How We’re Turning Agency Services Into AI Workflows

This is how I'm thinking about agency services or marketing services software in general. So right now we have, you think about it this way, if you have a 2 by 2 here, on the x-axis you have your customer usefulness. So left going to right, the more you go to the right, it's more useful, okay? And then on the y-axis, you have the ongoing delivery effort of something. What I'm really calling out here is a lot of the stuff that we should be trying to build more of, at least for me, is reusable workflows, right? So these are, you know, these are high usefulness, but over time, it's going to be less work over time, right? You might need to customize it every now and then for a customer, right? Now, I think a lot of agencies right now, they do custom and premium work, which are, this is, it's obviously useful to the client, but it's high ongoing delivery effort, right? Which is why a lot of people that I'm talking to right now are trying to leave the agencies in droves, right? And I'm in some of these AI executive chats and These are not even agency but tech companies, right? They're just like, dude, things are just too slow right now and these companies aren't adapting quickly enough. And so they all want to move from this world where you're still doing maybe 10%, 20% of your work maybe like this, maybe 80% is like this where it's reusable and scalable. And then anything that is low effort, low usefulness, you probably deprioritize it, not probably, definitely. And then anything that's high effort, low usefulness, you probably need to think about stopping and then refocusing the company, right? In today's day and age, you can do anything. You just can't do everything, just more and more of so that focus muscle is even more important today. So, this is something like I'm constantly recommunicating the vision to the company in terms of like, hey, we have this 3-layer cake. This is how things are going to go. This is how everything connects. And I have to kind of be the chief repeater, the chief reminder officer over and over and just so people know where we're going, right? More important than ever, and then some of the things that Neil's talking about in terms of what we're doing is is we're again thinking about reusable workflows. Like how do we skillify things? What repos do we put them in? How do people how do we continue to repeat that over and over? These these these how do we make sure that these things are secure? How do we make sure that there's a gateway for it? So imagine Neil all the things that you would be put on hold for. You can just run it through this bot, right? All the things that you never want to deal with. All by the way, a lot of people just just a pro tip for you. You can actually search how much money is owed to you by the state, and you can have these bots kind of look and make the full. phone calls for you and just stay on hold. And then maybe it can transfer over to you, right? But—

That's cool. Those state calls are such a pain when you call them.

Oh my God. I never thought about that.

That's such a great idea.

There you go. And by the way, Neil, you'll like this one too. I have a HaggleBot. The HaggleBot actually, it's been sending emails to all the softwares that we pay for. And the funny thing is, like everyone from all these softwares like Asana or our applicant tracking system, they're all responding, right? And it's like, hey, this rate's not going to work for us. What's the best that you could do? Blah, blah, blah. So instead of— you can just have your finance person running the Haggle Bot. So my whole thing with these things is I'm just making these Grok Bots and I'm just handing it over to my team to run. But the best one, Neil, is I have the Speed to Lead Bot. So anybody that fills out a lead form on the site gets a call within 60 seconds now. And the voice sounds good. I had a few people on my team testing it and And they're like, dude, this sounds really good, right? And so I'm like, oh, well, like we can probably run this for, you know, deals that are like stalled or deals that we need to revive. But the cool thing with GrokBot is it's fairly simple to spin these things up. You just need to spend some time with it.

So when I look at this week, Eric mentioned something on speed to, what was it? Speed to follow-up or something like that? Speed to lead?

Speed to lead, speed to lead.

I've been actually focusing a lot this week on speed to learning. And what I mean speed to learning is, imagine this, you do work for your company. You see something that's working really well on Instagram. How often is that knowledge transferred to the other social profiles? Sometimes it's the same person, so it gets transferred pretty quickly and they actually go and execute on it. Sometimes that knowledge needs to be transferred to people who are running email because they're figuring out what copy's working well, or they need to send it to people who are on paid strategy or conversion optimization, whatever it may be. And one of the biggest bottlenecks that I see in organizations is the speed to learning. And what I mean by that is something happens, you make a change on one of these platforms and you get this result. That is very advantageous for you. Sometimes you got that result deliberately because you intended to run that experiment and you knew something would happen. But a lot of times it actually happens by accident and it's just pure luck. But that's okay. That happens with all marketers in many cases. But you take what you got lucky on and you need to implement it on the rest of the organization. Now imagine this for an agency. You have hundreds of clients, maybe even thousands of clients. You could have them in one country, you could have them globally. You may be running multiple channels. You're quickly, you're not only implementing what you already know what's working, hence companies hire agencies, but you should also be running a lot of tests and experiments to figure out how you can get even better and better results. But what I find in almost every organization, when people learn something, that's working, that knowledge sometimes gets transferred over to people, but even when it does get transferred, people are very slow to execute on that. And these are easy wins and low-hanging fruit. And that's one thing I'm trying to tackle more in marketing. And I believe a lot of organizations face this issue, especially once you start scaling above 100, 200 people, you start seeing more of these issues. What have you been changing up on your, or have you been doing any changes on your social media? We actually started doing some, Yeah, you go first. Yeah, so we've been trying to crank out more content, more longer-form content, um, and we've been finding— and when I say more long-form content, we've been trying a new format where I can be screen sharing. So it's recording me in my office, which is where I am right now, laptop tilted to the side, camera head-on directly to me, and then it goes in between me talking and screen sharing. Technically, I'm not really screen sharing. The team is doing the screen sharing. What's happening is, is there's a teleprompter with, you know, the script that I'm supposed to read. And then when I go to my computer, it's the same script on my screen. So I can go back and forth and keep talking. And then on their end through post-production, they do all that stuff. That way we don't need a camera behind me recording the screen or anything like that. I don't always follow the script. Probably a large chunk of the time I'm just ad-libbing and just talking away because then they'll tell me what they're trying to say and then sometimes the script is just too wordy and long and I just want to freely speak. I would probably say I do that 60% of the time. But those videos seem to be working out really well on all the social platforms. So in essence, not only am I recording more videos and more longer-form videos, but I'm trying screen sharing formats, which people like. The whole thesis behind it is even though a lot of our customers, our ideal customer profile is a large global company, they have a lot of people internally in marketing and we want to give them a lot of the tips and the strategies so that way they can be more effective at their job. And then when they have a brief that they want to put out or RFP, hopefully some of those people think about us, But the longer-term play here is we're just getting our brand out there and a lot of these junior people will eventually get promoted. They'll eventually be the ones pushing out RFPs and be more decision makers. And hopefully they keep thinking of us as well. The other strategy that I've been doing is we've been scraping all the people that have been engaging with our content on social, specifically LinkedIn, then looking at their job profiles. What's their position? What company they work at? We try to estimate the size, and then we craft really personalized emails to them based on their business. And if we honestly think we can help, we do it. If we don't, then we don't waste our time crafting email. But we're putting them in buckets. So let's say Eric hypothetically worked at Microsoft and he was a CMO. Let's just go with this example now. If Eric interacted with 5 of my posts in the last 6 months, I would more likely reach out to Eric than if someone was the CMO of Apple and they only engaged with my content 1 time in the last 6 months. So I'm looking for people who continually engage roughly at least once a month for a consistent period of time. And our period is usually 3 months because we're finding those people are more likely to engage in conversations. And even if they don't give us any business, They know the next time they go out, they're much more likely to include us in a brief.

So a couple things here. So what Neil's talking about, I don't know what tool you're using, but I do know that Gojiberry can help find the people that are engaging on X and LinkedIn at the same time. So if you're attacking both of those, it makes sense. I think Lead Shark is something that we use. So I'll go ahead and share my screen right now and talk about the 2 things that we've been doing. So if you can see my LinkedIn over here, So this is what we've been doing. We've been creating these comment to get access on this guide type of thing. We add them to the newsletter. And then if you combine that with the Goji Berry and you see who's engaged with this, so for example, 900 comments on this one, 115 likes. So the idea should be, okay, they get an automatic DM and then you add them to your list. But the other thing is, to Neil's point, you should be looking at the people that have maybe engaged 3 to 5 times in the last 90 days or so.

Yeah.

and you should be hitting them up. And you should, I think you should have a human in the loop there. So I'll let the team, I'll set the direction, look at how the team does it, come in and tweak it a little more, and then go from there, right? So like, you know, that Gojiberry Lead Shark thing is the thing that we've added recently.

When people comment CMO on LinkedIn, I'm assuming you manually message them?

Nope, automatic.

Automatic? What are you using for the automatic messaging?

I think it's called Lead Shark. The other thing, Neil, you kind of called this out, but like I'm looking at my YouTube channel And I'm starting to become more proud of it because if you look at the views recently, and there's a big thing with GPT-6 Astra. So last Saturday I decided to record a video. Literally I got the video out myself with the thumbnail and with the editing, right? I think it was, it might be one of this one. It might be either. Yeah, I think it's this one. How I use GPT-6 Astra to run my business. 7 real examples, right? Attacking the latest marketing trend, sorry, latest AI trend, and then layering it on with marketing stuff, right? And so I use GPT-6 to run my marketing for a day. How Grofbot runs a market. Like, I'm good with 3,000, 5,000. I'm good with 12,000 views, 13,000. Like, I don't need, you know, rich BFF. Like, I love Vivian, right? But I don't need 731,000 views because it ain't going to drive no leads, right? And sure, I can talk about dating over here, 488,485 over here. But that's not the most exciting piece. The most exciting piece is getting the relevant views. In the past, like we do have editors on the team and, you know, they're great. We do have thumbnail people on the team, but Neil, like for me to cover these types of topics, whenever the inspiration strikes, I used to not want to do it because I knew I'd have to wait for the editor. I knew I'd have to wait for the thumbnail. And by the time the video came out, it would have been like a week later, right? Now I have a GPT-6 Astra skill called Leveling Up Content Engine. And it'll cut out the short forms. It literally edited this video and it came up with the thumbnails. Like this video, Neil, is completely AI edited. You see that, Neil? Like the first 30 seconds, like all these things that it added, it added on its own, right? So—

Yeah, that's cool. The only thing I don't like is the thumbnail because it's not your real image and I feel it's bad for brand.

So I added to the skill, like I just messing with it. You and I can create these things where it's like, and I can even share the skill with you if you want, but it's like, The first 30 seconds is very important. Keep the editing tight. You know, don't have a bunch of like dead space. Have captions at the bottom. Neil, to your point, I improved. Look, this thumbnail clearly doesn't look like me, right? It looks like somebody else. This one over here, right?

Yeah.

But this one, hey, how's this one over here?

No, that one's good. I assumed that was not done by AI.

No, this one was done by AI too, but I just improved it. I said, hey, here's what I actually look like. You get what I mean? So, I'm just like, dude, I get it, right? Like, one of the editors this week, I was like, look, man, I'm like, you want this, but then you can't hit deadlines. And then at the same time, I'm doing this right now. So like, you know, at the same, you're going to have to catch up, right? And so, because I interact with my brand team like once a week and I'm very direct with the feedback. And so he's like, he's stepping it up now and I'm hoping I could just hand him these skills. But the whole idea is like someone like a Neil who's, you know, pushing his company, you know, the founder, right? And same thing, founder for my company. I think it is your job to figure out how you can constantly mess around with these things. And if you can make a cool reusable workflow, hand it off to your team and then let them take it from there.

So.

Got it. Got it.

So yeah, dude. And when it comes to AI and thumbnails, the other thing you can end up doing, Eric's spot on. This is how I actually look. Like Eric and I probably have No joke, 1,000+ images of us that are not recent, but recent enough that you can actually put into AI and be like, this is how I actually look like, make sure I look similar.