323 Build A Quick AI Coach To Train Yourself & Your Team

AI assistants are getting better every day. Lately we've been putting them to the test with like role play scenarios. And this type of role playing can actually be super useful for your team to get folks up to speed to kind of de stigmatize uncomfortable conversations and help people sort of collectively come together and agree upon better ways to manage client conversations. And AI can be really helpful here, both on the role playing side, but also on the coaching side side where it can see a transcript and offer feedback on what you could have done better. Especially in cases where it may be a team member that maybe isn't comfortable going to like a human peer for that feedback. If they're asking an AI for feedback, they sort of got nothing to lose. So there's probably some version of this that we could pull into our firms. Whether it's just role playing like in a, in a meeting, whether it's building a proper coach that our, our teams can use anytime we have these calls, even automating coaching feedback based on meeting transcripts. Let's explore some ideas here. I'll show you how I've built the assistance that we've run on the podcast in the last couple of weeks and come away with something here that can can help our teams build some of those human skills, ironically enough, as we're pulling in AI assistance. Right. So come on in. Let's geek out on role playing with a. So two recent examples of stuff that we've done with AI role playing. One. The client battler. So you're saying you've been giving away more than you should have and now you want me to cover the difference? Feels like you should have figured that out earlier, don't you think, Gerald? It absolutely would have been in my best interest if I had had managed things better from the start. Right? But that's not really my problem. Why should I pay extra now? And another where we had two eyes. Take positions and debate each other. You want to stay at capacity now? You want to redefine it. Get leaner, get smarter and keep your eyes peeled for opportunities that fit your strengths. Expansion isn't just about more clients. It's about better clients and smarter services. Listen here. Your drongo, your mature firms at capacity. Bonza. Time to double down on what you're ace at. Analyze your client list and boot the bottom feeders. Then take your top service and make it bloody bulletproof. If it's tax. Become the Go to Tax strategy guru. Now, two sides to this, like the roleplay side. Creating an assistant you can role play with just to get some practice, but also the coach side. And I think this has applications for a bunch of type of meetings, from internal stuff like one on ones to external stuff like delivery meetings, like how we go through a set of financial statements with a client, how we deliver a tax turn, advisory calls, sales calls, how we navigate those conversations with leads, and so to think through how we could build a coach for this. So to first give you kind of a peek behind the curtain of the assistance you've already heard and how they work, because they're honestly really simple to set up, but just to get your wheels turning on, on how you do this in a specific way. Because if you just give the AI something general, it's not going to be all that helpful. So the client battler, we can link that GPT again down in the show notes if you want to play with it. We linked it the other day, but you can actually edit the GPT yourself and modify it if you wanted. But here's how that crotchety old guy works.

How am I? Oh, I'm just peachy. Except, you know, for that little fiasco you made of my tax return.

I'm sorry I called you Gerald. That is not a Gerald voice. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, Jerry. You found a whoopsie.

A whoopsie, huh? More like a disaster. I'm getting letters from the IRS now. So what's your plan to fix it?

This lady's voice is way too cheerful for this sort of situation. Okay, so this client battler, it exists inside of Chat GPT. It is a quote GPT, which is like a custom assistant. Basically, you just give it some instructions. Here's how I want you to work. You can share it with your team members if you want. And then when you have a conversation with it, it'll react like the way that you instructed it. So behind the scenes, how this GPT works. I'll read you the prompt. You're going to play a role in a professional services client duel. You're like the boss in a video game, but actually a client that I'm having a conversation with live. And you're difficult at every turn. This is an exercise to teach professional service pros how to navigate sticky conversations. Take leading professional services theory like value pricing, maintaining boundaries, and putting yourself ahead of your clients. Then take the opposite position as a client to push back and debate me on points. As an expert debater, our interactions will be concise. Most responses should be contained within 20 words or less, but always within 50 words or less, leading to a Quick back and forth, as is normal in a conversation like this. Be open to me digging further into nuance that you're willing to gradually unfold to develop the conversation and your personal backstory. Hard difficulty is unyielding, never relenting. Medium difficulty yields once the participant has unraveled enough nuance or personal connection to pacify the client. And then easy difficulty lets the participant win if they provide a few smart directed points, but if they're low quality points, don't let them win. And then I basically tell it to establish two things. First, ask the user for a difficulty level, what the client's upset about and what the setting is like, where the meeting's happening. This could be, I was doing some testing where it was like a text messaging back and forth and it was doing like emojis and stuff. And then I have it to say, second, ask if there's any additional context about what they're upset about that should inform the discussion. So the example we used in an earlier podcast was the client's upset that the financials are taking so long to get to them, but it's because they gave us the info so late. And so the lesson there was, do we actually have a like info in deadline? Because we may have a deadline for, you know, we're going to deliver your financials by the 15th of every month. But what if they get you the info on the 13th like in our terms, do we have something outlined that says you have to have your info in by say the fifth to get your stuff by the 15th? And as you have these conversations, it, it is actually a really useful simulation to shoot holes in your policies, to think through all the ways that clients will creatively break it. But also for you listening to this, who may be the big boss and the person most comfortable, comfortable with these conversations? This stuff, this type of conversation is terrifying to juniors, to people who don't do it very much, it may still be terrifying to you and, and it's what prevents you oftentimes from putting your team members into these situations. But with a bit of practice it can actually I think give em a lot of confidence. So that's how we set up a role play. AI is, is really good at like taking the position. Just be sure that you give boundaries around how you want it to respond. In my case I gave it like a word limit, but then also instructed on what it knows, like what kind of source material it ought to draw from. We told it to take the opposite position of like modern professional services theory. You could Also say that it could be like, you know, a value pricing nerd. Or. Or like give it even a specific article to say like use the wisdom kind of in this piece, this context to inform the way that you debate. Don't just leave it up to the AI to decide for itself. That'll just be probabilistic, which ends up being super vanilla and super boring. Give it a unique position. Take a unique stance. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Live Flow, who just recently rolled out zero support for the first time. Really exciting. Not familiar with Live Flow. Live Flow syncs your QBO or Xero data into Excel or Google Sheets on a one time basis. On an ongoing basis. Build out big old work paper templates and sync a whole bunch of data, your favorite reports from the accounting system out with the click of a button. Even then reuse those templates across different companies. Cool use case. Actually we're getting more into sort of lead magnets and attracting better clients in the podcast. One of the themes that we're kind of going through and so what's a like quick and easy lead magnet you could deliver to a specific type of potential client. Something that you build out in a spreadsheet that gets them to some sort of conclusion. And all it requires is getting you access to the question QuickBooks file. You run that like template with Live Flow to pull all that data into a workbook that is ultimately a deliverable that can go to that lead to say look at X, Y and Z. Here's some issues we identified, here's some opportunities, whatever that is. It could literally be as simple as highlighting all the silly things they're doing in their accounting file. But Live Flow, because with the click of a button you can sync all of that data out, be it a single sheet or a whole ton of sheets, 30 sheets into a workbook. You can templatize what that looks like and then use it across as many clients as you want. Now that's like the tip of the iceberg. LifeLow also does consolidations. You can use it to give limited access to accounting data to like stakeholders, people within the company. Bunch of ways you can use that. One basically just gives you a button you can click in your favorite spreadsheet app to instantly pull in any data that you want from the ledger. Pretty handy, right? That's lifelong. More about that one. Check out the link down in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in in part by Team Up. Do you like middlemen? I don't. Get out of here middle men and Women. Team up cuts out the middle people. Yeah. By giving you direct access to talented accountants in the Philippines. I need some suspicious character between me and my team. They're my team. Team Up's got the on the ground recruiterments in the Philippines that'll help you find super, super talented people with the experience that you are looking for. And then after you hire them, you know what Team up is going to do. They're going to. They get gtfo. Can I say that they're going to GTHO my biz. Unless. Unless you want help from them. That is one thing that I heard they're doing more of. It's just like offering support. Like, hey, never worked with offshore people before. Happy to hop on a call and kind of give you some best practices. But what they won't do is be the middleman. Long term charging fees, cutting out a big old part of the monthly check that you thought was going to your team member that's actually going to. To line that middle person's pockets. Not with Team Up. Okay. That's their model. Direct hiring in the Philippines. All they're going to do is they're going to help you find people rather than going through a BPO where you're paying like, like a facility or kind of a facilitator or employer record. And the person. I know people that do it both ways. There's actually arguments to be made for both ways. Team Ups approach. They want to help you work directly with the team. If that's the flavor you're looking for. Check out the link down in the show notes to learn more. Another example of how we built out a past avatar who was very popular. Fiona Focusworth, the niche ninja who debated another AI who was the other guy was kind of a hillbilly and she told him that his family tree was a wreath. Absolute incredible creativity there. She also cursed. That's first time we've had an AI cuss somebody out on this podcast. Truly a red letter day. But here's the prompt that I gave for this role. I just said I have a role for you to play. You're coming on my podcast called Jason Daly, a podcast for accounting and tax firm owners. You're going to debate the merits of focusing your firm on one specific thing rather than doing more. You'll use the attached transcript as source material to build your arguments. So the context of this episode was actually like an Alex Hermosi podcast that was talking about how you should just find that one service and crank on it. I actually pulled a transcript of that and said, take this position, use this context, reorienting it through the lens of accounting firm business strategy. When debating, use a direct tone. Respond in 80 words or less. You're an experienced coach to accounting firms. The character you are playing is passionate about what they believe, mildly quirky, and has a speech affectation that gives them character. When you introduce yourself, you'll create a parody name for yourself that leans into the position you're taking. Hence funeral Focusworth. You have a backstory that's gradually unwound in a subtle way as the conversation progresses. And. And you have a catchphrase. Now introduce yourself so you can create stupid, funny characters like this. You probably wouldn't create it, like, in the context of, I don't know, debating how you set up the services in your accounting firm, but you can create any scenario that you want here and walk people through it. And I've already said this, but I want to say it again. Doing this in a group with a team to, like, get people out of their bubble, out of their comfort zone, really, really cool. And a great way to, like, break barriers down around conversations that wouldn't otherwise happen. Especially if you run a distributed team. One of the things that you miss is overhearing the conversations people have with clients, which can sometimes go completely off the rails. And when you're in an office together, when you hang up the phone, there's a certain camaraderie there that happens at the end of that phone call that does not happen in a distributed environment. And so some of that, like, the benefits of that proximity that are lost in a distributed environment. One of the most, like, emotionally taxing thing that's missing there is sometimes that support structure when you get off the phone call and you need a freaking hug, you need somebody to remind you that, no, it's the client that's being ridiculous, or, no, we did screw up. But you know what? That happens. And in a distributed environment, it can be a little bit harder to get that support. So, like, having mindful conversations about, here's how we actually navigate tricky client situations where it's whether it's our fault or not, making it less scary by being vulnerable and doing it, like, in a group setting with our team, even being able to see how more senior people handle stuff is absolutely gold for juniors. The whole element of, like, how you had that person sit in every meeting with you like they used to do back in the day, in a distributed environment, maybe that's not quite happening. You don't get that, like, contact learning quite, like, you used to. But this for me like is, is a, a super helpful exercise. So that is how you would build out someone to, to role play with and have that interaction with. But one thing that we haven't done on the, on the podcast before is like, what about another Persona after the fact to help you coach and, and like offer feedback according to, you know, an agreed upon framework for how we should approach this type of meeting. And maybe that's for sales meeting, maybe that's specific sales scripts. Maybe that's the six things we need to capture from every sales meeting. I'm talking sales meeting, but this could be one on ones, could be advisory meetings with clients. Whatever it is, what would it look like to build out a coach where you give it the transcript of a meeting and it offers some feedback. Even if you don't have a super strict framework for, for how these meetings ought to run, it can still give you some practical things like how to not handle this thing in such a rude way or to call out like, hey, you were actually talking for like 70% of the time there. Here are some other ways you could have put the conversation back on them and asked some interesting questions. But I want to go through an exercise of building a super simple sales coach and I don't really have like a great framework here of like, well, what would you even want the sales coach to say necessarily? So it'll be as simple as this. Basically, my firm works with phlebotomists and on a sales call we want to validate that they're making over a half million a year in revenue. We want to ask why they're looking for a new professional. Ask if they're current on their obligations, like do they have any, you know, back taxes or anything like that? Cause that's usually a red flag. We're going to ask them what staff do, what sort of jobs in the back office, like accounting, bill payroll, understand what the team looks like today, but then also ask them like, what does the ideal setup look like? With the pains that they're feeling today, what would they rather that sort of look like? We want the talk time to be more or less equal. We don't want to take up too much of the airtime and the desired tone is friendly. So I'm going to chat with an avatar, an AI that is taking a role of this phlebotomist and we'll treat this as a sales call and then use a coach to give us pointers on how we could have navigated that sales call a little better. And this doesn't even have to be a fast or long drawn out thing, though I think using it in practice, you'd probably build out maybe 10 things that you want the coach to assess and then give it the full transcript. Let's have a quick little back and forth with this phlebotomist Persona, and this will serve as our sales call, setting.

A small, cluttered office in the back of a phlebotomy clinic. Papers are scattered and a half empty coffee cup sits on the desk. The phlebotomist, visibly tired, sits across from the salesperson, leaning back in the chair, rubbing their temples. All right, let's get this over with. Between dealing with no shows, insurance headaches, and constant staffing issues, my plate's full. I never wanted to run a business. Just wanted to draw blood and go home.

Draw blood and go home. Nice. Okay, what are the. What are the most. I don't know, the two or three most painful aspects of your back office that you would happily leave behind?

Honestly. Top of the list is billing and collections. It's a mess. Chasing down payments, dealing with insurance rejections, and figuring out why something got denied. Then there's scheduling, keeping it straight with cancellations, reschedules and trying to fit in last minute requests. Lastly managing inventory, running out of supplies because no one tracks properly. Nightmare fuel. I ditch all of that in a heartbeat.

So what has you moving on from your. From your last provider? Were they not doing something that you needed?

They overpromised and under delivered like most of them claimed. They'd streamlined billing, but it was more complicated than before. Their scheduling software was clunky, constantly glitching, which led to double bookings or gaps that cost us money. Plus they were unresponsive every time I needed help. It felt like pulling teeth to get a real person on the line. I can't afford to waste time on a service that's supposed to save me time.

Yeah, I can understand that. Give me. Give me an idea of what your business looks like today. About how much are you doing in revenue per year?

We're pulling in around 400,000 a year, give or take. It fluctuates with the usual ups and downs, seasonal demand, changes in insurance coverage, that kind of thing. I've got three phlebotomists on staff and we see a steady stream of patients, but it's the backend inefficiencies that are bleeding us dry. If I could tighten that up, we'd be in a much better spot.

I slide my hands across the table. Both. Both Hands open, palms up, raises an.

Eyebrow, leaning back slightly, watching your gesture. Alright, what's the pitch? You've got my attention, but I'm not biting unless you've got something that truly cuts through the nonsense. I need solutions, not just another set of empty promises.

I nod down towards my hands like I want her to put her hands into mine.

Glances down at your hands, then back up at you with a skeptical look. After a brief pause, she slowly places her hands in yours, clearly cautious but curious. All right, you've got a bold approach. Let's see if it's as solid as your pitch. What's the plan to make my life easier?

Look at me, Darla. I have a 12 step framework to take the pain out of managing your back office and you've come to the right place. Okay? Ooh. The problem is we only work with people that do 500 grand in revenue or more. So I'm going to send you our free template. Go check that out and then when you hit a half million, give me a call back, okay?

Pulls her hands back, crossing her arms, expression hardening. So that's it? You lead me down this path just to tell me I'm not big enough for you? I don't need a template. I need real help. Now if you're not willing to work with me where I am, then don't waste my time with the pitch. I've got patience waiting and I'm not here for a runaround.

I pick up my briefcase and briskly walk out the door.

Shakes her head, watching you leave, frustration clear on her face. Figures, she mutters under her breath, turning back to her desk piled with paperwork, another suit full of empty promises. Guess it's back to the grind. She sighs, picking up her phone to deal with the next insurance call, her expression resigned but determined.

I can't help myself when we do these role plays. That didn't go how I wanted it to go. I But we did learn that she's not at a half mil yet, right? If I'm coaching this person, I'm probably going to tell them. You know, you could have. There's probably a more tactful way to maintain the relationship because in 24 months time this lady's probably going to be at a half mill and she'd be a great client for us. This episode is brought to you in part by Maker's Hub. If you've been around the channel long, we've done a number of demo days with Makers Hub showing off how they're using AI Vision models to automate your accounts payable services, your bill pay services that you offer to clients. Super smart handles some really gnarly stuff. Well, they've been busy. They keep shipping updates. Couple of things they've shipped recently. They got a W9 module now to take the headache out of 1099 season. Just in time, man. That's coming up. You got W9 for all those vendors. Oh, do it now. Don't kick yourself in January again. And then they also shipped sequential approval. So by default, approvals in Maker's Hub have historically been like approvals in parallel. If three people need to approve something, they can all do it at a time. Now optionally you can make those approvals sequential where they have to be step by step. They don't go to person two until they go to person one. That sort of thing. Some cool improvements they've shipped recently and got a bunch more cool stuff on the way. If you're looking for a more profitable way to run your bill pay practice, check out the link to Maker's Hub down in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Forwardly. Are you sick of waiting for ach transfers that stick to bank hours or checks that get caught in the mail? Do you want to save hours on bill pay each month for you and your clients? Forwardly is your solution for Instant Instant Instant B2B payments. Forwardly offers an easy to use award winning ARN AP solution for accountants and their small business clients featuring advanced approval workflows and a revolutionary four way sync four ways with accounting software. What could the other ways even be? The software eliminates all manual work, automatically categorizes and records financial transactions for both customers and vendors, maximizing cash flow by ensuring payments are received instantly in your bank account. Enjoy same day ach for free. Why is that not a thing? Why is that not more of a thing? And forly it is a thing Obviously. Set up your free account@forwardly.com to work towards a free iPhone offer. Color me intrigued. Check out the link down in the show notes. And so you could have a senior like go through that like kind of, I don't know, coaching session with you. But in reality how many like how often are people actually sit down and going through a recording and giving folks that level of feedback like it really doesn't happen. Which honestly either an automated like approach to giving coaching feedback or at least having assistant on hand where someone could chuck a transcript in and get that feedback. That seems really useful to me. If I was a junior I would be even more likely to do it if I didn't have to bother or embarrass myself with another human being. But the more we can destigmatize that, the better. So we've got this back and forth a transcript. In my case the transcripts and ChatGPT because it's a hypothetical conversation, but your transcript could be out of your meeting recorder as well. You've got this transcript. Now we're just going to chuck it into a coach. But how do you make that coach? In my case in chat GPT, I would just create a GPT for this. And so I made a quick and dirty GPT. This is available on on any chat GPT plan. It's just called Sales coach. And here's the prompt that I put in here. Your job is to provide coaching feedback on sales transcripts. I provide. I'll give you the full back and forth and you'll offer practical tips to ensure that our sales team complies with our guidelines. Here are our guidelines and I just gave the little list of like seven or eight things that I mentioned earlier. Stuff like ask if they're at 500 a year in revenue, why are they looking for a new professional? That sort of thing. Offer feedback on things I didn't do well and things I did well and how I could have alternatively guided the conversation to achieve the things I didn't get to. Your responses should be concise under 200 words or less. Use bullet point lists to keep things short. Now. Cool thing with chat GPT. I don't know if you know this hot tip is amidst any conversation. In ChatGPT. You can do the at symbol kind of like in Slack or teams. You can do at a person's name. You can do at the name of a GPT to pull that GPT assistant into a conversation midstream. So I just had this whole back and forth with this hypothetical lead. Right now I'm going to do is do at sales coach to pull the GPT into this conversation and say give me some feedback on this conversation so far. And it pulls all the instructions that we built into that GPT and drops those kind of feedback points right in the conversation here. Okay, what didn't go well? Tone and approach. The gesture with your hands and the abrupt exit felt dismissive and unprofessional. Darla came across as open and looking for help, but the interaction felt abrupt and transactional, which damaged rapport not offering value. Instead of guiding Darla towards value based solutions tailored to her needs, you pushed her away with a template which didn't address her immediate concerns. What could be improved early qualification. Ask about revenue earlier in the conversation to save time and set clear expectations. I feel like I, I, yeah, kind of got her maybe excited or like I absolutely did pull her in. In fact I physically pulled her in by her hands and then said haha, you're not big enough for us yet. So that's a good note. I could have tried to do that qualifying a little earlier. Empathy and engagement Maintain an empathetic tone and engage more with her pain points. Offer value even if she doesn't qualify now, like scheduling a follow up or discussing a smaller scale solution. Alternative clothes. If Darla isn't qualified, offer a nurturing pathway such as a free consultation or a scaled down service that could grow with her success. What went well? Only one bullet point here. Probing questions you effectively asked about Darla's pain points. Getting a clear understanding of her back office struggles. Reasonably good coaching points. The one thing that maybe it missed is I think we had a note in there that said we need to always ask if they're current on their obligations. I don't think I asked that. And the sales coach didn't call it out. That's one thing to look out for in the current state of AI assistance. If you give them a really long list of things to do, they won't always do all of them, they will do some of them. If there is a big list of things that you want to happen, you can actually break that up between multiple assistants. So for example, we have just a single sales assistant here, but you could have like three sales assistant GPTs. One that just assesses tone, one that just assesses did you ask for the things that you need? And if you break it up it will give like more directed feedback in the way that you instruct it. But as silly as these things, kind of feel like there's something here. Like if you're looking for a way to shake up a meeting or if you have an off site or something like that, AI is really good at doing these sort of different Personas and it seems like they almost always tease out something interesting. Like the note here from the sales coach was you need like a nurture campaign or, or, or something of value that you can actually give to the people who are too small for you. And we talk about the value ladder of like all the different ways that we can serve people and how oftentimes we just kind of do it at this one dimension. Like we do the month end close, we do the tax return, but we don't have things higher on the value ladder for people that want to go deeper, and we often don't have things lower on the value ladder for people who aren't a great fit for us yet. So, like, even teasing this out of that conversation, a valuable part of a sales conversation is not just closing them on what we can do today, but building a rapport so that they will come back to us later if they're not ready for us yet. And in this case, I didn't have something top of mind that was like, oh, here's a valuable thing. I. I could have been like, listen, we don't do scheduling, we don't do medical billing, but I got a Rolodex of the best partners there are in the game. I'm going to give you access to that Rolodex so that you can pull people in. Give me a call if you have any questions. If I had, like, something like that sort of set up and ready to go when that realization went off in my head that, like, oh, she's not big enough yet, I wouldn't have, like, panicked and ran out of the room without anything of value. I. I could have said, man, I totally hear you. There's so many people that are struggling with this same thing right now. While we're better geared for folks a little bit further along in that journey or probably a couple of years away, what I can offer you is this, which will probably actually help you and maybe even help you get to a half million much faster than you would have otherwise, because these are really, really good vetted solutions that we have a ton of people using. And then she could have left that meeting and it almost would have been like, well, dang, they didn't have anything to gain by helping me, but they still gave me that stuff. And they're absolutely going to come back when they're further down the road now. Right? So take away from that hypothetical meeting, have a nurture thing. Have. Have something for people below that threshold. And I just think, like, there's something to these interactions where you get to the end of them and you do tease out helpful things. And if there's more people in the room listening, they can call out different things here because these are, like, it does a very good job of, like, flushing out these very real Personas. And the more of our team we have, like, tuned in and engaging with this, they can be like, yeah, like, this would have helped here, that would have helped there. And then when we're going out doing the real thing, we're gonna have more tools in that tool belt and probably just a different level of confidence in how we navigate that if we've done a bunch of repetitions here before. Doing the real thing. Pretty interesting and kind of fun. Like if you're looking for something different to do with the team. Any other ideas here or stuff that I can share that would be helpful to swipe? Drop a note down in the comments. Any good ways that you've leveraged this stuff in the wild yet? Would love to hear about it. I think we'll keep doing some version of this on the podcast when it's like it helps sort of illustrate a point or think through what an actual real life interaction would look like because that's, that's just a really helpful thing to visualize and kind of get repetitions on. That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging. I'll see you in the next one. Sa.