Eric Siu leads agency owners through tools reshaping client work: Closely for research, Clay for outreach automation, NotebookLM for content, and Agent.ai for customer service. Kevin shares how quizzes generate qualified leads; others debate which AI tools actually save time versus add busywork.
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All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you wanna learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy. Hope you enjoy the episode.
I was just asking, um, if you guys had found any like new tools or anything exciting that you wanted to share with the group this week.
Ooh, I have one. I'm about to start up with it. Not a whole lot of knowledge, but it's called closely.io. It's another .io and it's a fusion. Anybody heard of Closely? It's a fusion of LinkedIn and cold email. Okay. So Kevin, just really quick, it's like instead of Using what's that? I'm gonna forget what the, the cold email one. It's really popular. Instead of just doing cold email on its own, you can do cold LinkedIn, large quantity, like not whatever, maybe it's 20, 30 direct InMails a day and you can have the automatic nurtures and the cold email like together under one roof. So it's like $100, $150 a month. Seems interesting, I'm gonna try it out. Kevin, any perspective?
Yeah, I started using that about a year ago. You know, I think they're like all— a lot of them are all the same. Like, I got about 5 of those things. I think the key is the automations and the messaging and how you're connecting with your audience. I think you need— I just think you need to add value. I'll be honest, what we found really works is really targeting well who we want to talk to and creating some lead magnets for that space specifically and just really connecting with them. Like me going in and, hey man, uh, I'd love to connect with you, love to, you know, expand my network. Um, I see you do this, I have an ebook or a guide that I think would be very— you'd be very interested in. And sometimes I'll do it on the fly using AI. I'll write something up because I know what they need and I'll just kind of make it look pretty and send it over and that gets the conversation going. So what I find is I need about 5 to 7 touches before they know, like, and trust me.
Yeah.
And the AI is just kind of one way, if you will. It's kind of trying, you know, it's all about me. You know, kind of thing, what I want from them. So I'm starting to do it more manually and I'm finding it's funner, to be honest. And I've made some friends along the way. They're not ready to buy per se, but they trust, they come to me now for advice. And I kind of throw out fractional CMO, AMA stuff, ask me anything. It's, you know, I say I normally charge $250 for an AMA.
Okay.
Um, I'll send them my, my link and it says pay, and— but I give them a coupon code for free basically, so they feel like they're getting a free—
Oh, that's pretty interesting.
Yeah, hour of my time. Um, that's worked really well. It's not volume though, it's like very strategic, you know, kind of thing. But I think if you do stuff for free, people don't appre— I did that for years and I— it got leads definitely because I'm— I got a lot to say. But, um, I think the $250 kind of— they feel respectful of my time. And I record it like this. We record it like on a Zoom call. I send them the transcript, the Zoom call, and I say, I'll give you your money back. Or if I do charge, I give— so I give your money back if you're not completely satisfied. But that's kind of all built into my Calendly, and I just give them the coupon code so they don't have to pay when they first come in kind of thing. Sometimes people pay me afterwards, you know, kind of thing. They go, oh man, that was great, here's $250. No problem. Um, but anyways, I, I'm— I've reverted back to really being hands-on right, right now. Um, I found that the mass LinkedIn outreach is— everybody's picked up on it, you know, kind of thing. Um, and I don't feel good about it for me, you know. I feel like it kind of feels kind of scammy a little bit, you know. So anyways, that's just me. I'm not doing that. I'm not looking for 100 clients a month either, you know. If I get 3 to 5 clients a month, I'm killing it, you know, kind of thing, right? So you got to look at the perspective of like, those are really built for volume and sales reps and things like that. As an owner, you might just spend the time looking at your ideal client persona. And I can help you with that. I can share what I'm doing offline if you want.
Yeah.
I, I, we haven't connected in a while, Kevin. I always appreciate how you're like, oh, yeah, closely. I, I did that a year ago. It's like probably just a day before you beta tested it or whatever.
Cool.
Yeah. Let's speak, stay in touch. Good perspective. I, 5 to 7 touches, but you actually tried the spray and pray approach and you're kind of pulling it back to more manual.
Yeah.
I, I've tried a lot of stuff. Tough, man. I've tried Clay, um, with email. Uh, clay.com is— it's fabulous for clients. Like, whatever I give to my clients, I tried it on me first kind of thing. And so Clay— Clay is like the best, but it's like $300 a month or $350 a month, something like that. But it's kind of, uh, it'll write the customized e— it'll scrape, write the AI— AI write the conversation for you, and it's a lot more realistic. than some of— even though it's AI for the spray and pray stuff, it's just still—
you can—
everybody's been hit with it, I think, you know, on LinkedIn. I know I get 50 a week, you know. I'm like, I've got AI to respond to it now with funny jokes, you know. I'm like, you know, yeah, I come up with funny responses and I'm not trying to piss people off, but I'm like, dude, you're like the millionth person who's emailed me the same exact same thing, you know. You know, kind of thing. You got to be more credible. Um, so I'm— instead of just being pissed and archiving them, I've got it automated responding to these people.
Interesting.
Thanks.
There's a great AI tool, just— I won't go into it right now, but it's called Sider. S-I-D-E-R. Um, if the pro version, uh, $20 a month, just like ChatGPT Pro or whatever. But you get access to all the LLM Pro stuff. And it's got built-in like response, like I use it for LinkedIn responses. It'll say their message and then my response. So I'll paste in their message and then I'll just start like, no thank you. And it'll write a real, and then you choose the tone you want, you know, like funny, professional, whatever. And it'll write a nice short, you can choose short, medium, large kind of length of the response. And that just saves me so much time from thinking and not being rude on, 'cause I get so many inquiries on LinkedIn. And it's honestly, it's turned people around. People are like, okay, I'm not gonna sell anything, but I'd really like to connect with you and get to know you better. Can we just talk, collaborate? 'Cause I just hate how people just come in and just, I wanna sell you this kind of thing. It's— I can demo it for you when we meet, Adam, and show you. But Cider is a great— or if anybody wants me to show it today, I can show you how I use it since we're talking tools. But I'll let other people chime in. I don't want to dominate here.
They're, they're asking for marriage on the first date, is that right?
Yeah, marriage on the first date. You know, it's kind of like, seriously, man, you know, like, let's, let's talk.
I want to point out, um, John asked how do we get the Apollo discount. I put the link in there, so if you guys haven't checked it out yet School under the, uh, under the classroom setting, you can go to like the discounts and deals section and there's probably 6 or 8 maybe, um, discounts. And those are coming more and more all the time. Uh, as Eric and Neil make more partnerships, they, they bring in tools and discounts that are exclusive to AOA members. So make sure you're taking advantage of that shameless plug for the group. Um, but Cider AI, Rebecca said. Okay, nice.
I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.
Well, while we're on the topic, if anybody else wants to share like a tool that's, that's been helpful for them or like something new that they found this week, because like I went to an AI meeting yesterday and they were just showing like all the updates that came out literally this week and I was just blown away. So I'd love to hear if there's anything else that's like you guys are using that's helpful or interesting.
I'm not using it yet, but I was at HubSpot's inbound all last week and it was all AI and what they're baking into the platform. So they're actually, they're trying to activate it and trying to make it put in the platform so people aren't wandering around to Cider and all this other stuff. And so my big personal goal is to get in there, do some demos, figure this out, figure out what they've got going on, figure out which piece of it's real, which is roadmap. But it was a lot of interesting announcements. Their stock went up, the market liked it. So they're trying to actualize AI to help people rather than just You know, AI. So anyways, that's kind of it in summary.
So just all the updates in HubSpot is what you're talking about, Rebecca?
Yeah, but, but having, having, putting data inside of HubSpot to let people, you know, all the stuff you buy from ZoomInfo and Apollo and all that, sticking that into HubSpot, automating tasks inside of HubSpot with agents, and then you know, more predictive capabilities, all kind of agent-driven and AI-driven. And just, and, you know, there's the basic marketing stuff that's easy. You can see the use case with AI really easy, but it's customer services use case, and we're very familiar with the sales prospecting use case. So they're, they're trying to put it all inside so people don't have to go other places, and they're using it to sell. Obviously, it's not upsells, but it's just to sell certain basic subscriptions. So they're deep in.
That's awesome. Yeah, thanks for sharing. Um, Eric and Neil were at the HubSpot Inbound Conference too, no?
They were. They were definitely there. Yeah.
Did you get a chance to see them?
They're super popular, and I'm there for a different reason. And so no, um, some certain stages that have to do with guys like that, and also Jay Schwedelson, if that's how you say his name, he's an email guy. Certain stages like that are swamped and they're hard to get around, or the rooms are hard to get in and I'm, I'm doing something else. And so no, I did not. I'm there doing other things.
Right, right. Make the most of your time there. Well, thanks for sharing that, Rebecca. Scott, I noticed you put a couple tools in the chat. One was Clay and one was Agent.ai. What's going on with those?
Yeah, I just see Dharmesh's posts on LinkedIn and as Rebecca was talking about HubSpot, he keeps talking about the Agent.ai. I think it's a small marketplace that he's building. So he's got some cool agents there. I guess you want to upload data, train your own agents. Seems like a cool tool to play around with. Yeah, that's— and you would talk— sorry.
He's— to what your point is, one of the founders of HubSpot is Dharmesh. That's his URL, and that's his little playground where he's messing around with stuff way ahead of it hitting HubSpot. So that's— Scott, that's a great tip.
Yeah, yeah, he's, he talked about it on something Against the Grain, Marketing Against the Grain or whatever podcast is. Yeah, he was, he was in a lot on his personal post, but the other one is also, you were talking about quizzes, Daniel Priestley, I've been following him for a few years now. He has ScoreApp, which is a quiz builder. So it is a quiz, you take it and then it kind of helps you with sales actually on the back end. So it leads to a sale at the end. and provides you with enough information. So played around with it, did a trial, did it paid for a couple of months, but we just couldn't figure out how to fit it just yet into our business. But I think it's pretty cool too. If any of your customers' ICPs might be into doing quiz and then you using that information to close them, that could be helpful.
Thanks for sharing, Scott.
Yeah.
What else we got going on? I I want to jump in. So check it out, notebooklm.google. It's, um, less on the, like, the sales and prospecting side, but it's on kind of internal— I can see internal use cases or for learning something new. The coolest feature about this is you can upload all kinds of documents to it, internal documents, uh, something that you're trying to learn that's, like, long and technical. And there's an option where it creates, like, an 8 to 12 minute podcast, which is 2 people speaking American English to each other about the documents that you uploaded. So for me, someone who loves to listen to podcasts, I played around with it last night and found it super valuable. I even uploaded some of my own, like, personal goals and, and objectives that I'm looking to achieve and listen to 2 people talk about my goals and like, actually what was in the data. Super interesting. So I'm I'm curious to see how that would, how that would play out maybe in, you know, uploading SOPs and onboarding new people to get them up to speed very quickly.
