He Built AI Agents That Sell Better Than Humans | Nikhil X Rafa

What was your early journey like? How did you end up becoming an entrepreneur and, you know, to making tens of millions of dollars online?

I stumbled into my, into my journey as an online marketer. It was in the year 2001.

How are you taking advantage of AI in your agency right now?

AI to help support that journey.

So not only is our automation for people who are underutilizing AI, walk us through the process.

This changes everything because think about, do we want to be sold?

Talk us through your system for converting these into high qualified appointments.

If there's no pain, there's no sale. If we haven't identified the pain, I'm the guy that shows up to solve the impossible problems.

What's going on? What's going on, everybody who's actually listening to this podcast right now? First of all, guys, welcome back to another episode of The Nikhil Sai Show, which is hosted by me, The Nikhil Sai. And guess what's going on today? We're back with another amazing guest. This guest He's a 2 Comma Club X winner. I mean, this is so fun to interview ClickFunnels entrepreneurs. And you know, we are going to deep dive into the digital innovation and using AI and automations in marketing. And not just that, I mean, the AI is cool, but we are going to talk about how to convert skeptical viewers into high-paying clients, buyers who actually can join your movement, meaning creating journeys and sales processes that can convert attention into revenue. Attention into profits. And that is probably the most important skillset in any marketing campaign. It's not the automations, it's not the AI, it's the skill to convert attention into clients and revenue. And that's what we are going to discuss today. The person who's joining us today has been a fractional CMO and a key leader at interactive marketing, and he's been an award winner with ClickFunnels, won the 2 Comma Club X, 2 Comma Club, also HighLevel SaaS Award. This, this is going to be a fun conversation. He also closed $300,000 deals on stages to actually boosting engagement of multiple social media campaigns to upwards of 40%. Let's not waste any time and let's actually welcome Rafael Zabala. Hey, Rafa.

Hey, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here with you and to be able to have this conversation today on what I think is probably yours and mine's favorite topic in the world, right? How do we convert How do we convert attention into money, right?

Absolutely.

In that journey.

100%, Rafa. I mean, I love that. Like, I'm a marketing nerd. Like, I love the sales process. I love the marketing aspects of any business. And that's one of the things I geek about. So it's so fun to do this with you. Now, before we get into the fun stuff of talking about customer journeys and like all the techniques and persuasion tactics we could use and the automation AI stuff, let's go back into your journey. Like, give us some context. Who Rafa is? What was your early journey like? How did you end up becoming an entrepreneur? And, you know, to making tens of millions of dollars online.

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been doing this for some time. You might be able to tell I got, I've earned this gray.

10 years.

Yeah. I had hair when I started this journey. Entrepreneurship is not for the light at heart, but it's such a rewarding and powerful experience. I stumbled into my journey as an online marketer. It was in the year 2001. So this is many, many, many, many moons ago.

I was born back then.

Yeah. I was working for corporate. America. I was working for a web hosting company at that time. So somehow I was, I got, I was lucky. I got connected into this revolution that was taking place online. But, but I also entered right after the big dot-com bubble burst. This was something that, and I think that over the years, we're going to continue to experience these bursts, these hype-up moments when everything gets hyped up and then there's the drop. And a lot of people fear the drop, but it's in the drops that where opportunities are made. And so here I am after the dot-com bubble burst, we're, I'm working for a web hosting company that sold, sold several hundred dollars a month hosting when An1 first came out offering $1 a month hosting. So like, this was such a disruptor in our industry that like, we, this multimillion-dollar web hosting company was freaking out. They just saw the end. They, they saw that it was the end of times for them. right?

Yeah.

And it was just a, and so they didn't see a future in what was gonna happen, but it was a couple of us, a, a couple of guys in the customer support and me in the sales department. The customer support guys came up to me and they're like, Rafa, could you, what do you think? Could you sell SEO? Now granted, this was 2001. At this time, Google had been around, what, for 5 years or something like that? Yeah.

No one knows Google yet.

Right. Or what SEO was. And I'm like, sure, I can sell it. What is it? It was my response. And they're like, well, we have thousands of web hosting customers. Search engine optimization is the art of getting them ranked in high rankings for this inside of Google and inside of the different search engines. And I'm like, all right, let's do it. Guys, this opportunity came from a freakout moment. This company didn't do this. Two, very low— all of us were in our early 20s. I was 21. 22 years old at that time. The guys in customer support were lowly customer support guys, even younger than that. I think the youngest one was 19 at the time of the two guys. And we decided to— they taught me SEO and we decided to go start outbound dialing and selling it to the folks inside that were on our web hosting platform. And guys, from there it exploded because it was the new opportunity. It was a new thing to offer. It was something that people hadn't fully considered yet. And so not only did it turn into a top product line for this web hosting company, well, we decided to leave the company and start an agency.

SEO agency. That sounds fun.

Yeah, exactly. And so that was kind of the beginning of the journey, the journey for me. And I love sharing that story because I feel like a lot of us and a lot of the great entrepreneurs that I've met, are people that have been able to keep their head on their shoulders through a really scary moment. Because sometimes it's like transformation comes from fully experiencing the pain of not transforming.

Yeah, I agree. Now, I believe the same evolution of like how like the hosting got disrupted, I believe the same thing is happening in the marketing space, the agency space. I remember those good old days where you can charge somebody like a small business owner thousands of dollars a month just to run their Facebook ads. right, to create the creatives. And now ChatGPT can do it. Now AI tools can do it, right? It's definitely empowering businesses to scale much faster. Now I'm curious, how are you taking advantage of AI in your agency right now? What's the disruptive moves you are making in your business to attract more clients or serve them well?

Yeah, that's a great question. So over the years from starting with SEO, it, it was kind of like, it was an organic growth. Well, wow, now we have traffic coming to the website. What's the next thing I need? The next thing I need to do is convert that traffic into leads. And so we started learning conversion rate optimization and design and what it takes to convert traffic into leads. Then it's like, oh, we got good at that and we had leads. Well, now we have leads. What's the next thing I need to happen to turn them into sales? And that's when we got really deep into marketing automation and really deep into nurturing into what customer experience means. And that has been really the most fulfilling and longest part of my journey is really grasping what is— what you can do with marketing automation systems. I mean, today we have GoHighLevel. We're so lucky. Every— and different tools like that. There's other ActiveCampaign. There's, there are a lot of wonderful tools, but back in the day, we had— it was all broken all over the place. It was different tools trying to connect everything together. But what made things successful was never the tool. It was the message. It was understanding the journey that these people were going through. What is the journey that someone goes from becoming a prospect to becoming a believer, right? And so up to now, marketing automation has really kind of filled that gap for us. But there is a revolution that's taking place, and that revolution is with AI. So what I'm— the way I'm using AI, understanding that to me, that is the most important part of the journey. I think lead generation is obviously, you can't do anything without it. You can't do anything without leads, but it's kind of straightforward still. Lead generation, like once you learn how to do it, of course, this is something that you learn. It's a skill that you learn, but it's something that is doable. You can learn how to do it and it's not that hard, right? It's much harder to turn leads into sales. And so what we're doing today with AI is really exciting because what we're using is AI to help support to support that journey. So not only is our automation, our nurturing journey, you know, the emails or the SMSs and the CTAs and the VSLs and the webinars, all of these different milestones. I like to call them milestones in that journey from prospect to buyer, right? But then using AI to help accelerate that and communicate to them in a different way, in a different channel. And so this is my big aha. You ready for this?

Yeah, let's go.

Because up to now, people like you, myself, and many other award winners, we've been using direct response marketing in our nurturing to get there. And there's always, there's always going to be a place for direct response marketing. It's really, really, really powerful, but only X amount of people are triggered by it at that specific time, right?

That's so true. So many more don't take action.

That's right. In, in And the thing is that we've been limited to that. That's all we can do, right? We might be one person running automations for 10,000 leads a month, but in the automation, and it works and it's direct response, a certain percentage is going to go to that, but it's limited in how we can show up. So here enters AI. So I've been working for the last 2 years to build AI agents. AI, and a lot of people are doing that, building AI agents to help engage qualify, book, or drive to a specific call to action. Hmm. But a lot of people are still thinking about it the old way, from a direct response way. And I think that as marketers, we have a whole new opportunity in front of us. And this is what I'm really leaning into is that instead of showing up in direct response, hey, do this, click this, take this action, you want this now, you know, all the things that we learned from, from our teachers and coaches, what we can do something that we were never able to do before. And that is to actually show up to serve. Because instead of saying, hey, Nick Raffa here, I'm just following up. The next step is to click here, do this right now. I can show up to say, hey Nick, I noticed that you were interested in this and I'm here to help you in that journey, right? Outta curiosity, what's driving this for you? What is triggered? What's, what's, what, what is triggering your desire today to achieve this thing? You couldn't do that. You can't do that with with direct response and just marketing automation. You can with AI agents because then we can now show up to serve and really provide more of a consultative process, right? That have been, that's been done for hundreds of years by humans, right? But now we can automate and scale that through AI. So my most exciting thing that we're doing with AI is then building out these agents inside of HighLevel We're using all the different tools. I'm not tool specific at the end of the day. I'm always learning and working on what's working the best, the latest version of Closebot, HighLevel. I mean, there's so many different tools that are out there, but to me, all of them, they're, these are just tactics. These are just tools, right? They're how we, how do we use them? What are we using them for? Because I can show up with a hammer to hit you over the head with it. Or I can show up with a hammer to help you put up a picture of you and your family.

Yeah, it's not the tool, it's the way you use the functionality. Now, this is incredible because I genuinely believe it's underutilized, at least at this point. I mean, obviously multiple reasons. Some people are pessimists, like they're skeptic about AI taking over the conversations. Then they're like over-optimistic, they're trying to build like the next billion-dollar app, and then they feel like, oh, this is still developing, it's not there yet. But I believe like you hit the right spot where You're using it according to what it's capable of right now, which is conversating and personalizing sales experience and personalizing that. It's like what your company name is. I've seen like, Bryce, I met him when I was at the summit. I was speaking at the HighLevel summit. Such a cool guy who built Closebot. And I've seen your post where you had scheduled over 15,000 appointments using Closebot. That is an incredible milestone. I mean, we book thousands of appointments. We are not like using AI to the scale we could be. So for people who are underutilizing AI, walk us through the process. Like how do you think, what's your ideation, what's your process to increase the amount of bookings? Because getting the leads is easy. I could put up a lead ad or buy a list directly, right? Download from Apollo or generate from LinkedIn, whatever that is, right? I got the leads piece. Talk us through your system for converting these into high qualified appointments using AI.

Absolutely. Well, it starts with showing up to serve first. This changes everything. Because think about what do we, do we want to be sold as people? You don't want to be sold as people. No. Right? We don't, we can tell, we can, I mean, you know, Dotcom Secrets has been out now for, have we hit the 10-year mark yet? It's almost 10 years.

I think so, yeah.

Yeah, it's right around there. So people can smell it when it's coming, right? And there's nothing wrong with it. There's still a space for it. But if someone turned into a lead, it's because they wanted something. They needed help with something. So what if we show up to help them from the start? Right? So think about this. So the first KPI that I think about is engagement and response, right? So which one is going to get a better response? Me selling you something or me offering to go ahead and help you right now with it. Right? So that's the first way I think people are are, are not thinking about the use of AI and automation in the best way. Because that first part that we're talking about right now is automation. It's not AI. We do the outbounds. We're, we're writing the outbound messaging. It's just that we're flipping the switch in the conversation. Hey, Nick. I, I, you know, I saw that you downloaded, you know, my, my blueprint on AI agents for your business. Curious, what drove What are you facing in your business today that drove, that's driving that curiosity? Are you, are you having challenges with your lead nurturing? That's such a different question. That's just such a different way to reach people. So number 1, what we have seen and we have found is that that jacks engagement rates all along for 100%. Right? And so once, so step 1, step 2 is then, and this is where Closebot and Bryce come in. You're right. Bryce DeCora is such an awesome guy. Him and Lara, what they've done with Closebot to me is a dream as an automator and marketer because they understood that a conversation— what I think a lot of tools don't, in that a sales conversation or a consultative conversation, let's use the right term, a consultative conversation has objectives and milestones. I'm driving them through objectives and milestones. This is not a chatbot. This is not, let me answer, let me, let me copy my brain and answer any freaking question that you want. That's worthless. That means nothing to anybody. No one wants to do that.

Right? Yeah.

People want their hands held to help them transform from this place of struggle and pain that they're in right now to relief, right? For whatever, whatever pain or problem that they're facing. Right? So let's map out that journey in build the objectives and milestones for it. So step 1 is engagement. How do I engage? Well, I engage by showing up first, showing up first to serve. The rest of the conversation is then helping them, is serving, it's going ahead and delivering what they need, answering questions. So in the, in the example that we were just doing, right, you and I was like, oh yeah, it's interesting. I am struggling with, with my salespeople doing what they're supposed to do. Maybe. Are my SDRs following up on our leads fast enough? Right? And so now I got them to engage. They gave me information. Right? And so now my first objective is then to see— it's like once they have given me the pain, let's get them to tell me how it's affecting them. Step 2. Oh, wow. Yeah, that sounds like a rough experience that your salespeople aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, or they're not meeting people quick and fast enough. How is that affecting your business? Is this having more of a negative effect? Like it just, I love to always ask two questions, by the way. I stack the questions, but how is this affecting your business negatively or positively or whatever, however I want to position it, but I want them to then tell me, because what I can do through a conversation is kind of, I'm sure Nick, you've heard, but if, if, of Gene Schwartz from Breakthrough Marketing. It's an, it's a powerful, amazing book. If you haven't, or if the, the, the listeners haven't, uh, you have to get it. I think it's $100 to get the book. It's not cheap, right? But this guy basically invented direct response marketing as we know it today. And it's all about the awareness spectrum and where they're at in awareness, right? Are they problem aware, solution aware, or unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware? That's right. Right. I added one to it. Well, we all were, well, as marketers, we're always, we're always tweaking the formula, aren't we? And so mine is before problem aware is pain aware. Right. And to me is really important. One of my, one of my partners and friends and even mentor, Chris Moore. He's an awesome guy. You should mark, have it on this podcast as well. Another UCCX Award winner. He tells me all the time, he's like, Rafa, if there's no pain, there's no sale. If we haven't identified the pain, how can, how can we give them the prescription that they need for wellness? So I want them, I want to help them realize that. And that's what we can do in a consultative AI conversation. So I got them to tell me what the problem, what the problem they think they're having. Now I'm going to tell them, have them become pain aware. I want them to tell me what the pain is. How is this affecting you? Right? So now, now I'm having, I'm building rapport in a conversation. I'm pre-framing where they want to be. Right? It's like, well, it sounds like this is something that, that you don't need to have, have in your business life. Right? And it's exactly what we help people solve and do. Would you be interested in, in a 15-minute phone call where we can discuss how We, we helped to streamline that process and speed to lead and make sure that, that all the things that you want your salespeople to do are being taken care of automatically.

Yeah. More likely now to respond and book.

Of course they're going to say yes. Why, Nick? Because I empathize with them. I empathize with them and I helped them. I got them to tell me what the problem and pain is.

Exactly. I 100% agree. We have seen so much data. That when you are pushing an idea to a customer, they really don't like it. They don't like the promotion you're running. They want to find the promotion themselves. Like I've seen behaviors where we are pushing a social media story, but they watch the story and they go back and they buy. But when we send an email, the responses to that email is not as high as a social media promotion because of the same, because they feel like they discovered it versus we push that promotion to them directly, right? These are two different things. So I could see how the consultative approach in conversating with the leads, in using interactive AI in conversations and getting them to tell you why they're struggling and what they're struggling with and how does it affect them and making them vulnerable. I believe that's like, like when we, when you create a vulnerability in a sales process, they trust you more now. They just feel like you know them very well and the chance of them interacting and continuing the next step is much more higher. The good old days of buy or die are gone. Now it's all about creating human experience, creating empathy, and believing in the long-term process of sales nurturing. That's pretty cool. Thank you so much for sharing that. Now, my next set of questions, Rapha, is all about the involvement of agency with AI in the future. Talk us through how are you attracting clients right now in 2025 and beyond using AI?

Yeah, so I believe we're in a very interesting moment in time. We're definitely in a disruption that's taking place. We might be in a bubble in a lot of different ways. I think that people are scared as well, confused. I mean, like everything from the economy to wars to people. I don't know if you saw the latest craze that people are afraid the Yellowstone Park is about to explode with a volcano, and it's not true. This is misinformation that's out there. Got it. Just to make sure, if you're in Yellowstone Park, I think park, I think you're safe, but check in with your authorities. But, uh, I share that with you is because it's, it's, it's, it makes, it makes for a really unique time. We have it. We, and now we have a giant shift also in, in technology and everyone is an expert now. Everyone's claiming to be an expert.

Yeah.

Right. And so there's a lot of noise out there. And so for a lot of people, that noise becomes a problem. But, but I, like I mentioned before, these disruptors, these problems are actually the opportunity because the more noise that there is out there, the more that everyone sounds the same, which is also easier to make yourself different. Right? If you think about it the right way.

I agree.

So everyone is an AI expert. Everyone's a funnel expert. Everyone is a marketing automation expert. Everyone is a high-level expert. It's crazy. People are tired of hearing that. So my approach is, I call it the celebration approach, right? Because it, because it's social proof, but I like to come out, but I, but I like, but it's not just, it's not just the thing. It's the spirit of the thing. Right? So I love, I love to share it is to celebrate success, celebrating 15,289 booked calls with Closebot. Celebrating our medical, medical client is booking 45%, a point at 45% conversion rate, booking rate from cold traffic, celebrating that. And like, it's just sharing these, these wins, sharing wins at the end of the day, because all of these experts that are out there, they may or may not be real experts. I don't want to speak negatively of anyone I don't know. Right. But even if they are geniuses, who are they helping? A lot of, there's a lot of closet geniuses that are just back there writing on their, on their, on their, on their whiteboard, all these amazing, awesome ideas, but who's it really helping? How is it impacting?

Zero impact. Yeah.

That's right. So, so that's my approach. My approach is celebrating success because that automatically makes you sound different than everybody else. It builds authority right now. Of course, you can't make this stuff up because they're going to ask you about it. When you get to talk to them. They're gonna look, they're gonna want the proof. You, you have to be, you have to be real in what you do, right? But it completely positions you in a different light. So when we're celebrating and showing up to help, that's a completely different experience than most likely the other conversations that they're having with other folks.

Yeah. Quite, quite an interesting type of campaign. I mean, with data, I could back it up and say most of the, I would say the best ads and even follow-up sequences which had the highest conversion of somebody actually buying, like that last tip they want to tip their toes in before they make a decision, is all about consuming case studies and results. So I could completely agree with you when you said like, hey, people have to see more people. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And we have to be able to show real people, real faces, and real results. And I think that could absolutely attract the right things.

Now, One more point on that, Nick, before we move from that point, because my little, my little aha, and I share with it, I share with everyone, is that while that's true, that has been true for some time. That's always been true. Right? The question is, what's the spirit that you're sharing it in? How do you become more human in the process? Here's my case study.

No one cares.

No one cares. Right? Hey, I'm celebrating this awesome person's success that they're receiving, that they're, they're enjoying.

Yeah. The package of that.

Everyone wants to be, everyone is, everyone wants to be and is the hero in their own journey. Mm. Right. Our jobs as consultants and marketers is to help them be that hero. Mm. Which means that we're not the hero, we're the guide.

Yep.

Right. We're here to support them. Right. Mm-hmm. And so the more that they feel that spirit of support, the more they trust you because you're not blowing smoke up their you know what.

I love that. Appreciate that advice. I think, yeah, like I could totally see how the same situation, which is my client made X revenue packaged in a different way and celebrating it like you mentioned. Yeah, I think that's so cool because it's like, it's a more human experience. Like more people want to be social animals. We are, right? Like we always moved in clans, you know, together. Everybody wants to be a in a celebration, but not another promotion. Oh, you know, I don't want to get promoted again. Like I'm already opting in. Just tell me about other people who are having success in a manner where I lean in. I think that packaging is pretty smart. Now I have a different set of questions for you, Rafa, if you're ready. I'm curious about what are the tools you're using on a day-to-day basis to get the marketing geek out and, you know, like flex their muscles and build the most competent systems possible.

Yeah. So the first, the first tool that we're using is, is ChatGPT, but not maybe the way that a lot of people are using, or I think a lot of us are using it this way. I use, we build our own custom GPTs. And so, and that, and that, when I say we is that I'm blessed to have relationships like with people like yourself, other awesome marketers, and we get together and we start training AI and GPTs, right? To help us. Do the work that we're doing. We're all contributing to it and sharing in it. Right? And so by continuing to evolve and develop these genius brains, so we call them, right? It's like, okay, let's, so let's hack. And I, I hate using the, I, I love and hate the word hack because I'm a funnel hacker, but it has this negative connotation to it. But let's hack this, let's hack this book. Let's hack, let's hack, you know, the $100 million offer together with Alex Hormozi. And let's build and train a custom GPT system to help us draw out from a, in an interview conversational perspective, all the information that we need to meet this model and then create these outputs that we want.

Hmm.

So powerful. I think like we're in version, so it was some of our friends, we're like in version 13 of some of these GPTs that we've been building. And where we're getting to now with them is just mind blowing. The level of copy, of context, of insight that we're beginning to be able to generate by taking the time to train these models this way is really amazing. And our focus is to build these tools for ourselves, but to build them in a way that follows an interview style so that I can be on a phone call with you and just kind of, and just be recording my notes using a note taker. right? And just be going through an interview style that I can just grab and dump it into my custom GPT and begin to build out everything from the customer personas to the pains that they might be experiencing to all of the trick— all of the big triggers that we need to begin to identify before we even start writing our first lines of copy. Right? But if you get the— it's kind of similar to what we were talking about with the, with the, with the prospects. It's really powerful when you get, when you, if the prospect says it themselves, they came up with the problem that they're having and they came up with the pain. It's almost the same with these AI models. If I can get the AI model to really identify and come up with themselves what the persona pains, prospects, and triggers are before it starts writing, at the moment that it starts writing, it's getting to genius level, right? So that's the— yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead.

No, I agree. I 100% agree because I've seen people trying to use AI, but they're trying to act smarter than AI in some way. I'm like, that's not the best approach. Like, you, you let AI control the conversation and give it the context required, right? So I love the way you explained it.

You know, in ancient philosophy, it was called the Socratic method. And the Socratic method was basically Socrates didn't teach, hey, this is what you need to know about the soul. He asked questions to his students that drove them into curiosity and wonder, and they discovered for themselves in that process what were the lessons. So this, it's really, really powerful. You know, it's funny, I call it Socratic programming or Socratic prompting. Again, I am a marketer. I'm, I'm inventing a new name. I appreciate it.

If anybody haven't read this book, they should totally do it. Something called Socratic Selling. And that book really has a lot of insights on how you use question-based framing in your sales calls to convert clients, because you can never sell any deal if they don't want to buy it themselves. So all you have to do is have them picture what they're trying to buy, by what timeline, at what price. And all you have to do is take that information and present it saying, yes, I'm exactly doing that. Would you like to get started? And they start throwing credit cards at your face. It's crazy.

Thank you for sharing. I haven't read that book. I will be buying it immediately after this podcast because that's exactly what I'm trying to do with the AI agents. I think that consultative sales process is Socratic selling.

Yeah.

And it's what we can be doing with training the tools. So ChatGPT is like, we're, I'm living inside of it, but it's in our own custom GPTs, right? Yeah. Our number one tool for everything that we're doing. The other things that we use are different platforms, and I don't know if you meant the platforms that we're working in or we can get into that next.

Yeah, let's go. Let's go with all the platforms and tools. We could give like a list of all the tools we are using so people could go check out themselves and see how they can use the same.

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, building your own custom GPTs is incredibly powerful. The next platform that I'm living in, I think a lot of us are, I think most of us are, is GoHighLevel.

Yeah.

HighLevel— GoHighLevel brought everything under one roof. It makes it for, for people like us, integrators and auto— and automators, it just makes it so easy. We don't have to worry about the Zaps and APIs. A lot of times, most all this stuff is taken care of within, and it makes this very effective for our clients. It's incredibly powerful. But what I love about HighLevel, it's not just that the team it's just so, they're such go-givers, right? It's incredible. It's the community as well. We have an amazing community. So I spend a lot of time in the different groups, the high-level groups and some of the other platforms I want to mention inside of the groups, because I find that we are, there's a lot of very collaborative people that are having great success. And I think that's creating an amazing culture for us at the moment right now. I think that even 20 years ago, Like, or 10 years ago, we, people like us, we would used to see each other as competitors, right?

I agree. Now it's no longer the same case.

No, and we would hide our cards. It's like, no, I don't want anyone to know what I'm doing because if they know this one little stupid SEO trick that I know, they're going to take all— no, share all your information. You don't know what they know either. Come on. So, but in HighLevel, one of the things that we're really, really getting into in HighLevel is then the use of custom GPTs and OpenAI agents, which is the same thing as custom GPTs, but the backend side of them, right? Inside of HighLevel. Oh my God, it's so powerful. We have the ability to build automations. That's what we've been doing that for many years now. But now imagine adding little brains inside of the automations, right? Let's say, All right. Read where we're at in our conversation. Read all the conversations to the convers— and then assess. Are they ready to move on to book a call, or does it make more sense to— or they need more time and they should join us for a webinar, or they need— so imagine a little function, a little box inside of our automations, right, with OpenAI that's assessing this, and then based off of this branching out. That's one simple example. Of how we can be using, sometimes this is called layered prompting, using layered prompting inside of our automations in GoHighLevel. Super, super sick. It's absolutely incredible. The next, the other platform that we're using a lot, really for our clients from the AI agents, you mentioned it already, is CloseBot. I'm a huge CloseBot fan. We mentioned them already a couple of times. Anyone that's looking at working with different AI agents, I highly recommend this community and this platform. They're, to me, they have the same heart and spirit that I think GoHighLevel has at their core, which is it's here to serve the community, right? And so I've had Briath on pod.

His commitment to creating the best chatbot in the world is just insane. Like that platform, which can enable agencies to, to have great conversations and let their clients get best results. It's, it's insane. Rafa, I have a different set of questions for you. I'm curious, walk us through your average day. Like, give us your routine if you have any.

Yeah, that's interesting. I don't know if I have an average day per se, you know, as an entrepreneur and working, I do consulting for equity. So I'm involved in multiple different companies. Right. And so I do start that I do my best to start the day is with, with exercise and breathwork every morning. I like to wake up. I try to wake up before, before 6 o'clock. And the first thing I do is go down to the river to go for a run down at the river. And after the river, doing Wim Hof breathwork. I think that there is a big movement in entrepreneurs across. We're looking for ways to fine-tune our energies.

Agreed.

Yeah, it takes a lot of work what we do. It takes a lot of, it takes, what's the word I'm looking for? Grit, right? Stay power, right? To be able to do what we do and to face problems that other people have faced and haven't been able to solve. That's what we signed up for. That's our calling. We're the guys that raise our hands to go do the impossible.

I agree.

And you can't do that nonstop without burning out. So taking care of the mind and body to me is really powerful, important. And breathwork is just, to me, is the absolute bomb. From there, the first thing I do then is to meet with my team, right? Meeting with my team on a daily perspective. We all have check-ins of whatever is most important for them. Right? And then we run through all of the tasks that are in place. We start at stuck. What, what's in stuck? Anything in stuck? Let's go there and let's focus on stuck first. And then we move from stuck to finished in review, from finished to review to in progress to assigned to assigned to unassigned. And we review that so that as a team, we can all be aware of where we're at, right? And how we can help each other. Um, I think that we are all, we don't know it because we don't know any better, but we, we run in the disadvantage of a virtual world. And I know that might be an unpopular concept, but can you imagine if you, me, and Bryce and some other amazing marketers and friends that you, that we know showed up to the same office every day?

It would be incredible.

It would be insane. Like the amount of like, even what happens at the water, like the amount of collaboration and—

We would cure cancer. I don't know. We would cure like rockets reaching other orbits. I don't know. It's crazy how much innovation. I mean, I'm talking in the sense of marketing, but you get the point.

But yeah, I do. And I agree with you 100%. And so I feel like, I mean, I became a marketer, an online marketer, because I never wanted to go into an office. Now I find myself in a place in my life and my career where like, wow, I really want to accelerate and do the next thing that I, the next level, maybe I would benefit from building my team in a way that we could be in the same building, in the same room. There's no doubt that, that, that, that we have some challenges. So I'm, so I'm trying to meet that through daily meetings and moving through our, our perspe— our objectives.

Nice.

Or the task and stuff. And then from there, for the rest of the day, It's focused on where my genius is most needed, right? Which is I'm the guy that shows up to solve the impossible problems, right?

The most difficult possible problems.

Yeah. My team can handle everything else, right? Where's the problem? Where, where's the poo? You know, I don't know. You know, I don't know. I have a pet, I have a dog, and sometimes when we come in the house, you'll notice that the dog is not like so happy to see us and it's kind of hiding behind a chair and it's just like, Okay.

You made a mistake.

Where's the poop?

That's a funny analogy. That's pretty cool.

So that's what I focus on for myself, for my team, and for my clients.

I agree. I think momentum comes with like moving with other people who you like and enjoy. And that's one of the reasons like I run this podcast as well, because I could associate and meet people who are smarter than me and just keep this momentum and continuation of learning. And we just have great chats after and before the podcast. It's just fun to network with all the amazing entrepreneurs, right? So let's get to the next question, Rapha. I mean, you have had this long career in just marketing, right? Like you've been just great, like working in the marketing space for so long. Save us from one big mistake that you made in all this 20, 25 years of you working in the marketing space. What was the number one biggest mistake that you don't want to repeat for yourself and obviously save everybody who's listening to the podcast right now?

It's a, I know I have one at the top of mind, right? But it's a tough one because I'm still struggling with it. Right. And I just want to be vulnerable and sincere. Right. I think the biggest mistake that I've made in the past is that I try to be the, I'm trying, I always strive to be the expert at everything. And I think that it happened— now we're all different, but I, I find I'm very passionate about what I do. I love what I do. And sometimes I love it too much that I'm the one that, that I'm still trying to be, always be the expert. And I wish earlier in my career, I would have noticed that while I can still have my passion, while I can still strive to be the best, that I'm better off growing experts. Right. And so, and maybe it's, it comes with age too. I am getting, you know, I am square in, in the, in my midlife crisis and in my midlife crisis, I'm realizing, wow, you know, there's an opportunity here. There's an opportunity to grab what I've loved and what has held me back, but just twist it a little bit so that it can help me go to the next level. And it is growing experts. It's in being there to help. Mentor and grow experts in the fields that, that, that I've taken. I've only, I've done it by myself this whole time. I've been almost greatly a lone wolf for the last 20 years. And while I've had success and we've had great success, I know, I know it's been 10 to 20% of what it could have been if I would have realized this earlier.

Oh boy, it hurts. I like just thinking about that idea.

It hurts, doesn't it? It hurts a lot. But you know what? Pain, remember, pain awareness is an important part of transformation. Let it— so I'm aware of that. I'm willing to feel it, to experience it, because it's this pain that is motivating the next evolution of Rafa.

I love that. I think it's important to not just be the lone wolf, but create a wolf pack. You know, I've built incredible teams and partners and different partnerships and a portfolio of companies, which I love enjoying working with. And I believe like that creates sanity and momentum in your life. And I completely agree with, uh, you know, advice. Now, if somebody's watching this, Rafa, and they're curious, they need more help and they want to connect with you in some shape or form, where do they find more information? How can they get in touch with you? What's the best place to shake hands?

Yeah, absolutely. InteractiveMarketing.net is my website, and that's an easy one to remember to be able to just go there and connect with me. I love connecting with other marketers. I love entrepreneurs. As I've mentioned, this is— I'm one of those lucky people that gets to do what I love for a living. So that's the easiest and best way to get with me or through social. I'm on Instagram and Facebook at Rafael. I'm beginning to bring my LinkedIn game back up. It's time to, it's time to do it. But anyone inside of the groups, I mentioned that I spent quite a bit of time too inside of the Facebook groups for GoHighLevel or the Facebook group for Closebot, because there is a lot of great collaboration that's taking place in there. And there's a lot of smart people out there, right? Another mistake that I think that we make sometimes as the experts, right, is that we're afraid to see people that are smarter than us. When it should be the one thing that you should always be looking for.

Yeah.

Right.

I totally agree. I've met so many of those people transparently, but yeah, there is one thing which separates them, which is the collaborativeness, like what you have here, you know, which is really helpful. Now, any words of wisdom that you would like to leave with to all the podcast listeners who jumped on today? Like something to conclude the whole session we had.

Yeah, absolutely. I would say that the number one thing to always remember is action. Just to keep it flowing. There is, I love the idea of imperfect execution, right? So many of us, as we're continuing to grow or trying to reach the next level, we hit a moment when we freeze, right? And that freeze happens either from exhaustion, burnout, doubt, shame, right? And trying not to feel pain, right? It's almost like little kids, like what happens when, look, what do little kids do, right? They freeze and take a deep breath and they stop breathing sometimes. Like just, they're trying to, themselves. As entrepreneurs, that's death for us. As marketers, that's death for us, right? No matter how messed up it seems, move, move forward, right? It's the only way that the universe has the opportunity to then create the circumstances and resources to help you get— address that, that problem, reach the solution, and to continue to grow and evolve.

That's beautiful advice. Thank you so much for sharing that. I think that momentum and the continuation of action as an entrepreneur is probably the number one reason why most are successful, because when you keep moving is when you find differentiations and you keep adapting your journey and you finally achieve the goal. Now, Rafa, with that being said, thank you so much for jumping on and sharing your wisdom and giving us the secrets of creating marketing journeys and walking us through how you're using AI and automations to create the best out of the leads that are generated to increase the chance of them becoming appointments and giving some wonderful advice on how agencies can scale and embrace AI in this unique spot. Because 2025 is a very remarkable year. It's, it's quite interesting on how AI is moving and how quickly it is evolving. And I love to get industry experts like you to talk about this. Guys, hopefully you enjoyed the podcast session so far. If you did, make sure to subscribe and share this with your friends. And if you need more help, check out Interacto Marketing and connect with Rafa. I'm pretty sure you'll have a good time working with him. And I'll be back on this podcast with another amazing guest, just like Rafa.

Nick, one more thing. One more thing. I'm sorry. In reference to connecting, one of the things that I've been thinking about, right? I'm really looking for opportunities is to be able to provide white label our services for other agencies in that spirit of not be having to be the expert at everything. I think that we all have an opportunity to work with each other. Right? And I was talking to another amazing marketer around this, and it's like, guys, in the past, we've always hid our secret sauce. Let's give it to everybody. Let's let them white label. I don't have to be the expert. You can be the expert.

Right?

And so we've been— that's the new evolution that I've been working towards with the work that we're doing with AI agents and the way that we're building stuff out.

Nice.

Just to be able to make relationships with other agency owners that would be interested. It's like, hey dude, you guys run it, run it under our names for us, make us look good. And I think it's a win-win.

I think it is an incredible opportunity. So anybody who's listening who is a coach or somebody who wants to have a marketing partner for your marketing agency and you want to find that marketing fulfillment expert, you could definitely check out Rafa. And I think that's an incredible opportunity. I genuinely believe that businesses who have these strong partnerships, because we are a very partner-focused business as well, they just have more like resilience. You know, no markets can shake you because you have diversity. You have diversity in client base and sales, everything possible to keep the business actively flowing. So guys, that's an incredible opportunity. And please stay tuned, connect with Rafa if you need more help on that. And I'll be back with another amazing guest on the Nick Gil Saad Show. Rafa, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you, buddy. Really enjoyed it, Nick. Thank you. Yeah.