The Future of AI and Selling: How One Workflow Closed a $12K Deal

Before we get started, I want to ask you something. Are you tired of feeling like AI is moving faster than you can keep up? Because I know what that feels like. And I hear it all the time. Marketers keep telling me they're drowning in all the new tools and updates and features and must-try frameworks. And, and they got to do all this while they're also doing their job and trying to run their business. And that's why the AI Business Society was created. It's your personal curation team for AI. We tell you what deserves your attention and what you can safely ignore. And inside you get live trainings from leading AI practitioners and interactive skill building sessions, bite-sized learning libraries when you just have a few minutes, and a community of incredible marketers who are just like you. Hundreds of them are on the inside, and you can join right now and lock in an incredible special sale we've got going on. Visit socialmediaexaminer.com/ai. Give it a shot. You got a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you've got nothing to lose. Go to socialmediaexaminer.com/ai and let's now jump back into today's show. Welcome to the AI Explored podcast, helping you put AI to work. And now, here's your host, Michael Stelzner.

Hello, hello, hello.

Thank you so much for joining me for the AI Explored podcast brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers, creators, and business owners who wanna know how to put AI to work. Now today we're gonna talk about AI and selling, but I'm here to tell you there's some killer stuff that we talk about as we dive deep into today's episode, specifically around design work. And we're gonna dive into Claude Design and also some research applications. So even if you're not in the business of selling, I think you're gonna find a lot of value in today's episode. Today we'll explore AI and selling. My special guest is an AI consultant who helps entrepreneurs and businesses scale with AI chatbots. Bots, automation, and AI agents. He's the creator of the AI Integrator Certification, agents, automation, and deployment as part of the Chief AI Officer organization. Aitan Pollinger, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Excited to be here. Doing great.

Yeah. Apologize if I pronounced your name wrong.

It's okay.

Yeah. Aitan is the proper pronunciation, folks. All right. So let's start with how'd you get into AI? I would love to kind of hear your journey into it.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the reason I jumped into it, I think goes back even more. You know, I started in sales and cold calling. I was after the military. I didn't know a lot what to do. So naturally, you know, I started as a bartender, but my first real job was outbound calling. And, you know, long story short, they closed that whole group of people. They fired all the outbound callers and brought in an SEO person to do, you know, search engine optimization. I then got fascinated with that and the technical side of the web. Uh, and also with the fact that, heck, they're going to pay this one person all the money that they paid us and You know, I want to be on the other side of this, you know, if I could do sales and to get people to come to you, that would be great. So I went into that side of things and I was in marketing for over a decade and started my own agency at some point, Crossdressmedia, and as you know, became part of this ecosystem. And then when AI started knocking on the door, kind of, I saw this moment of, oh gosh, it's the cold calling thing all over again. And really, I just wanted to jump in as quickly as I could and go for everything. I've always worked in tech and worked with development teams and have had an interest in that kind of technical side. They've used it to some degree with marketing, but really when I saw it get into the public, you know, starting with Jasper and whatnot in my world, at least from the generative AI perspective, that is, that's when I jumped in and invested as much as I could to learn and be in the right rooms and, you know, be the guy who gets on that train early this time.

So tell us what you're doing these days when it comes to AI.

Yeah, so these days what I'm doing is a few things, but mainly it's about how do we provide real value with it, right? So I work with companies, whether it be small businesses to mid-market, you know, companies and consulting them and finding the real value and then building actual tools from, you know, Copilots, more chat things they can engage with that work with them to help them complete the work to Agents that becomes more like a colleague or a counterpart that can actually go and do the work and develop it and create it. And I also go all the way to AI-powered applications and developing that. So it's kind of a spectrum of, you know, the strategic roadmap, but all the way to the building. The way I like to think of it is this Harvard Business Review article I saw recently where they talked about instead of being a thought leader, becoming a thought doer. So I see it as the thought doing of AI and really taking it from these ideas into what brings actual outcomes, you know, to the business world. So that's kind of where I'm at right now.

Perfect. So when it comes to using AI to help you sell, what do you believe is one of the biggest misconceptions people have when it comes to this particular thing that we're about to talk about today?

Yeah, so when coming to selling, you know, particularly selling AI things, but in general, if we talk about sales for a moment, I think that often we show up to the party thinking that we need to convince the other person to buy something. And in reality, they need to convince us that we're the right partner. And if we don't go into that right mindset, with AI in particular, we're able to come to the table with so much that we don't have to come with this, you know, oh, I hope they choose me. And in reality, the goal is of that conversation is for them to feel this pressure that they really want it to be you. And can you take them on? And I think that's a flip of a script that we can do so much more right now with AI that takes the whole conversation to a very different place. If you show up prepared and show up with the right assets and show up with the right things that you can do with AI that you would never spend the time to before, and now you can do all of it.

Got it. We're going to go pretty deep into how to use AI to help sell or pre-sell or whatever perspective you want to come at this from. But what is the upside? What are the benefits when this is done well? When people pay close attention to what we're about to talk about today, what are some of the benefits that they could receive by following the advice you're going to give today?

What I've seen firsthand is the ability to, you know, really choose the types of clients you want to work with and have an astronomical close rate where when you show up, this is likely going to be a deal. It's more of a question if you want to work with this person or not. And I think that's a— not to be hyperbolic about this, not to be— that's just my experience going with this and the experience of the people who I've taught to do this, where you can go into that and really increase your close rates in a pretty dramatic way.

I love that. If I think about the business that I used to run before I started Social Media Examiner, I was a writer. I was in the business of working with large B2B brands and I was helping them write white papers. And because I had done so much work to establish my brand reputation online, because I'd written a book, I had a blog, blog and I was pretty well known in the writing community, I got to be really picky when people came in and they wanted to work with me. That is something that is not necessarily true today, but I think it's possible is what I'm hearing you say. If you do what we're about to talk about today, which I think is what everybody wants. Everybody wants to be able to be super picky about who they get to work with instead of having to work with people that are not fun to work with or are not an ideal fit for them. So this is kind of a bridge to my next question. When it comes to selling and when it comes to AI, is there any mindset shifts? You've kind of hinted a little bit, or any things we need to lay groundwork for before we get into talking about artificial intelligence and how it can affect and help in this way?

Definitely. I think the concepts that I would want people to keep in mind when about to apply this are the same ones that would have worked in many other settings, but now we can really deploy them. And one particular is unique for the AI conversation, and it's the conversation of time and value. You know, the world of my time and, and value and how much do I charge per hour, you know, these things have completely gone to who knows how to measure some of this, right? That's where we're in right now, which is I can provide something that would've cost people $100,000 in a week. And then you wonder, well, what does that mean? Can I charge that? Will people pay that? So where I'm going with this is the mental model of you can spend more time on certain things for free without even thinking about it because it's so beneficial for you in the long term. So if you're going to put preparation into a meeting with someone like we're about to discuss in a moment, I think it's important to note that this conversation of, well, I'm not going to do it if it's not going to pay me, or I'm not going to do, you know, or how much time should I spend? It's really just about your goal is to get a deal. So we got to first reframe this conversation in you can do amazing things that would've taken months and hours, and your goal is to simply come as ready as you can to win, not to, you know, you're not worried about anything else. So the win focus and doing what's required before you meet and not worrying about the time. And I think there was a few things that, but we can decode that later. So just one more thing there, and I think this is important, is this concept that's been pretty well known for marketers in behavioral economics world, which is, you know, loss aversion. So it's way more powerful when people show up and they, you know, or when they have something to lose versus something to, to gain when they're pursuing something. So the goal of this conversation when we use AI is to, you know, this mental model of how am I going to show up with them already having something to lose the moment they leave the conversation, right? And it's kind of like a— this person's already in the game, right? So it's kind of this reframe of you showing up, and that's part of that first frame that we talked about. You do all this work, you're almost already working with this person in a way, and there's value to show it. And that's when I get really this little hook of Oh, if I don't choose this person, I actually have something to lose now. Now I must have to start over with someone else. So that's just a few mental frames that I think are healthy for, for this discussion.

Love it. So why don't we talk about conceptually what is the concept here, right? Because we have hinted at it, but we haven't really described it a little bit. You've hinted that there's some preparation that we need to know and we need to do. So let's unravel a little bit of what, of what this is, what's involved here. And just to kind of set the groundwork that this is a different way of selling than maybe the way most people are familiar with selling.

Fair enough. So a piece that I discuss when we talk about the, you know, you mentioned at the beginning that I teach this AI Integrator program and the big part of it is how do we sell ideas, you know, with AI. So it's not just, you know, yes, it's for selling to other companies as a consultant, but it's also internally. If you work inside of a company, how do I actually, you know, how do I get prepared and ready for it for selling in my idea with this? And what we're talking about today is that process that we go through pre-meeting, whether it's, there's an idea or a direction or not, and how do we take that idea and we scope it into a focus we can actually go all the way through into developing some type of branded assets that relates to us, whether it be a prototype or a deliverable, a PDF, a PowerPoint, whatever it may be that's on brand and focus so that people already see that you're not only understanding what the issue might be or what you're suggesting the idea, it almost feels like you understand their business and understand what they're dealing with and We understand their language. So you show up almost one of them, which is another, by the way, frame, but from Cialdini, right? The likeness. So we show up and we're like them already. We have this idea, we've already done the homework that, you know, if you're out there as a marketing agency and you know the pain of trying to collect assets from a client or, you know, trying to get these kind of, you know, marketing assets, we can grab all that already without even talking to them. So we grab the assets, we grab the idea. We go through a research process to quickly identify the best way forward, and then we develop a quick prototype, whether it be not a, you know, application or full agent, but just say it can be a prototype of a document, even outlining this. It can be all of those things. But the idea is we have an idea, a direction, we scope it out, we get some research behind it, and then we mold it into an on-brand kind of asset that people can see and get their hands on, something tangible that they have now if they start the progress with you.

Okay, so let me go ahead and just translate a little bit of this for everybody in the audience, just to make sure everybody's processing this. This methodology that we're about to talk about, which is made possible only because of artificial intelligence— prior to AI, this would have been completely unreasonable to do something like this— you can now go out there and effectively do some work that you may never get paid for, that they might say no to, but might impress the client. And sometimes the client is someone inside the business if you work inside of a larger business, or the client might be a future somebody who's going to pay you money. But if you do what Eitan says and you do this well, this will be so desirable, right, by the other party that they're going to think if they don't work with you, they're going to lose something that you've already created. Am I hearing you properly? Is that kind of effectively what you're talking about?

Yeah, 100%. I mean, we're looking to create that wow moment from the beginning, right? That wow, okay, I have something real here. Not just like a gimmick, not just like a whatever, just something that actually can help with the business. And that's kind of what we're going for with this is we can use AI to do the work of many over a long time in a short amount of time. And we would never do it before. It's rooted in real principles. Just now we can actually all leverage it as individuals or small teams or big teams, whatever. But We can all do it, and that's the point. AI enables us to do the best practices that a scale would do, but on a smaller, more lethal unit.

Love it. Okay, so what I'm going to ask you to do is start with an example. We talked when we were prepping for this that you had an example of a deal that you had closed. The reason I want to start with that story is to help people understand a little bit about what you did, and then we can reverse engineer kind of how you did it, if you're okay with that.

Yeah, of course. A good example, you know, so there was a post in a community that I'm a part of and I saw this desire for a, uh, someone was saying, hey, we're looking to do some type of chat widget we can embed in different places that has our knowledge in it. You know, we have these kind of things we're looking for. It was this overall like idea of what they're looking for. Uh, when I looked at it, honestly, it didn't even look like a, you know, that stack didn't even make a lot of sense. They obviously like went to ChatGPT and had some type of desire that they've inputted into the world. Uh, but when I looked at it, the first thing I wanted to do is understand the signal versus the noise, right? So I take that request and I say, what are they actually wanting here? Oh, they want their own controlled platform that they can build chat widgets that they can embed on their website. And this chat widget would have information that they have their own intellectual property and they'll be able to answer questions on this. Now there's a lot of ones out there you can use, but they wanted their own kind of custom one, right? So that was kind of the first step is that identification of what are they actually wanting, right? So if you're doing this for someone who you don't know what they want, it's a bit harder, but you can try and identify what they might need. But the starting point was that in this example, and we can work through, you know, I can just walk through that use case, you know, end to end what happened there.

And then we can decode it a bit real quick on the, on the what do they want side of it. Sometimes some people are coming into organizations that don't even know who they are and they're coming in cold. Other times they might be part of a Facebook group or they might be part of a paid community, or maybe they meet them at an event. So let's just talk through a little bit of like how we can get some, a little bit of intelligence if possible, if you have any tips on how to really understand what they want before we go down too far to the next step.

Sometimes it's as simple as a prompt of, I know nothing about what they asked for. You go into a, an Allegro ChatGPT, it's like, I just saw this message, copy paste. What do they want in one sentence that anyone can understand? What do they actually want? What are they trying to get here? And then if it gets, uh, it can tell you back, oh, they look, they're wanting a chat widget., right? So even in a simple way, just a simple, you know, if you really don't know, and I've often, even in with meeting transcripts, you know, I may take a moment 'cause I'm using a tool and it's, it's live transcribing and I might say, what the hell are they saying here? Right? What do they want in one sentence? Give back to me in a simple sentence. What's the one thing that they're trying to accomplish here? Right? Just to get an idea real quick. So that is one way you can do it. There's of course with time and with expertise, when you know, you'll, you'll see, you understand. But if you don't know anything about it, and often with new industries in AI, you can go into any type of industry. It's so much opportunity. You won't know a lot about the industries you go into. So you do need to kind of query that and say, well, what does this mean? Right? And I think that's a simple enough way to get started.

Do you give them the name of the person and maybe the company also so that, so your AI can do a little research on it? Or do you just give them the state, give AI the statement and have, have AI reverse engineer what they really mean by that statement?

So that would be like a phase here. I first understand what they want and then I would go into a bit more research about them and see where the context fits to who they are. That would be the first thing I do, right? Let's go, what do they actually want here? Because this changes the conversation, by the way, because I don't have to come with that stack. I don't have to know that stack. I need to know the outcome they're after, which is the focus that I always talk about is, you know, we want to be outcome-oriented. And the outcome is they want the chatware. It doesn't matter. They don't care if it's JavaScript or they don't know half of what that means on the other side of that. What they do care is to have the widget and there's 100,000 thousand tools out there. Some are free, some are not, some you can build that do that. So, you know, the world opens once you just say, you know, what do they actually want versus the how to get there. Most people don't know how they want to get anywhere. They just know what they want and we got to get even clear on that.

Okay, real quick. What about if you're doing cold outreach and you don't have any public posts inside of any social platforms or anything like that? Is this typically where you are interacting with them at first? And get in a couple answers to questions before you go ahead and move on with this research?

To clarify what I actually do there, it's an— I don't go back with an answer necessarily. I first see, you know, it took me about— and this seems like maybe— I don't know how long people think this takes, but it took about a few minutes, right, to gather that of where are they, what do they want, and then to say back to them, I think I can help you, that's me. And, you know, like, I just got it, I think we can do that, right? So that's an easy one on that side. Now, if you're outreaching, which we do if we see a company we want to work with or an idea or something that just shows up and you want to reach out to a person. Now, not everyone's just throwing out there what they want, which would be ideal, right? In a lot of cases, there are companies out there where they are posting, they have job posts, they're showing you what they're trying to accomplish often, right? They may not be saying it. One way to do it is also use AI to analyze their job postings, analyze whatever they have online if they have it. If it's a small business, of course it's harder. If it's a construction company in Albuquerque where I'm from, not where I am right now, but if it's where they are, you know, it'd be much harder to find that information. But even then, maybe it's worthwhile to figure out a bit more about them, right? So we can try and understand where they are in the market, what they're doing, who they're hiring, and we can possibly get a better idea of what they're trying to accomplish. You know, there's these containers that each business is in, right? If you're below 7 figures, if you're above 7 figures, you're above 8 figures, you're above that, there's these like clear things you're trying to accomplish in each one of those steps. Often, right, to unlock that next step of growth for the business. And they're always kind of similar, you know, playbooks are happening in each to unlock the next part of that puzzle. So it's not necessarily, there's nothing new under the sun, right? There's the things that they're trying to do in that and then how it fits to their context in their market. And I think if we think from that, we use the eye for that, we get some ideas and we go with that.

Okay, cool. So let's get back to your example. You're obviously in some sort of a group and somebody posts something and keep going with the story.

Yeah. So now, you know, there's an idea, understanding what they're trying to accomplish. Reaching out saying, I can help. In this case, very simple. But what happens in the next phase is where it gets interesting. Before this, great, let's, you know, set up the time, you know, before we're setting up the time, before the meeting's happening. Once I said I can help, I get already invested in it mentally. Now, in my mind, me and this person are going to, you know, likely work together. Let me get prepared on what they want. Let me learn about the person, the company, the market where AI is working at right now. And this involves essentially a series of prompts that are focused and specific, right? So the more we try to broaden our prompts, right? So they try to do too much. Say I'm going to research the person or research the company. I would want to research each one individually. Not that it can't handle it, but I want the depth and the focus on that category and all the compute and the focus of the language model or the tool that I'm using to really focus in on that. So one, the person, who am I selling to, right? This person was connecting me to an owner of the company. Right? Who's this owner? What do I need to know about them? What are they saying online? What are their stances? If I can even understand a bit more about their— anything from political ideology to problems they face to legal stuff they may have gone into to whatever it may be. Really just as much recon as I can just to understand the person. Because if you can understand the person, find some language that might work, you know, find the language that they like to use, how they describe certain innovations if they're out there, you can learn quite a bit. Focus on a company. What's the company? What's their model? You know, what are they actually, you know, trying to accomplish?? And then the industry, particularly with AI, what's happening right now in AI? They want a chat widget. Who's out there doing, you know, the widgets for these types of companies? You know, how is AI being used right now? What opportunities are being, you know, just really taking a broad moment. This sounds like a lot. This can be done in an hour, right? Of you just sitting and reading some articles that you create for yourself from search, right? I do recommend deep research. And for those of you who are probably thinking, well, where and how and all of those things, any deep research tool would really do enough for that. What type of prompt? I would recommend you start by just asking it to build you a deep research prompt for Joining 2 Research, and that will get you already to the 80%, uh, ahead.

Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to talk to you about something I've been thinking a lot about lately. You already use AI, and if you're like me, every single day you're using it, and you're not someone who needs to be convinced that it matters. But here's what I've learned from working with hundreds of marketers inside our AI Business Society over the last 2 years. The problem is almost never AI. It's trying to do it all on your own. You're testing tools that you're likely not using again. You're rewriting prompts because they don't sound right. You're probably watching tutorials that give you lots of ideas, but you have no idea what to do with it. And you're working harder with AI, not smarter. And that's exactly why I built the AI Business Society. Every live training is led by an expert practitioner who uses AI in their marketing all the time. And I'm personally there on every single one of these training sessions to make sure that nothing gets too crazy or abstract. You leave with something you can implement that very day. Plus, you're surrounded by a community of marketers who are just like you, and they're all there to support each other, and you get to be part of this awesome community. The investment is $497 for the full year. And if within the first 30 days you decide it's not for you and you join, then just ask for a refund. We're not going to ask any questions, but at least you gave it a shot. Head over to socialmediaexaminer.com/ai. That's socialmediaexaminer.com/ai. And now let's get back to the show. On the deep research. So I've used deep research quite a bit. I would imagine we're going to have a deep research prompt just for the person. Right. And another one for the company. So each of these things is specifically a prompt.

Yes.

Deep research on that company and on that person and their maybe competitive stance and competitors and stuff like that.

Yes. So understanding them, their company, competitor, but then the market and opportunity with AI and what's happening right now.

Okay.

Right. Because if people have already figured out what you're maybe going to figure out, it's better, right? So for instance, if I know in this case, I know they're wanting their own little chat building platform. That's good news, but also it means we need to understand what else is out there like it. If I haven't built one like that before, a good place to be is what else, you know, there's all these widget tools that I'm, I'm not competing with them because they're just them. I'm just doing it for this person. So I need to understand how they did it if I never done it before. And AI is really good at patterns and understanding how things are structured. It can give me a good idea of how people have done what they might want. Already, or how they've tried to.

I love this because right now I am actively looking for a gutter shield for my house, and I've done some research, and I started on YouTube, and then I went and I had deep research assignment done because I want to understand the state of the marketplace. And it's safe to assume that your prospect probably knows and has done some research on their own. So it's in your best interest to understand what the alternatives are. What are the out-of-the-box solutions they could choose, what are the pros and cons to that? All that information, when you present all that to them, eventually I would imagine that makes you more credible in their eyes, right?

Absolutely. And they may even offer it as a sub-option, say, hey, you know, if you don't want to build it, I'll set up one of those other platforms for you. No problem. For this cost, again, it's about value for the client. So we want to, you know, one door opens many with AI because there's so much people want to do. So even if you're in at a smaller scale than what you thought you're in,, and if you prove the value, which you can if you do it right with AI, then you can build upon that and have many more projects together, right? So that's kind of the, in my mind, it becomes just another option on the table, plus building blocks for me to learn better how to design the solution that they may want.

Okay, so is there any other part of the research? We've really been focusing on this research phase, if you will. Is there anything else that we should talk about before we move on to the next part of the process here?

I think once we understand the person, the company, the market, and the AI opportunities, then you're in a good place to, at least for now, You don't really, I mean, there's more you can go into and I certainly do, but those would be core things you may want to come in with that show that you are in the game. I mean, you know what they're up against, you know what's happening, you know who they are. Even if you never uttered a word, this is just like, you know, even if you never say anything about the research you did, which ideally you don't, you just show up with that preparation ready and it shows up naturally. You're not like, I prepared a brief for you. No, you just come with it prepared. And if they, you know, if it comes up naturally, the better.

Have you done this before you've even reached out and said, I can help? Is this, is this part of the process already done, or are you waiting for them to say, yes, I'm interested in your help before you do this? I'm just curious, like, the order of operations here.

It's happened in either way. I mean, I always do the same things, but yeah, this example, the story is me reaching out saying I can help.

But you've done the research before you reached out and said I could help, or did you do it after they indicated they were interested in a conversation with you?

Once I understand the actual solution, so this is a really good distinction, right? There's the prior to the conversation, the let me understand the solution they want, can I help? Yeah. Once I can know I can help, I can help. Now, to what degree and how good can I make it or what style and how do I start to personalize it? That's when I start to research them. First, it's if I understand what they may be after, like, can I actually do that or do I wanna understand that a bit more, right? So in this case, I understood it enough so I can progress. If I didn't, I would do a bit more research on it, see if I can actually configure it. Right, then I would move into the next piece, which is more about an elevation and optimization, less about the core, can I do this? I'm confident enough to say I can help, if I can do the solution, then it's about how do we make this even better?

What about using their language and echoing some of that language back? Do you have any thoughts on that? Because I know you have a background as a marketer.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. So everything we collect when we're researching the person, and this could include, by the way, right, finding ideal, you know, in the ideal world, everyone does YouTube videos or podcast interviews, and you can grab those transcripts and see exactly the language videos, right? And try to assess them, you know, as a person. But what I've done before too is just go to their, you know, whatever profile they have publicly, websites, LinkedIn, scrape it because that's whatever they say about themselves on those self-owned profiles, what they want to say about them to the world, which in itself can tell us quite a bit. Once we have that, then whatever deliverable I send in writing or when I'm thinking about certain, you know, and I often talk to, you know, AI before this and I say, well, what are some words, you know, I should consider for this? Or what are some phrases? I don't rehearse this to a point where I'm now like an actor and I have like a script for it It's perfect. I'm sure someone who goes to that degree, that would be amazing. I can't do that, but right, they can create a script for that person. That would be great. You should do it, whoever's doing that. But in this case, I'm just, I'm simmering my mind in it and I kind of get myself into that mode where I'm, I'm probably gonna use some of that naturally or it's gonna pop up when I need it. And when I'm actually giving the written deliverables, it will have their language and their words and that seasoned in within, you know, how they talk about these things.

Okay, so up to this point, you've engaged in some sort of a dialogue with this person. This prospect and you have done a lot of research to really understand where they are, who they are, and kind of what the options are for them in this particular case, because you're offering some sort of AI service. What's the next part of the process and what are kind of the options of what you can do here? Because obviously I know where this is going and not everyone is going to want to do something to the level at which you offered. So let's talk a little bit about like what, what are the options here, you know?

This is part of the fun too, though, of the AI world, right? And it really, it can start to go to so many places and I really do believe the most important part is one we just kind of went over. If done right, the rest becomes easy because the tools are getting so much better, right? But the next part is to start to decide on which deliverable we're about to come with. And my example was to actually create a prototype, a working prototype of the chat widget creation tool, right? And their brand and everything. And more than that, also the deliverable was a whole deck on the options and their color branding logo. Everything with screenshots from the prototype apps. I actually created the app before I sent the proposal for the even meeting for them to consider, right? And it seems like a lot, but really it's kind of like scratch paper, right? So you gotta think of it as right now, it's everything's so capable that I wouldn't care and I have no ego and like, it's like, oh, oh yeah, we'll do another one. Um, so the idea here is now to start to mold it across and, and to make deliverables on their brand. And you know, that's where we're gonna go to that discussion of, you know, how do we collect it and, mold into that actual deliverable. And there are some options for this that we can, you know, open up now.

Yeah, and I want to just address a couple things here. Uh, do you have a background as a developer? Are you a developer?

No, I'm not a— I'm not a developer. Uh, I've shipped about 12 apps, feels like it, but I'm not, uh, I'm not a developer. No.

Those that are listening, you do not need to be a developer to deliver a prototype of something, right? And you can use AI to rapidly create something that's very impressive, which is the objective here, right? This the objective to impress the heck out of them, to show them that you've already invested a lot of sweat equity, for lack of better words, time, effort into this. But the reality is that AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us here. Is that correct?

Absolutely. And to be even more like, if I just do a 1-minute story on this, but, you know, I walked into a room with, you know, there's probably about 20 CTOs in it, all for companies doing, you know, range between, say, $20 to $100 million a year. Right. And I was sitting there and obviously I'm a little intimidated. These people are obviously from the high, you know, very high technical degree of accomplishments between all of them. And we're in this kind of breakout session where I'm kind of supposed to lead this conversation. And they were talking amongst themselves, saying the word vibe coding, which I'm sure everyone's heard by now. If not, it's just kind of, you know, talking to AI that codes. And they all started giggling and laughing, right? And I was like, oh, is that funny? It's like, oh yeah, yeah, you know, vibe coding. I was like, oh well, is it funny to that 15-year-old who sold us out for, what was it, $50 million or something from Lovable? I was like, wait a minute, what? 15-year-old, $50 million or $5 million, you know, millions. Anyway, a kid sold for millions now. And I told him, look, it's simple. It's because no one cared about the quality or the beauty of the code. They care that it's safe enough and that it actually delivers and solves a problem and gets to an outcome that people are wanting. Right. You could be a great developer, but if you can't do that thing, then, you know, and everyone got a bit quiet and it's because these tools If you're clear enough of where you're trying to get to and you have just enough of the right frameworks, you can get unbelievably far and more so every single day. And this is something we all know at the moment, probably. If you're listening to this and you don't know it, it's time to know it because these tools are definitely at that place right now where a lot of developers are saying we're not even touching the code. And that's a place where if developers aren't doing it, you know, we certainly aren't going to either.

So let's dig in on how you used AI to create a deck. Deck, a proposal deck, right? Or any kind of PDF resource, maybe it's an ebook or whatever, that outlines how this could be done. Like, let's just talk through that a little bit before we get into the working prototype.

Yeah, obviously the first step is they need to understand where, where their brand and style is. And I'm not a branding expert, I was never— I was always a performance guy, right? I got into the branding world mainly because my friend Mark Degrasse, who's a great guy, I don't know if you're familiar with Mark, started the AI Branding Academy. Wonderful guy, great resources. He talks a lot about this, but What I did is simply, I'm not a branding guy. There's tools out there like What The Font and ColorZilla, like free Chrome extensions where I go onto their site, I select the font, I select the color, right? And I take that in. Now you can take this into a variety of tools. I'm gonna talk about one in particular right now, but Claude, you know, Design is a great example where uploading a few screenshots, taking those color hex codes or, you know, the font names and you plug it into the chat box there and you say, hey, Let's create a design system from this. And you don't have to say that by the way, cuz it's a button in there, right? Create literally design system. You download the logo from their page, from their site. Most of the time you can do this for right-click. If not, you can screenshot it. Okay. And then you upload it there and you create a design system. Now what this design system is, is very simple. It's, it's a playbook of components, quite, you know, the code, the snippets for every type of assets you pretty much need from headers to websites to, it starts to build all these components for you for a design system based off that brand. If you show it a screenshot of the website and it builds this beautiful, like unbelievable, highly detailed design system. I'm not a designer, but again, it's plenty enough to create assets on a brand better than probably most of their employees, if not. And it just starts there.

Yeah, I want to ask a couple questions about this because this is a relatively new thing. We're recording this in late May of 2026, and I think we're talking less than a month old, if I'm not mistaken. So with Claude Design, I believe you can use the Claude app on your computer or you can use the web app. I'm pretty confident that that's accurate. So what I'm hearing you say is you can just put a screenshot in there and Claude will probably understand what the font is just by looking at it, I would imagine. And you can right-click and copy and paste in the, the logo or do a Google search and try to find a vector version of the logo. But what Claude is going to do, it sounds like, design is it's going to discern what their color palettes are, right? It will just effectively do that. So you don't even need to understand that. And it will come up with some sort of a brand book, for lack of better words, where it will— I mean, help me understand a little bit about what that output is.

So that's a really good point. So, you know, the design system is often like, it's a term in development, right? And user experience and user interface. But what's so interesting is that it's now become something that these coding tools that know the coding language, right, are using also for asset development and, you know, from presentations and so on. So design system, think of it as a brand guide, a style brand style guide of sorts. But in this case, think where it's created a really robust one with all the different types of, you know, what does the top of the website look like? What does the footer look like? The different options of the different brand colors. You know, it just creates quite literally, you know, if you're to think about all the different assets or what will the graph look like, you know, and it creates a bunch of those components, so to speak, or different, uh, design elements. It and places it in a folder for you to leverage with any other AI tool that you can just feed it to it and say, hey, make a presentation using this brand style guide or, you know, design system at the moment.

So now you can create something that feels on brand is what I'm hearing you say, right?

Correct.

So what do you do with this? How does this lead to a proposal ultimately?

Right. So this can go in a few options. I mean, one, if you're using Cloud Code and you're in that world of things, all you have to do, there's a button that says share to Cloud Code and it quite just takes that sign, boom. Boop, brings it into your, uh, the design system and you have it within your Cloud Code environment. Anyone who's not on Cloud Code, you can download this folder, you can do whatever you want with it, you know, and you can feed it to any other language model, whether it's, you know, Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT or Groq, wherever. And once you have it, have it understand it and whichever tool you're using, if it can create assets based off this, now you have the, the tone and you have the, you know, you have the color, you have the fonts. You don't necessarily have the tone and the style of, of conversation yet. Ideally, you gathered some of that in the initial research that you did, and you bring that in and you start to say, okay, now I am meeting with this person who wants this thing from your initial conversation. We have this research on them and this is their design system. Let's brainstorm some ideas as to what a proposal may look like and go through that process and then design it and it'll create it and it'll be stunning. And now that's a, say, presentation or proposal, you know, the app side of it, you can do in Hotcode or Replit or wherever environment you're happy with the same idea. Once you have the design system and the research side of it, you can start to brainstorm the different ways to go about it and then just have it start to execute and you'll see that you'll end up somewhere quite remarkable.

So in your particular case, tell us what you did specifically with this story so we can continue this story and kind of what the outcome was.

Yeah, so this, uh, story, right? So, uh, we led to from the idea that the research created together proposal. I built an actual, so in Replit, I built a prototype of the app where I can actually click through it on the call we were on. And the reason I, they wanted to sign up, but you know, I think Don would think that I would tell a story where that doesn't end up, you know, it was a deal that ended up being at about $14,000 at the end for this, uh, development. I was already 80% of the way done with the project. And this is important to note too, right? Think about the delivery side of this, because I already had the prototype, already had their design system, already had so much of it. Just connecting a few things to make it more like a real app. And we were there. The outcome is, you know, from that conversation, we had our first conversation, they wanted to meet again and they were stressed. You know, they started to ask me questions as to when am I, you know, do I have enough time for this? You know, suddenly you become the asset. And this is one of, I'm happy to say and lucky to say, you know, that's one of a good amount of stories from that type of asset creation before the meeting. Again, if you show up to a meeting against someone who's done all this research and preparation and shows up ready and part of the team, it's going to be really hard to beat them. And I think anyone can get behind that idea. The story ends there and it's a, you know, a good one at that. But you know what's the most interesting part?

Let's hear it.

He said, the reason I got the deal is because I did it based off exactly what they wanted. Right? So it all starts with that first clarity on what the outcome they're after. And then everything else was this incredible kind of focus that, you know, went into it and they felt the pressure to just move because it's already there.

How much time do you feel like you invested before you closed the deal? Because I'm sure a lot of people are like wondering how much work this was.

I would say for this particular thing, I probably spent about 3 to 4 hours.

Okay.

Of my own time. All right. It's a good amount of time.

But that's not unreasonable, right? You could easily spend that much time having calls with people, right?

Certainly. Especially if you think, you know, through what the outcome is of winning the deal and you calculate what that time is worth. But what I'll say more on that is my lens on that too is once I have that, you know, oh, it'd be really cool to know how to build a chat widget tool that you can create your own chat widgets and connect to stuff. And I'm sure other people are gonna want it. So in my mind, I'm also creating an asset that I can duplicate and leverage, which is a big piece of the AI building world. And I believe it's part of the new AI wealth side of this is everything you build is a reusable component that you'll be able to leverage now and tweak and change. And the more you build different things, different apps, different automation, different agents, Now AI can take those things and have all these blocks to redeploy. So I really believe that for me, it's not a waste of time, even if I'm just messing around and tinkering for fun. But it's not really, 'cause I know I'm A, gonna win a new client, B, I'm gonna have new assets I can redeploy or, you know, or learn from as I'm doing other things. So it's really a win across all the domains.

Aiden Pollinger, thank you first of all for sharing your insights and wisdom with us today. It's super exciting to hear this, and I know a lot of people are gonna be jazzed about this. There's going to be some people that want to connect with you. If they want to connect with you on the socials, what's your preferred platform? And if they're possibly interested in working with you, where do you want to send them?

So I would say the best places right now to connect are one, our LinkedIn, and I'm sure we'll add a link here at the, you know, with the show notes. And another place that I spoke to, Chief AI Officer community, where I am, that's where I mostly spend my time focused, and that's where we do our courses., and we'll provide free access for you guys to the community. So I'm sure we'll, we'll add that in there too. I'd say those are the two main places to, to meet up and chat if you're, you know, curious about what else we can do or want to learn more about, you know, what we're up to. But I often share in there different trainings and, uh, you know, different events that we do. So it'll be great to, to have more folk out there.

Awesome. Hey, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us today.

Hey, thank you really to, to be here as an honor. I appreciate it. It, and I hope, uh, you know, it brought some value to your people.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com/a111. Man, 111 episodes. Be sure to follow this show on your favorite podcasting app, and if you've been a listener for a while, we would love a review. Also let your friends know about this show, and do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day, and may AI help you become more successful.

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