, and then started prompting it to give, to consolidate the answers that every RFP, every RFP that asked the same question.

So you have one template, so you don’t have to keep going in and copying, pasting from previous RFP documents. You just have it in one spot. And then we also uploaded competitor information, so websites and content and things like that. And now we can say to it, okay, please answer the questions that are common, and then please answer the questions that are not, but compare it to the competition.

And so it will, it will help them kind of figure out how to answer questions, you know, with their unique differentiation, especially compared to competition. So I, I say that so that if you are an agency that responds to a lot of RFPs because you work in government or nonprofit or wherever it happens to be, that’s a great way to use AI too, because you can create a custom GPT and it’s so easy to do it.

It’s so easy. That just helps you automatically get through the, the sort of nitty gritty that you always have to do in your RFPs and then helps you customize the answers that are not sort of the templated ones.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean it, and, and these are all great ways for it to leverage what you’re already doing, what you already know about.

And it’s not, it’s not trying to be a substitute. Right. You know, the other thing to do is to think about AI as we’ve talked about before, as your intern. And so think about the things you might ask an intern to do. Yes. You might say. Hey, go put together a list of all of the events that target the automotive industry because maybe that’s part of your ideal client profile.

You might say, Hey, let’s build a list of job titles that, that fit within the ideal client profile that we have here. And you can give them a starting point and then see what else it might come back to you with that might be helpful. Maybe you want to use that for some sort of targeting effort or searches within LinkedIn Sales Navigator or that kind of thing.

It can give you a lot of ideas. And it can really do the same kind of research that you would hand off to an intern that might help you to grow the business and it’s, it’s so much faster and probably more accurate in most cases. Sometimes you need to prod a little bit because sometimes, you know, my experience is it’s not, it’s not always one for one the first time you ask.

Sometimes you have to hone it a little bit, but it often gives you a starting point and you’ll say, Oh, I never thought of that. And then that causes you to ask another question of the chat GPT or again, whatever platform you like best.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, I really like the intern idea because I, I, I do treat it like an intern where I’m training it.

Where I’ll say, I don’t really like that and here’s why. Can you try again? Or, you know, we usually, when we do work like this, we usually do A, B, and C. Can you incorporate that in? Or, you didn’t get the voice right this time. Let me give you an example and then have it do it again. So, I treat it just like I do an intern, where I’m constantly coaching and giving them advice on how to increase their skills.

I do the same thing with the, with the AI, which is, it’s, it’s, It also works a lot faster than an intern, but.

Chip Griffin: There’s that. And you don’t have any job classification issues or that kind of thing with it, at least not yet. I mean, you know. Right. You know, I, I think the common thread for a lot of these things is, is these are all things that you and your team can do with AI and, and we, none of what we’ve suggested has been to go out and hire that, that company that says they’re using AI to make magic and generate leads for you.

Now, certainly you can work with outside partners who can leverage AI to do some of these things with you.

Gini Dietrich: Mm hmm.

Chip Griffin: But I, I think it is a mistake to think that someone who claims to have AI on the outside can take over a lot of these functions from you. The reality is, as we’ve talked about before, in a small agency, you, the owner, need to be deeply, personally involved in all business development.

You can get help from your team. You can get help from AI. You can get help from other agencies. But you cannot take yourself out of it entirely. And I know a lot of you would love to do that. I know a lot of you would love it if you could just hand things off to AI, and AI came back to you with contracts signed and said, here you go, here’s some money coming to the door, go serve them.

Gini Dietrich: Right.

Chip Griffin: That it, that doesn’t work. And even if it did, even if it could get you contracts, they’re not likely ones that would be successful because there’s no personal relationship being built. And so AI needs to assist in those things. It cannot replace it.

Gini Dietrich: Yeah, and I think you touched on this, but I’ll elaborate a little bit more.

The number one job of an agency owner is to do business development and make rain. That’s your job. And I know all of us, myself included, get sucked into the day to day client work and it gets put on the back burner. You have to make time for it. It has to be your number one job. And then the client stuff and things like that, either you have, you delegate appropriately to your team or it becomes secondary.

And for me, I always do things that I know if it’s the end of the day, I look at my list and I go, okay, if it’s the end of the day and I haven’t been able to accomplish everything I need to today, what are the things that are going to force me to get it done? So that means I might do my business development work in the morning because I know the client stuff has to get done. Where the business development stuff, if it’s six o’clock at night, I’d kind of be like, okay, well I’ll just push it to tomorrow.

So I always do it first. And then the client stuff, because I know I have a strict deadline or whatever it happens to be. And so I will, I will work later to get it done essentially is what I’m saying. Then that’s, that’s how I plan my day and because it works for me, so I still get the business development stuff done.

I’m not postponing it to the next day or to the next week or to the next month. It’s the very first thing I do.

Chip Griffin: And, and like everything else, you need to figure out what works for you. I mean, if the business development is what you like to do, you know, maybe you need to put that off till later in the day so that you can do the client service first to make sure you’re not losing business or vice versa, you know, you all need to figure out what works for you and you know, the AI can help you to be more efficient in all of those things.

It can help you. I mean, it’s, it’s not going to do the outreach for you, but it can certainly help you build the lists. I mean, there’s no, there’s, that can be direct or indirect outreach. So, you know, we advocate the value of podcasts, shockingly. And so if you’re looking to be a guest on podcasts, why not ask AI, you know, what are some podcasts that would be appropriate for my expertise?

Maybe seed it with, Hey, some people like me are A, B, and C. You know, share with me a list of podcasts that these folks have been on. That can be a great way to figure out where to reach out, in order to be a guest. Or vice versa, if you’re looking for guests for your own show, say, here are three similar shows.

You know, who are some guests that I should think about inviting onto mine? So there’s a lot of things that you can use. The tool, the AI tools that exist to help you out, whether it’s doing outreach, whether it’s creating content, whether it’s building lists, whether it’s writing proposals, all of these things can be made more efficient by AI, but it’s not magic.

There’s, there’s nothing that’s going to generate all of these easy contacts and calls. Even if it did, as, as you pointed out, Gini, it’s not going to be something that you’re going to enjoy.

Gini Dietrich: No.

Chip Griffin: If you had to talk to 10 prospects a week, you’d go out of your mind.

Gini Dietrich: It’d be terrible.

Chip Griffin: I mean, it, it would just be nuts.

And I, I don’t know very many agency owners who could handle doing that number of calls, let alone actually closing deals. Right. Out of that. Nor would it be good for the business. And so, again, AI assists, AI does not replace, and AI is not something that’s going to get you magic overnight 10x success, which is unhealthy anyway.

Gini Dietrich: Yep. Yes. So, use AI to your advantage, do not be smarmy or gross, just like in anything else that you do. Don’t spray and pray, don’t be schmarmy, use it to your advantage.

Chip Griffin: And with that, we will draw this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast to a close without any smarm, maybe with a little bit of actual intelligence.

Well.

Gini Dietrich: Well, maybe at the beginning. Eh.

Chip Griffin: All right, I’m Chip Griffin.

Gini Dietrich: I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin: And it depends.