Ep108: I Stopped Cold Calling and Replaced It With AI… Here’s What Happened

Everything's turning pro. So I'm spending a lot more time on an extra 10, 15, 20 hours a month on organic content to nurture these leads that are coming through. So the, the annoying part about this is even if I got a hundred leads per month, which is what I do get, as soon as they respond, the bot takes over and the automation turns off. So it's a little bit complicated to set up, but this is the power of AI these days. Foreign. Welcome back to the show. This is Matt from PT Mastery from the PT Profit Leverage and lifestyle show. Super pumped for this episode. It's going to be called I Stopped Cold Calling and Replaced it with AI. And here is what happened. So, super juicy episode for today. So I've got a few stats that I'm going to go through with you in just a second from the month of December. And before I get into the stats, I want to go through why I actually decided to do this. And no one likes cold calling people, right? And it's not really a cold call because they specifically inquired about my services. But I didn't like calling people for like an hour or two hours a day where I could just get them to. I could like nurture them through emails and through some of my trainings, and they could become closer and closer to wanting to reach out to me, to work with me. So here's a couple of stats from both paid advertising and organic marketing as well. So for the December, we had nine bookings. Two of them were canceled or no show. So we had seven show up. We got five new clients. Two people messaged me themselves to get started with me. So me not doing anything, they reached out to me. We had one person get started from a VA message that my VA sent out, and we had two from the lead magnets that we've had on paid advertising. So what that essentially looks like is $705 spent on the lead magnet ad. Overall in the month, we spent 2,600. And we've got $600 cash collected, 30k in contracted just from paid ads. Overall, 70 to 80k in new clients for the month of December, I didn't do a single cold call. Now that is an 11.5% return on ad spend just on their paid advertising. Okay, so that's the stats from December because let me explain kind of what happened for me to do those type of things. So first thing was I stopped calling people. So all the leads that were coming through, which we usually get between, you know, 100 to 200 leads per month, come through my business, I stopped calling all those people. So I still do appointment setting myself that I had, I had an appointment set up and then I had Jason do appointment setting as well. But we just weren't getting a lot of, a lot of people booking in. But the people that were booking in, they didn't really want to book in, or they wanted to book in, but they weren't like ready to buy. So what I found was I was doing between 30 to 40 consults every single month, but I was only converting five or six people, which is the same as what I did last month. So what we've actually done is we've gone from 30 to 40 consults per month, which is 30 to 40 hours of my time per month, down to seven to eight hours of my time. But we converted the same amount of people. Okay, so we're going to go through essentially what that looked like and how it could possibly work for you. Now, I'm not saying ignore your leads, we're still messaging our leads, but I'm getting an AI agent to message my leads for me. So an AI agent basically is an AI bot that's essentially engaging with the leads that engage with me. So a live example of what this, what this, what it looks like is if you have a lead magnet on pad advertising, which could be, you know, for example, if I gave away my phone, phone call scripts to get leads to book in, someone downloads that and they put in their phone number and email my. My order or my automation or workflow would send a message to that person saying, hey John, it's Matt. Just want to make sure you got the email I sent about the scripts. Just reply yes or no, you've got it. Once they reply, then my AI bot takes over. So essentially what that bot is trained to do is to nurture them, find out a little bit about them, and then offer what we call a scale session, which is a 15 minute call with. Not with me, with one of my team to identify if they're a potential good fit to possibly work with us in our program. So that right there saved me 10, 15, 20 hours a month, which, like, it's not massive, but it allows me to focus on other parts of the business where I wasn't able to do that before. So I'm actually talking to people who want to actually work with me and that actually want to join our program. The second part of this is I made a decision in November to go all in on organic content. So as of right now, as you can see, I'm In a podcast studio, I'm leveling up the type of content that we're making more professional, better quality in terms of audio and video. Like, I've prepared some questions and stuff to go through today, so everything's turning pro. So I'm spending a lot more time on an extra 10, 15, 20 hours a month on organic content to nurture these leads that are coming through. So I'm basically using the lead magnet to get people into my nurture cycle. I suppose you would call it through email, through content, through podcasts, through my YouTube channel, for example. And that way, when I'm actually booking people in for calls, they're more willing to work with me because they've seen all the content. They've actually been on my emails, for example. They've. They've consumed my lead magnet. So it's not like a. A cold lead, so to speak. So that's essentially what's happened for my business. So I'm going to answer a couple of questions here to give you some more context. What did you hate about cold calling, specifically? The energy, the rejection, the time, or the brand misalignment? So for me personally, it was the. The time, the time it took. I was spending one to two hours per day calling people who did not want to be called. They wanted to download whatever I was giving them, and they wanted to consume it, take action on it. And then once I took action on it, then they might be ready for an actual conversation with me. So we're just finding like one hour per day, like five hours a week of just pointless conversations or just not so much getting ignored, but continuously going to voicemail, et cetera. Like, we were getting pretty low pickup rates. For me, usually you would expect as a PT you get 30 to 40%. But for me, for my business, I was getting only around 10% pickup rate. So it wasn't really effective for me and my business. So it was more the time. And I could spend an extra one to two hours a day creating better content, nurturing my leads through my content. So that's why I did it. This is a really interesting question that a lot of people are asking. Why? What does your AI bot actually do? In plain English, so not the confusing stuff. And what does it not do? What it does do, we'll go through that first and then what it doesn't do. So essentially the bot is actually set up through a software called Go High Level, which is a CRM, a client relationship management software. And it's relatively easy to set up, but I actually had someone set it up for me and they basically trained the bot to ask qualifying questions and you, you kind of choose what qualifying questions you wanted to ask and you choose the, the end goal. So you, you might say something like hey, I want you to ask qualifying questions like are you a face to face trainer or an online trainer? Or if it's for personal trainers, as in for you guys, you might set up a bot to be like, hey, I want you to ask if they're focusing on fat loss or muscle gain as an example. Basically say I want you to ask them pre qualifying questions around what type of goals they've they've got and why they want to achieve them. And then I want you to book in a free discovery call where we can understand the goals a little bit better and provide a recommendation on how to get back on track. And basically once you have the bot doing a few conversations, you give it feedback. So same as like an employee or a staff member, you give them feedback on the performance and you make them better. So you give it feedback saying hey, this message was a bit too direct or a bit too pushy. This is what I would have done instead. Future okay, but essentially what it does, it just, it asks pre qualifying questions and then you basically tell it what you want it to do. So I personally want them to book in a 15 minute call to see if it's going to be a good fit for us moving forward. And you can obviously program it to do whatever you want, but it's relatively easy to set up. But what it can't do is it can't just message someone just for the hell of it. They need to message first. Yeah, if someone downloaded a lead magnet and I sent them a message which is an automation which is through the CRM. So it's not through the bot, that's just an automation from the paid ad which says, hey John, I just want to make sure you got the training. He used to reply, yes, to make sure you got it. If they just ignore that message, the bot can't actually engage in the conversation. So the annoying part about this is even if I got a hundred leads per month, which is what I do get, only probably about 15, maybe 20 people actually respond to that message. So what we've done is we've added some automations on top of this. So if they don't respond to that first message, like for example, three hours later, they get a follow up message which is just an automation, not from the bottom to try and get a conversation started. As soon as they respond, the bot takes over and the automation turns off. Okay, so it's a little bit complicated to set up, but this is the power of AI these days. So AI can do like phone calls. We personally don't do that right now. Perhaps in the future we might get AI through phone calls, but right now we just do SMS. You can get a bot to do DMs as well, but again, they've got to start the conversation. You can't just randomly message people with the bot. They've got to start the conversation. Then you can get the bot to take over. For example, you can have like a keyword. So if you have a, if you have a post, let's just say you have a post on Instagram and it's hey, send me a message or DM me Fat Loss and I'll send you our Fat loss guide. You could set up an AI bot to respond when someone sends you that keyword. To start a conversation, ask them pre qualifying questions and then book them in for a scout session or like a discovery call or you know, consult or whatever. What problem was I trying to solve? Was it contact rate? Was it speed to lead? Was it follow up consistency or qualification? Yes, this is a really good question. So the main reason why I went to AI with this is speed to lead. Now I can't remember the exact stat, but I've seen a couple of stats recently being like, if you can contact the lead within like 60 seconds or not 60 seconds, within like two or three minutes of them inquiring, it's like a 300% increase in sales. If you can contact them within like a minute or two. So basically as soon as someone responds, the bot automatically starts a conversation and it starts to pre qualification process and then books them in for that scale session. For me previously, let's say they're, well, let's say as an example for a PT, right? Let's say you're on the gym floor at 3 o', clock, someone inquires with you, you can't get back to them until 7, 8 o' clock at night, once you've finished your sessions. By then they've got bombarded with other ads because as soon as, as soon as someone like clicks on an ad, they're just going to get bombarded with the same type of ads on, on social media, we all know that, but essentially that lead can kind of go anywhere else in that time and it's just slowly dropping the chance of them working with you because you're not able to get back to them fast enough essentially. So that was the main reason we went with AI and we wanted to test this. And literally I made a decision in November and I said we're just gonna test it for two months and if it doesn't work, we'll just go back through and calls again. But if it works, then happy days. And happy to say the results speak for themselves. Not only have we got time back, but it's allowed me to spend more time on going all in on social media content and going pro with that. So that's one of the biggest reasons why I did it. Of course, it does also help with the follow up consistently or consistency. Sorry. The one thing the bot can't do is if someone doesn't respond to that bot's message, the bot won't do a follow up. So let's just say the person says yes to the message and the bot will be like, hey John, my name's William, I'm part of the PT Mastery team. It's great that you've been able to get the resource. We just want to make sure it's going to be a good fit for you. Do you coach face to face or online? Say they don't respond to that message? There's going to be no other follow up from there unless that person actually sends a response. That's the only downside to that. That's when you've got to manually come in and start nurturing yourself. And as soon as you start messaging, the bot actually turns off. It's a work in progress, but it's really effective for us. Next question is what would you say to a PT who, who worries AI follow up will feel robotic or hurt the brand? How do you keep it personal? So simple answer to this one is you train it how you want to communicate. So you can train it to be super, super casual, you can train it to be very direct or. And you just, you just constantly give it feedback. As I said before, it's just like you're training like a staff member to kind of be like you. Or if you, if you're a PT and you want to train another PT to train like you do, you just gotta give them feedback. So you don't micromanage them, but you kind of analyze the conversation to be like, hey, this is what I would do if this happens again. You just need to give it feedback. So if you want to learn more about AI bots, there's a little bit of a process to set it up, but definitely well worth it in the end. Especially if you got, like, a lot of leads coming through to your business. So if you guys want more information, just message me with the word AI and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction or help you set up one yourself. So I'll leave it there for that episode. I hope you have an amazing day, and I'll see you next week.