In this episode Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss three main themes. First, they review Gong Labs’ study on AI‑assisted sales, highlighting a 2,200% rise in AI‑related sales conversations, a 464% increase in AI‑generated emails, and win‑rate lifts of 50% for completed AI‑to‑dos and an additional 26% when using AI‑informed deal strategies. They explain how Gong’s newer AI features now transcribe calls, segment them, auto‑generate next‑action items and follow‑up emails, and provide stakeholder recommendations, illustrating a shift toward AI‑augmented selling rather than replacing humans. Second, they share the results of an analysis of 2.38 million pieces of social content to determine the optimal length for various formats: Instagram reels (11‑17 s), educational reels (38‑51 s), carousel slides (7‑10 slides with dual‑hook first two), LinkedIn short videos (40‑46 s) and long‑form (3‑4 min), LinkedIn text (motivational 20‑38 words, educational ~291 words), TikTok (entertainment 9‑10 s, educational 42‑54 s), YouTube Shorts (28‑33 s entertainment, 41‑57 s educational), long‑form YouTube (7‑9 min), and inconclusive Facebook patterns. Third, they discuss content packaging: the importance of compelling thumbnails and headlines (citing a YouTube strategist who achieved 7‑10% CTR for B2C videos, aiming for 5‑8% in B2B), A/B testing lessons from Vanessa Lau, and the risk of burnout, illustrated by personal anecdotes about family time and creator fatigue. The episode also includes promotions for Single Grain and the Agency Owners Association.
Chapters
By the way, okay, so here we'll start out with the ROI of AI in sales. And I'm going to tell you about something I learned in a podcast yesterday that might be helpful, Neil. So anyway, so the ROI of AI in sales. So this is a study done by Gong. Shout out to Gong, both Neil's company and my company, we both use Gong. We're not getting paid to say this, but check this out. So this case study says sales conversations about AI have increased 2,200% since November of 2022. Basically, I mean, that's when ChatGPT came out. And Gong Labs, who did this case study, said it's 464% increase in number of sales emails composed by generative AI. And then the other piece here is it says the win rates have increased by 50%. That's a huge one, okay?
Wow.
That's what matters at the end of the day. If your win rates are going up, then your revenue's going up. And then with the— so that win rate's 50% is on the, Number of completed AI-generated to-dos. So that's helped the win rates go up. The other thing here is with an informed, with an AI-informed deal strategy, win rates have increased by another 26% there. And what that means is a deal strategy is with Gong Engage, they actually tell you, hey, here's who you should be following up with. Here's other stakeholders you should be talking to. Here's the, and then like, here's the emails. Like these, this is basically like, these are the things you should do, right? And that layers on with the to-do list as well. And then finally, with AI guidance.
Okay, so before you discuss AI clients, let's back up a bit. Gong is known for recording calls and telling you who's talking more and it helps analyze, you know, what helps close a deal and what does not help closing a deal. They've been doing that for years. That's right.
Conversational intelligence.
That's what it is. Okay. So what are the other features that they're using with AI that's helping with sales?
Yeah. So with Gong, so before, so Neil's right. The base level of Gong a couple years ago when they first launched was, hey, it's a call recorder that's joining your call and you're able to coach your people, right? If Neil does a call, I can go in there, I can listen to it. I can see how often he's talking and I can just leave comments at those timestamps, right? Now, what Gong is doing now is it will actually transcribe the call for you and it'll also break up the call into different sections. Let's say I'm doing a call with you. One section might be on the introduction, one might be on the offering, one might be on your challenges, one might be on the services that we're offering, right? And it'll show the next action items too. So it'll summarize things. So based on the context it draws from that call summary, it'll say, okay, these are the next action items. The to-dos are automatically created for you. And then also the follow-up emails are automatically created for you and it'll also find emails from the company that you're talking at and saying, hey, you should also follow up with these people if someone else, you know, if someone doesn't respond to you or something like that. So it does a lot more now.
Oh, cool. I myself haven't used Gong other than listening to the recorded calls back in the day. I know our team uses it quite heavily, but I didn't know that they added all those.
Yeah, and here's a couple other numbers and we can move on from this. So for this analysis, Gong Labs analyzed more than 1 million sales opportunities across 1,418 sales organizations. that currently use one or more AI features in Gong. Deals of all sizes were included in this study where the duration was greater than 7 days. So longer sales cycles, right? We then determined, I mean, even 7 days is fast. We then determined differences in the win rates by comparing deals where the sales team used AI functionality against those that didn't use AI. So long story short, we're not saying you need to use Gong for this. We are saying that we are moving into a world where, again, people are becoming more AI-assisted. So we're not saying a human is out of the loop here completely. But, you know, because of the AI-assisted assisting happening, people are having a better time winning deals and doing the activities that they should be doing. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show.
And speaking of analyzing data, We had fun and we analyzed 2,384,083 pieces of content on social web to figure out—
How many?
How many? 2,384,083 pieces of content to figure out the ideal length of content for each social network. So let's play a little fun game. I'm going to ask you what you think the ideal length is for each social network and different types of content. So on Instagram, if you're creating a reel for entertainment purposes, what do you think the best length is?
On Instagram?
Uh-huh.
For entertainment? I don't know, like 30 seconds?
11 to 17 seconds long. What about for educational content?
Longer, 30 to 45 seconds?
Close, 38 to 51 seconds. And carousels, I know you and I have both used carousels. What do you think the ideal length is, slides for a carousel?
3?
7 to 10, longer the better. But number 1 and number 2, both the top slides. Oh, okay. Can you guys please go to Lisa? Daddy's recording a podcast, baby. Thank you. I almost— no, this is— okay, kids, scratch to me. Lisa, can you please watch the kids? I'm on a call. Thank you. Okay. Lisa will give you chocolate or something. Come on, kids. Go, go, go, go. Come on. Okay, okay. Go have popsicles. I'm like, all right. Okay, so that solves all problems. You give them a little sweet, which is bad, but ours is organic popsicles. They behave and they leave you alone for a while. I love them, but sometimes during—
Well, let me share the story with you. This is a great spot to share the story. So I was doing a podcast interview yesterday. And this guy has 2 kids, right? And it was Christmas time. And then his daughter wanted to play with his mom. And the mom said, go play with daddy. And then the daughter said, oh, looked at dad and was like, no, dad just likes to work. And I was like, oh man, I should share this story with Neil.
Love it.
And then at that moment, it made him realize that he's like, oh crap, I can't work all the time.
My daughter complains about the same thing. And then I explained to her, you know those toys you like buying? Daddy pays for them through working. She's like, you work hard. But then what really hit me was, this was a while ago, a few months ago, my daughter was sitting at the dinner table with me and she says, Dad, one day it would be nice to eat dinner with you and you not being on your phone. You give your attention to your phone instead of me. Now I don't use my phone at dinner, and you know I try to hear my kids. But I was like, this is what happens when you're on TikTok and Instagram and all these apps all day instead of just paying attention to what's in front of you.
All right, new experiment everyone: Neil's going to delete all those for 30 days and let us know how that goes.
No, no, no, I'm not deleting them. I don't use the apps myself that much now. My team members create the content, but they'll post. Like I try not to log on to Instagram. It's a big. Time could suck. Okay, so carousel 7 to 10, we talked about that. But what's interesting is for them to work well, both slides 1 and 2 have to contain a hook, not just slide 1. You need 2 hooks and that really makes carousels perform well. LinkedIn for short-form videos, what length do you think they should ideally be?
Like less than a minute?
Yep, 40 to 46 seconds long. Long form, what's the ideal length? I know they cap you at 10 minutes, but what do you think the ideal length is?
I'd say like 3 to 4 minutes.
Dude, spot on. It is 3 to 4 minutes. Text should be, if it's motivational, how long do you think it should be word length or word count-wise?
Like 6 to 8 words.
20 to 38. A lot of times— That's a lot. For a quote.
How are you going to read that in a—
that's so much. 20 to 38 words? No, it's not that much.
It's a lot of words.
Motivational quote or, you know, like if you're, Try to inspire.
That's like a tweet. Okay, fine, that fits.
And then if it is educational-based content, how long do you think people want it on LinkedIn?
Educational content?
Yeah, how long?
Words-wise?
Yeah.
I think it's like, I don't know, 150 words?
291 on average.
Okay.
X, if it's motivational, how many words?
Same.
Similar, 14 to 21. Entertainment, 9 to 35 words. And by entertainment, a lot of this is like memes or trolling. And then educational content.
200?
Close, 173.
Yeah.
TikTok, for videos to be entertaining, take a guess on this.
Wait, I think it's shorter.
It is.
It's like 9 to 10 seconds.
18 to 31 seconds long and 42 to 54 seconds long. Yeah, 42 to 54 seconds long for educational. YouTube Shorts, entertaining, how long do you think the best performing ones tend to be?
10 to 20 seconds.
28 to 33 seconds. And 41 to 57 seconds for educational. Long-form videos, if you had to take a guess, what was the average long-form video that performed really well?
On YouTube?
Uh-huh.
I think it's got to be over 5 minutes.
You're right. It's 7 to 9 minutes. Long-form videos perform the best if they're on average 7 minutes and 9 seconds long. Yeah.
So—
And Facebook, this is the last one. We couldn't come up with any patterns. We needed to analyze more data. We analyzed a lot on Facebook, but still there weren't enough patterns.
All this to say is you just have to play the game natively for each platform. And based on the data that's given here, that's— it's basically reinforcing that. This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization and has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's Single Grain, grain like wheat, and we'll see you on the other side. One thing that Neil mentioned on the topic of hooks. So the guy I spoke to yesterday, he helped grow a company called Jubilee to 15 million subscribers across different platforms and then 5 billion views or so. So he's pretty good at YouTube, right? And I said, okay, what is the challenge? What's the problem that we have, let's say with the podcast, right? He's like, well, it seems like you guys don't come up with the headlines and the thumbnails ahead of the podcast, the concepts, right? Because the packaging of those matters so much and we should be aiming for a CTR. I think in B2B we can have lower CTRs, but he's more B2C. So 7 to 10% is what he aims for, for consumer videos. I think for us, a good video would be like a 5% to 8% click-through rate, if not like something like way bigger. So food for thought, like we don't spend enough time on the thumbnail concepts as we should, but also because we have many things that we're working on.
Speaking of thumbnails, you know who I ended up learning the A/B testing from? Vanessa Lau?
Lau.
That's the last name. And by the way, she came back to social media. Yeah, her content's been entertaining. I was like, oh, good for you.
And it was radical.
One of her posts that I saw— I unfollowed her when she was gone because I only try to follow people who are posting.
And then I followed her back once I saw the content because like, oh, how did you even like spend the time to find out that she wasn't active? So then you unfollowed her? Reels.
I go through my follow list like every few months and I just unfollow people who I haven't seen tons of content from.
Interesting. Okay.
And then every few months I'll start adding it back. I don't know why, I'm just OCD about like emails and all these kind of things. Just for like cleanliness purposes, my accounts can't follow too many people or I can't just have like open unread emails. I don't know why. It's just like a mental thing that I can't get over.
Yeah, you're OCD.
Yeah, I'm OCD. But funny enough, I saw one of her videos and then I followed her back and it was about how she wanted to not do all this, not influencer, but like ebook courses stuff. She told her, I think she's engaged now, her fiancé at the time, maybe boyfriend, and he's just like, we don't need a Porsche. We don't need a lot of these things. Just let's let it go and do what makes you happy. I was like, good for you. But now she's back at it and she's cranking along. But she's destined to do well. She's smart and she's hardworking.
That's a good— I mean, I think it's good to end on this one where she basically shut down all her businesses and she has a video on this. So she had multi-seven-figure business, I believe, that was doing well. And she just felt like all of a sudden she was being pulled in a lot of different directions and she felt like she wasn't being herself anymore. It's like, She's doing a mastermind. There's actually even a video of her asking a question when we were doing the Austin mastermind. She was asking like, how do you start an agency?
Right?
And so, there's just too many things going on. And then she felt like she wasn't being true to herself anymore. So, she decided to shut everything down and she decided to go on sabbatical for about a year or so. And then now she's back and I think she's really thought through what she wants to do. And she now understands that, hey, maybe I don't need to build a multi-billion dollar business, or maybe I don't need to compare myself with everyone else. And you can see she's enjoying the content that she's putting out. And I think before, like towards the end, you could see, you could tell when someone's starting to get burnt out a little bit and someone isn't, they maybe aren't doing what they, they aren't creating the content that they want to create. But yeah, you can tell also when someone's happy too. So if you feel like you're on that hamster wheel right now when it comes to content, or maybe you're doing a business just because You feel like you should be doing it because other people are doing it, maybe it's time to reflect and think about what you actually want to do for the next 10 years or so. Anything else? Nope.
That's it. All right.
Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe. It helps us grow. Marketingschool.io/agency. That is the Agency Owners Association that Neil and I have created to help agency owners grow. There's an online component to it. There's a live component as well. It just depends on the size of your business. This. And that being said, we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.
